Would you like fries with that?

The topic du jour on NPR and other news media seems to be fast food workers having the gall to strike for higher wages. To say the stupid runs deep in most of the discussions would be an understatement. What amuses me no end is the suggestion that the folks working at McDonald's and other grease pits should simply acquire additional technical skills and move on up the career ladder. So who's going to serve the burgers once the current crew is gone? And why should the new employees be any more willing to work for shit wages than the folks assembling the Whoppers and Thickburgers are now?

The harsh reality is that we live in a service economy. One reason the average age of a fast food employee is 28 is that the fastest growing job sectors are the ones at the bottom of the economic scale: burger flippers, nursing home attendants, hotel maids, discount store cashiers. There aren't enough jobs to go around for the people with the four year degrees now, so what kind of miracle is supposed to occur to permit the workers at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy to move up? We've all been hearing the stories for years, the ones about recent college grads discovering they've incurred thousands of dollars of student loan debt and now can't find a job that actually requires a college degree or that pays enough to live on. If they ever put down their smart phones and I-pads long enough to figure out just how thoroughly they've been screwed by society's lies, there'll be riots in the streets.

Further, the people doing those jobs work damn hard for the pittance of a wage they do collect. Isn't hard work supposed to result in a financial reward? Why is it that the jobs that society absolutely needs -- all the service workers of various types, from fry cooks to garbage collectors -- are the jobs that garner the least respect? Over and over we get to hear that entry level jobs, the ones that don't require much in the way of training, shouldn't pay decent wages. Neither should any job that requires physical exertion or that results in your hands getting dirty. If it doesn't require multiple years of education or if you're standing while you do it instead of sitting at a desk it's not a job that the elitists think is worth doing. There is a remarkable amount of hostility out there towards the idea that the guys working at a tire shop should make as much as the dudes selling you life insurance, all of which seems to be premised on the the classic white collar vs blue collar distinction. Doesn't matter how hard you work, if at some point doing the work day you're reaching for the GOJO, then your job isn't valued by the chattering class.

Given that there are businesses out there in almost every sector of the economy that do pay their employees decent wages and still manage to make a profit, it seems rather self-evident that the businesses that persist in paying low wages are motivated more by pathological greed than by necessity.

The cartoon is from the Virginia Tech newspaper, The Collegiate Times, and is now 20 years old. Some things never change.

Alternatives to the Evil Empire

There's been a lot in the news recently about Walmart and the way the House of Satan (aka The Evil Empire) screws over its hourly employees: low wages, miserable scheduling, abusive working conditions, you name it. A number of people have tried to make various arguments why we should forgive the Evil Empire its sins, including variations on "but we po' folks need a place to shop for cheap shit," "it's what all employers on the low end of the wage scale do," and "it's not possible to turn a profit and sell for low prices simultaneously." Bullshit on all three.

Taking them in reverse order, there is the stellar example of Costco. Costco sells goods at remarkably low prices. Granted, you have to buy a membership, but that membership aspect isn't what makes Costco a decent place to work. It's the company's overall ethic and business philosophy. Sam's Club is also a membership discount retailer, and their human resources policies are classic House of Satan. What drives a business to treat employees like human Kleenex is an underlying corporate philosophy that values squeezing the last possible dime of profits out of every transaction -- a modest profit isn't good enough; the profit margin has to be ginormous. Granted, the corporate model in general lends itself to profit maximization above everything else; shareholders have been known to sue boards of directors and CEOs if they decide dividends have not been sufficiently maximized. That's a subject, however, for a different post. For now, suffice to say that Costco demonstrates it is possible to sell products cheaply and still pay livable wages, provide decent fringe benefits, and co-exist with labor unions. Businesses do not have to operate like Walmart; the ones that do have made a conscious decision to do so.

Second, the "all low wage employers do it" is pure nonsense. As a person who has labored in the trenches of low wage employment (at various times in my life I've been a nursing assistant, hotel maid, and dash waxer in a car wash) I know that the fact a job is a minimum wage position does not mean the workers also have to tolerate some of the garbage Walmart is notorious for doing. Example: I worked as a nursing assistant or restorative therapy aide at four different nursing homes. All four provided the same level of skilled nursing care, had similar numbers of patients and staff, and in each case the entry level wage was whatever the legal minimum wage was at the time. Two were decent places to work; two sucked. Why did two of them suck? Management. At one, management deliberately cultivated a climate of uncertainty: you wouldn't know from week to week just how many hours you were going to work in a week or what days you would be scheduled. Each weeks' work schedule would be posted at the last minute, making it impossible to effectively plan either your budget or your life. Working in a nursing home is stressful to begin with; adding stress was a good way to guarantee a higher turnover rate among employees.

From what I hear, Walmart does post schedules fairly far in advance. However, one of the games Walmart does play with schedules is to keep as many employees as possible as part-time workers. Most of their stores are open 24/7; nonetheless, most workers are there less than 30 hours in a week. Why? Because if they go over 30 hours in a week, they qualify for the Walmart health benefits plan. Instead of doing the decent thing -- scheduling to maximize full-time employment and thus allowing their human resources to benefit from the company health plan (not to mention avoiding the need to juggle multiple part-time low wage jobs) -- they go in the opposite direction. Walmart trains its managers to respond to requests for more hours of work from employees by steering employees to the local social services office to apply for Medicaid. Again, I will grant that the nature of the business requires that some workers will always be part-time -- certain times of the day or days of the week will always be busier than others so full staffing isn't always going to be necessary -- but Walmart's policy of trying to minimize as much as possible its number of fulltime employees has been well-documented, as has its policy of steering workers toward welfare to supplement work.

Finally, there's the "where will we go for cheap crap?" rationale. Well, depending on just what type of cheap crap you need, there are places like Family Dollar, Dollar General, and so on. Family Dollar is almost everywhere, thanks to the low start-up cost for the franchise, and they're cheaper than Walmart on a lot of items -- you just have to learn to shop carefully and recognize that the inventory at Family Dollar or Dollar General is not going to be as huge as that of a Super Walmart. Aldi is a good cheap source for groceries -- the chain has its own in-house brands and a limited product line, but, depending on what you need, they're cheaper than Walmart. Target has been beating Walmart's prices lately, so have various regional or local chains. Before assuming Walmart is your one and only option, look around.

I never have understood the fascination with Walmart and the belief so many people have that everything there is a bargain. Back when I was in grad school at VaTech, a new Walmart opened in Christiansburg. People were so excited about it that there was actually a shooting in the Walmart parking lot over a parking space. We waited until the initial insanity died down a bit and then checked it out. I did get a good deal on a television set, but when I took the time to comparison shop for stuff I was buying on a more routine basis, there were better deals at Rose's, Hill's, and Kmart. Nonetheless, Walmart did a nice job of snuffing all three of those chains. Advertising does indeed work wonders when it comes to consumer perceptions.

Mining

SueJ has the lyrics to this up over at Nailing Jello to the Wall, and that reminded me I'd seen this video someplace recently (and I am, of course, totally blanking on where).

One of the things that's been lost in teaching history in the US is just how incredibly violent American labor history is.  Everything we enjoy today -- e.g., the idea of an 8 hour day, 5 day work week -- was bought with blood.  If it had been left up to the employers, we'd all still be putting in 14 hour days and working for starvation wages.

4th of July question: what is patriotism?

And who is Angelo Herndon?

One of this country's many unknown working class heroes. If you Google his name, you'll find a number of articles, including a Wikipedia entry, about his arrest for inciting insurrection for having the nerve to encourage Georgia mill workers to unionize back in the 1930s. What none of the articles mention (at least not the ones I skimmed this morning) is that inciting insurrection was a capital crime in Georgia, and the District Attorney pushed hard for the death penalty.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the case is that Herndon was released on bond while his case was being appealed. It was not unusual for labor organizers in the deep South to take advantage of being out on bond to leave the region rather than returning to face the certainty of extremely long prison terms and the very real risk of mob violence and lynching. Herndon, who had been only 19 at the time of his arrest, chose to go back to Atlanta and allow the legal process to proceed. In 1937 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Georgia civil insurrection law, reversing Herdon's conviction and freeing him from prison.

Herndon remained active in the Communist Party and the labor movement through the 1940s, and then quietly disappeared into obscurity in middle age.

You know, I occasionally am subjected to anti-union and anti-communism rants by politically conservative acquaintances. Well, the last time I looked it wasn't a capital offense to complain about working conditions. You might get fired if you suggest forming a union at work, but no one's going to march you off to jail with a legal recommendation for the death penalty. You can thank Angelo Herndon and his compatriots -- they were willing to die so the rest of us could enjoy freedom of speech and freedom of association.

[This post was inspired by C-Span asking the question "what is patriotism?"]