After Amazon Increases Worker Wages, Whole Foods Responds By Cutting Worker Hours (theguardian.com)

schwit1 shared this article from the Guardian: In response to public pressure and increasing scrutiny over the pay of its warehouse workers, Amazon enacted a $15 minimum wage for all its employees on 1 November, including workers at grocery chain Whole Foods, which it purchased in 2017... But since the wage increase, Whole Food employees have told the Guardian that they have experienced widespread cuts that have reduced schedule shifts across many stores, often negating wage gains for employees.

"My hours went from 30 to 20 a week," said one Whole Foods employee in Illinois... "We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time," the worker said. An internal email shared by the employee from their department manager cited the across-the-board shift cuts as "the direct result of guidance from our regional team". In Maryland, another Whole Foods worker said their regional management is forcing stores to cut full-time employee schedules by four hours, to 36 hours a week. "This hours cut makes that raise pointless as people are losing more than they gained and we rely on working full shifts," the worker said...

In September 2018, several Whole Foods workers organized the group Whole Worker, with the goals of forming a union and providing workers a resource to organize since Amazon took over... "There are many team members working at Whole Foods today whose total compensation is actually less than what it was before the wage increase due to these labor reductions," said a Whole Worker spokesperson in an email to the Guardian.
Neither Amazon nor Whole Foods responded to requests fo a comment, the Guardian reports -- while the workers that they interviewed "were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation."

Comments

Re:Minimum Wage is a Poor Form of Welfare

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum wages are nessesary if you dont have strong unions. In Denmark we dont have a fixed minimumwage. Instead the wages are handled through negotiations between unions, politicians and employers unions. Take a Mcdonaldworker in denmark. The startning wage is just below $20.... and yes we still have plenty of fast food stores. American workers should never have abandoned their untions.

Re:Minimum Wage is a Poor Form of Welfare

[ranton]

I would agree that unions are a better way to provide general welfare than minimum wage laws, but still not as good as methods which do not interfere with market forces. This is of course debatable, but many contend (including me) that unions harm overall competitiveness of a society in an effort to provide general welfare to all citizens. Basic income could do the same, but paid for by progressive taxation instead of reducing the global competitiveness of businesses.

Well, that's because it's not welfare

[rsilvergun]

it sets a floor you can't fall below. It says "If you work 40 hours a week you should be able to get by".

It also raises _your_ wages, because it increases job mobility on the low end and makes it less likely somebody at the low wage sector is going to start gunning for the next job up the pole, pushing wages down in that sector and causing a cascade effect that eventually hits your end.

An economy without worker protections is always, always a race to the bottom.

Re:Minimum Wage is a Poor Form of Welfare

[apoc.famine]

I concur. Minimum wages and unionized wages/benefits are really stopgap measures to try to ensure a living wage and appropriate compensation. UBI would negate the need for both, as there wouldn't be a compelling reason for people to accept poverty wages. That would force businesses to be competitive in getting workers to work for them, rather than being able to abuse their labor because there isn't much of an alternate.

I think this would also nudge people into being self-employed and trying to start their own businesses, as the risk in doing so would be markedly reduced. People trying out new businesses can only be a good thing for most communities.

While I'm on the Subject

[rsilvergun]

what the F happened to The Guardian? This is some crap reporting here. You went to press with nothing more than a few employees complaining about hours dropping? I'd expect that from Fox News since this fits their narrative and they'll print anything that does, but not from the Guardian.

I'm seeing a lot of left wing sites I used to read seemingly going to the right. Politico was always kind of establishment...ish but lately they're worse than MSNBC. I've even seen Vox get into the act. The only one that hasn't is Motherjones. Maybe Al-Jazeerez and the BBC but they're not left wing so much as balanced.

I'm wondering if they establishment types are getting scared of the progressive left and turning up the dial? Bernie's got a good shot at the presidency if the DNC doesn't cheat again and AOC is basically the face of the Democratic party at this point. Hell, there was a member of the House that called out AIPAC for Pete's sake and when they tried to shut her out the best they could do was pass a milktoast "anti-hate" resolution (for those wondering, the actual left wants the Israeli gov't to stop shitting all over the Palestinians so we can have actual peace while the Establishment among the Dems would like to keep soaking up the gravy train of campaign donations).

Either way as a Democrat it looks like the Establishment types are sweating, and that can't help but be a good thing for all of us.

Re:Up the wage

[Anonymous Coward]

"medicare for all" would actually COST LESS, much less, than what the country, as a whole, is paying now for health care. do some fucking research, and turn off the fox news.

Which is why the gov't and larger orgs step in

[rsilvergun]

and collect the cats, spay them, and let 'em go. I knew a gal who worked for a catch and release outfit funded by the local gov't and donations. Worked great at reducing feral cat populations in a humane way.

OTOH if you just leave it up to random chance or an imaginary free market you get bad outcomes. As always ask yourself this: When, in your lifetime, has the best answer to a complex problem been "leave it alone and hope it sorts itself out"?

TL;DR: raise federal minimum wage and the workers can quit and go elsewhere when a manager pulls this crap.

Re:Which is why the gov't and larger orgs step in

[Rick Schumann]

The business world left entirely to it's own devices, with no laws or oversight to regulate them, would bring back horrors like the mining camps of old, where your wages were charged against for the tools and supplies necessary to do your job, and the only place you could buy food or other necessities to live was the 'company store', which price-gouged the living daylights out of you; life in those mining camps amounted to indentured servitude, if not outright slavery; workers families were de-facto held hostage, because if you were 'fired' you were thrown out of your company-owned housing, and would have no money or transportation to go anywhere else. Lack of regulation of business would also bring back things like Debtors' Prison and child labor.

As an aside to this subject, if you look at the 'for-profit' prison system, and how certain demographics of our citizens are treated by law enforcement and the criminal legal system, it comes close to slavery. But that really is a different subject.

Fix the systemic problems

[rsilvergun]

and the problems go away. The trouble here is that this wasn't a minimum wage increase. It was a pay increase by Amazon.

I've pointed this out elsewhere on the thread, but either Amazon didn't increase payrolls and set their store managers up to fail or they did and the store manager is taking advantage of the situation to lower his wage costs in the hopes of netting a nice fat bonus.

In either case the solution is to fix the systemic problems at the top. To wit:

1. Raise Federal minimum wage so the employees can go find other work at the same pay.

2. Implement Medicare for All so employers no longer fear paying benefits just because they gave somebody 30hr/week.

As an added bonus you'll get a stronger economy from increased spending by low wage earners (who tend to spend 100% of their income), studies show you won't see inflation and you'll save $5 trillion every 10 years on healthcare while giving everyone access.

There is literally no reason not to do this except "I feel like I earn less when somebody earns more".

True story, a bud worked for a shitty call center that cut everybody's pay. This caused a ton of backlash so they company said that, as a reward for their years of good service, they would be starting new employees at $2/hr less than the existing employees.

Re: Of course they did

[Rick Schumann]

Actually there are people who do precisely this all the time, and there are veterinarians who will provide the service for free, to help fix the feral cat population problem without euthanising them all. Apparently you're ignorant of any such things.

That's now how economies work

[rsilvergun]

Economic growth happens when productivity increases faster that population. This is exactly what's been happening. See here. We've doubled productivity while decreasing labor by 1/3.

The problem we have is that the increase is from automation. Meaning that it's machines, and not workers, adding the value right now. This means a worker cannot simply bargain for better pay anymore because the value of their labor isn't raising. It's the opposite. Automation is decreasing the value of labor. So we have more of everything but less to go around. Here's a much more succinct explanation of the phenomenon

TL;DR;You do not "run out" of money because economies grow. But without public policy to manage where that growth goes you end up with out of control inequality & robber barons. Exactly like we did pre-New Deal. Time for a New New Deal.