Organize! Many Employers are Just Using the Recession to Stick it to Workers

[Joanne98]

By Dave Lindorff

Whatever the truth is about where this economy is heading, one thing is clear: employers are taking every opportunity to slash employment and, if they are unionized, to hammer unions for pay cuts, even when there is no justification for these actions.

Take Safeway Inc., a large national supermarket chain. The company, which had $44 billion in sales in 2007, and which, based upon third quarter figures for 2008 was well on the way to show record sales for 2008, appears to be using the economic downturn as a justification for laying off employees and making remaining employees work harder.

I can only give anecdotal information on this, but the Genuardi’s Family Market store (a Safeway subsidiary) where I live, in Upper Dublin, PA, an upper middle-class suburb north of Philadelphia, according to its employees, has been laying off cashiers, and slashing its night work force—the people who restock the shelves and unload the delivery trucks when the store is closed. The management is doing this not because sales have slumped. They haven’t. People may not be buying new cars, but they are still buying food, and in fact, if they are cutting back on eating out, as restaurant chains are reporting, they are probably actually buying more groceries, not less. Management is making these cuts simply because they can get away with it.

The layoffs, in the face of continued heavy business, means that cashiers are working harder. It means that the night staff, cut by half, is working twice as hard. But with jobs getting scarce, what is their option? If they don’t like the speed-up, where are they going to go in the current environment? Meanwhile, if service gets worse, customers will accept the decline because they’ll blame it on the economy, not noticing that there is really no justification for employee cutbacks at the supermarket.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Organize-Many-Employers-a-by-Dave-Lindorff-090218-144.html

[patrice]

1. At the last big telecom where I worked, they used their troubles to force out anyone who

rocked their boat about how business should be done, i.e. anyone who tried to reach across from one silo to another.

Labor attorneys should be kind of busy for the next decade or so.

[ejpoeta]

2. where's the surprise in that? at my husbands job, there are those

higher ups that are implying that there are plenty of folks lined up for the workers jobs. Now, considering how much it costs them to hire each new worker..... they do complete background checks and everything.... and the fact that it took the guys so much just to get a couple of workers who weren't doing their jobs out of the company.... find it a little amusing. but, yes, they are using the recession to scare the workers into submission. it's sad. really sad. and it makes me a little scared about the unionization effort which failed a year ago and will be coming up for a vote again in a couple of months.