Just saw this on twitter. BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY ALL PEOPLE WHO WORK RETAIL CAN AFFORD TO JUST TAKE A DAY OFF and probably lose their job to ~strike a blow~. For fuck’s sake.
What the fuck. Not coming in on Black Friday when you work retail is pretty much an insta-fired offense. Where the hell do they get these people? You can tell most of them have never actually worked retail in their lives.
More anti worker bullshit.
Also how is it ever helpful to recommend to people who are probably already poor, that they go ahead and lose that job?
Are you serious dood?
RLY DOOD?
….
RLY?
And that’s how the system is designed, to make you feel dependent on it.
This is up there with being mad at protesters for blocking you from making it to work.
Who should you be mad at, the protester working against a corrupt system, or the corporation cutting hours, laying people off, cutting benefits, all while collecting more and more money?
Besides the fact that I’m sure you could easily take a sick day. The only reason to make excuses not to do it is if you’re afraid. Because if you weren’t, if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t take issue with the idea in the first place, and could just brush it off.
“Besides the fact that I’m sure you could easily take a sick day”
“the only reason to make excuses not to do it is if you’re afraid”
AHAHAHAHAHAHAH. You just have no fucking idea how working in jobs like retail works, do you?
Take your epic class privilege and shove it up your arse.
dashingbilly, please go work shit-end retail for a few months, complete with pressure and stress and shitty customers and long hours - if they give you enough hours - or barely any hours so you’re struggling to make ends meet, and also work through the Xmas season at any retail business and then you look me in the eye and you fucking tell me “I’m sure you could easily take a sick day” on fucking BLACK FRIDAY and that choosing not to FUCKING LOSE YOUR JOB “FOR THE CAUSE” is just “making excuses” because “you’re afraid”.
Spoken like someone who has never been dependent on a shitty retail job in their life.
To clarify: Most retail jobs do not HAVE “sick days.” ”Sick days” are an artifact of middle- and upper-class jobs, and even then, they are often quite minimal; my spouse has avoided taking any this year because he’s going to need pretty much every single one that he’ll have banked by February in order to take a week off when our daughter is born (not having worked at the company for a year, he is ineligible for family medical leave, the only federally mandated leave that can be used for paternity leave). Similarly, a manager in retail work, even if in a salaried full-time position, cannot afford to squander a sick day, much less in a way that is guaranteed to piss off their superiors and make retribution likely.
But forget that, anyway, because the vast majority of retail workers are not in middle-class jobs. The vast majority of people working retail jobs are not actually full-time employees; they are kept at 39.5 hours (or fewer) in perpetuity, to avoid having to follow labor laws that only apply to full-time employees (such as having to pay benefits or provide any kind of leave at all). Working at Taco Bell as a teenager, I witnessed an adult co-worker get screamed at by our manager for going over 80 hours in two weeks and thus costing the company for overtime, and risking the possibility of being reclassified. I don’t know if her hours were subsequently drastically cut, but they might well have been.
Similarly, a retail worker who calls in sick for a scheduled shift, even one that isn’t considered high volume and crucial, is taking a risk—often a very high one—that they will see all their hours disappear from the next schedule, because the manager can find someone else who will work through a 103-degree fever if instructed to do so.
Because, see, retail workers hardly ever get “fired.” They just lose all their hours, or are given the worst, least desirable hours, until they effectively no longer work there. This allows management to circumvent even the tiny possibility that a wrongful termination suit could be brought (as if the majority of retail workers have the resources to do that).
THIS A THOUSAND TIMES THIS. I forgot to mention that. “Sick days” are not something the vast majority of associate-level retail workers even get, in the sense of “paid day off”. Only at the manager or above level do you accrue paid time off, and so for most retail workers, if you can’t/don’t want to come in on a given day, you call in and you just don’t get paid for the hours you would have worked that day. So you’re (as in the person who tweeted this, also dashingbilly and anyone who agrees with them) not only asking retail workers to risk losing their jobs, you’re asking them to sacrifice a day’s pay as well. And let me tell you, when you’re working that level of retail, odds are you really can’t afford to lose even the $50-60 takehome pay you’d have gotten for that day. That’s a week or two of groceries, or two tanks of gas to get you to and from work, or a good chunk of your electrical or water bill for the month, or your phone or internet bill.
Also, like cabell said, if you call in, you can expect subtle punishment for it. Even if you don’t get yelled at - and you probably will, because that’s just how it is - you will see your hours diminished, or your manager will punitively assign you the worst shifts, make you work every weekend for the next month, or spread out what paltry hours you get over every day so you can’t get a full damn day off for weeks (actually happened to one of my co-managers when our district manager tried to push her out of the store while she was pregnant; she was given half-shifts *every day* for almost a full month). And all of these tactics are totally legal, too; complaining about them will just get you written up for backtalk (that’s not how they phrase it, but that’s essentially the offense) and put your job even further in jeopardy. Retail managers know they have their bottom-level employees over a barrel in terms of dependence, even more so in this economy and job market, and they actively take advantage of it, because corporate pushes them to do it.
These are the same retail jobs I see requiring employees to work on Thanksgiving day until 9, leave & be back at midnight or 6 am. I don’t know why anyone would look at those kinds of store hours & think the people working there had many options. Well I do know why, but it doesn’t involve the use of critical thinking skills or any knowledge about what it means to be the working poor.
Reblogging for excellent commentary.