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

Of course they did

[JeffOwl]

What did people think would happen?

Re:Of course they did

[rmdingler]

What did people think would happen?

People are generally long on good intentions, and short on consequences and repercussions.

The sweet blue-haired lady who feeds the stray feral cats until their population growth outstrips her ability to dump out enough friskies.

The folks who thought Amazon was a goin' to take the wage increase out of their piggy bank, and bear the burden of it heroically.

Re: Of course they did

[armada]

Exactly. Furthermore, they are glossing over the fact that the same money for fewer hours of your life is a freaking raise and it is being perceived as a bad thing done to them Who is teaching value to these people?

Re: Of course they did

[brian.stinar]

That actually may not be true, when looking at the complete picture.

Higher wages for fewer hours are better, given all other factors remain the same. In my state, and in other states, there are laws requiring benefits to be paid when a certain number of hours per week are worked. In those situations, it's better to work the required number of hours at a lower wage, and receive the additional benefits, than it would be to work fewer hours at a higher wage, without the benefits.

This isn't rocket science. Anyone that has paid payroll to employees knows this stuff.

Unfortunately, most people haven't paid payroll to comply with multiple different state's laws, and Federal laws, and don't understand basic economics.

Re: Of course they did

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that's not true at Whole Foods, they give benefits to part time employees as well. Glad I could educate you.

Re: Of course they did

[mrsquid0]

Of course, in this case the hours worked are not enough that the employees qualify for most benefits, so this argument falls apart.

Re: Of course they did

[nctritech]

Healthcare benefits are required at 30 hours per the ACA but not at under 30 hours, so I'm not sure where you're coming up with "hours worked are not enough that the employees qualify for most benefits." Where's the argument falling apart? The law governing the health benefit requirements says the argument is sound.

Re:Unions

[Anonymous Coward]

Each of the 13 original colonies should have stood up to Great Britain individually. If they were truly strong, they would have gone it alone. Why do you hate America?

Minimum Wage is a Poor Form of Welfare

[ranton]

This simply illustrates the obvious reason why minimum wage is not a good form of welfare. Universal basic income combats the same problem (workers without the economic value being able to earn a living wage) but without fighting against the supply/demand curve. It has been obvious for at least a century that market forces are insufficient to promote the general welfare of all citizens, but the answer is not to combat market forces. Just let wages fall where they may and provide for general welfare in another way.

The economic value of any individual is exactly what they would be paid without any minimum wage. That is fine. Just make sure society is providing basic means for all citizens without relying on wages. Minimum wage is a very poor way of doing that.

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.

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.

Re: Minimum Wage is a Poor Form of Welfare

[apoc.famine]

Ubi is economically impossible....What is needed is to bring executive compensation down to merely 500 times minimum wage from the 5-10,000 it currently is.

You say it's impossible, but hint at one thing which would help.

What's not talked about much in UBI calculations is the potential economic growth that would happen under it. If everyone suddenly has financial stability, a lot of deferred or luxury purchases are going to occur that currently are not happening. And a lot of parasitic businesses that extract money from the economy will start to dry up.

One of the compounding factors of poverty is that wages are often uncertain. You're making ends meet for a month or two, then you stop getting shifts. During that time you might have made some purchases that are suddenly unaffordable. This is in part why predatory businesses like rent-to-own, pawn shops, and payday loan places set up shop in the poor parts of town. They capitalize on the uncertainty of poverty.

Those businesses right there represent another place where we can squeeze out more money for UBI.

Back to the executive paychecks, the top 1% now have wealth equivalent to the bottom 50%. That represents an economic anchor of epic proportions, as that's money that's not circulating in communities. That's money that's not changing hands daily, subject to sales tax, property tax, and income tax. At best it gets dinged a little with capital gains taxes, but given the tax accountants the 1% can afford, even that is unlikely. We've steadily chipped away at estate taxes too, so even in death this money won't go back into economic circulation.

We literally are not taxing 50% of the money anymore.

And this is all without dismantling some of the military industrial complex, and a military which is larger than the next 6 combined, which includes allies.

We've got enough money for UBI. It just requires a rather significant war on the rich and and the military. Unfortunately, they're much better equipped to fight that battle than the population as a whole.

Up the wage

[AHuxley]

Where did people really think that new wage money would be extracted from? Profits?

Re:When are the behemoths going to learn?

[tomhath]

I'm betting on the latter, personally.

I'm betting one of the choices you left out: not enough profit means the business will close

Cuts both ways

[Roger W Moore]

There is certainly some truth to that but, on the flip side if you raise wages then job expectations also rise because you can attract better people. This means that those less competent workers are going to be let go and replaced with fewer, more effective workers.

The end result may not actually affect a companies bottom line much but it will mean that those less capable workers are going to find it harder and harder to find jobs as they are squeezed out by automation and higher job expectations. So while raising wages may reduce the number of people in poverty for some it is likely to make things a lot worse.

Margaret Thatcher...

[blackt0wer]

Socialism is fine until you run out of other people's money. A retail worker is not worth $30,000/year. When politicians, who hypocritically tout the wants of "the people" for their own purposes pass legislation purporting to seek a higher wage floor, corporations have no choice but to respond by slashing hours and benefits.

Re:Margaret Thatcher...

[v1]

and by raising prices of course. Workers are thrilled to see that minimum wage go from say $13 to $15/hr, right up until they take home their new paycheck and discover the cost of dinner out just went from $13 to $15. Imagine that. And that's how inflation works. When businesses have to pay more, they just have to pass along the costs. Raising the minimum wage doesn't just magically make money appear in the economy. Well, I suppose it DOES make money appear, but with a corresponding drop in value. So, no net gain. The only way this can possibly put more value in people's paychecks is if businesses volunteer to lower their profit margins (or go bankrupt trying), and no smart business is going to do that. Expecting that to happen is on par with believing in trickle-down-economics. People and groups aren't rich because they're stupid and generous, they're rich because they're smart and shrewd, and you must anticipate consistent behavior from them.

I think we have to assume the people making these changes understand how the process works, and are only doing it to entertain the people that don't understand it and think it'll be helpful to do. Making the voters (the stupid ones anyway) happy for a little while.

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.

I'm gonna call some bullshit here

[rsilvergun]

so Amazon increased wages for the company they owned but didn't increase labor budget?

Something doesn't add up here. There's one of two possibilities.

a. Amazon didn't increase labor budgets, in which case raising their employees wages was a cynical PR stunt pulled specifically so they could then point to and say "See, we tried to help, but minimum wage just doesn't work".

b. Amazon _did_ increase labor budgets, in which case these are just asshat managers exploiting the raise to cut hours without taking the blame for it. If you've ever worked a low wage manager job you know your bonuses are tied to costs.

Either way somebody is blowing smoke up our asses.

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.

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.

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

[scamper_22]

Actually, pretty much always. The answer to complex problems is "to leave it alone and hope it sorts itself out."

Well I just used your phrasing here, but let me walk you through it.

How do you know which of the million proposed solutions to any complex problem will work? You don't. That's why it's a complex problem. You probably risk making things worse by thinking you can make a solution.

So, your best bet is to actually leave it alone and know that many people will get off their butts and try and do something about it. Generally speaking, when that happens, good solutions emerge.

For example, when the colonial British had to deal with the Native Indians, they saw a problem. How do you integrate this vastly different culture and people with the more modern British one? They could have just left it as is and let culture and society progress as it may. Instead they decided, let's solve this problem by making Native children into British people. Let's remove them from their parents and educate them in residential schools and that will solve the problem. The result was worse than if they had just left them alone.

That's an example of screwing it up.

Here's a successful example.

Drug prices are a thing.
Certain generic drugs were not readily available or priced reasonably. This is as true in Canada as in the US. I'm in Canada, and it is still a problem here. Here's what some US hospitals did:
https://civicarx.org/about/

They created a non-profit generic drug manufacturer so they could solve that problem. They got off their butts and solved the problem. Best of all their way of solving the problem doesn't prevent or short change anyone else from trying to solve it either.

That's actually what people do. No one likes to sit around doing nothing. People solve problems. For the person who opens a pizza store to the guys who founded Google who saw the a chance at the Internet when Microsoft was slacking, to the guy who decided to try and clean up the ocean with that ocean cleaning floating device.

As it is with the minimum wage. You have no idea what to do with the minimum wage. How does that affect local wages? How about your ability to compete with India/China/Mexico. How does that all play out? I don't know and no one really knows either.

So best to let them play it out. If you really believe in good wages, please get off your butt and start a company and try it out. Just a pizza store, nothing complex.

Even your cat example. I don't know the exact organization you speak of, but no doubt it was a grass roots effort by some people who got off their butts and did something. Not just complain to the government to solve the problem. They might be getting some government aid now or cooperation with the government, but chances are they started out just trying to solve a problem and doing it.

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.

No

[rsilvergun]

We are not

This wasn't a minimum wage increase. Amazon increased their wages. If we'd done a federal increase then the workers could leave or go get second jobs and do just fine. If we did Medicare for All they wouldn't have to fear losing health benefits (and the employers wouldn't have to worry about paying for them).

Progressive policy works when it's not being actively sabotaged by bad actors.

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.

Actually it does

[rsilvergun]

because when poor people have money they spend it.

The reason why trickle _down_ doesn't work is that no matter how greedy you are there's only so many hours in the day to spend money, and only so many yachts to buy.

Give a rich man money and he sits on it to use it as a power broker tool to get what he wants. Give a poor man money and he spends it. Multiple studies have shown that demand side economics works. That a dollar given to a poor person circulates far, far more than even two given to a rich man.

The other way minimum wage "trickles up" is that it sets a floor nobody can fall below, reducing desperation. Desperate people will struggle. Most will collapse under the weight of those struggles, but a few will make it. Those few will compete with you for your jobs, putting pressure on your wages. The guy what would have been happy in life at $20/hr in a factory is now gunning for your $90k/yr job because that's what it takes to get by. Sure, he'll fail, but there's a million guys behind him. If even 1% make it into your industry you wages will go down.

You do studies

[rsilvergun]

and when something doesn't work you take a step back, research and learn from your mistakes. In other words, you apply the scientific method.

If you want a fantastic example of what happens when you leave shit up to chance take the entire first half of the 19ths century. The Great Depression and both World Wars were basically people letting stuff happen.

Post Great Depression, for example, we heavily regulated banks and had no major crashes for decades. Then we started deregulating things and blamo, Savings and Loan scandals. Same thing happened with the 2008 crash where we let Main Street and Wall Street banks interact (we didn't used to). And then there's stock buy backs. They are absolutely wrecking our economy as businesses pour capital into them instead of investments. Pre-Reagan they were illegal market manipulation, now they're standard practice.

Yes, Human beings can solve our problems. If we couldn't we'd still be at the mercy of the elements. But the thing is, we have to try. And we can't just throw up our hands and say "Welp, that didn't work, I guess we'll never solve that". That kind of defeatism is what gets us the Dark Ages all over again. Thousands of years with no progress.

Re:That was already proved bullshit

[Uberbah]

Good thing you're free to leave Detroit.

And how do you propose to do that when you work full time but earn $20 a week? Or two full time jobs - for a whole $80! Or less! Since there's no minimum wage!

The minimum wage exists to price people out of the market.

The minimum wage exists as a floor. If your business doesn't pay a living wage, your business doesn't deserve to exist.

If anyone's sucking the corporate boot-tip, it's you.

Suuuuuure. But I ask again: why don't you Randians put your home economics where your ideology lies? Back in 2001, Nickel and Dimed was written by Barbara Ehrenreich, on what a rotten existence it is to try and get by on the minimum wage. Which hasn't been increased since Bush was president.

So why don't any of you show us all how it's done. Show us how awesome it is to live under a bridge and eat potatoes because that's all you can afford. You Randians are real big on advocating starvation-level wages for other people, but never try doing it yourselves.