The Localist by Carrie Rollwagen

Author:Carrie Rollwagen [Rollwagen, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Business & Economics, Free Enterprise & Capitalism, Small Business
ISBN: 9780692319482
Google: 0M-3rQEACAAJ
Publisher: Carrie Rollwagen
Published: 2014-11-12T04:19:02+00:00

A Penny Saved Is an Employee Burned

Even at the best of times, food service and retail work are not enviable jobs. Dealing with the paying public is difficult — for every kind customer, you have five angry ones who take out their problems on you (even, and maybe especially, when they have nothing to do with you). It’s an easy way to lose your faith in humanity, and that’s before you even get to job perks like cleaning bathrooms, wearing hairnets, smelling like grease or spoiled milk all the time, and watching your hands shrivel away due to constant exposure to sanitation chemicals. But those are just parts of the job, and they can be made bearable, and sometimes even fun, by taking pride in your work and finding camaraderie with your coworkers the way you often can at an independently owned store or at a corporation with an especially good manager. The kinds of jobs lots of people consider low-level can actually be quite fulfilling and enjoyable in the right situation. Unfortunately, the corporate model doesn’t foster that kind of situation because keeping low-wage earners unhappy and unmotivated is better for the bottom line than keeping them around and having to compensate them for long-term service.

The most effective way to keep prices low, of course, is to pay your work force as little as possible. In most retail and service businesses, labor is one of the highest expenses, so it pays to manipulate your employees into accepting lower wages and giving up benefits like health care and retirement savings programs. There are the day-to-day low salaries and employee cuts that we’re used to seeing from big box stores, but there are plenty of other abuses that go far beyond those. Wal-Mart, for example, has been accused of locking their employees inside stores overnight so they can’t leave, and of discriminating against women as a matter of policy. The same accusations have surfaced so often that it seems clear they’re indicative of business-as-usual and not just the decisions of a few bad managers, as the company would like us to believe.

The low wage at most corporately owned stores is keeping our country in recession and putting an unsustainable drain on federal resources, but it’s routinely misrepresented by political talking heads and ignored by wealthy and middle class people who believe hard work always leads to prosperity despite facts that say otherwise. As a white, over-educated, middle-class person, I know a lot of other white, over-educated, middle-class people. We like to do things like eat hummus, buy records on vinyl, and start book clubs because those are the kinds of things over-privileged white kids do. In one of these book clubs, we read Nickled and Dimed, an excellent book detailing the struggles of the working poor. There’s a passage in the book that describes eating peanut butter sandwiches for every meal when you can’t afford proper food, and one of the girls in the club latched onto that as proof that being poor in America isn’t that hard.

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