For Anthony Rodriguez, every diaper for his two-year-old son means less money to put food on the table, or to fill up his car at the gas station. His fiancee, Melinda Prothero, tries to make each diaper last longer, but there is a limit to that, he said.
Rodriguez, 26, makes those trade-offs even though he already receives above-minimum wages at Wal-Mart, and will make at least US$10 an hour next year, part of a move by Wal-Mart to raise wages for hundreds of thousands of workers.
“It’s not going to help us. We need the hours,” said Rodriguez, a member of the union-supported workers’ group, OUR Walmart.
Photo: Bloomberg
He said he constantly begs his managers for full-time work at the bustling Wal-Mart superstore in Rosemead, California, but is assigned as little as 18 hours a week.
BEGGING FOR HOURS
“I work as hard as I can, and when they offer me hours, I stay,” he said. “But when the time comes, and I beg them for hours because I’m not going to afford rent, they don’t want to help me.”
The move to increase hourly wages by Wal-Mart, which employs 1.3 million workers as the country’s largest private sector employer, is sending ripples through the retail industry. On Wednesday, the TJX Cos, which runs the discount chain T.J. Maxx, said it would follow suit, raising the pay of its hourly wage workers to at least US$9 later this year, and to US$10 next year.
With some progress on the hourly wage front, labor activists are highlighting another long-standing demand: more hours — and more consistent hours — for hourly-wage workers like Rodriguez, something they say will make as much a difference to workers’ pocketbooks as an increase in wages.
Wal-Mart says about half of its hourly wage employees work part time, and that percentage can be even higher at other retailers. Stores change many of their workers’ schedules week to week. And while many people prefer to work part time — for instance, college students eager for extra spending money — the number of part-timers who would prefer to work full time is surging, especially in the retailing and hospitality industries.
“Wages are just the first step in getting Wal-Mart on the road toward being the type of employer that treats its employees with respect, and part of that is to set some standards around hours and work schedules,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, an online civil rights organization that has campaigned for Wal-Mart to raise wages and give workers better hours.
“It’s about creating an environment where employees are not just at the whim of Wal-Mart,” he said.
At the heart of demands for higher wages and better hours is the dwindling number of middle-class jobs, experts say. More primary wage earners who in the past may have held stable blue-collar jobs in manufacturing are now relying on low-wage jobs at Wal-Mart or other discount retailers to support their families.
“Wal-Mart always provided jobs at the margins of the labor force — to people who were just re-entering the labor force after many years, for example, or supplementing a spouse’s income,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “But what you’re increasingly finding is that it’s the primary wage earners who work at Wal-Mart, because a lot of workers have more or less given up on getting middle-class jobs.”
“Now these workers are being pushed into Wal-Mart-type jobs, they’re demanding higher wages, full-time jobs and better benefits,” he added. “So I wouldn’t necessarily interpret Wal-Mart’s higher wage as a sign of an economic turnaround. I would interpret it as permanently bad news.”
COST CONTROL
At the same time, Wal-Mart and other retailers, facing stiff competition and shrinking margins, have taken a more severe approach to controlling labor costs, doing more to align staffing to customer traffic. Sometimes that involves sophisticated software that tracks the flow of customers and allows managers to assign just enough employees to handle the anticipated demand.
By hiring a large pool of hourly workers whose hours can expand or contract depending on business need, retailers can better sync hours to demand, experts say; posting schedules with limited advance notice allows managers to further minimize the risk of assigning too many hours. Restricting work hours also limits outlays on overtime and employee benefits.
“A number of companies have become more focused on keeping a very tight link between variations in consumer demand and the number of staffing hours,” said Susan Lambert, an employment expert at the University of Chicago. “It’s easier to do that if you have a lot of people who can be scheduled for very short shifts, and who are hungry for hours.”
“But that makes it harder, harder and harder for these workers to move up the ladder in terms of wage growth,” she added.
Wal-Mart has said that on top of raising wages, it will work to give some employees more control over their schedules. “We’re pursuing comprehensive changes to our hiring, training, compensation and scheduling programs,” company spokesman Kory Lundberg said.
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