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Jessica: Class 17
March 26, 2015 | Leave a Comment
The standard job is thought to be the typical hours from 9am to 5pm. However, I would be unable to think of ONE job that is strictly from 9am to 5pm. With telecommuting, work phones provided by the company, and technology increasingly entering our work, the typical 9 to 5 is basically gone. With my limited experience in a large, corporate company, I feel like as long as your work gets done, no one really cares what hours you work. However, not everyone is working at a corporate office where all they have to do is scan an ID, walk in, and then walk out. Sometimes an employee is the non-essential employee and the essential one, in charge of opening the building. I never considered how the shifts and hours of some workers coincide with their lives.
With the example of Navarro and her son Gavin, I can only imagine the frustration with having to match schedules and adjusting for commuting times. At the end of the article, her working hours and son’s schedule seemed to match, but my only question is, why did she not ask for this before? Why did it take her so long for her to just ask for better treatment? The article clearly showed how unfair scheduling work shifts are even with the technology nowadays. I’m sure there are more employees in a Starbucks franchise where the employee who is closing for the night is not the one opening the next day. I can understand why Starbucks would utilize a system such as Kronos, but it still has its flaws and I’m sure there are many variables the system has to consider that it currently cannot cause no one has programmed those functions. With a company like Starbucks, I think it is harder to come up with a comprehensive work schedule that all the employees can be satisfied with considering
Additionally, all the class action suits against McDonald’s seemed petty that the company would not cough up a few more dollars so their employees can have an easier work experience. If a company’s top priority isn’t trying to keep their workers satisfied, then I think that company is headed in the wrong direction. Obviously, attracting and retaining consumers is an important aspect as well. However I think employee satisfaction is more pertinent compared to consumers. If your workers are not happy, the consumers will not want to do business with those companies. The fact that McDonalds is already paying their workers minimum wages and won’t pay for their uniform makes me not want to do business with them. Overall, it is clear that McDonalds is more focused on other matters than keeping their workers happy which in my opinion will not help them in the long run.
Furthermore, Amazon also seems to have troubles with its workers. I understand why the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Amazon instead of the workers, because the company technically does not have to search all of its employees, it just does so for inventory and security reasons. I would propose that Amazon get rid of its searches, but clearly that is not plausible since some workers would take advantage of this and Amazon’s inventory would disappear with no profits to gain. It can easily be seen that the employees are not trusted by the warehouses which is why time consuming searches have to be done.
Overall it can be seen that large companies and its employees have a lot to work on before employee satisfaction is holistically reached. Most of the issues however seem to be the fault of the companies and their lack of concern for their workers. Increasingly many new workers are concerned about work life balances due to problems like these. Many millennials want to know that the company they are working for will take care of them and small issues such as uniforms and work shifts will not be a problem.
