“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader
DIDN’T THE SOUTH LOSE THE WAR?
(Written and posted 24 September 2009.)
On
April 22, 1998, I wrote a piece blasting Tyson Foods for the numerous safety
violations at its plants and how the safety of the meat was suspect as a Tyson
subsidiary had sold tainted meat. I also
mentioned how my then father-in-law refused to eat Tyson Chicken because he had
heard that they were compromising the safety not only of the meat, but of the
employees. My then father-in-law was a
union man, and he believed that non-union shops like Tyson did not give a care
about the health and well-being of its employees. Subsequent events proved him right, as they
were caught employing illegals from
Wal-Mart
is another corporation that I try my best not to support. Over the years I have met numerous Wal-mart employees who have told me how the company will
work them thirty-plus hours a week, but not forty, to
avoid paying them benefits. For example,
Wal-mart saves millions of dollars a year on
insurance costs by not having full-time employees, leaving a huge class of
working people who cannot afford to get sick.
I have also heard that if an employee does take off sick, they are
punished with a reduction of hours or other types of harassment that make the
employee so miserable, that they quit.
Unfortunately, because Wal-mart is so
successful at putting competitors out of business, it is impossible to boycott
them completely (in many locations Wal-mart is the
only place to buy essentials such as food and clothes), but I make every effort
to avoid Wal-mart when I can. I will pay ten cents more for a can of corn
at my local unionized grocery store rather than go to Wal-mart. To me, it’s worth the extra expense to
support companies that treat their employees well.
Now
I am adding Braum’s to my boycott list. Two years ago, I started working at Braum’s on the weekends to get a little extra holiday
spending money and to get out of the house for a while, as I really did not
enjoy my wife’s (now ex-wife) company. A
couple weeks after I started, my daughter started working there, too. What we experienced was mind-boggling. It was virtual slavery.
First,
they would not let employees spend cash; instead, employees were given a 15
percent discount and their purchases deducted against their paycheck. Sounds like a great deal, right? On the face of it, a 15 percent discount is a
good discount. However, Braum’s prices are more than 15 percent higher than their
competitors, so even with the 15 percent discount, you
are still paying more than you would elsewhere.
However, since your purchases were charged against your paycheck, you
never really thought about how much you were spending, and you spent much much more than you normally would. There were employees that would charge
hundreds of dollars in merchandise against their paychecks, so that by the time
they received their checks, they would not have enough left to pay their bills. For most of the employees, this was their
only source of income, so they had to keep working even though they were
blowing most of their paychecks because they had no choice, as they had to work
to pay off their charges. They were
eating well, but couldn’t afford to have a car to get to work, but in their
minds, at least their bellies were full.
My daughter and I figured out the game, and intentionally spent the
least amount that we could, which put us on the “bad employee list”. You see, managers get bonuses based on the
how much is sold, and if employees aren’t buying, then sales drop, and the
bonuses drop, so it was in the manager’s interest to encourage employees to
spend generously, even though the employees couldn’t afford it.
Once
you are on the bad employee list, you are done, as they will do what they can
to get you to quit. For example, they would
give my daughter and I herculean tasks to accomplish while
giving the favored employees simple tasks, and then chastise us for not accomplishing
them. Yes, we felt like Cinderella. In the case of my daughter, they would
schedule her to work hours that they knew she was not available to work, and
then threaten to fire her for not showing up for a shift that they knew she
couldn’t show up for. What’s worse, is that this schedule would be made after she had
checked the schedule, so that she wasn’t even aware that she was
scheduled. After three months of this
nonsense, we quit, because neither one of really needed the job; I had my
regular full-time job, and she was my charge, so she didn’t really need a job
in order to live.
My
fiancée has worked at Braum’s for eleven months now,
and she has had a similar bad experience.
They have worked her forty hours a week, but she is classified as a
part-time employee, so she gets no benefits.
She has no insurance, so she can’t afford to get sick. She had to have emergency gall bladder
surgery this summer, so not only does she owe 15,000 dollars in medical bills,
she had zero income while she was in the hospital and recuperating, as she doesn’t
get any paid leave. She is not a
full-time employee. Back at the end of
spring, she injured her wrist on the job and filed a workers’ comp claim. The managers chastised her for filing the
claim, because they would lose their safety bonuses.
Because
she has had some health issues, she is now on the “bad employees” list. Not only will they not put her on full-time
even though they have promised to do so since she started, they have cut her
hours. They had promised to cross-train
her, and yet she has still to be trained.
The other day, she went to work, and they sent her home sick, and then
they told her she has to go to a doctor and get a doctor’s note to verify that
she is sick, even though they are the ones who told her she was! So, not only does she lose a day’s wages by
not working, she loses almost two days’ wages having to go to a doctor to get a
note verifying that she was sick even though it was the manager, not her, that
said that she was. Needless to say, she
is actively looking for another job.
Workers
are not slaves, and should not be treated as such. It is inexcusable that any company in a
free-labor system like ours should ever treat an employee in this manner. Is it any wonder why there is such enmity between
the classes? Is it any wonder why the
working poor despise the rich? Is it any
wonder why socialism, be it education or health care, looks so enticing? Either we stand up and say “Enough’s enough”
or we will have a socialist system that will be bad for us as individuals and
collectively, crammed down our throats.
It’s time to send a message to those organizations that treat their
employees like slaves that that is not acceptable by refusing to patronize
them. We have to hit them where it hurts
– in their pocketbook!
Tens of thousands of Americans died in a bloody war to end
slavery. Let’s not let their sacrifice be in vein.
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