A co-worker recently asked me to write a rant about being employed. Since I'm a blogger (though I will admit that I've been a piss-poor one as of late, due in part to lack of things to say and a need to keep my personal life slightly more personal), I opted to use this as an opportunity to get back into the swing of blogging.
Here's what I find to be the main problem with employment in this century: we are all replaceable.
Let me explain with a little parable. When I worked at Wal-Mart and I was being trained on my very first day, the person who was teaching us how to use the registers told us that if we messed around on the job, we would be fired. Her exact words to us were, "There are seven people out there waiting to take your job." The message was clear: you don't matter and we can find anyone else just like you to put in the same position and do exactly what you do.
The transparency at Wal-Mart was interesting. You knew from the first day that you were quite replaceable. You knew that if you screwed up, they would get rid of you. They could find any old reason to get rid of you whenever they wanted. This didn't really make anyone work faster or harder or better, but it set a standard. It illustrated an expectation.
Now, I work elsewhere, though I'm still in retail. In the interest of keeping my job, I won't mention where it is that I work, but I will say that it is a major, national drugstore chain. We put our best face forward. We tell our employees that they matter, and to some extent, we might even treat them that way. But the problem is that the Wal-Mart standard still rings true. There's a message in the background--almost like a song on the radio that's just loud enough to hear, but not so loud that it gets distracting or worrying--that tells us that we can be gone tomorrow just as easily as we were hired yesterday. We still know that we're the expendable crew members.
This notion of disposability is ruining retail. Managers can treat you however they want because they know that you won't quit and you can't do anything about it. And, even if you did create a problem for them, they can invent a reason to fire you and it won't be an issue for them. It creates a climate of powerlessness among workers. The mantra of anyone in retail who has been upset or offended by a manager is, "Oh well, it's not like I can do anything about it."
The problem doesn't just lie with managers. It's systemic. It's more cost effective for a company to get rid of a higher paid worker and replace them with a new body for a lower wage every so often, so this is what corporate offices encourage. Gone are the days of retiring with 50 years at a company. The dream is over. With that kind of encouragement from home offices and CEO's, it's really no wonder that the people who actually maintain and run a store--that would be the minimum wage workers, for those of you playing along at home--have so little control over their own destinies.
So what's the solution? Is there a solution? The more time I spend working in retail, the more out of control I feel. Someone else gets to decide what I do. Someone else gets to tell me what is or is not good enough. And I don't even have the security to be able to argue about whether or not the standards are fair because I might lose my job for any old reason. I am the nonessential essential worker. Without people like me, the store wouldn't function. Yet, people like me are just a dime a dozen to the corporate office. Where does that put my future? What does that say for kids who are growing up now? What will their future look like in ten to twenty years? What are their prospects? More to the point, whatever the answers are to the previous two questions, are we okay with that?
The major question I'd like the answer to, though, is how did we get here? How did we come so far without anyone protesting?
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