Enough With the Just In Time Schedules, Say Retail Workers

2012-11-24 · first published in marxsite · 190 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

---

Retail Action Project members make an "underemployment claim" against retailer Uniqlo on October 17. Retailers are taking advantage of new software to create a 'just in time' workforce who have to always be available despite not knowing when their next shift is. Photo: Alicia Canary, Retail Action Project.

A familiar cry for the 40-hour week has gone up, but among retail workers the meaning is new. Part-time workers are demanding an end to erratic scheduling and a chance to work enough hours to survive.

“I lost my house. I lost my son I was about to adopt,” said Cory Parker, a Tupelo, Mississippi, Walmart worker, who said his managers won’t give him enough hours to make a living. “And I’m not the only one. We’re losing our places to live because we’re not getting any hours at all.”

Parker is an activist in OUR Walmart, a group of employees trying to improve pay and working conditions at the world’s largest private employer.

Unreliable scheduling and insufficient hours were also major issues in the effort to organize a Target store in Valley Stream, Long Island, last year.