Life at the coal face

[Starbucks Reserve Roastery. The fancy end of the Starbuck operation: this one in Chelsea, Manhattan appears with bugs and mould in the piece noticed below. Bing suggests that we also have such places in the smarter parts of London]

This being prompted by a piece in the NYRB (reference 1) about life at the coal face in the US. That is to say the various industrialised and computerised service industries which have taken the place of the coal mines and satanic mills of old. Industries like Starbucks, McDonald’s and Amazon.

The bottom line is that life at the coal face is pretty grim. I share few snippets.

Starbucks, owned by a man who is very rich, works hard at keeping the unions out of his business. And, if necessary, simply closing outlets which do manage to unionise. The idea that working with unions to improve work and work places might just possibly be a win-win presumably has not crossed his mind.

About a third of the US workforce as a whole make less than $15 an hour, that is to say, £12, against a UK minimum wage of just over £10 an hour. Worse if you are female, black or a single parent. Demographics associated with, as it happens, a greater dependency on tips.

Amazon warehouse employees might be on their feet for 11 hours a day. Pun apart, my own legs would no longer stand for it.

Churn is high in these industries. Presumably there are plenty of newbies willing to give it a go. It can’t be that bad. Phrased another way, plenty of newbies desperate to make a few dollars for their food, clothes and rent. One side effect of which is making it harder to unionise.

Sick leave seems not to be taken for granted in this part of the US: throwing a sickie is not the option is was sometimes said to be in, for example, the mental hospitals of old in this country.

There is plenty of labour relations law in the US and there is a National Labour Relations Board (NLRB, to be found at reference 2), but Amazon and their kind seem to be able to handle all that. One wheeze is the franchise, widely deployed by McDonald’s. And it helps that a good chunk of the workforce is undocumented, which I read to mean that they are what we would call illegal immigrants. People who might have been living in the US for years, but who are not in a position to make a fuss.

Traditional unions are struggling, a gap which is being filled, in part, by various other kinds of activity. The outfit at reference 3 is one such, focussed on getting the minimum wage raised from $7.25 to $15.00, coupled with a thinning out of all the exemptions and exceptions.

It seems that progress is being made. But it is all a bit slow, a bit piecemeal. When will enough of us work out that the people who fill our coffee cups (as it were) deserve decent working conditions too? Work out to the extent of paying for them?

PS 1: as it happens, only yesterday, I read in the Guardian of changes at Pizza Express here in the UK, whereby in a number of their outlets which are quiet in the afternoon, the rank-and-file, front-of-house staff are stood down – potentially losing quite a lot of hours a week – leaving their managers to hold the fort until the evening shift comes on – without extra pay. With service charge being a further complication here: the service charge is added to the bill automatically, but managers do not participate in the service charge fund. So to where does that chunk of the receipts go?

PS 2: I am also reminded of the difficulty which we in the UK, along with much of the rest of the western world, have with migrants and immigrants. From which comes the thought that when you make something illegal which lots of people want to do – like recreational drugs or gambling – serious crime will surely follow. And lots of people in poor countries want to move to rich western countries which might not be very welcoming – but which do offer opportunity. So the serious criminals will move in to facilitate such movement. For a fee, naturally.

References

Reference 1: The fight for fair wages – Willa Glickman, NYRB – 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.nlrb.gov/. 

Reference 3: https://onefairwage.site/. 

Reference 4: One Fair Wage: Ending subminimum pay in America – Saru Jayaraman – 2021. Hopefully I will get around to this one.