What's the biggest challenge facing minimum wage workers in America today? Low wage per hour or low hours per week?

There’s another issue happening at big box stores and corporate chains. To keep labor costs low, managers use forecasting software to write schedules. So if the software says you can only have 20 man-hours on a shift (or whatever), that’s the schedule.

The upshot is that employees have short shifts that are constantly changing. You could have a late-night closing shift followed by an early opening shift, or work on only Monday and Tuesday. This makes it almost impossible for employees to have a second job, go to school, or arrange childcare.

On top of that, managers will often schedule employees just below the limit for benefits. So if you have to work 30 hours to get benefits, your schedule will be 28 hours. There are also stories out of places like walmart and target where employees are cheated out of overtime or asked to work off the clock. Like if you work 45 hours this week, they record 5 hours on next week’s pay period.

America is shifting away from a production economy and toward a service economy. Most of the new jobs being created are low-paying, entry-level service jobs. I think it’s this century’s version of Gilded Era factory work.

Working 40 hours a week and still not bringing home enough to cover child care and gas doesn’t help anyone, either.

Both. Less money, less hours = well, less of everything. haha
After being wiped out in this recession I refuse to take a minimum wage job after years of earning a decent living and the fact that I was making $10.00 an hour 20 years ago.
Nope, I am now building a pet and house sitting clientele and am paid $50.00 per day which involves about 1 hour and 15 minutes of “work.” I’d rather feed horses and scoop dog poo and play with dogs for an hour a day and then be free to enjoy my surroundings than to work 5 hours plus driving time to make the same.

There will be a forced set of jobs come available shortly: Infrastructure. It’s largely hanging by a thread. People who can work with anything related to that will be in good shape.

Most awards here set minimum hours too. So you can’t be called into work for less than xxx hours. Under the Retail Award a worker can’t be called in to work less than three hours in a shift.

I agree that it’s not just about the hourly pay, it’s also about work hours available to workers. In certain industries there is no way employers want to employ people full-time, but it disadvantages the worker if they are called in for multiple shifts or very short shifts. There has to be balance.

I think work culture is changing globally. Sweden is moving to a six-hour work day because people want better work-life balance. In my own country, we have a big debate about penalty rates and whether they should be reduced with arguments about whether this will lead to less hours for people who are dependent on those jobs. Work-life balance means something quite different to a retail worker who can’t pay his bills and a corporate worker who’s earning a fortune and wants to spend more time at home. Their pressures and motivations are quite different.

I’m in a low cost, rural area and a lot of people I know could get by on a full time minimum wage job with benefits.
They’re becoming non-existent.

It’s becoming the norm for low wage workers to work less and less hours a day/week. Unless there’s some way to address that, raising minimum wage alone will just shorten the hours more, IMO.

@Earthbound_Misfit‘s Retail Award is a step in the right direction, but is there any way to seriously encourage low wage employers to staff a majority of full time employees?

Those low level managers using @Haleth‘s program will be the next to go. A computer can screw the workers well enough on it’s own. And there’s absolutely no reason for most of the flex time. The business is going to open at a certain time and close at a certain time and maintain a minimum staff the entire day. As it always has. There’s opportunity for more than a couple of workers to have a full shift every day.

But is there any way to seriously encourage low wage employers to staff a majority of full time employees?

I don’t think you will ever encourage employers, and especially employers in fields like retail, to employ mostly full-time workers. And not everyone wants full-time work. Those who study, mums who have children in school, people who are sem-retired, people with certain disabilities and for many other reasons, do not want a full-time job. Having a job for a few hours a day may work perfectly for them. What we need is a range of work options to suit the diversity of people seeking work.

However, what we want to avoid is organisations that actually NEED full-time staff employing part-time workers or only putting people on casual or fixed term contracts to avoid having to pay a range of employment benefits that only apply to permanent staff. I’ve worked in part-time positions and often you’re expected to complete much more work than the hours allow for. I also work in an industry where casualisation is a major problem. Organisations don’t want to take the risk of taking on permanent staff. So they employ casuals with no or little intention of ever giving them a real job. Apart from people being duped out of benefits they deserve, it also means those people are never terribly invested in the work once they realise there’s no real job coming. It also leads to a high turnover of staff. It means people servicing clients aren’t as well-trained or knowledgeable. And so on and so on…

What does it matter? The results are the same – too lttle to live on. So is the solution 2 or 3 such jobs?

In thinking about what it must be like to be one of these workers, to go somewhere (job) for three hours at 9 dollars an hour, 27 dollars before taxes. About 18 dollars after taxes, plus the effort of getting ready and getting to the job, the gas, the interruption of the day, for 18 dollars, I probably wouldn’t bother. I am feeling very grateful that as an adult, I’ve never had to experience such bullshit.

Mostly full time workers would still leave plenty of part time jobs, @Earthbound_Misfit. Not that I’m arguing with you, or even that we’re saying different things. It’s just that I think we’re pretty much assured enough part time jobs. Not so with full time.
That’s the crux of the question.

The answer? Full time jobs that pay a living wage for the area, @stanleybmanly. What’s easy. HOW is the hard part.

Yeah, and even worse (in my opinion) @jca, are food service jobs that want you to work 11:30 – 1:30, leave, and come back 6 – 8:30 Sun-Thurs. Work 7 days and you might make 40 hours. You sure the hell can’t work another job anywhere. Maybe 2–5 at the quick-stop, if it’s close.
And look at all the transportation costs.

2 hours is unreasonable unless the employee literally lives next door, or if it only happens once in a great while. You can’t ask someone to commute for 2 hours of work. I would say 3 is the minimum.

Part of the problem, or let’s say reason, a lot of companies went towards part-timers is because of the government, or companies themselves, imposing rules that cost the company a lot of money for full-timers. Things like health insurance, or even the risk of going into OT. I support OT pay, but not health insurance through employers, and not forcing employers to give specific benefits to workers who clock over a certain amount of hours.

If I have to choose I think the low wages are the bigger problem, but both low wags, and not enough hours can be a problem obviously.

It’s not just minimum wage workers; it’s pretty much everyone earning under $50k/yr.

Really, the biggest challenge goes beyond low wages or low hours. Healthcare, housing and food, three things that every other industrialized nation (and most non-industrialized ones too) consider a human right are considered luxuries, and priced that way too. But who should pay for people to have access to healthcare or to have a roof over their head and food in their stomach? Americans Conservatives won’t allow it to be taxpayers or employers; they will ONLY permit healthcare to be paid for by the individual. If they don’t earn enough, too bad, so sad, maybe you’ll get sick and die before you starve in the streets.

So the biggest challenge is that those who profit from inequality have a lot of power, and they will keep it because they managed to dupe a lot of the working class into thinking that they are temporarily down on their luck billionaires who would be hurt by things that, in truth, would not even affect them. Those that can pay all the bills would rather do nothing with the money but make more money without benefiting anyone else, leaving all the bills to be paid by those who can’t.

TL;DR – The challenge is the system itself.

The union contract for my job specifies that an employee gets paid for a minimum of 4 hours per day. That’s reasonable, as far as transportation and effort to get to work.

Full time employees receiving benefits from their employers is the foundation of the American social system, @JLeslie. That’s how we determined health insurance would be collectively bargained. Insurance and “special benefits” to workers that consistently clock in a certain number of hours a week was the employers insurance against the time and training invested in having a reliable, competent employee. They were the “carrot” against the “stick” of just being fired.

That’s the point. Employer’s are using short shifts to circumvent the process whereby we used to maintain a stable, living wage workforce.
It’s precisely the reason you walk through a Walmart Super and there are 45 employees and not one in 5 gives a shit.

Maybe I misunderstand you “special benefits” for full time employees? Are you talking about OT? Vacation time? Back in time to 1900?
How else do you propose administering health care? Knowing that Obamacare is less than ideal and in jeopardy of repeal.

@ibstubro Health care would be either done as a socialized system, or directly to consumers. Doing it through the employer gave employers power over the employee (this has changed a little with obamacare) you couldn’t leave if you had a pre-existing condition.

The insurance industry all too often does not negotiate cheaper fees for medical treatment, and so a ridiculous amount is paid to the hospitals and diagnostic centers, and we complain about high premiums, but don’t look at the whole picture. The disconnect between copay, actual price paid, and premiums, is why America has runaway medical costs.

In my opinion, the majority of Americans are not “consumers” of the health care system. They are subjects of the health care system, @JLeslie.
If you’re low to middle wage and you have health care, you do what the hell the doctor tells you. A third opinion is on your own dime, and with the system computerized, how else to decide between 2 opposing opinions? And if the doctor screws up, the medical profession closes rank anyway.
IMO medical patients be “consumers” of a product is largely a Republican/conservative conceit.
The easiest way for low income people to access healthcare currently is through the ER. How many people are given options in the ER?

Alternatively, what’s the chances of a socialized system in the US?

What’s worked in the past is subsidizing benefits through employers of full time employees. Employers are increasingly circumventing that. We need to find a way to turn that around because millions of people are falling through the cracks while the Teabaggers and Trump obfuscate the issue.

@ibstubro I like your word choice. “Subjects” does fit.

I do think that the only way to get a big change in the health care system is for it to get so bad people revolt. People will get harmed before the revolt. People will suffer and die. I mean that quite literally.

What Obama did barely changed anything in my opinion. Some of it made it a little better, some a little worse, but in the end the insurers and health care providers are generally running the racket. Lawyers also benefit from the system as it is.

[Mod says] Moved to Social with OP’s permission.

I suspect that some of the largest insurers didn’t sign on knowing that they could bait, and then switch later after they had enough people over a barrel. Start writing their own ticket, again, or threaten to take their ball and go home.

Face it, we’re going down, as a species, as a country, as a world.
Too many damn people, not enough resources, not enough jobs, the beginning of the end. Yeah, yeah, nothing new under the sun but the doomsday prophecies are looking pretty real these days. Such irony, on the one hand a push for premiere health and longevity, on the other the hardcore realities of un-sustainabilty in all factions.

So how are all of us humans supposed to survive if we live to be 120? Someone is not looking at the big picture, clearly. lol