‘No Poach’ Deals for Fast-Food Workers Face Scrutiny
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Not to be offensive but these people do low skilled work. You can onboard another employee relatively quickly.
A part of me would think it's there to avoid turnover costs because I imagine these businesses have decent turnover given the low quality job and pay, why not bounce to a new job if this one sucks or is too stressful?
Well, the companies are arguing they are doing it to protect their training investment, so apparently they think the onboarding process is not that simple.
It is a bullshit argument anyway; you keep your ‘investment’ from walking away by paying them a decent wage.
Short notice shift changes and lazy/incompetent supervisors are examples of why someone might leave for an otherwise similar job.
Also, in some settings finding reliable low wage workers with transportation is hard. When I was in high school in the early 90s. I worked for a sandwich/coffee place that would pay a $1000 bonus to people who could operate the cappuccino machine and stay through Labor Day.
Companies can enter into contracts with employees to prevent them from going to other employers but unless they offer some sort of consideration you are walking down the path towards indentured servitude and slavery
That's about a 30% raise for an extra 15 minutes of commute each day.
80s conservatives: "If you don't like your job, quit and get another one"
90s conservatives: "If you don't like your job, start your own business"
Neo conservatives: "If you don't like your job, I need to see compelling evidence that you are being harmed"
I've never seen evidence that those arguing for a freer market want such for the employee
1. Other franchise owners knew each other by name and would call each other up when they found their employee were hired by us. Enough harassment and you tire or worry that they won't help you in situations like running out of product or selling/purchasing stores from you
2. The kind of person looking to sell themselves often were often trouble and weren't what we were poking for. Signal to noise ratio was terrible in these situations
3. Since we paid so little, a wage war was a sort of Mutually Assured Destruction and good employees were worth much more than we were paying them. Why chance that?
4. Training a new employee was a lot of time and money - a week with another employee just to make them somewhat competent in their station and a month so they could reliably hold their own. Then do that for every station the employee was expected to work (5 - 6 for a non-kitchen employee)
I only "poached" if I was sure I would withstand a tongue lashing from the office and I was almost told to stop the hiring process on one after I had offered them a job.
Glad I'm out of that industry
The franchises have set themselves up as separate companies for their own benefit, but when it would benefit employees they work in concert?
Wage theft alone is the largest form of theft in America. Wage suppression is just as significant, and carried out through a huge variety of means, many of them legally questionable at best.
Not if you can’t find anyone willing to work. I doubt the teenagers I see driving to their minimum wage jobs in decent cars are doing it out of necessity. Many are just doing it for work experience.
I’m sure their are other high priced areas where the people who work minimum wage jobs aren’t doing it to support themselves and their families - especially in places that are inaccessible via public transportation.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/624566202/why-teen-employment...
They are doing it because as soon as they got a paying job they went and blew all their money on a loan to get a stupidly expensive car, and now have no choice.
Outer appearance of a vehicle also means very little - my motorcycle looks great, but it has 50k miles and cost me less than a lot of the commuter bicycles I see people on.
People making the median household income of around $60K can reasonable afford to either by their kid oa car or give them a hand me down and buy themselves a car.
Teenagers working part time making mininum wage would barely be able to afford the car insurance that can easily run $200 a month let alone the car. I use to pick up my son from high school and you would see kids driving around in newish SUVs and older semi luxury cars. At the time, I was living in a city where the mean household income was $137K a year and the median was $110K.
These same kids would drive over to local fast food place to work.
Heck, my parents were a teacher and a factory worker not exactly extremely “high economic status” and they bought me a low end low mileage car my junior year in high school. They were paying at least $500 a month between the car note and car insurance in the early 90s.
But you don’t have to have a high income to make it not worthwhile from a financial standpoint to have teenagers who either don’t work or just work for fun money or to pay a token amount toward their car note and car insurance.
There was no way my little part time job at Radio Shack was going to do that.
But to reiterate my main point, if you have a business that depends on low skilled labor in an expensive area and public transportation is poor, you will have a hard time finding employees. The teenagers who live close by don’t have to work and the people who would take the jobs can’t affordably get there.
If that were true then there would be no point in creating this regime. If you want a higher wage as an Arbys employee, you need to jump to McDonalds or Popeyes or anywhere that's not Arbys. They wouldn't have bothered to make these deals unless there was some economic advantage for Arbys chains to hire workers from other Arbys restaurants.
I'm generally libertarian-minded but I see the value in California's employee-friendly restrictions on noncompete clauses. I don't see why this shouldn't be extended, as much as possible, up and down the payscale.
You're assuming the reason is always purely rational or economical. This is about control, pure and simple.
It's been many years since I worked in a fast food place, I'm gonna add my grocery store work in there too because it's fairly similar skill wise, but there were people there who'd been at these places for a long time, like most of their lives, they were treated really well, paid well and pretty much allowed to do whatever the fuck they wanted. A few of the employees like that at a grocery store I worked at in a small town were hunted and hired by a competing grocery store. Even me when I worked there, I was only there for two years, but I got a bunch of raises while I was there, was given a bunch of responsibilities, got to choose my shifts and was told when I left if I ever needed a job I'd always have one there just because I didn't fuck around and worked hard while I was there.
I suspect that Arby's would dispute that vociferously in court if it suited them.
And nobody mentioned a tragedy but you.
Does anyone know any any groups in NY agitating to ban these terms for all workers? I would be quite interested in participating in such a group. Bonus points if anyone knows groups interested in restricting the rights employers have to IP employees create outside of work hours/scope.
That’s an interesting twist.
next thing they will do is say that employees of one franchise of a conglomerate brand cannot leave and go work for another franchise of the same conglomerate brand (which happens to own 5 different brands, including ChickenLicious, BuildaBurger, SteakMachine, FreshCrunchy, and SugarCoffee)
When I started, I was asked directly not to switch to another store without letting them know. It wasn’t a threat, just a courtesy. I believe the given reason had something to do with anti-poaching.
Just a guess, but I could see a group of 6 people at one store saying “let’s go over to the other store” together. Losing one person isn’t a big deal, losing 6 people from a shift is an expensive pain. I doubt it happens often, but it doesn’t feel like a stretch to me.
As far as onboarding goes, my job performance continued to improve for at least 2 years. They were getting one hell of a bargain at $8.80 back in 2007. When I started, it was mostly washing dishes. A few years in, our team could push 130 cars and $1,400 through our drive thru in an hour.
OH wait.... [1]
1: https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...