Bea, a manager at a big-box chain store in Maine, likes to keep a professional atmosphere in the store. But with a staff struggling to get by on $6 to $8 an hour, sometimes things get messy. When one of her employees couldn’t afford to buy her daughter a prom dress, Bea couldn’t shake the feeling that she was implicated by the injustice. “Let’s just say ... we made some mistakes with our prom dress orders last year,” she told me. “Too many were ordered, some went back. It got pretty confusing.” And Edy? “She knocked them dead” at the prom.
Andrew, a manager in a large food business in the Midwest, told me about the moral dilemma of employing people who can’t take care of their families even though they are working hard. This was something that he couldn’t pretend was okay. He came to the decision to “do what [he] can” even at the risk of being accused of stealing. “I pad their paychecks because you can’t live on what they make. I punch them out after they have left for a doctor’s appointment or to take care of someone ... And I give them food to take home....”
Ned, who works in a chain grocery store, detours some of the “product” that doesn’t quite pass muster—dented cans, not-quite-fresh produce—to his low-wage employees. “I guess you could say I make the most of that,” he said. “I make the most of it. I don’t see it as a scam. It’s not for me, it’s for them. ... At the end of the month ... that’s all they have.”
Between 2001 and 2008, I spoke with hundreds of lower- and middle-income people about the economy, work, schools, health care, and what they saw happening around them. When this research began, I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents. He acknowledged there were plenty. I was getting toward the end of the interview and he seemed to sense that, so he stopped me and asked, “Don’t you want to know what this is doing to me, too?”
At first I thought he was going to tell me his own financial problems. But he wanted to talk about being someone who makes enough to live “fairly comfortably” while having authority over hardworking parents who do not. He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families. Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.
Like Andrew and many others, Jonathan looked beyond the fact that it was legal for the market to set wages below what families need to survive. Does that make it right? Yes, of course it is lawful and “good for business,” and thus enthusiastically endorsed by a government increasingly run by corporate interests and their lobbyists. But when you look into the faces of people who are doing their work and trying to take care of their families, is it decent? And if not, who do you have to become to obediently go along with impoverishing workers and their families? Very different people from across the country told me that when you ignore injustice embedded in your society, you become part of it, complicit with what you consider immoral. And for some, this changed how they saw their role in the world and the work that they did.
Work is a core class intersection in American life because, every day, millions of low-wage and middle-income people come together to do their jobs. They often get to know each other, their family concerns, hopes, and plans. Some of the people I interviewed said they had no interest in low-wage workers and others said that low-wage people have only themselves to blame for being poor. But most employers thought that working people should get a fair day’s pay and be able to keep their families fed and housed.
A few went beyond concern. They found a little opening, a little chink in the system, and used it to treat working people better. Even if they had to break company rules, they were determined to treat people as though their survival mattered in a business environment that valued nothing but bottom-line profitability.
I spoke to many people who, like other regular Americans in the past, decided that when you see people being treated unfairly and, worse still, you realize you play a direct role in that unfairness, the right thing to do is to act against it. In the tradition of civil disobedience that marks the nation’s history, often unassuming but morally clear-eyed people refuse, every day, to go along with the economic mistreatment of other people. Andrew, Ned, and Bea were some of the people who showed me how profound unfairness will give rise to a people’s moral underground, but they were certainly not alone.
The talk about the economy is now very different from when I began this research years ago. The malignant effects of unregulated market rule are being exposed as economic damage spreads beyond millions of working poor families. But I found that long before the press and politicians became riveted by an economic “meltdown,” plenty of ordinary people had been grappling with an unjust economy. Far away from debates about Wall Street and Main Street, in the side streets, byways, and common corners of the nation, where most Americans live, some have been staking out different moral terrain.
There is a tale that has always emerged in America when business has free rein, can freely undermine the public good, and can freely buy and sell political will. Today’s is a contemporary version, but it is one that recalls a history when market rule could justify almost anything—buying and selling human beings, sending children into coal mines, denying people the right to organize, gutting whole communities to take jobs to a cheaper elsewhere, or leaving people who have labored their long lives without a pension or a home.
But there is also a parallel story, the one about resistance. It is a new chapter in the proud history of how people will refuse to go along with economic abuse—and not just the few heroes we recall. Heroes alone don’t shift the ground. Deep change comes only when regular people start naming what is happening, talking to one another, and, inevitably, some of them decide that they can’t accept such injustice. Occasionally, they move a nation.
source
This is not breaking news but I think it's more apt than ever and I wanted a positive story for the slow and stressful holidays. And, yeah, bolding wee sections is not my strength.
Andrew, a manager in a large food business in the Midwest, told me about the moral dilemma of employing people who can’t take care of their families even though they are working hard. This was something that he couldn’t pretend was okay. He came to the decision to “do what [he] can” even at the risk of being accused of stealing. “I pad their paychecks because you can’t live on what they make. I punch them out after they have left for a doctor’s appointment or to take care of someone ... And I give them food to take home....”
Ned, who works in a chain grocery store, detours some of the “product” that doesn’t quite pass muster—dented cans, not-quite-fresh produce—to his low-wage employees. “I guess you could say I make the most of that,” he said. “I make the most of it. I don’t see it as a scam. It’s not for me, it’s for them. ... At the end of the month ... that’s all they have.”
Between 2001 and 2008, I spoke with hundreds of lower- and middle-income people about the economy, work, schools, health care, and what they saw happening around them. When this research began, I was focusing on parents in low-wage families, documenting their accounts of working, being poor, and trying to keep children safe. But that changed when I spoke with Jonathan, a middle-aged “top manager” in a chain of grocery stores in the Midwest. I was asking him about the stresses of running a business that employed lots of low-wage parents. He acknowledged there were plenty. I was getting toward the end of the interview and he seemed to sense that, so he stopped me and asked, “Don’t you want to know what this is doing to me, too?”
At first I thought he was going to tell me his own financial problems. But he wanted to talk about being someone who makes enough to live “fairly comfortably” while having authority over hardworking parents who do not. He spoke of parents whom he got to know pretty well, who headed home each week with less than they needed to feed their families. Yes, he said, it is the “going wage”—America’s “market wage”—that doesn’t cover the market cost of basic human needs. Still, it didn’t seem right to Jonathan. He described how it changed his job, tainted it, to be supervising people who couldn’t get by on what he paid them.
Like Andrew and many others, Jonathan looked beyond the fact that it was legal for the market to set wages below what families need to survive. Does that make it right? Yes, of course it is lawful and “good for business,” and thus enthusiastically endorsed by a government increasingly run by corporate interests and their lobbyists. But when you look into the faces of people who are doing their work and trying to take care of their families, is it decent? And if not, who do you have to become to obediently go along with impoverishing workers and their families? Very different people from across the country told me that when you ignore injustice embedded in your society, you become part of it, complicit with what you consider immoral. And for some, this changed how they saw their role in the world and the work that they did.
Work is a core class intersection in American life because, every day, millions of low-wage and middle-income people come together to do their jobs. They often get to know each other, their family concerns, hopes, and plans. Some of the people I interviewed said they had no interest in low-wage workers and others said that low-wage people have only themselves to blame for being poor. But most employers thought that working people should get a fair day’s pay and be able to keep their families fed and housed.
A few went beyond concern. They found a little opening, a little chink in the system, and used it to treat working people better. Even if they had to break company rules, they were determined to treat people as though their survival mattered in a business environment that valued nothing but bottom-line profitability.
I spoke to many people who, like other regular Americans in the past, decided that when you see people being treated unfairly and, worse still, you realize you play a direct role in that unfairness, the right thing to do is to act against it. In the tradition of civil disobedience that marks the nation’s history, often unassuming but morally clear-eyed people refuse, every day, to go along with the economic mistreatment of other people. Andrew, Ned, and Bea were some of the people who showed me how profound unfairness will give rise to a people’s moral underground, but they were certainly not alone.
The talk about the economy is now very different from when I began this research years ago. The malignant effects of unregulated market rule are being exposed as economic damage spreads beyond millions of working poor families. But I found that long before the press and politicians became riveted by an economic “meltdown,” plenty of ordinary people had been grappling with an unjust economy. Far away from debates about Wall Street and Main Street, in the side streets, byways, and common corners of the nation, where most Americans live, some have been staking out different moral terrain.
There is a tale that has always emerged in America when business has free rein, can freely undermine the public good, and can freely buy and sell political will. Today’s is a contemporary version, but it is one that recalls a history when market rule could justify almost anything—buying and selling human beings, sending children into coal mines, denying people the right to organize, gutting whole communities to take jobs to a cheaper elsewhere, or leaving people who have labored their long lives without a pension or a home.
But there is also a parallel story, the one about resistance. It is a new chapter in the proud history of how people will refuse to go along with economic abuse—and not just the few heroes we recall. Heroes alone don’t shift the ground. Deep change comes only when regular people start naming what is happening, talking to one another, and, inevitably, some of them decide that they can’t accept such injustice. Occasionally, they move a nation.
source
This is not breaking news but I think it's more apt than ever and I wanted a positive story for the slow and stressful holidays. And, yeah, bolding wee sections is not my strength.
From most of the cases I read above, the managers are NOT giving the lower-level employees their own money. They are essentially stealing the money from the company and giving it to the employees. The article seems to imply otherwise. A VERY courageous move, as that usually calls for fast termination and good luck getting another job after!
Their hearts are in the right place, but that's not the right way to do it. I think people should work together to change the political system to make the environment more favorable to workers, and use their own money for charitable acts instead of taking money from someone else to do so. That's like me robbing the rich guy down the street just to throw the money into the Salvation Army bucket. Two wrongs don't make a right.
The owner was super laid back and gave people food and didn't sweat it if they ate more, etc etc.
But there was one manager who gave lots of people more money, as in large amounts every week, from the company bank and had the termininity to say he wasn't stealing.
Helping people is good. But there's a line there, and it can be fuzzy as hell.
One store I worked at used to give us 75% off coupons pretty randomly just as something nice to do. That plus the employee discount meant I came home with some pretty nice stuff (this was an outlet for a very high end store) for cheaper than I could get lower quality items at a store like walmart or kmart. Sadly, corporate found out, shit a brick, and that was the end of that.
I worked in a grocery store for a while as a teen, and we had one manager who liked to 'accidentally' open containers of chips and cookies and other snacks (so they would be damaged out) and would leave them in the break room for his employees.
In my experience, a lot of management really disliked the folks higher up the food chain who worked for the corporate offices and weren't tied to a particular store, since they tended to come in and insist on things that really weren't practical and which made all of our jobs more difficult.
I'd never before seen stories of managers doing this sort of thing *because* workers didn't have a living wage. Apathy yes but not in order to help workers get by.
:D
And yes, they hated corporate. Hated them. For the longest time my second-to-last store manager gave me almost 40 hours a week, regardless, and kept the schedule to only a certain amount of employees so that there were enough hours to go around. It was great. Then corporate sent somebody to change all of that, after having a two-month fit about it. After that, she just gave up, and so did the asst. manager. They were so sick of dealing with corporate that they gave into everything corporate wanted, and ultimately the store went to shit. Luckily the asst. manager only did things by the book when corporate was looking, and the department managers were amazing to us. I could go on forever about how much I love this article, and how much managers like this have saved my ass so many times with either food or discounts. Seriously.
Because they took a one-size fits all approach to all the stores in all the markets, and were usually several provinces away, so they had no clue.
Change? good luck. I argued as a store manager myself with corporate till i was blue in the face, and they'd just come in and play seagull: shit all over things and fly away.
Corporate are too. They're soooo busy making sure cashiers aren't stealing pens they don't even care that the ancient software in their machines is letting money slip out right and left.
I need a new job like yesterday.
Sorry for the rant, this topic just drives me nuts, and I know I'm one of the lucky people who is better off thanks to my husband having a more stable job.
<_< Corporate can suck it, minimum wage is not a living wage. /may or may not do things similar to this for their employees
And this is the problem - our "politicians" and "leaders" (LMFAO, "leaders") don't ever have to. They schmooze with the Richie Riches. They have fundraiser dinners at thousands of bucks a plate. They don't see what their bullshit CAUSES. Yet another reason why they ALL need to go, and the ONLY funds allowed are PUBLIC CAMPAIGN FUNDS. No more private donations, period. IDGAF if you have the purest of pure intentions, it fucks up our political system.
It's funny that in many, many cases in this country, what's "legal" is not DECENT.
Giving the customer more than they technically paid for is one way; enhancing effective compensation is another . . .
At the same time, even the department managers (just under store and assistant managers, so long-time, salaried employees here, with some health benefits) were on food stamps and/or living with family just to get by. I was at the bottom of the ladder and making $6000 a year working 4 days a week with a 1 1/2 hr commute each way. To make matters worse, as soon as the economic meltdown happened, there was an immediate pay freeze.
There were lots of stories at our store of managers at other stores doing things like this.
IMO, it's the companies that are stealing from their workers. Their time, their effort, and fucking years of their life, leaving them unable to afford even basic necessities, and:
*expecting them to be available literally 24/7 (one place I worked at was open 24/7, and all workers were on call 24/7/365, despite stated availability, and expected to be at work within an hour of getting called.)
*expecting overtime without pay or other off the clock work, being required to work through lunches and breaks on a regular basis
*being expected to clock out during breaks (illegal)
*being sent home after only one or two hours of work (legal)
*being required to work without a day off for weeks at a time (legal, overtime not required)
*being required to work 12 hours or more in one day (legal, overtime not required)
*being required to give personal information in detail when needing a day off (without pay, obviously) because things like "personal day" and "family obligation" are too vague,
*having to work on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas,
*being required to come in off the clock to learn the layout of the store and item locations in departments you don't work in,
*being required to work without pre-training because training costs too much money, then getting written up for not doing things properly,
*being expected to not waste time by counting your till before your shift and just ~trusting~ that the night manager counted it properly, then getting written up when oops--it totally wasn't,
*not being allowed to drink water while on-the-clock without a doctor's note
*being required to "look busy" at all times even when there isn't work to be done (for some reason, this stresses me the fuck out)
*being required to break food safety rules by outdated food (sometimes, literally by years), open and thus unsanitary food, food that had been dropped on the floor (open food like hamburgers, etc.) or had been cooked too long ago to be safe. (I would speak up about these sorts of things regularly because I'm a food safety stickler. Guess how popular that made me!)
*being required to purchase store uniforms with the store logo on them (illegal)
*having to do all of this bullshit and more with a smile.
But yeah, fuck that girl and her prom dress. What a mooch on society, right?
*being expected to clock out during breaks (illegal)
Really? I definitely want to look up the laws clarifying this, because I have always been required to clock out for lunch and breaks in general at jobs.
*being required to purchase store uniforms with the store logo on them (illegal)
Again, really? Does it matter if the uniforms don't necessarily have the logo on them, but are only available from the store? Of course, I know I'd get fired if I ever spoke up about this anyway. Kind of like some training activities we were required to do at home, despite being hourly employees. I remember saying that wasn't exactly legal or fair, and just getting a response like "tough, well, see if we let you work on Monday."
*having to work on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas
I agree! It sucks having to take a break from holiday celebrations, and it's even worse that most customers don't appreciate the fact that you're there serving them and just treat you like dirt. I mean, I feel dehumanized on a regular basis, but it's so much more discouraging to experience it during holidays.