It is great that we have put all kinds of labor laws in the work place such as no sexual harassment, safety, breaks times, and amount of hours considered regular time. Even with all those in place I still believe most employees today in retail are not being treated well when it comes to duties, hours and remuneration.
It seems to me where in the past an employer would hire people to work certain positions, the trend now is more employees wear many hats doing multiple positions for same pay as one person. The rules of engagement for employers and management is simple, be polite, no foul language, and your employees must adhere to any job that is asked of them within legal reason. With so many people being unemployed it is a field day for employers even in their contractual job descriptions. Someone is hired to be a clerk it is stated clearing the expectations, but somewhere they might put from time to time the employee might be asked to do other duties as well. The employee signs the agreement it is a done legal deal where they can have that person do whatever extra duties are assigned.
Over the last several years I've personally witnessed employers over working and under paying their employees. Here are a few real stories to make my point, and afterwards you can decide if these situations would be ideal working conditions for you to accept as an employee.
I worked briefly in a retail store, with a person who had a child to support, and had been with this company for many years. They promoted her to be the Customer Service Manager basically throwing her under the bus with an overwhelming work load. I witnessed her breaking down crying on a weekly based being so overcome because they had her doing two or three job positions weekly, and constantly giving her heat because it was impossible to accomplish at times. They had her paid hourly refused to allow any overtime to complete the tasks at hand. On top of her job title they had this person doing the inventory for the whole store weekly which was around 65,000 square feet. It was also her responsibility to ensure every item had the price tag properly placed including their endless sale ones, help out the office manager with administrative duties, and replace other management during their days off. When there was a special event like B.B.Q for customers she was the cook. We have not even spoken about her actual Customer Service position yet.
This company would purchase many of their products from the orient with no spare parts, if a customer had a damaged or broken item many times it took months to receive shipped by boat. Customers were irate to start with knowing it will take months, there were no returns being final sales, and the many of these customers bought on credit, still required to make monthly payment for their items purchased not even in their homes. All she could do was take the heat daily which wore on her, and was not given any alternative solutions in providing the client service.
The second major problem for this women had in her position as Customer Service Manager was when the parts arrived how long until the items were fixed from there. The person they expected to repair all the broken or damaged merchandise was the Shipping Manager who had very little extra time to fix broken items. They refused to let him hire enough warehouse personal or delivery drivers always short of man power, he had no choice but to help empty trucks many times by himself, place and enter inventory in the warehouse, do some delivers, and bring new merchandise to the floor, find and place in vehicles merchandise picked up by clients, plus scheduling and managing his team for deliveries at the same time.
Not to mention his other extra responsibilities like cutting the grass and trimming the bushes on the property in summer, clearing walk ways of snow in the winter, washing the store windows, and doing small in-store repairs like fix entry doors. With all that how much time did he really have to repair broken or damaged merchandise which does take considerable amounts of time? The Customer Service Manager was well aware of this, sharing an office with him in the shipping that was as small as a match box, cold, and dirty. The sad part for me is these people earned a little more than minimum wage, worked hard, and at end of the day were up to debt to their eyeballs. Both didn't leave because they felt painted in corner financially to find something else, this city has a 7% unemployment rate.
As much as we would like to believe that was an isolated situation it is happening all the time now. I went for an interview to become a store manager at very well-known submarine place. The duties were hiring, training, ordering, doing inventory, serving customers, daily written reports, maintaining standards, basically running this man's whole business at that location. The owner told me it was 44.5 hours a week unless someone did not show up or short-staffed plus time for meeting with him etc... The yearly salary for running this man's business was $27,000 gross or take home after deductions at source $20,250. An hourly take home of around $9.00/hour based only 44.5 hours platform. I obviously passed on his generous store manager opportunity.
If an employee like the ones above say it is too much for them to handle, they are given the riot act about being team players, or not able to multi-task which is a criteria required to work there. If they still refuse can get written up, and possibly fired over time for not performing their job well enough.
Once again I blame this whole mess on our government who is failing us in many aspects of our lives like reducing taxes and inflation, making a fair minimum wage, and reducing unemployment where people can earn a decent living. In the last century the watch dog for employees where unions, who made sure employers to treated fairly, positions were defined in stone. Taxes were lower earlier into the century, and inflation was always high but not unreasonable. I feel the way things are structured today is retail employees are being abused, all wrapped in outside look of decency.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Arnold_Nadler
No comments:
Post a Comment