Flexible wage slaves

These days it’s not unusual for someone on the way to work to receive a text message from her employer saying she’s not needed right then.

Although she’s already found someone to pick up her kid from school and arranged for childcare, the work is no longer available and she won’t be paid for it.

Just-in-time scheduling like this is the latest new thing, designed to make retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, and other customer-driven businesses more nimble and keep costs to a minimum.

Software can now predict up-to-the-minute staffing needs on the basis of  information such as traffic patterns, weather, and sales merely hours or possibly minutes before.

This way, employers don’t need to pay anyone to be at work unless they’re really needed. Companies can avoid paying wages to workers who’d otherwise just sit around.

Employers assign workers tentative shifts, and then notify them a half-hour or ten minutes before the shift is scheduled to begin whether they’re actually needed. Some even require workers to check in by phone, email, or text shortly before the shift starts.

Just-in-time scheduling is another part of the new “flexible” economy – along with the move to independent contractors and the growing reliance on “share economy” businesses, like Uber, that purport to do nothing more than connect customers with people willing to serve them.

New software is behind all of this – digital platforms enabling businesses to match their costs exactly with their needs. 

The business media considers such flexibility an unalloyed virtue. Wall Street rewards it with higher share prices. America’s “flexible labor market” is the envy of business leaders and policy makers the world over.

There’s only one problem. The new flexibility doesn’t allow working people to live their lives.

Businesses used to consider employees fixed costs  – like the costs of factories, offices, and equipment. Payrolls might grow or shrink over time as businesses expanded or contracted, but from year to year they were fairly constant.

That meant steady jobs. And with steady jobs came steady paychecks along with regular and predictable work schedules.

But employees are now becoming variable costs of doing business – depending on ups and downs in demand that may change hour by hour, possibly minute by minute.

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Yet working people have to pay the rent or make mortgage payments, and have keep up with utility, food, and fuel bills. These bills don’t vary much from month to month. They’re the fixed costs of living. 

Workers can’t simultaneously be variable costs for business yet live in their own fixed-cost worlds.

They’re also husbands and wives and partners, most are parents, and they often have to take care of elderly relatives. All this requires coordinating schedules in advance – who’s going to cover for whom, and when.

But such planning is impossible when you don’t know when you’ll be needed at work.

Whatever it’s called – just-in-time scheduling, on-call staffing, on-demand work, independent contracting, or the “share economy”  [in the uk it is more commonly known as Zero Hour Contracts]– the result is the same: No predictability, no economic security.

This makes businesses more efficient, but it’s a nightmare for working families.

Last week, the National Employment Law Project reported that 42 percent of U.S. workers make less than $15 an hour.

But even $20 an hour isn’t enough if the work is unpredictable and insecure.

Not only is a higher minimum wage critical. So are more regular and predictable hours.

Some states require employers to pay any staff who report to work for a scheduled shift but who are then sent home, at least 4 hours pay at the minimum wage.

But these laws haven’t kept up with software that enables employers to do just-in-time scheduling – and inform workers minutes before their shift that they’re not needed.

In what may become a test case, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last week warned 13 big retailers – including Target and The Gap – that their just-in-time scheduling may violate New York law, which requires payments to workers who arrive for a shift and then are sent home.

We need a federal law requiring employers to pay for scheduled work.

Alternatively, if American workers can’t get more regular and predictable hours, they at least need stronger safety nets.

These would include high-quality pre-school and after-school programs; unemployment insurance for people who can only get part-time work; and a minimum guaranteed basic income. 

All the blather about “family-friendly workplaces” is meaningless if workers have no control over when they’re working.

By Robert B. Reich on Alternet website

We are wage slaves and that's the cold reality. Until we abolish wages system, as Marx and the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the IWW and Eugene Debs proposed, employers will use all manner of ways to ensure they extract the maximum profit from our toil

Agency wage slavery

“ Martin” works at the Jacob’s biscuit factory in Liverpool, although he’s not employed by the firm. Instead, he works for Prime Time Recruitment, one of Britain’s biggest suppliers of contract labour. He does the same work as Jacob’s own staff, and often substitutes for their absences – but is on the minimum wage; they get paid over £2 an hour more. They’re on a rota, while he has to wait by his phone for each shift. His holiday and sick-pay entitlements are much worse, too. Jacob’s staff enjoy access to a workplace gym and medical centre; when Martin had an accident with a forklift truck, the medical centre turned him away, telling him to find his own doctor.

Martin never knows when he will be working: just last week, he was rung up in the morning to be told he had 45 minutes to his next shift. Nor does he know where he will be working: his agency regularly offers him work in a factory in Blackpool. As Prime Time pointed out, that’s within a contractual 25-mile radius as the crow flies. But as Martin demonstrates on Google Maps, it’s over 50 miles by road, and the travel costs mean that a six-hour shift would only earn him just over £3 an hour. When he turns down such impossible jobs, the agency then uses a legal loophole to chalk him up as unavailable for work and pays him nothing.

Prime Time, has more control over his life than he does. What makes this different from zero-hours work is Martin isn’t directly employed by his workplace. But the effect is almost the same: the workers and their families are burdened with all the insecurity and powerlessness, while their employers enjoy the flexibility of labour on tap. Add the estimated 1.2 million agency workers to the 600,000 on zero-hours contracts, and you have a shadow workforce of about 1.8 million unpeople, enjoying none of the security that should come with employment in a rich country. Thanks to official neglect, so much about these unpeople is unknown. We don’t even know how many employment agencies there are, let alone how many names they have on their books. But we can say some things about such workers. They are never going to be helped by prime ministerial exhortations for a pay rise. As such, they form part of the answer to one of the major conundrums in Britain: what’s gone wrong in our labour market. he shadow workforce tells us that all this is bunk. Its growth points the way to a new world in which big employers draw upon a pool of casual labour, stripped of most of their rights and bargaining power. It’s a pool that’s been growing fast since the banking crisis. Particularly heavy users of agency workers are logistics companies of the kind that deliver our online Christmas orders, and food manufacturers such as Jacob’s, which disclosed last year that at any one time up to 250 of the 900 staff at its Aintree factory could be agency. (Today the firm estimated the agency number at 70.) Last year, the company marked its centenary of operations in Liverpool. Generations of locals would have passed through there, and the royal seal still hangs over the door. But those social ties now count for nothing; the factory is becoming a hub in an extractive labour market.

The shadow workforce is spreading especially fast in those economies that never recovered from Thatcher’s great industrial wipeout. Much of the former steel town of Corby is now just agency land. And in Martin’s home of Liverpool, the city council found that of the 13,771 vacancies advertised in Merseyside, nearly half – 6,600 – were for temporary agency work. Its report, published last autumn, in effect punctures all the smug forecasts that the jobs market will soon turn a corner. What it tells you is that for people like Martin, in hollowed-out economies like his suburb of Liverpool, the market isn’t suddenly going to right itself. And until that happens – as Barry Kushner, a Labour councillor, points out – the housing association will continue to rack up arrears, and the waiting list for advice at the local Citizens Advice bureau will grow.

As a middle-aged father, he’s borrowed to cover food and fuel bills, and “I’ve not known when I’ll be able to pay anything back”. Holidays? Forget it. He points at one of two toddlers messing around on the living-room floor: her first Christmas was “nearly ruined” for lack of money. What you need to know about agency workers, he says, is, “they don’t live, they get by”.

Sure, there are supply teachers enjoying the freedom that agency status brings. And one imagines that others do skip from temp job to fully fledged career. But elsewhere there are people like Martin, who have no choice. He’s holding out for a permanent staff position, yet can’t think of anyone who has made the leap. Nor can he sign on while looking for other work, because that would count as making himself voluntarily unemployed and lead to being deprived of jobseeker’s allowance. So he is stuck at the very bottom of the pile.

There are winners. The workfare company A4e, which sent Martin to the factory, gets a fee from the taxpayer for placing a warm body in a job. Jacob’s, an arm of a £2bn business, gets cheap labour with none of the pesky overheads or obligations. Middleman Prime Time, part of a group with a £500m annual turnover, takes its cut and was until last August getting government funding on top. The losers are Martin.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/jobs-agency-workers-britain-economy-insecure-low-paid-work