My daughter’s employer (a coffee shop) nominally has a ban on phone use during work. Enforcement has collapsed. The girls (almost 100% of the hourly workforce is 15-18 year old girls) use their phones when business is slow. Often strangely to message each other!
They are probably violating their franchise agreement, but they’d rather have happy staff and happy customers.
The grocery store nearest me previously required men to wear white dress shirts and ties. They now wear white polos. Customers don’t care. They also use their cell phones (as Broomstick says) to show customers how to sign up for the loyalty program and to load coupons electronically. If they are playing with their phone and ignoring a customer at the checkout they’d get disciplined, but it doesn’t really happen. A year ago they had to keep their cell phones in their lockers. Now only people doing certain inherently hazardous jobs need to. Working behind the deli or meat counter for instance. But those are usually older adults.
It’s also a security issue. Phones have cameras, and there are a lot of proprietary processes in these kinds of factories. It will almost certainly be mandated if any kind of military work is going on.
If the workforce contains a higher percentage of women, then it will to a greater extend reflect the employment choices of women where they differ from men. That might explain fewer young factory workers but more young health care workers.
Part of it is also parental/society influence. When I was growing up the emphasis was on going to college and getting a desk/office job. Getting a factory job or one that had you working in a hardhat or on a cherry picker was seen as a failure of sorts (not explicitly, but that was the sub-text). Only the “slow” students who it was perceived couldn’t handle college were steered towards the trades. Fast-forward a decade or three and look what you have…
I don’t know about the meat grinder (which is in the meat department, not the deli, but let’s not get picky) but we did once have someone drive a forklift into a wall while on the phone and driving… Said person fired for causing the accident/damage.
We do occasionally have people doing stupid stuff, but that has to do with them being stupid people, the phone is just a symptom.
Your friends are not typical .
It’s nice that your friends had “side hustles” (but not, I notice, “side jobs”)., with the right skills to provide a product and enough entrepreneurial spirit to succeed. . That’s what makes capitalism work.
Because the vast majority of people working a full time job in a restaurant are doing so because they need money, and don’t have a better way to earn some.
Not everybody can make a living hustling on Etsy or Ebay.
Sure, a factory doing military work I get. I was responding to @nearwildheaven mentioning supermarkets. At a supermarket I doubt there’s any job where just having a cell phone on you would be a problem. Even the person operating a forklift or meat grinder would be fine just having their phone in their pocket.
Here’s a good NPR article on this issue, particularly about restaurant workers. This is a pretty amazing stat:
Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who’ve quit said no amount of pay would get them to return.
That’s because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers.
(bolding mine)
Lamar Cornett’s story is indicative of the larger issue, IMO. 20+ years grinding in restaurant kitchens, goes off work for a while due to COVID and decides he doesn’t want to work in kitchens anymore - it’s not worth it. But he gets lured back. How? A steady salary and health insurance.
Tell people all of their lives that working at a physical-labor job is terrible and most of them will believe it. Including people who would be far happier doing that than sitting down indoors in a cubicle all day – but who don’t know it.
ETA: Making the physical-labor job in addition genuinely terrible in ways that it doesn’t need to be is another problem.
I have a difficult time imagining how stressful it must be not to know how much money you’ll make from week-to-week. Mr. Cornett was actually able to save money while on employment which he had never been able to do before. And to think he seems fairly happy with just $30,000 a year and health insurance. Does this seem like a man who doesn’t want to work to anyone?
It is very stressful and it is indeed very difficult to save money. I’ve lived like that for 34 of the last 35 years. Buying my house took a hurculean effort of over 3 years to rid myself of college loan debt, build my credit a bit and save up the downpayment. Keeping the house since then hasn’t always been easy, either, but I’ve managed.
The message that physical-labor service jobs are failure jobs also gives the customer a sub-text reason to treat these workers poorly. They are lesser people because they are not able to achieve better jobs.
Anyone who works with the general public for any length of time knows this. These workers are being paid to smile and so they better do it. The customer with the money expects to be in the superior position in the exchange for goods and services. It’s not a trade-off.
For a brief time during the pandemic these workers were “heroes.” That is over now.
Want to help this crisis? Quit adding to the problem and give these workers the respect and empathy that all human beings deserve. The person seeking a service is in no way better than the person offering the service. They need each other. Treat it as a partnership.
Lines are long? Don’t gripe about it. That cashier is probably not getting a break today. Wait your turn or go home. Surly employee? Their job is probably tough and have you ever been surly on your job? Likely so. Let it go. Hope they have a better day tomorrow and go on to the really important things you have to worry about in your life.
It’s as if we want these jobs to be so much worse than they have to be.
Especially if you also tell them that physical labor/manufacturing jobs are all being automated/moving to China or Mexico and they have no job security worth mentioning.
When you’re starting out in a career, you’re generally going to look for something that looks like it has a future. If the messages about that are negative, employers are going to have a hard time filling positions in that career path.
That’s all well and good in theory, and we can talk about how blue collar jobs, food service jobs, etc are necessary and noble until we’re blue in the face. But the truth is, our society DOESN’T value those jobs very highly, and it doesn’t really reward people for going down that path. So the message I’ll be giving my kids - unless something radically changes in the next decade or so - is exactly the message we are decrying here. The same message that my father - a contractor who still works with his hands every day - drilled into me since I was a little kid. That you need to work hard at your education so you can get a job that lets you make far more money, have far more job security and far better benefits, and is physically a lot easier.
So in theory, I agree, our messaging about these roles is negative. But choosing those roles, in our society, tends to lead to a harder life. I’m not going to withhold that information about the way the world works from my children; if I was a school counselor helping other kids male their own decisions, I’d consider it wrong to give them advice I wouldn’t give my own kids.
I guess my point is, the messaging about these jobs is negative, but the reality of working those jobs is often negative too. These jobs ARE more likely to be outsourced or automated. These jobs DO offer less job security, overall lower wages, and less prospect for growth in the future. They ARE generally harder on a day to day level. Why wouldn’t I give that information to the next generation as they decide what they want to do?
Of course we want to give that information out. But a negative job does not equate with a negative person. These jobs need to be done and the people that do them deserve respect like anyone else.
Indeed let’s teach our kids to respect hard work and the person doing it. Let them know the waitress that brings the meal is of equal value to the person receiving the meal. That the lives of the low wage workers are hard and we should count our blessings if we have higher paid jobs and we wish the best for others regardless of their wealth.
Someone has to do that hard work or the restaurant you want to eat at is closed. Teach your kids that truth.
Oh, of course - I don’t think any less of people who do that kind of work, I think they deserve living wage and good benefits like the rest of us, I think society should do much more for them (and also for people who are unemployed, for whatever reason. I’m all for giving everyone the basics, and treating them all with respect).
But what I’m probably not going to do is encourage my kids, or anyone really, to seek out those paths. Not because raking that path makes you a bad person, or worth any less, but because that path is harder in the long run.
He left out one possible option- the business responds by cutting profit margins and eating that increased cost. Not likely, but possible.
More likely though is that they do some combination of those things he mentions, but none in a dramatic way, so that it’s not likely that it’s noticeable. Like they may drop portion size a hair, and raise the price a hair. But it’s not like most people have such good memories that when they go back to Taco Bell after not having eaten there for a month and a half, they recall that the taco was 68 cents before, and now it’s 73 cents. It falls in the same rough range as before, and people go on none the wiser. If they’d doubled the prices, people might know. Same thing for portion size; who’s going to notice if the Taco Bell flour tortilla is 1/3" of an inch smaller in diameter? Or slightly thinner? Nobody.
There isn’t a scenario where nothing changes- it’s all a balancing act, and moving one part, means the others move as well. Where, how much, and when are all up to the business though.
I believe we should teach that it is better to contribute to society and that the less help we need ourselves the more for someone else who needs it more. And that this “someone else” is no better or worse than we are.
Life is hard for most everyone, though certainly in different and unequal ways. Ideally we would want to teach the physical benefits of trying to make one’s life less hard and the spiritual benefits for helping make someone else’s life less hard.