Some Retailers Promote Decision to Remain Closed on Thanksgiving
New York Times - November 14, 2014, Steven Greenhouse - This...
New York Times - November 14, 2014, Steven Greenhouse - This Thanksgiving, the open-versus-shut debate has grown even louder.
Walmart, Kmart, Macy’s, Target, RadioShack and many other major retailers are proclaiming that they will be open on Thanksgiving Day to make shoppers happy. But Costco, Marshalls, GameStop and T. J. Maxx are riding the backlash against holiday commerce by boasting that they will not relent: They will remain closed that day to show that they are family-friendly and honoring the holiday.
But even as retailers vie for every dollar during a very competitive season, Tony Bartel, the president of GameStop, views this debate as open-and-shut. “For us, it’s a matter of principle,” said Mr. Bartel, whose company has 4,600 stores nationwide. “We have a phrase around here that we use a lot — it’s called ‘protecting the family.’ We want our associates to enjoy their complete holidays.”
“It’s an important holiday in the U.S., and our employees work hard during the holiday season, and we believe they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving Day with their family and friends,” said Richard A. Galanti, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Costco Wholesale, the nation’s second-largest retailer after Walmart. “We’ve never opened on Thanksgiving, and when the trend to do so occurred in the last couple or three years, we chose not to because we thought it was the right thing to do for our employees.”
More than two dozen major retail chains plan to stay dark on Thanksgiving, including Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, the Burlington Coat Factory, Crate and Barrel, Dillard’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Patagonia.
Johan Araujo, a senior game adviser at GameStop’s flagship store in Herald Square in Manhattan, applauded his company’s decision. “It’s good to know they’re thinking about us and what we want,” he said. His plans involve cooking the turkey for his fiancée and friends this year.
Sidney Bartlett, the manager of Mr. Araujo’s store, said that when the store used to be open on Thanksgiving — it started closing for the holiday last year — it was painful to figure out which employees to inconvenience and schedule to work that day. “I thought it’s great the C.E.O. decided to close for the holiday,” he said.
He said it saddened him to see so many stores open that day. “We’ve shifted as a nation — it’s not so much about the family, it’s all about business,” said Mr. Bartlett, who is studying for an M.B.A. at Columbia.
“We don’t believe we will lose any ground to competitors,” said Mr. Bartel, the company’s president. “Even if we lose some ground to competitors, we are making it corporate principle — we have committed to associates that we will not open on Thanksgiving.”
Pushed by competitive forces, some malls are opening on Thanksgiving Day for the first time. In Paramus, N.J., Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park will open from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., prodded by Macy’s decision to open its stores in those malls.
Walden Galleria, a mall with over 200 stores near Buffalo, threatened to fine retailers about $200 an hour if they don’t open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign pushing retailers to adopt schedules that are more friendly to workers, said, “What’s different from years past is there are more and more retailers coming out publicly and saying, ‘We’re staying closed on Thanksgiving.’ ” They want to demonstrate to their customer base that they’re family-friendly.”
More than 55,000 people have signed a petition on change.org urging Target to remain closed on Thanksgiving, while the Boycott Black Thursday Facebook page has more than 87,000 likes.
Walmart officials say they are doing consumers a favor by opening on Thanksgiving. To reduce the long lines that have upset many shoppers on Black Friday, Walmart announced on Tuesday that it would spread Black Friday over five days.
“It became Black Friday, then it became Thursday, and now it’s becoming weeklong,” said Duncan Mac Naughton, chief merchandising officer at Walmart. “Maybe it’s going to be November.”
Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman, said many shoppers were happy that the company would be open on Thanksgiving. “We’re in the service industry, and we’re just like airports and grocery stores and gas stations that are open on Thanksgiving so they can provide what customers need,” she said. “We’ve been open on Thanksgiving for 20-something years.”
Walmart will again face a wave of protests this holiday season. Our Walmart, a union-backed group of Walmart workers pushing for higher pay, said on Friday that it would hold protests at 1,600 Walmarts on Black Friday.
After keeping almost all its stores closed last Thanksgiving, the financially troubled RadioShack said that it planned to open its stores from 8 a.m. to midnight this Thanksgiving. But after some employees voiced dismay, the company changed course to give them time for their feast. Its stores will open from 8 a.m. to noon, close for five hours and reopen from 5 p.m. until midnight, and again at 6 a.m. on Friday.
The University of Connecticut Poll conducted a survey last November that found that nine out of 10 Americans said they didn’t plan to spend Thanksgiving hunting for bargains, while 7 percent said they planned to visit stores on Thanksgiving Day.
The poll of 1,189 adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent, found that 49 percent disapproved of stores opening on Thanksgiving Day, with 16 percent approving and 34 percent neutral.
Last Thanksgiving, J. C. Penney, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears and Target all opened at 8 p.m. This year, Kmart plans to open at 6 a.m. and remain open for the next 42 hours.
“All these companies were closed for decades,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “What’s changed is that some have chosen to remain open, and those companies should be getting demerits. People should ask, ‘Is this the sort of society we want to live in that people aren’t even given the option of celebrating holidays?’ ”
He said that if stores decided to open on Thanksgiving, working that day should be voluntary, not mandatory. He said many part-time workers were eager to work on Thanksgiving.
Mr. Appelbaum praised the Macy’s store in Herald Square for using only workers who volunteer to work that day
Macy’s plans to open at 6 p.m. this Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than last Thanksgiving — and Sears is doing the same thing. “Customer response to the 8 p.m. opening last year was exceptionally strong,” said Jim Sluzewski, Macy’s senior vice president for communications. “At Macy’s Herald Square store, we had 15,000 customers waiting outside when the doors opened. The experience was similar across the country. Many customers asked why we couldn’t open a little earlier.”
In contrast, he said Bloomingdale’s, a Macy’s subsidiary, would remain closed on Thanksgiving Day, saying it was “less promotional” than Macy’s.
Roger Beahm, executive director of the Center for Retail Innovation at Wake Forest University, said it was smart competitively for retailers to open on Thanksgiving. “Did the folks who questioned the sanctity of Thanksgiving learn a lesson?” he said. “A good start to the holiday retail season can really make your year, and a late start can really cripple retailers.”
Dan Evans, a spokesman for Nordstrom, said his company kept its stores closed on Thanksgiving, with a few employees completing holiday decorations that day, before they are unveiled on Black Friday.
“If our customers really wanted us to open on Thanksgiving, that’s what we’ll do,” Mr. Evans said. “We used to be closed on the Fourth of July. We used to be closed on New Year’s Day, but customers wanted us to be open on those days, so now we’re open on those days. Our customers guide us. We don’t guide them.”
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J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and More Just Stopped Using ‘On-Call’ Scheduling
J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and More Just Stopped Using ‘On-Call’ Scheduling
Several major retailers have in recent weeks relieved their workers from having to spend their mornings waiting for...
Several major retailers have in recent weeks relieved their workers from having to spend their mornings waiting for their boss to tell them if and when to show up for work.
J. Crew recently joined a group of several other top retail chains in dropping on-call scheduling—the system that requires workers to make themselves available for a shift with no guarantee of actually getting any clocked hours. Under on-call scheduling, workers generally must be ready to be called in for a shift just a few hours beforehand, and often that meant wasting valuable time by not being called in at all. In addition to J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Gap, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret, and various affiliated brands, have announced that they’re phasing out on-call nationwide.
The abandonment of on-call at these high-profile chains—affecting roughly 239,000 retail sales workers, according to the Fair Workweek Initiative (FWI)—represents growing backlash against the erosion of workers’ autonomy in low-wage service sectors. The pressure for reform has been stoked by media scrutiny, labor protests, and litigation, and an investigation into on-call scheduling in New York retail stores by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
But the fight for fair labor practices isn’t over in retail. Carrie Gleason, director of the FWI, a project of the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy, says nominally phasing out on-call at a workplace may simply lead to a “whack-a-mole situation,” pushing managers to find other ways to drive workers into erratic and unstable schedules. Your supervisor might not call you in two hours before a shift starts, but might still abruptly cancel your pre-scheduled shift, or text on an “off” day to pressure you to sub for a coworker. Some workplaces might have a set start time for shifts, but then pile on on-call extended hours, so the workday expands unexpectedly. Across the service sectors, Gleason says, “there’s not a real commitment around standards around what workers experience as a predictable schedule.”
Nationwide two-thirds of food service workers and over half of retail workers have at most a week’s notice of their schedules. Part-timers and black and Latino workers disproportionately work irregular schedules.
According to National Women’s Law Center, over half of workers surveyed
“work nonstandard schedules involuntarily because they could not find another job or ‘it is the nature of the job.’” The “nature of the job” reflects the nature of our current economy, which has redefined labor as a seller’s market for employers, while union power and labor protections have disintegrated.
FWI campaigns both for stronger regulation and industry-led reforms. It presses for “high-road workweeks,” under which workers and employersnegotiate equitable scheduling systems, which can streamline operations and reduce turnover, while giving workers more predictable hours, along with flexibility to change schedules on a fair, voluntary basis. (Yet there’s good reason for skepticism about voluntary corporate “social responsibility”: in a recent study of Starbucks’s scheduling reforms, workers nationwide reported irregular and unpredictable shifts, despite the company’s promises of more humane schedules.)
On the regulatory front, as reported previously, some state laws and San Francisco’s new Retail Workers Bill of Rights provide reporting time pay(compensation for unplanned shift changes), and safeguards for stable hours.
California, New York, and other states have recentlyintroduced fair-scheduling legislation, including reforms that provide workers with negotiating mechanisms at work to make scheduling procedures more democratic, and limits on consecutive hourly work shifts.
Nationally, the proposed Schedules That Work Act would provide similar protections for advanced notice, reporting time pay and the right to bargain schedule changes.
The basic principle that drives labor advocates is predictability in both time and earnings, which counterbalances the service industry trend toward precarious low-wage jobs, pushing workers into part-time, temporary, or unstable contract work.
The opportunity cost of abusive schedules drives financial insecurity, impedes career advancement, and hurts families. Erratic hours can interfere with childcare arrangements and medical care, and are linked to increased marital strain and long-term problems with children’s behavioral development.
Sometimes, it’s just humiliating. Like when Mary Colemangot sent home from a shift at Popeyes and ended up effectively paying not to work. As a campaigner with FWI, the grandmother described the experience as a theft of precious time and wages: “When I get to work only to be sent home again, I lose money because I have to pay for my bus fare and hours of time traveling without any pay for the day.” Under a reporting time pay system, however, she might instead have been reimbursed for showing up, instead of bearing the cost of her boss’s arbitrary decisions.
“The idea is that if you need this level of flexibility for your workforce, that’s something that has value, being able to have a nimble workforce that’s ready when you need them,” Gleason says. In fact, honoring the workers’ overall role in an organization, not just hours clocked, is akin to the salary system. White-collar professionals often voluntarily exceed a 40-hour workweek and feel duly rewarded with their annual compensation package.
A fairer schedule system isn’t difficult to imagine if we start with the premise of honoring workers’ time in terms commensurate with the value of what they’re expected to produce—whether it’s impeccable service at peak-demand time, or a good cappuccino. And that’s why unions and other worker-led organizations, which understand a job’s real meaning in the context of workers’ lives, have historically been instrumental in shaping wage structures through collective bargaining. Though unions have withered, smart policy changes and grassroots organizing networks are carving out more autonomy and control for labor over the course of a workday.
The byzantine, unstable scheduling systems that dominate low-wage industries aren’t really “the nature” of today’s jobs so much as the result of a society that deeply undervalues workers’ lives, whether that’s the value of a parent’s time with her children, or the time invested in a college degree. In a “just in time” economy, employers put a premium on consumer convenience and business logistics. But as boundaries blur between work and home, the “new economy” challenges workers to finally reclaim their stolen time.
Source: The Nation
Letter: Congress must pass law for universal health care
Here are the health care issues on which we need government to act......
Here are the health care issues on which we need government to act...
Read the full article here.
Debbie Lesko wins Arizona congressional race, leaves Republicans anxious about the fall
Debbie Lesko wins Arizona congressional race, leaves Republicans anxious about the fall
Ady Barkan, the California man with ALS who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, over health care issues last year,...
Ady Barkan, the California man with ALS who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, over health care issues last year, started an organization to oppose GOP health care policies and raised money for Tipirneni. "There is no such a thing as a safe Republican seat this year. Dr. Hiral Tipirneni overcame the odds to come within striking distance of victory in a deep red district, because the Republicans put their donors' greed ahead of the health of families like mine," Barkan said Tuesday.
Read the full article here.
Yellen Says Improving Economy Still Faces Challenges
The Washington Post - August 22, 2014, by Ylan Q. Mui - Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen on Friday expressed...
The Washington Post - August 22, 2014, by Ylan Q. Mui - Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen on Friday expressed growing confidence that America’s market is improving but uncertainty over how much further it has to go.
Yellen began her remarks before a select group of elite economists and central bankers here by enumerating the unequivocal progress made since the Great Recession ended: Job growth has averaged 230,000 a month this year, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 6.2 percent after peaking in the double digits during the depths of the crisis.
But she quickly transitioned to the challenges in determining how close the labor market is to being fully healed — and how much the nation’s central bank should do to speed its convalescence. Although Yellen has consistently emphasized that the recovery is incomplete, her speech Friday focused on the difficulty of making a current diagnosis.
“Our understanding of labor market developments and their potential implications for inflation will remain far from perfect,” Yellen said at the annual conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “As a consequence, monetary policy must be conducted in a pragmatic manner.”
The Fed slashed its target for short-term interest rates to zero and pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in the aftermath of the recession. More than five years later, it is finally scaling back that support. The Fed is slated to end its bond-buying program in October and is debating when to raise interest rates.
That decision carries enormous consequences: Move too soon, and the Fed risks undermining the economic progress made so far. Move too late, and it could risk stoking inflation in the future and sowing the seeds of the next financial crisis.
Investors generally expect the Fed to raise rates in the middle of next year, but several central bank officials gathered here cautioned that the moment could come earlier if the recovery improves more rapidly than expected. Yellen gave no clear timeline Friday but called for a “more nuanced” reading of the labor market as the economy returns to normal.
For example, the size of the nation’s workforce unexpectedly declined after the recession, the result of both demographic factors and unemployed workers who gave up hope of finding a job. Yellen reiterated Friday that a stronger economy could help stem that drop and suggested it may already be working. She also said that the run-up in involuntary part-time work and the low level of people choosing to quit their jobs could be reversed as the labor market improves.
But Yellen seemed to shift her stance on the country’s stagnant wage growth. Previously, she has cited it as a sign that the labor market remains weak. But on Friday she called on research that suggests wage growth has been subdued because employers were unable to cut salaries deeply enough during the recession, a phenomenon dubbed “pent-up wage deflation.” She also suggested that globalization and the difficulty that the long-term unemployed face in finding jobs could also be depressing wage growth.
The uncertainty facing the Fed means it will be carefully evaluating economic data over the coming months, Yellen said. And she said the central bank will remain nimble in its response.
“There is no simple recipe for appropriate policy in this context, and the [Fed] is particularly attentive to the need to clearly describe the policy framework we are using to meet these challenges,” she said.
Central bankers were not the only ones gathered in the Grand Tetons this year. Several workers and activists also traveled to Jackson Hole and called on the central bank to be cautious in removing its support for the economy, the first protest at the conference in recent memory.
The grass-roots group, organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, also issued an open letter to the Fed earlier in the week signed by more than 60 activist organizations. Kansas City Fed President Esther L. George — one of the most vocal proponents of raising interest rates soon — met with the protesters in Jackson Hole on Thursday for about two hours to hear their stories. Ady Barkan, senior attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, said the groups plan to request meetings with other Fed officials as well.
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5 days ago
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