Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal in a slightly different form.
Over at our blog, "The Writing on the Wal," we've been talking about Wal-Mart's computerized scheduling policy ever since that Wall Street Journal story came out about it last week. While many Wal-Mart watchers have been rightfully appalled, the "It's not so bad" counter-chorus has just started to strike up its tune.
Consider this puff piece from the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger that makes it all seem hunky-dory:
Latoya Machado, a cashier in Grapevine, Texas, near Dallas, said her previous work schedule changed every week. Now, she works Monday through Thursday between the hours of 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. and on Sunday between 3 and 9 p.m.
It doesn't bother her that she no longer gets overtime [Ed: Oh come on, they really want us to believe that Wal-Mart ever pays overtime?] because she would rather be certain she can leave by 5 p.m. each day to pick up her two sons from day care. Previously, she had to arrange for someone else to pick them up or pay a late fee.
Machado said the Texas store has more associates available at 5 p.m. when it gets busy.
"There are less lines for the customers, and I don't have to pick up anybody else's slack," she said.
But the most important piece of revisionism on this subject comes from Wal-Mart itself. It's called "Wal-Mart Clarifies Enhancements to the Scheduling System" and you can find it here. Would I'll do in this space today, tomorrow and the day after is clarify Wal-Mart's clarifications obfuscations.
Let me begin today by tackling Wal-Mart' s first three points at once as a sort of introduction:
- The new system has the capacity to consider associates’ scheduling preferences and availability while scheduling to meet customer traffic.
- Associates self-select their preferred and available hours and the scheduling system first attempts to schedule within those preferred hours and then looks to available hours. The scheduling system will never schedule an associate outside of the hours they told us they are available.
- Our associates are not required to have "open availability" or be "on call."
Referring to this as being "on call" or "open availability" is just a bad anaogy. Try thinking of the new computerized scheduling system as a reverse auction (like Priceline), except employees are bidding hours instead of money. The more hours that you are capable of "bidding," making yourself available to be scheduled, the more likely it is that you will get the number of hours you want. Sure, nobody is being forced to work hours that they don't want to, but if you're not willing to give your entire life to the company, your hours will be taken over by people who arel.
By implementing this system, Wal-Mart (as well as the other firms that use this computer program, like Radio Shack) are engaging in a capitalists' dream. They are forcing their employees to compete against each other for a scarce resource: time on the job. If you don't have the availability to win this competition because you have children, or (God forbid) you need another job besides Wal-Mart to make ends meet, then you are going to lose irrespective of your performance on the job. At Wal-Mart, it's all about holding down costs.
We shouldn't be surprised by this development. The infamous 2005 Susan Chambers memo [.pdf, page 7 if you're looking it up] explained that Wal-Mart would be lowering the total number of labor hours per store by increasing the percentage of its employees working part time. Everybody thought this was all about health insurance, but it turns out Wal-Mart also gets to cut its labor costs to an absolute minimum at the same time. If Wal-Mart can do it, so can nearly every other company in America. Any employer in the country can now have a workforce that is in essence no better off than temps.
This computer system is the law of the jungle writ large. It may have the capacity to consider the associates' scheduling preferences, but Wal-Mart has no reason to do this. If it can staff its stores with the most dependent people possible, people who can't go get another part-time job because they need more hours at Wal-Mart, the workers will never have the nerve to even imagine joining a union.
Still think this sort of thing is just like what every other employer is already doing? Remember, these aren't doctors or nurses or even Target workers. These are people who are paid the bottom of the barrel to staff stores that are mostly open 24 hours. They are not highly-trained, so therefore are not exactly getting compensated for the inconvenience this system will inflict upon them.
But they aren't stupid, either. Many of them will quit, but as Susan Chambers' effort to replace longtime employees with wage slaves comes to fruition, others are going to give the company labor problems that will make last year's Florida protest look like a day at the beach.
JR