The chances of the double attack are slim starbucks stores and amazon warehouses throughout the country interrupted its Christmas season. By most accounts, the packages arrived on time, while consumers eager for espressos shaken with oat milk and iced brown sugar almost certainly managed to find sugar and help elsewhere. Still, the central themes of the strikes offer a way to understand how fundamentally violated working conditions are in the United States.
Whether you clock shifts behind a counter, work in a classroom or factory, or sit at a desk, today's battles for opportunity have not only trapped more Americans than ever, they have undermined mobility society that was once essential to America's self-concept.
In 2023, an economic opportunity survey by Gallup found that 39% of Americans believed that they were not managing to get ahead despite working hard. That figure in 2002: 23%. The failure of hard work in America makes our communities shaky, our faith weak, our lives lonely, our politics toxic, and our relationship with work masochistic and unsustainable.
In pushing for a better quality of life, for example, one of the main complaints raised by striking Starbucks workers was the unpredictability of schedules, a popular practice in which employers do not set workers' schedules more than a few days (or even hours) in advance. . “Employees in lower-wage industries are increasingly at the mercy of scheduling algorithms designed to maximize efficiency and minimize labor costs,” Rebecca Plevin noted last year. “When staffing doesn't match expected customer demand, workers may be called in at the last minute or sent home early.” Anyone who has email on their phone knows how work can turn into free time, but for those who have a second or third job, are enrolled in training, college or certification courses, provide stable child care or are simply hoping to spend time with family or friends, a lack of predictable hours makes basic life patterns erratic.
Problems like these tend to escalate quickly. Although some cities, such as Los Angeles, have approved predictive programming ordinancesThat has not solved the problem of workers not knowing how much income they will earn each month. Known as income volatility, the phenomenon of fluctuating wages and family income has become at least twice as common since 1970 and now affects about a third of American households.
The unreliable nature of wages, caused in part by the rise of gig work, perma-lancing, and jobs without a set number of hours, has all sorts of consequences beyond making families hustle. to adapt when your budget drops. “I have to beg my boss to make sure I'm scheduled to work at least 20 hours a week,” said Arloa Fluhr, a Starbucks barista in Illinois. wrote of his decision to strike last month. “If I don't meet those 20 hours each week, I could lose my benefits and the health insurance I rely on to care for my three children, including my 10-year-old daughter, who has type 1 diabetes.”
Beyond financial stress, unstable wages can make it impossible to save money, make long-term plans, and access credit. A family with unpredictable income could qualify for public assistance one month and then exceed the income threshold and be disqualified another. “Families close to the food stamp eligibility threshold who had more volatile incomes were less likely to use this benefit in the years they qualified to receive it,” a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. foundand adds that nearly 1 in 5 eligible families do not sign up for food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
And while many quality-of-life issues may seem academic or abstract, they manifest in fundamental everyday problems and a degraded experience for everyone, everywhere. Complaints about chronic overwork and understaffing are not limited to fulfillment centers, coffee chains or fast food restaurants, but are also ubiquitous in hospitals, schools and air traffic control facilities. For obvious reasons, a staff retention problem at the Secret Service captured headlines last year. A recent workforce survey found that about half of all American workers said their workplaces are understaffedwith 43% of workers considering leaving their jobs.
Ultimately, shortcomings in our labor standards hurt everyone, including bottom-line-focused executives. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup set a conservative price of a staggering $1 trillion in replacement cost of employees who voluntarily leave their jobs in the United States each year. Including factors such as low worker morale and knowledge loss, lower productivity, and hiring and training expenses, he estimated that “the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from half to double the employee's annual salary.” .
The context of the Amazon warehouse strikes highlights the absurdity of this dynamic. According to internal company documents. made public By 2022, Amazon will suffer a worker attrition rate of approximately 150% annually double the industry average. In simpler terms, only one in three workers hired by Amazon in 2021 managed to stay with the company for more than three months. This level of workforce drain cost the e-commerce giant a staggering $8 billion in profits. In addition to showing twice as many workers leaving voluntarily as would be expected, the documents also highlighted concerns that the company could be left without potential hires in certain markets because it had drawn down so much of the workforce.
This brings us back to the strikes. Depending on where you live, the emergence of worker-led protests and work stoppages may seem like a constant in the landscape. They are not. Despite the union visibility and record popularity In the US, union membership It is currently at an all-time low.. With more meaningful protections against wage theft or basic benefits like paid sick leave, guaranteed time off, and affordable healthcare, companies largely retain the power to dictate the terms of American workplace culture. And as we're all seeing, they're doing a terrible job.
Adam Chandler is the author of “Dreams from the car” and the next “99% Perspiration: A New Practical History of the American Lifestyle”, from which this article has been adapted.
