I dropped my wife’s car off for a routine oil change, lube and tire rotation. In at nine in the morning, I expected the “come get it” call before noon…Try 4:45 p.m.
The shop only had one mechanic. They had lost three in the prior week, one lured away by a competitor’s $2,000 signing bonus and two skipping-out when the new manager demanded everyone work on Sunday.
Walking along Telegraph Road from Baumgartner to Forder that night I passed about 100 retail businesses: at least 38 had forms of “now hiring” signs easily visible to passersby. The unemployed could work with grease (fast food or automotive); sell CBD or snow cones or pizza; do counter work at a gas station, dry cleaner or tanning salon; or, if into ugly, work at one of three establishments which do ‘intimate waxing.’
Despite what His Accidency and many other Republican governors call true, Missouri and the rest of America does not have a great horde of unemployed sitting home growing fat on unemployment benefits and food stamps. Here in Missouri cutting unemployment pay weeks and having a food stamp program on life support has not increased those taking jobs because, well, there simply are not enough people able to fill every job.
The other day I came across a Commentary I did for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back in 2001. I pointed out that the availability of jobs and even the hourly wage weren’t the big issues. No, the two steepest impediments to getting help were the number of weekly hours employers offered, and, the way employers treated their ‘just in time’ interchangeable workers.
Back then one fast food not far from Circle Of Concern in Valley Park refused to make name tags for new hires. So, a Shelia became Alison because there was an Alison tag available. Another fast fooder had folks working two shifts a day – the breakfast and lunch rush or lunch and dinner with an unpaid two-hour break between the shifts.
This morning I stopped for a couple of fast food sausage biscuits. This major, national chain franchisee only had two employees working the breakfast rush. The customer ahead of me asking for a popular sandwich without egg caused me to turn my engine off to save gas. I finally asked the woman taking orders, filling bags and collecting money why they were so short handed. “The company won’t let us start people at more than 20¢ an hour over minimum. Most people don’t even finish the application when they hear that.”
In other words, today’s employers are just as cheap and demeaning towards their workers as bosses were twenty years ago.
Oh, blaming kids for a lack of work ethic makes a good sound bite. It doesn’t answer the question, “What do you do to encourage and reward your workers?”
Remember capitalism? Market a needed product at a fair price and treat your workers well enough that they remain loyal. That formula is so dead.
Glenn