Rage Against the Scheduling Machine!

Retail workers are treated like dirt. It is an abomination!

This is an abomination! Everybody involved knows it too.

“Instead of simply reporting for work, the employee has to check in with a supervisor a few hours in advance. If she gets called in, she may have to scramble for a babysitter. If she doesn’t get called in, she doesn’t get paid, and it’s too late to get a shift on a second job. “People will be scheduled for eight on-call shifts in a pay period and only get called in for one shift,” says attorney Rachel Deutsch of the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group.” [photo above and this text are in a Boston Globe article here]

Another Boston Globe article titled, “Rage against the scheduling machine,”reports:

Earlier this year, The New York Times profiled part-time Starbucks barista Jannette Navarro, a San Diego single mom who couldn’t arrange child care or take classes because her hours fluctuated so wildly. Workers at chains from Walmart to Jamba Juice have gone public with their frustrations. “These hours don’t match the basic realities of people’s lives,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. The burden for workers with families is particularly heavy, she added. “Kids need routine, but when you work in retail routine doesn’t happen.”

Obviously, this mis-treatment of retail workers is inexcusable. It amounts to treating the workers like dirt.

How Should it Be?

In a decent society, an egalitarian society, the workers—ALL of the workers—in an economic enterprise such as a retail store are equals when it comes to having a say in all of the policies of the enterprise. Economic enterprises are democracies of their workers (there is no higher “employer” calling the shots) and the workers are all economically equal too. And for sure, in such a decent society, retail workers would make certain that scheduling was reasonable for all concerned, and not designed to make a few rich people richer. Read about the no-rich-and-no-poor egalitarian kind of economy here. And read about egalitarian democracy here.

The reason retail workers are treated like dirt today is because we all live under a dictatorship of the rich. How can we remove the rich from power so that regular people can make our society decent and just and fair? Read what I suggest here.