On call for Walmart

Ron Galloway wrote yesterday about a new plan at Walmart. Now, instead of relying on the management to decide when to schedule people, there will be a computer that deterimines when people should be called in to work and when they should be sent home, as well as notifying when they get close to 38 hours so that the store can send them home to avoid paying overtime.

Really, the only new thing that I see here is the idea of having people be on-call without pay.

I worked for a couple of different stores with differing degrees of schedule flexibility. At Fleet Farm, you had your schedule and worked whether there were people there or not. This often meant that sometimes there were a lot of people on the floor and sometimes not enough. I remember one night where I was the only person for the whole department because everyone else had scheduled time off. At that point, I would have wanted to be able to call someone in.

At Jo-Ann Fabrics, they often schedule people for 3 hour shifts and/or send you home early if there are no customers in the store. That was frustrating, because it was hard to know when you would have time or not to be doing other things, and you didn't know what your paycheck would be.

I don't think that there is much to be done about sending people home early, but as far as being on-call, I think that a better solution would be to either pay people to be on call or to not have them be obligated to come in. For example, with the Fleet Farm thing, I would have liked to have been able to call around to find someone willing to work, had I been allowed. If I had been home on my couch, then I would have probably come in, had someone called. Some people would welcome the option for extra hours, while chafing at the idea of being on-call.

It really bothers me that the employer always has the upper hand in the scheduling of employee time. I remember reading at some point that some cultures consider the whole employer/employee thing to be a form of violence (though one should note that this was a culture in a jungle somewhere without McDonalds or Walmart). People will say that if you don't like it, then you can work somewhere else. Unfortunately, pretty much all employers operate the same way for any given segment of society. Try finding a job in unskilled retail that doesn't try to dictate your life.

When I was a student working in retail, I decided that I wasn't going to give the job that much control over my life. When I was there, I worked - don't get me wrong; they were paying me to be there, so I held up my end. It was a way to pay the bills, but not my main focus (and I have to admit, that my parents were still paying a lot of my bills at the time, so I had the option of quitting). Anyway, I told my employers that I was taking certain days off (always before the schedule was written), and that they could schedule me if they really wanted to, but that I wouldn't be there. Maybe I just got lucky, but I never got fired over this. This is probably not an option for most people and probably not as appropriate if you've selected said employment as a career, but really, life is too short to have some boss dictating your life.

I have a friend working for a small pizza parlor. The boss has been laid up in the hospital a lot over the last few years and hasn't been able to work. Well, my friend is the manager, so she's been working 80 hour weeks for the last few years. I couldn't imagine that. She says that if she stops, the boss will never be able to afford to pay her for all her work. I don't know...in my mind, no amount of money is worth working so much that you don't even have time to go spend it!