Kroger

The Kroger Co grocery chain reached a tentative agreement with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1059 yesterday. The Business Courier of Cincinnati reported that the agreement covers 10,000 workers in the Columbus, OH area. UFCW locals throughout the south and midwest currently have contracts with Kroger stores.

Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the growth of insecure part-time jobs with constantly changing work hours and reduced wages and benefits. Fluctuating work schedules with no guaranteed hours each week are major detriments to the quality of life for retail workers and their families. Here's how it often works at the retail and food chains:

Every week or two, employees will find out their work schedule. Not only do days off change week-to-week, so do the start and end times of shifts. One week you might have Monday and Thursday off and then the following week you'll get Tuesday and Saturday. You might start a week off with a 9am-3pm shift, then do a 1pm-9m shift the next day, only to wake up the following day for another morning shift. You also don't know how many hours you'll get each week, so your precise monthly income is very much up in the air.

The basic idea here from the perspective of workers is that the regular rhythms of family life are seriously disrupted. What time you work each week and on what days is dictated by a computer scheduling system which seeks to deploy labor the way companies deploy other resources - just-in-time for when the company wants them. But despite the treatment they often receive from the corporate giants, human beings are not soy beans or electricity or Barbie dolls.

Workers deserve to be able to schedule their lives around predictable hours of work and predictable monthly incomes. The corporations are pushing in the other direction. The preferred frame of the retailers, their lobbyists, and their public relations firms is the mantra of "flexibility". Flexibility in the 21st century workplace is a convenient frame which seeks to avoid the inconvenient topics of reduced wages, lowered benefits, and schedules which stress flexibility all right, but "Flexibility For Whom", as Professor Elaine McCrate recently titled an academic article on the deleterious effects of schedules over which workers have no control.

In Europe, a public discourse regarding the degraded state of many once secure jobs has emerged under the banner of precarity. Whatever term advocates in other parts of the world choose, a robust public debate including the voice of retail and food workers is needed.

A pressing task ahead for retail workers and their allies is a push back against the tyranny of constantly fluctuating and insecure work schedules. Family life and personal wellbeing is too important to be subjected to the whims of computer scheduling systems and the greed of corporate executives.