
Whole Foods cuts workers' hours after Amazon introduces minimum wage - vector_spaces
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/06/whole-foods-amazon-cuts-minimum-wage-workers-hours-changes
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vgoh1
So what, was Whole Foods giving employees more hours than what was required to
have the store functioning properly, simply because labor was cheap? That
doesn't add up, to me. Also, this is discounting the value of the employee's
time. Like, if they get the same paycheck, but are working fewer hours for it,
that's of no benefit to them.

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nybble41
> more hours than what was required to have the store functioning properly

Most likely, yes. Beyond the minimum amount of work needed to keep the store
functioning there are other tasks which offer some benefit, but not enough to
justify the increased wages they would be paying employees to perform those
tasks. Which is unfortunate for those employees who preferred longer hours and
more total revenue over a higher hourly rate...

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MivLives
So I actually worked at Whole Foods for a bit.

It helps when you realize there's actually three classes of workers at Whole
Foods. There's Part Time (Not supposed to be over twenty hours), Part Time
20(at least twenty hours), and Full Time (think north of 35 hours a week).

The latter two get health insurance, the first does not. The part time 20
worker has to pay a lot more for health insurance but it's a really good plan.

I suspect what they're doing here is bumping more people from part time 20
down to part time to reduce benefits.

Honestly this doesn't really surprise me. While I worked there they were
hostile to giving people consistent hours. I suspect many jobs are like that
though. Made it very hard to have a second part time job while you worked
there.

There was also radical swings in my hours week to week. Some weeks I worked 12
hours, one week I worked 32 (I was a part time worker).

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vector_spaces
I worked for Whole Foods for a while too, and can vouch that even prior to the
Amazon acquisition this is how they rolled.

I was hired during a hiring freeze when they weren't hiring new outside FT
people. My team leader needed me full time, so we learned that, internally at
least, the constraints on PT/FT status weren't the weekly hours worked but the
average weekly hours during a fiscal period. This led to a situation where I
worked a couple 25-30 hour weeks, then went down to 8-16 other weeks.

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x38iq84n
It's the same old story every time minimum wage is raised. Will they never
learn?

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drugme
Exactly - when minimum wages are introduced, they need to be met with rigorous
protections against reductions in working hours.

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lotsofpulp
Why not just have the government pay the person directly? Complicating things
only introduces avenues for corruption and errors.

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zapita
The US government already subsidizes underpaying employers in the form of food
stamps and other palliative services.

If employers were required to pay for the foodstamps and welfare services of
their own workers, I wonder if we would see a change in their behavior? It
would suddenly make less economical sense to reduce costs by pushing their
most vulnerable workers below the poverty line, since that would just push up
their welfare costs. Today they don’t pay a dime - so hey, if the government
is subsidizing you to screw your workforce, and public opinion is brainwashed
to blame the workers instead of you, why would you _not_ do it?

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lotsofpulp
I see all of that as a consequence of unnecessary complications. If society’s
goal is to provide people with a quality of life floor, then do that for
everyone equally. Then you don’t have to calculate the costs of which employer
is using how much welfare (which are impossible calculations anyway subject to
political pressure).

