Starbucks to Revise Policies to End Irregular Schedules for Its 130,000 Baristas
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Working anything but 9-5" - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-w...
A lot of the problems she is dealing with are things I have never experienced and likely never will. The things she is facing on a regular basis are personal nightmares of mine. Imagine if your life story started out "drug addicted mother and an absent father," what a disadvantage that is. Certainly worth a read.
This is just a plain evil tactic, moving the cost of bad capacity planning from management, who made the decision, to the employee.
Same goes for it being extremely busy and calling someone who is off and asking if they wanted to come in to make some extra money.
He would always comment that the weather played a huge role in how busy they were, particularly a sudden downpour.
Planning around such ephemeral things is quite a challenge.
I own several retail stores. Labor is by far the largest manageable cost and whether or not we make any profit is often a direct result of managing our labor cost.
Re: being the one who should bear the risk, I am also the one who bears the responsibility to make sure they have a job tomorrow. If we don't make money then there is no job.
Of course, the alternative is that we could raise prices so that we don't have to be ruthlessly efficient. But then, the market doesn't tend to like that.
There are also other practices that people might be allowed to perform but which are prohibited - consider, for example, young children working for businesses outside the home. I don't think the willingness of labor is a reasonable metric to gauge the fairness of a business practice.
In general, I think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that pro-business positions (even understandable ones like what you're mentioning) don't unfairly hurt workers - to be fair, 'flexible' hours have been mentioned by the Obama administration multiple times this summer.
With all of the talk about raising the minimum wage drastically (small increments are fine), or something like requiring a certain minimum shift length, it will push small business owners towards non-human workers faster (automation and robots).
And a lot of us think the government should have nothing to do with regulating based on some vague notion of "fairness". As long as no one is being compelled to take any action, or make any choice, through coercive violence/force, the government - IMO - ought to stay out of it.
If someone scams your aging parents/grandparents into selling their house unfairly, do you think the government should stay out of it? After all, your parents/grandparents are the ones who willingly went ahead with the scam.
Do you consider monopolies a coercive force? If a local cable company (say, Comcast) holds a de facto monopoly over local internet, imposing high fees and bad service on customers, do you think the government should stay out of it? After all, no one is being compelled to buy internet; it's everyone's choice not to.
Do you consider monopolies a coercive force?
Not as a rule, no.
Doesn't make it OK. We're not machines. We're not robots. We're not fungible resource. We're people, and we object to creating a society in which the rich and powerful play off the less fortunate against each other, creating a race to the bottom until every employee is scratching out a bare existence in the knowledge that if they so much as ask for a five minute break they'll be fired and replaced with someone slightly more timid. Obviously the rich don't generally object to this.
But then, the market doesn't tend to like that.
Which is why we have government and unions. "The market" is meant to be a tool that serves people and makes life better. It's not perfect, it's not magic, and applied excessively it makes people miserable; there is very definitely a time to tell the religious caste in society that worships "the market" to get bent.
That's not an excuse. In early 20th century there were kids of 10-14 years old, "willing" to work in coal mines, as "breaker boys" (and other worse jobs).
https://www.google.com/search?q=breaker+boys&tbm=isch
Most advanced countries still outlawed it. You are only "chosing" to do a job if you're not directly pressed by starving or being homeless. When you can chose between job X or job Y.
When you're hard pressed to do whatever comes your way, you're not "willing", you're forced.
Scheduling is quite open to abuse from dodgy managers - for example, I had a friend who worked at a supermarket that rostered him on for 3.75 hours, then 30 minutes later, rostered him on for another 3.75 hours. This 'split shift' meant that they didn't have to give him the mandatory paid 30 minute lunch break for an 8-hour shift.
Same goes for it being extremely busy and calling someone who is off and asking if they wanted to come in to make some extra money.
This sounds like a balance, but it really isn't. "Would you agree to do more work" is not the opposite of "I'm reneging on our agreement for your current work" - the latter is unilateral.
Hospitality sucks. When I was in my early 20s, more than half the people I knew worked in hospitality. Now I'm 40, only one still remains in hospitality. It's an abusive industry that people get out of if they can - in general, it's short hours, odd shifts, bad pay, crap managers with little or no training, and no job security. Screw defending the practices of that industry.
Except they gave him 30 minutes between shifts? It sounds like all they did was schedule his lunch shift rather than letting him do it himself. My guess is that 30 minute break was at an inconvenient/non-rush time?
There's not an ounce of apparent judgement or subjectivity in it. Rather the article is purely an enumeration of causes and effects that leads to a scathing critique of these scheduling practices and the effects they have on people's lives.
We are revising classic OR scheduling methods to fit small workforces. With fewer workers comes fewer constraints and more canonical solutions, so just minimizing cost does not always create the best schedules - in fact, with little or no increase in net employee hours worked per week you can make cleaner schedules that prevent things like "clopens" and give employees consecutive days off every week.
We are accomplishing better small-workforce schedules using a two-stage nonlinear model that first minimizes net employee hours (cost), then holds that minimized sum as a constraint (plus optional flexibility) to pick the canonical schedule that meets "nice to have" criteria, like letting employees pick preferred shifts ("I like to work mornings").
To learn more about the difficulties in scheduling, check out the "Nurse scheduling problem":
I own several retail stores that usually have 2-6 employees on the clock at any given time and don't see any meaningful benefit at our level. I could see how a place with 20 employees on the clock at one time might have more benefit, but that seems like a pretty small market to me.
When my twins were in NICU, it hit me what a challenge it must be to schedule nurses in such a unit. Accross the three shifts in a day, the nurse/patient ratio is a little over one. I think for about 30 NICU babies you had about 75 nurses, so this is an interesting planning problem.
* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee A also gets along with the manager better that employee B.
* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B because employee A has worked for the company longer. Employee B is equally capable of doing the work.
* Employee A gets a more desirable shift than employee B. Employee B feels that it's because of race/gender/sexual orientation.
* Employee A covers the shift of employee B. Employee A now has enough hours to qualify as a "full-time" employee, causing an administrative headache.
This is not to say that completely randomizing work schedules is the answer, just to point out that there's more reasoning for these systems than the article suggests.
(edit: I worked for a major U.S. retailer when they were implementing such a system.)
Do you have any evidence to support this claim? (I hate to be that guy, but, wow...)
(edit: The mere fact that Starbuck's has 130,000 barristas at any given point in time makes it quite likely that someday one of those barristas will sue them for discrimination because they couldn't get the shifts they wanted. If the company can prove that the shifts were assigned using an algorithm and not by a person, they have a good chance of winning their case.)
It is about making money. Plain and simple. Occum's razor at it's finest.
I'm not sure what evidence you're asking for... That people sometimes feel discriminated against?
This is wrong. An action can be ruled discriminatory even if the intent wasn't such. Though if it is considered "vital" to the survival of the business there can be exceptions.
But honestly, companies with only white collar workers face downtime too, but the employees still get paid
Then as the years went on and new people took over it changed abruptly to pretty much daily. Lots of terrible shifts like 2pm to 10pm.
One time my schedule changed five times in one hour. I've talked to staff who were on vacation and had their schedule changed to require them to work or change so much they return not having a clue what happened.
Names of staff in an Excel spreadsheet seems to be the most common way for supervisors unfamiliar with anything other than typing words and numbers into a cell, and even then some can't even highlight or add colour.
I can certainly see the value in a good schedule and a good application to create it but the complexity of it, business needs, lack of skill of management all seem to converge into one big clusterfuck.
I have no doubt she will.
“Encouraging managers not to rely entirely on the automated software is the best thing they can do. But I’m doubtful of how many managers will actually do it,” she said, because of the wide variation in how managers at different stores treat their employees.
Why? Because it gets to the point that a company may, on the whole be trying to do the right thing, and may have progressive policies, etc., but - at the end of the day - it is individual middle managers who most directly impact the conditions that workers experience.
I doubt this point will resonate with the left'ish wing folks who consider all business owners evil, blab about "capitalist oppressors" and want a wholesale adoption of socialist (or psuedo-socialist) policies, but this is the truth. Companies are not inherently evil, and companies can - and do - choose to try to do right by their employees... but enforcing consistent application of a policy related to working conditions is just as a difficult as enforcing consistent application of any policy in a large organization.
The question then, to me, is whether or not Starbucks can find a way to ensure that this policy is actually adhered to. And at any rate, good on them for at least making the attempt.
You're right, companies are inherently amoral. If their pursuit of profit happens to be moral, all the better, but don't expect them to rescind immoral policies if it means it'll hurt profit and nobody with any power is around to put on pressure to make them stop.
When they do awful things, those poor persecuted businessmen can always count on apologists like you to come to their defence though.
I fully subscribe to one of the basic economic axioms. That people act out of self-interest (whether being a manager in a capitalist system or volunteering in a hospital in North Korea). This is a rule that's true "on average", not absolutely, but it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases you'll look at.
That means "evil" barely ever happens. There are very, very few people who hurt others knowing they'll also hurt themselves in the process (there are, in theory they should be confined to insane asylums). This suggests it's at least a Nash balance.
Almost all people who commit bad acts do so because they are expected a benefit in return. Murder, theft, rape, hell, even suicide bombing ... all come with a benefit to the perpetrator. This makes their actions fit your description of "amoral".
The opposite of good is not your definition of evil. That's merely insanity. I'm not saying that never happens, but it very rarely do. The opposite of good is your definition of "amoral", and because of that it makes a lot of sense to call anything amoral evil.
Having some machine learning experience I might also mention that I've noticed on easy communality in evil versus good. There is this concept of "time horizon" of decisions. Because predicting the world is a cpu and memory expensive process, when evaluating a decision people only simulate X time out. X is called the time horizon. If there is a decision that will have good effects for X-1, and cause a disaster at X, they will make that decision. What we call evil can, to some extent, be simplified as being a "decision with low time horizon" and good is the opposite. Hell, what most saints did can be summarized as making decisions where the time horizon is far longer than their lifespan, which doesn't make sense for most people.
Alternatively one could say that you're trying to let companies get away from being called "evil" by taking a far extreme and then showing that they don't satisfy that standard. That you are presenting a "reductio ad absurdum" fallacy.
To the extent that it makes them more money, this is true. Providing perks for employees is sometimes necessary to ensure you have good employees, and going above and beyond what's expected can provide positive PR, which in turn can generate revenue.
Irregular retail schedules are an example of what happens when neither the market, nor regulation force employers to do right by there employees.
Also whether there is going to be any real change here is debatable. When I worked in retail, schedules were posted 2 weeks in advance, so posting 1 week in advance is hardly "doing right by the employees". The rest of it is a nebulous promise to allow managers more input in creating the schedule and allowing workers to transfer to more convenient locations.
Basically all this change amounts to is something that sounds good in a press release, but is unlikely to actually do much.
We could argue about the exact definition of "evil" and "altruistic", but the point is that companies do do right by employees at times, and I'd argue that in reality it's more often than not. What people should keep in mind is that "companies" aren't just some abstract caricature pulled out of Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto - companies are people, and most people aren't fundamentally evil.
I'll stand by what I said before (albeit perhaps paraphrased a bit) - when companies DO do "evil" vis-a-vis employees, it is not, generally speaking, because they have a generally evil/negative outlook towards employees or because they don't care (at some level). It's more because they are trying to strike that delicate balance where everybody wins, while using imperfect humans to manage things.
Honestly, we'll make more progress towards improving things when we get beyond the socialist/communist caricatures of businessmen as "Boss Hogg" from The Dukes of Hazard, or some "Robber Baron" and deal with the actual issues, not tearing down strawmen.