debt snowball, debtsnowball
Most of the posts here are about saving money. This one is about a really negative, nasty, cruel, mean spirited, anti-worker, policy used by Pier 1 Imports.
I learned something this week that is really appalling to me. When I heard it for the first time I was at first nonplused and then got a bit angry that a national company would operate this way. What am I talking about? Employment.
What is a job? When it comes down to it, a job is an activity one does on behalf of someone else or a company that trades money for skills and labor. The business uses the efforts of employees to earn more money than each employee generates and keeps the difference as profit. Every employee is vital to the company earning that extra profit. Each position isn’t equally valuable. All positions contribute to the production or flow of business.
An engineer or chemist that creates a new process for a company that will revolutionize an industry is more valuable than the person who maintains the office supplies. That difference in value is shown in the amount of pay given to each employee. Most of us understand that concept.
If someone feels under valued they can always look for a different employer who will offer more money. If there are no employers who will offer more money then the employee isn’t undervalued in that industry.
Sometimes it is necessary to learn new skills or a totally different profession in order to earn more money. It is always wise to learn some skill that is in demand instead of learning something in a field that is saturated with others doing that same thing. For a long time nursing has been a field with not enough people. It is a field that will be understaffed and still in demand for more than a decade. That is a good example of a skill to learn.
What about people who just want to work as a regular retail employee? That is something that is usually in demand. All stores have such people. Those people make the world of commerce work. The job doesn’t have too much specialized knowledge and can be done by any normal person with a little bit of training. Many people working in the retail profession are very good at what they do and bring plenty of value to their employers. They should be valued and rewarded for their efforts.
Many people work in part time jobs and prefer them. In 2009 and 2010 there are people that must take part time jobs just to get by. This article is about part time workers at Pier 1 Imports. This whole situation is probably being done at other retail stores. Please make comments below if you know of other stores that do this same thing.
Here is why Pier 1 Imports is anti-worker. Those stores only hire part time workers. They don’t hire full time workers. In my area there is only one full time worker at Pier 1 Imports and that is the manager. The assistant manager is the only one who gets to work full time hours besides the manager and that isn’t all of the time.
Pier 1 Imports lets people spend thirty to forty-five minutes filling out their application form and reading the job description before telling them this bizarre tale. They only hire people to work between four and ten hours per week. At the very most they might get to work twenty hours. Imagine that! WHO IN THE WORLD WANTS TO GET A JOB FOR FOUR HOURS PER WEEK AT MINIMUM WAGE?
That is what they do. I can understand hiring a teenager to come in for an hour per day to sweep the floors and empty the trash but they expect all of their employees to just do a tiny bit of work per day because it is best for the store. Pier 1 Imports is too cheap to hire temporary workers. Temporary workers earn too much money, plus they are usually guaranteed a minimum number of hours per day.
Pier 1 Imports in my city has over twenty employees that work this way. It is true that they agreed to do this but I wonder why? Most people drive cars to get to work and everywhere else. Driving a car five miles to work and home in a car that gets twenty miles per gallon would cost one half of a gallon of fuel per work day. If you just get to work four hours per week that is really expensive. Four hours per week at minimum wage is $29.00.
What if they spread those four hours over more than one day? It actually happens! They call in people to help unload trucks and move things around for just a couple of hours per day.
Pier 1 Imports does this to get around needing to pay any type of benefits to their workers.
How could anybody have pride about their job if they worked for this scummy company? They know that the company is doing everything it can to avoid paying a decent wage. If Pier 1 Imports just kept a few employees they could hire people with great retail experience and actually help people to earn a real living instead of getting people to work for just enough hours to go to a movie or pay their cable TV bill.
Years ago I worked in the hospitality industry as a bar tender. The company I worked for had a minimum number of hours we were guaranteed to work. If for some reason the event we worked ended before the guaranteed number of hours, we would still get paid for six full hours of work. It was rare for such an occurrence. It happened to me only twice in five years.
Even six hours pay was not a large amount of money but it was at least enough to justify getting dressed in the uniform and traveling to and from the job.
What would you consider enough hours to constitute a part time job for an adult? To me I would need to work no less than twenty hours per week every week to invest my effort into a company. Those twenty hours would need to be done in three days, not five. It takes time to arrange a schedule and to travel to and from work. For me it takes twenty minutes to go into town and twenty minutes to return home. That equals forty minutes per day travel time. That is almost an hour per day. For forty hours per week it is worth it. Doing it five times per week to work only twenty hours or less would be wasteful.
If somebody works only five or ten minutes away by foot then having a part time job that only gives you ten hours per week might be beneficial for some people. There are companies out there that have plenty of full time staff and hire a couple of people as extra part time employees. That is understandable. Having ninety-five percent of the staff as part time employees is criminal in spirit if not the law.
Pier 1 Imports deliberately keeps over ninety-five percent of its staff in minimum wage part time positions to avoid paying any type of benefits or helping its staff to become gainfully employed. I use that term gainfully because I don’t really believe working four to ten hours per week is gainfully employed. To me working that many hours per week is a hobby not a job.
I intend to never buy anything from that company again until I know that they have stopped this practice. I hope you feel the same way. If you do, please tell your friends about it and let them decide if they want to support such a company.
Please comment below about any company you know of that has such a practice. I already know that Wal-Mart has many thirty hour per week employees. At least they offer some benefits to their workers unlike Pier 1 Imports.
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