The Retail World Part One: The Mythical Work "Family"

I was watching a comedy series on Netflix the other day. One of the characters was bringing in doughnuts and other treats for his "work family". It got me to thinking about how easy it is to view the people that you work with every day as equivalent to your real family. After all, you're probably spending more time with the people at work than at home. At my last job I usually got up at 6:00am and was at work at 8:00am. My wife was generally asleep; I worked until 6:00pm and usually made it home by 6:30 and was in bed by 10:00. So that's 3.5 hours with my wife and 10 hours (9 if I made it out for lunch) at work (plus 8 hours of sleep). Aside from details of start time and quitting time, every job I've ever had was basically the same.

The other day I listened to a segment on NPR about a guy who was out of work. He made a statement that got my attention: he said that work is like a family only if you're talking about a family that completely forgets about you if you move to another town. Upon reflection, I think I'll add that most families don't fire you or lay you off when times get tough.

The place where you work, no matter how nice your co-workers are, no matter how cool your boss is, no matter how responsive the company president is, is a place from where the owners of the company expect to extract a profit. If you are not contributing to the generation of profit dollars, then you are expendable. Any benefits that you receive are not extended because they like you, or care about you; you receive benefits, whether they are vacation days, increased pay or recognition, in order to be more competitive in attracting competent employees. Companies that talk about "The XYZ Corp. Family" are blowing smoke up your ass. They want you to give your all for the company, like you would for your family, but usually do not reciprocate. Why should they?

Well one reason, which I briefly alluded to, is to be more competitive. The company where I until recently toiled, was for many years well below the local average in wages paid to their workers, including managers. If you were lucky enough to work in one of the reasonably profitable stores in certain positions, you might earn a bonus, but equivalent positions in smaller stores saw no bonuses for years. Certain positions commanded a decent salary, but most of the managers and other employees were paid insultingly low wages. Raises were tightly controlled and could be as low as 15 cents per hour per year (or 1% for managers); a redesign of the evaluation form used to determine raises made it more difficult to achieve higher increase levels. This went on for many years.

Several years ago, the corporate leadership began to harass the Human Resources Managers and Store Directors because there was an unprecedented number of open positions, implying that those responsible for hiring and recruiting were somehow not doing their jobs. HR and store management knew the reason: unemployment in Lincoln was hovering around 2%. When unemployment is low, the power dynamic shifts to the worker and away from management, especially in regards to entry-level positions. Many non-management employees were making wages barely above minimum wage for demanding, stressful jobs; it wasn't that difficult to find another job for a few cents more an hour when things got tough. When hiring, the competition was tough for potential employees with a good work ethic. Then, one day, someone at the central office woke up and realized that unemployment was low and that minimum wage, which had just been increased to $8.00/hour, would be going up to $9.00/hour at the end of the year. In the wake of this revelation an initiative to reevaluate pay scales was started. Pitched as evidence that the company cared about its employees, minimum hiring pay rates were increased and pay scales for most positions were redone, resulting in raises for virtually all employees.

Why was this done? Not because the employees were family, but because if it wasn't done, there would soon be no employees around that they could pretend were family. And what about the recent closing of one of their locations? Not only did they lie about their intentions when directly asked about it over the course of several years, but once information leaked out special meetings were held in which corporate leaders convinced employees that what was actually going to happen wasn't going to happen. Is that how you treat your family?

When you view companies as sources of profit and employees as the means to that profit and, as an employee, you are at peace with being a means to an end, with no expectation that the board of directors love you, your feelings won't be hurt when you're screwed over. If you think that you're a family, eventually you'll be disappointed.