The myth of "part-time"

NYT: Part-Time Schedules, Full-Time Headaches

This NYT article, collecting readers' experiences of part-time work, is a perfect example of the corporate monopolization of employees' lives that I wrote about in my last post.

Courtney Moore, a cashier at a Walmart in Cincinnati, said in an interview that she had been assigned about 40 hours a week until she told store management in June that she would begin taking college classes most mornings and some afternoons. She said she asked her manager to put her on the late shift, but to her dismay, the store reduced her to 15 hours a week.

“They said they need someone they could call whenever they need help — and they said I’m not that person,” Ms. Moore said. She said she would prefer being a dedicated full-time employee at Walmart but had to take a second job at McDonald’s instead.

In my retail job, I remember being told by my employer that I had to be available on weekends, period. I couldn't ask for Saturday mornings off (for a martial arts class I was taking), even if I was available Saturday afternoon and evening, Sunday, and every other day of the week. Even though in any given week the odds were that I wouldn't be scheduled to work that shift. They might've said something like, it's only fair for everyone to have weekend shifts off sometimes, but I don't doubt there were other workers who would have gladly committed to working Saturday mornings if they could just be guaranteed some other time slot to themselves. Or simply guaranteed more hours per week, for that matter.

A middle-aged New Yorker who lost his teaching job of two decades because of a budget squeeze in his school district said he had applied for retail jobs and was shocked by what he found.

“You had to be available every minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29 hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,” he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right here. You have to be available every day for us.’

Get an education! Get a second job if you need to! Here are workers trying to do just that, and employers actively blocking those efforts. And if you try to argue that Walmart--a company that generated net income of 17 billion dollars in 2013, owned by a small group of people with a combined worth of $152 billion--can't afford to pay Courtney Moore for 40 hours a week, with benefits, I will laugh in your face.

It's awfully hard to pull yourself out of poverty when your employer confiscates your bootstraps.

See also: Debra Harrell.