Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I have had this recurring thought on so many labor days that I've lost track when it first began, but I'll restate it so that it is on more minds than my own: who will give the authenticity speech for the American worker, from the heart just as much from the head, about the state of labor and the "average" American worker. It will be angry no doubt; if it isn't, it's my call that it won't be authentic. But it can't be just angry, it has to be "things are going to change or there will be turmoil," lots of turmoil, as constructive as possible. It will be American labor claiming its rights, just as American business does, to its own creative "brand" of "animal spirts." And for those of the establishment taking notes on this, by that I mean nothing more, updated for the times, than some of the manifestations of young colonial America's animal spirits, political exuberance, the symbolic protests that led to our break with England, 1763-1775. Who can say what form they will - or should take. And why should the Tea Party have a monopoly on that history?
Is Richard Trumka or anyone else at the AFL-CIO capable of doing this, of breaking with the Democratic Party enough to declare independence, and announce that party's policy hollowness over the past 40 years or so, ever since Jimmy Carter? So far that's not the case.
Public persona, thanks to Donald Trump, and to a lesser degree Bernie Sanders, whom I support and have given $10.00 dollars to - months ago - is front and center in American politics. What's the message from Trump's blustering: I'm wealthy enough to be independent, to tell it like it is, America is in deep trouble. Trump is right: the tone monitors are always part of the establishment. Trump is wrong: content matters too, wisdom has to come from a fusion of reason and passion, and no one can write the right equation on that, because so much comes from personality and family history, huge components in someone's persona. But in our society, who else has standing to declare their independence and remedies, stances that the Center-Right won't give the back of their hand to, as the outrageous coverage on CNN clearly demonstrates? Does labor have this standing? Can they any longer summon the internal resources to even sound a few notes on their muted trumpets? There are signs of hope, in the $15.00 per hour movement, but where is the call for FDR's Second Bill of Rights, from 1944, and its very first right, the one to a job at a decent wage? American society, and the world economy badly needs that, and there is no shortage of work to be done repairing all the environmental damage already caused and still vastly under way.
Editor's Note: I'm posting this on Tuesday morning, September 8, 2015 and it's hard to believe what actually happened with Trumka on Labor Day. There was no big speech, no independent voice, no seeming awareness that this was the time to be candid, blunt, independent, to help create a new public persona for the AFL-CIO and Labor; no, instead Trumka demonstrated he's oblivious to the "authenticity" race, as relevant for the missing white blue collar voter as any other block of the citizenry...so what does he do? He walks with the President, and touts the Vice-President in a Pittsburgh march and brief introduction. Inside the beltway as usual. Hey Richard, I'm available as an advisor for a reasonable $60,000 per year and I sure think I can give you better advice than you're getting. But then again, I'm now far, far from the beltway. There was no need to "endorse" Biden now; the nation needs a "from the gut, from the heart" speech of the working person's reality, detached from party politics. You rushed to serve up leftovers...there's plenty of time to assess Biden. You've apparently "bought him" already. Here are two links, the first to a pretty good speech from early August that Trumka gave in Iowa - it "could have been" (do you hear Marlon Brando's voice from "On the Waterfront?") nationalized for Labor Day very easily: http://www.aflcio.org/... and then the Boston Globes' account of the coming agenda for Labor Day - set a week at least in advance...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/...
So what am I looking for in a more authentic voice from labor? I've written about this before in previous postings here at the Daily Kos, and no one can or should write the script for this, it has to be "unscripted." But my mind keeps coming back to the voice of Morgan Freeman, a narrator's voice, it is true, especially in one of my favorite movies, the Shawshank Redemption, which does a pretty good job of capturing the horrors of prison life even before Chris Hedges has taken us inside the more contemporary forms of abuse, the racial and economically exploitive aspects of mass incarceration.
What I am looking for from labor's missing Labor Day speeches can be seen in two examples. Morgan Freeman's "speech" as "Red" to the parole board inside his Maine Prison, a blend in my mind of the best of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, of anger, reason and passion - and a statement of how he feels, consequences be damned, and he surely must know, given the realities he understands inside the prison, that the consequences can be the hell hole of solitary confinement, a fatal beating, or a bullet through the head just after a courtyard interview with the "warden." So here it is and I think you'll understand what I am trying to say by listening with your heart and emotions to the brief segment: https://www.youtube.com/...
The second and even more contemporary example is from the formally resigned (but hardly resigned in spirit) former Greek finance minister and member of Parliament from Athens, Yanis Varoufakis. Mr. Varouvakis, to make a long story short, has been denied by the world's neoliberal establishment, most prominently in the business press, like Bloomberg, the exercise of a much more modest range of human feelings than Mr. Trump, an experience I am far too familiar with in too many ways in my own life.
Mr. Varoufakis has been criticized for his dress, his lifestyle, his tone and his ideas, ideas which are, as best I can judge, far deeper in intellectual depth and human dignity than Mr. Trump can ever hope of emulating. But judge for yourself, what I mean by a fusion of passion and reason: https://www.youtube.com/...
For a popular culture which has brought the US, and the world, a long list of angry white men-avengers, beginning with Telly Savalas as Kojak (and note the irony of what this Greek-American was granted in his roles, compared to Mr. Varoufakis), and proceeding through the Charles Bronson movies, Clint Eastwood's western and modern police roles (and maturing, finally, in a pretty good "Grand Torino"), Bruce Willis...and so forth.
One has to ask, where is the comparable labor figure, nothing even approaching John L. Lewis, who was a Republican, believe it or not...and who delivered a famous punch to the jaw of the conservative AFL leader just before walking out and founding the CIO...today, labor leaders seem to have to clear even their Labor Day speeches with the sitting Democratic Party leaders...
Two personal notes:
While I worked at Target, I found myself having a recurring movie scene pop into my head. It was from Ben-Hur, and it was the Roman galley scenes where Charleston Heston is chained and straining at the oars as the Roman admiral explores the prisoner's psychology (back to Shawshank, in many ways...isn't it?). The prison has become a modern human metaphor, ironic, don't you think, from a "freedom loving America?"
Heston would like to strangle him before he dies and gets thrown overboard like so much human chum...the Roman admiral likes his fierce spirit...hoping that it is a sign he will row with increased vigor when "ramming speed" is called for...a bit more tolerant view than management takes today...or Germany took towards the not-quite-so-ferocious Varoufakis and his fellow Greek debtor-rowers.
When I would mention this recurring "flashback" and the accompanying emotions to co-workers at Target, none of them knew what I was talking about; Ben Hur, the Easter season perennial at movie channels like AMC or TMC, was unknown to a younger generation. Instead, it was the Matrix. Hard to get at those running society, isn't it? But who knows who will be thrown together on any of the future forms of human life rafts? The Walking Dead has dropped a few hints.
I also have to marvel at Target's ability to recruit a workforce that was drawn from every immigrant group present in the US population, from the Sudan, the Philippines, Indonesia...and many different Latin American nations...many women, substantial sexual minorities, and a very "judicious" blend across all these contours also by age...I often thought to myself: how in the world would a union organizer ever begin the task. And Target was shrewd: there were no large gatherings, unlike the pep rallies at Home Depot; lunch room shifts were the best one could do, usually never more than a dozen or at the most two...
Target is known as a fairly liberal corporation, a reputation forged by this very broad demographic of their work force and their pledges to local charities. While I was "chained" there, it didn't feel so "tolerant." And a diverse work force, as any good steel or coal mine operator from the Gilded Age could have told us, has many very practical uses. Eventually, it was a near heart attack and stent surgery which "set me free." (See my first Daily Kos diary: "Field Notes from A Lagging Indicator."
And to close, a note about "negotiating skills," since Mr. Trump has made so much about how he will dominate the table with his breathless, matchless prowess "at the table." Before my environmental career, while I worked at the Mercer County Board of Social Services (1976-1987) as a social worker (among other jobs) I was also the Chief Steward of AFSCME local 2285, and also the chief negotiator at the bargaining table. State law (Ruling 11) already had taken away the ability of county locals to bargain over pay increases and most benefits, the negotiating room, like that for Greece, had been vastly narrowed.
Most of my time was spent being a non-practicing "lawyer" for workers who came in late, repeatedly... or had long running disputes with supervisors. I earned the title "Philadelphia lawyer" from the Chief Personnel Officer, a compliment I think. I knew a little bit about "the Main Line" from college friends at Lafayette; but I was lower-middle class, neither working class nor upper middle class, even though for most of my life I looked up, as Americans are pushed to do by family and class pressures. The American Dream, let us not forget, only looks up, never down...even in Lincoln's formulations, which did so much to found "the Dream"... and which is why the recurring nightmare of "falling" haunts us like...well, the Introduction for Mad Men. I looked up for role models: for speaking, writing and who knows what else. But I sympathized with those who were excluded in our politics. And today, who isn't excluded? But silly me: at one time I thought that's what Christians were supposed to do. But I'm secular now.
And I walked out from a negotiation where I had no power and little bargaining room. It was a briefing with just two union members and the county "adjustor," who, and I say this with all due respect, acted and spoke like a character from the Sopranos. Dictating. (After all this was NJ). And the political establishment in Mercer County was the very last, faint twilight glow, death throws, actually, of the old New Deal coalition. The tone from across the table was brusque, condescending and keen to rub into our faces the fact we had no bargaining room at all. I didn't think too long about it; about half way through his insulting speech I said: "Nick, I've had it, I don't have to listen to these insults..." and I got up and walked out.
I was also the chief negotiator in my environmental career for a coalition of conservation groups who were backing Republican Governor Tom Kean's attempt to win a coastal regulatory commission from a very, very reluctant and at times hostile NJ legislature, where even a leading Democratic Senator who was a good environmentalist did not want to give new land-use powers to the state ("Trenton") over "local" coastal matters, his wealthy donors and constituents still smarting from the aftertaste of the NJ Pinelands Act (1979; the coastal negotiations were in 1988-1989).
We had no chance, and I have since, in writing my "memoirs," called this a "suicide mission"...and I was green, very green. But I was called a "pit-bull" (they already had a very bad and partly undeserved reputation, fed by ghetto posturing and pushing) in defense of some key provisions, like preventing those property owners whose structures were destroyed by a storm from rebuilding without a state permit...the bill shriveled and weakened week by week until it was not worth supporting, unable to deliver. We disowned it and said it wasn't worth passage at the end. Comprise is one thing; but the parts of a bill have to mesh enough to function...what was left wouldn't have. An empty legislative shell.
My message to Mr. Trump is this. I've been at the table too, and know how to defend good terrain. But I also know you can't win by blustering what has been given away or not won by all the politics, fair or foul, from the causes and movements that brought you to the negotiations. There is a structural power element there that emerges from history and democratic politics (in the full range of meanings, good and bad.) That can't be overcome by posturing. Keep that in mind if by some god forsaken chance you should become the next president, where you will find out that all the US has given away to China over the past 20 years (and the Chinese knew what to do with the gifts, I don't want to diminish their skill and drive) - and all the things about these years the American establishment won't discuss openly with its citizens - are the determining factors in what happens at the table, not the blustering contained in all we have come to know from "The Art of the Deal," loosely construed.
I wanted my readers to know that when I call for a real labor speech and a new labor movement, and when someone postures about negotiations, I'm answering not from an academic study, but speaking from my own life experiences.
I also don't want to pretend that the job of writing and delivering the needed labor speech is an easy one. The American workforce today is at least as diverse, and perhaps more so than the segments which make up the American left (of course, not at the top of society though, and maybe not at the "heights" of the left): labor itself; the black "caucus,"; the Latino caucus; the feminist movement, which is distinct but has some overlap with the LGBT "community"; environmentalists, and one might add in the human rights ACLU lobby as well as the peace "community"...I like to also cite this clip of the speech given in the movie Gettysburg by actor Jeff Daniels, portraying the abolitionist college professor turned soldier, Col. Joshua Chamberlain, who won the Medal of Honor for his role in leading a bayonet charge to save the Union Army's lines on the second day of battle. Here he is addressing an all white male group of potential Union deserters from Maine; picture a union organizer addressing a group of non-union workers comprised of just the groups I have listed a few sentences ago. Mission Impossible? Perhaps. Nonetheless, for tone, the proper fusion of passion and reason, and as the antidote to General Patton and Donald Trump, it's not a bad model for public speaking, Lincoln like in self-effacement and appealing to the best angels of ourselves for solidarity: https://www.youtube.com/...
If you would like to read my deeper thoughts on the task facing the American left today, please consider my comments recently at Corey Robin's blog here, the task and question before us is whether there are still any "universals" which can unite the fragments of "postmodern" America? Editor's Note: I am "graccibros" for the comments...
http://coreyrobin.com/...
Best to you all and good luck to our nation; do we really know how deep we have to dig to turn it around?
February 2014
Testimony About Wages and Working Conditions at Target Corporation
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
The winter of 2014 has become the season when elected officials and many civic organizations are calling upon citizens to “tell their story” about why raising the local, state or national minimum wage is a good idea. The nation, as captured in most opinion polls, strongly agrees. But, of course, we don’t know whether it will happen at the state or national level or at all.
This is not a new topic for me, as most of my loyal readers know. Before anyone besides Dean Baker was talking about it, I was wondering why the minimum wage proposals were being linked only to the missing inflation adjustments since 1968. What ever happened to the linkage to labor missing share of “productivity” gains, a topic which, over the past twenty years, has been a near obsession of executives and economists, with the moral being that without it, “they” just couldn’t increase labor’s wages. Well guess what: if, as Dean Baker has calculated, and he is supported by others, we include this missing productivity share, starting from a 1968 base, the minimum wage should be somewhere between $16.00 and $22.00 per hour. Interestingly enough, when Montgomery County Councilmember Mark Elrich skillfully worked in the last months of 2013 to shepherd an increase through more than one county, he cited a wage of $17.00 per hour as the minimum for a living wage in Montgomery County. But he could only get a bill promising $11.50 by 2017 through, and lost the linkage to inflation. Part of Mark’s intent, as he tells it, was to help spur the state to action, and have the state serve as a further spur to the Congress to act, but one of the unintended consequences now is that each level is arguing that the other one is the best route. Ah, federalism in action.
It seems very strange, and more than a bit of a tragedy to me, that this is where we have ended up, focused solely on the minimum wage, which is really now just the bare minimum of what should have been a much more robust program of public works and jobs - green infrastructure and environmental work unending - that needs to be done, including alternative energy programs to combat global warming. (Gas “fracking” is not one of them.) But until the ideological spell of neoliberalism is broken on the Right, and the Democratic Center, none of these other badly needed full employment measures are going to be placed on the policy table.
With the preliminaries now out of the way, and the context set, here is my own story about work and wages in the private retail sector, at Target Corporation. I could have missed something, but I’m not sure it’s a story that’s been told yet.
My name is William R. Neil. I am sixty-three years old and have lived in Rockville, Maryland since January of 2005. Although I began receiving a small New Jersey public employee’s pension in 2010, and an early Social Security retirement payment out of economic necessity in 2012, the fallout from the great financial crisis and the high cost of living in Montgomery County necessitated my return to the workforce in the summer of 2012. I was hired by the Target Corporation, and I was relieved and grateful for the chance to work because I had been out of the formal paid workforce for a good number of years, even though I was engaged in what I, at least, believed to be important work: writing about politics and the political economy.
In one of my previous work lives I have been the Director of Conservation for New Jersey Audubon Society, have testified in front of two Congressional Committees and before committees of the New Jersey Legislation on occasions too numerous to count. Although I did serve on Governor Martin O’Malley’s Transition Team for Smart Growth and Planning, and developed a number of unique land-use skills during my decade long environmental career, society has subtly informed me that my services in those areas (“Takings law,” TDR’s, regional planning, real estate appraisals and land swap investigations) would no longer be needed.
I was hired by Target Corporation, one of the nation’s largest retailers, in July of 2012, in what is called “hardlines” in the Target division of labor: meaning the heavier end of lifting and moving merchandise from the stock rooms to the retail floor. All Target employees multi-task, so in addition, I spent time on the “cash” registers and in, “zoning,” which is the process of returning order to disheveled display shelves – a constant need in the world of retail.
My starting salary at Target was $8.50 per hour, with no guarantee of the number of hours. When I filled out my application for “availability” I placed no restrictions on the days, and only ruled out the very early morning shift and overnight work. Because of my openness, I have found myself working most weekends, to which I have raised no objections.
Before completing a sketch of my pay history at Target, I feel it is very important for public officials to understand the work climate and corporate business model at Target. Although I have not done formal investigative research into that model, or heard it discussed in employee briefings, I feel quite confident in stating that Target runs on an extremely lean labor model, and has top down guidelines on the seasonal staffing levels for each of their standardized stores. Store managers are graded in part on their ability to keep to these levels and to prune staff to keep the total hours worked within guidelines – or perhaps exceed them by coming in “under hours.” At the best of times – that would be normal staffing levels – there is still the pervasive sense among employees of being pushed to the absolute limit to get the work done, keeping in mind that customer traffic (that would be “Guests” in Target speak) varies widely due to weather and other variables, so staffing assumptions can be quickly overwhelmed. Keep in mind also that no matter where a Target employee is working on the floor, or even in the backroom, customer (Guest) service is always the top priority, and, although Target “team leaders” (the 1st line supervisors) and managers are reluctant to admit it – in fact never do formally – this priority can interfere with getting the other assignments done. There are times, due to this lean labor policy, and employee absences, and I’ve seen this repeatedly, where there may be only one or two employees on huge segments of a floor, and I’ve run into angry customers who can’t find assistance. And that reality is getting worse, not better.
In fact, there are tensions and conflicts inherent in this “lean labor “ model as it strives to live up to the Target motto of “Fast, Fun, Friendly” towards the “guests.” (And I submitted a formal set of recommendations in May of 2013 for the P-Fresh operation – that’s the food/grocery section - dealing with some of these problems.) Target expects the work to be done quickly, and employees are queried multiple times during a work shift about where they stand in getting the push lines (products in carts from the stockroom/backroom heading for the retail shelves) out or “reshop” done (finding the right location for “orphaned” products discarded by guests). Supervision at Target most of the time is close and relentless – until the “lean labor” model also impacts the number of team leaders available. On most normal days at Target, there is very little unsupervised time for employees, and there is no way of escaping the relentless pace.
But such realities pit speed and the appearance of task completion against work quality.
Target is the vast modern equivalent of the old corner general store, selling 50,000 different items – or so I’ve heard. Given the dynamics of modern product differentiation – mirroring the vast division of labor in society itself – it takes close scrutiny to sort the ten or twelve different versions of “Tide” - for example - into the right place and correct price slot. Equipment – like hand held scanners which are really small PC’s – and walkie-talkies - help greatly, but Target is notorious among its workforce for having a shortage of that equipment, much of it aging and slow. I would say that 20-30% of my shifts over the first year started out with equipment unavailable, thus cancelling out the first two words of the motto and impacting the third– although no one admits it – the ability to constantly feel “friendly.” This, combined with the lean labor model and other labor dynamics* can mean at times that a significant portion of merchandise is in the wrong place at the wrong price. (* “Call outs,” missing a shift, is the last tool available for the modern retail worker to express unhappiness – although most call-outs are driven by exhaustion and the lack of paid sick time.)
I supply these basic background details as the minimum necessary to understand the additional impacts of the Target compensation system. Part time employees like me can sense their hours being managed to keep them cumulatively under 30 hours per week. In the retail cycle they can grow to 35-40 per week during the crucial October-December months, and then plunge to 20 hours per week in the January–March lean times. Part time employees used to be eligible for a low cost Medical Benefits program – lower cost and lower deductibles than the ACA as I have regretfully come to learn firsthand – but Target’s financial troubles stemming from the infamous hacking crisis have now led them to drop the program. (That and the unprovable speculative premise that there is now a government program for healthcare). But part time employees are not eligible for paid sick time, which creates its own nasty feedback loops of working sick and making guests and co-workers sick also: respiratory illnesses spread readily through the workforce given these realities. Vacation days are earned on the basis of total hours worked: after 18 months at Target, I have less than one day “accumulated.”
Now let me come back to one of the significant moments for a new private sector retail employee in the 21st century, the first year employee review, which I received in July of 2013. In my first year I worked very hard, trying my best to be what Target wanted; for my efforts I received two employee of the month awards, the first a wall plaque and the second a small Target Gift Card and certificate. I missed just two work days, one when I was so sick with a respiratory illness and fever that I was bedridden, the second after I ran a heavy cart loaded with merchandise up on my heel. So I worked sick and hurt (limping for two weeks on the bad heel – I have been without any medical coverage since 2005) and, I would have liked to think, earning something extra in the private sector’s system of rewards for giving 110%. But I don’t want to promote myself or become sentimental about this: when one finishes most months with less than $100 dollars, and has no savings, no medical coverage and no sick days, the blunt reality is that one does work sick unless it is absolutely impossible. In these circumstances there is no social safety net, and one is carried back to the grim work realities of the late 19th century.
What I found when reckoning day arrived, like an old tenant farmer at “settle time,” was that I got an eleven cent per hour raise, from $8.50 per hour to $8.61. This has, over the last work quarter, been raised to $8.75 with no special explanation having to do with me or my work efforts. The only explanation I heard was that this was the new wage being offered to cashiers, so they applied it to the general workforce. Whether the growing political background pressure to increase the minimum wage had some effect on this last increase, I cannot say with any certainty, but I never received either a written or verbal notification; I learned about the change by looking at my pay stub. Some workers attributed it to Target keeping pace with what cashiers are paid at other local retail stores.
About one year ago, in February of 2013, with a very tight personal budget and my hours seeing the proverbial off season retail shrinkage to 20 hours per week, I approached the head of the grocery department, called “P Fresh” at Target, to ask about working there. This is not a popular department, because it has a reputation for even harder physical work, and moving in and out of dairy, meat and vegetable coolers, and the -20 degrees frozen food freezer. But because it ostensibly held the chance of more hours, and partly for a change of scenery I applied and was given training. A little deeper background on the operations there will help to put Target pay practices in some perspective, as well as shed some light upon how Target seems to view “productivity.” (As an important aside, Target has no “training department.” Regular line workers or team leaders perform what training there is during the normal flow of work. There are some online training materials, but I’ve never seen one or a manual for operating the handheld scanners).
In the P-Fresh department, an average line worker does everything a hardline worker in other areas does except help out at the registers – we are formally excused from that, but the pushing of product and the zoning remain the same. However, the P-Fresh worker must learn how to identify and then “cull” dated and damaged produce, how to subtract that inventory at the end of the evening to account for the losses, and also how to pull merchandise from the back room and electronically subtract them from inventory, something the average hardline worker is not taught - or allowed to do. P-Fresh workers must also learn how to use an electronic scale, to weigh certain meat products individually before being put out on the floor, and to electronically code products approaching their “use-by” date so then can be culled by an upcoming shift. Additionally, workers in P-Fresh must learn a “toxicity” protocol” in handling meat, placing products on the mobile carts and in the storage area in a sequence which places the least bacterially dangerous items above the riskier ones (uncooked chicken always on the bottom.)
There is a direct point to be made in presenting this level of detail: I now can do an entirely different job for Target, at a higher skill level than the “hardlines” work, thereby, in my opinion, doubling my overall productivity and value to the company. However, despite the more demanding physical work involved, especially in the dairy cooler and lifting crates of bananas, and the higher technical levels, there is no greater pay for the basic job. There is another rung in P-Fresh, at slightly higher pay, a specialist job, but the pay differential for more technical work (direct ordering) and having to get up at 5:00 AM to be in for the 6:00 to 2:30 shift was not a good trade-off for me, the pay differential being well under $1.00 per hour, and my own prior experience teaching me that I don’t do well at early morning shifts, having tried them as a TSA Security Screener at Logan Airport in Boston in 2002. I was urged to apply for this job, but turned it down for the two reasons listed here – as well as observing the higher stress levels in those who already worked in the slot.
As it has turned out over the past year, when I have primarily worked in P-Fresh, with short stints back in “hardlines,” my average weekly hours did not change, coming in at around 30 per week, with my gross annual earnings in 2013 totaling almost exactly $14,000.
But there is one more situation I must cover, the type of incident that leaves an ineradicable burn mark seared into one’s work memories. On Christmas Eve of 2013, a Tuesday, I was working the 12-6:00 PM shift. I was in a good mood, expecting light traffic in the store and a relatively easy shift. My supervisor, however, gave me an unusual assignment sometime in the mid-afternoon. He asked me to clean about a dozen corrugated plastic sheets (one surface being like corduroy) about 2.5 feet by 4.5 feet which lie beneath the milk containers in the retail cooler displays.
This was the first time I had ever heard of that operation, which I have since learned is usually done, time allowing, in those early morning shifts. But cleaning operations in P-Fresh seem very episodic and informal as I have observed them, amateurish, if and when time will allow, and that doesn’t seem to be very often. These sheets were already pulled and sitting in another location, the ends of the pieces caked in dried milk and mold. When I looked around for a good stiff scrub brush, which is what the nature of the operation clearly called for, I was told to use a brush lying in a sink, a dust-pan type brush which was transparently inadequate to the task, the bristles being far too soft. Using it would be like scraping a mud-encrusted boot with a feather. Was he kidding? I hoped so. The supervisor, after I protested, told me to scrounge around for something else, handing me a soft scrub pad, which didn’t seem much better.
The most common cleaning tasks for P-Fresh at Target take place in a “special room” which looks like it belongs to the set of a B-Grade gangster movie, the one where the informer gets beaten up, although I suppose it could fit as well into the abandoned factory scene if there is a French Connection III or IV coming out. It consists of a jury-rigged mesh wire cage extending some 20 feet or so high, with the supports being bare steel studs, unpainted raw lumber and plywood sheeting. The “cage” is about 15 X 10 feet in extent, but is filled with a hodge-podge of maintenance equipment and supplies, including floor polishers. The only claim the equipment can make to even approaching what one would expect in a major food retailer’s sanitary operation is the equivalent of a small shower stall of about 3 X 3 feet, with faucets and hoses (short ones, less than 4’) and a large floor drain, but no sides other than three inch high splash pads. There is no counter-top, no working surface, much less the long stainless steel tables and rigorous protocols one would expect to accompany a professional food operation, retail or restaurant. When I set about, without any guidance, to clean these milk mats, I got a plastic garbage can about waist high and an unfinished piece of plywood sheeting to use as my tabletop: splinters, chemically treatment wood, moldy end and all. I never did find anything adequate to the scrubbing job, so I used an old, battered scrub pad of the kind used to clean Teflon cookware, its previous history and uses unknown. As for soap, I have to say that on other cleaning missions which I will describe below, to clean our white, rolling discard tubs for damaged or dated food products, which I have done about six times previously, I have never seen or heard of a standardized or prescribed cleaning agent: one time I found bleach, one time I found Lysol, another time I found nothing, and another time, like this time, I used an loose squeeze canister of anti-bacterial hand soap – or at least that’s what I think it was because it wasn’t labeled but looked like the container for hand soap in the restrooms.
So while this was an unusual request and mission for me, the methods and the improvised work station was not; I’d been there at least a half-dozen times, maybe more, to clean the rolling discard tubs. Now for that mission, because the tubs are about 2.5 feet deep by 3.5 feet long and 2.5 feet wide (approximations) a good stiff toilet cleaning brush would be the tool of choice, or something like it with a 2-3 foot handle. But every time I’ve done this task I’ve used a battered cut-off floor broom with straw bristles that looked like it last belonged to Mother Hubbard. So this is the state of the Target P-Fresh backroom sanitary operation.
Now for just a few more Christmas Eve details to complete the picture. In addition to having only improvised scrubbing tools, very inadequate to the task, and the cleaning “agent” de jour, there were no gloves, no eye googles and no apron, either of cloth, or what is really required, a substantial rubber one. It took about 1.5-2 hours to do a task which might have been done, with the proper room and set up, and tools, in about half-an hour. Ideally, for such a task, as someone else has pointed out to me, these soiled mats should have been soaking overnight. But in what - there are no such facilities.
As the reality of what was going on sank in to me – which I imagined was the civilian equivalent of military punishment, scrubbing latrines with a toothbrush - I became increasingly angry, composing my own sarcastic poetry rap about how unfair I was looking for such expensive, high tech tools – how unfairly demanding I was. Proper workstation of stainless steel aside, Target itself sells most of the missing tools and I reckon that it would have cost under $25.00 to walk out on the floor and buy what was missing. That would be a daring move by a Target worker, with unknown repercussions. In my May 2013 set of observations and recommendations, seven pages worth, encouraged by a “reforming” senior team leader who did not last long but sensed some things were very wrong in the operation – I did not delve into the unprofessional and episodic cleaning and sanitary procedures because I was so new – and they were so blatant and casual and obvious – that it was clear that no one gave a damn about them: the grocery-P-Fresh operation ranks low in generating revenue and costs were to be kept at an absolute minimum. So my comments focused on the negative fallout of the “lean labor” model.
Oh yes, one more detail from how I spent my Christmas Eve. There was no place to dry the cleaned plastic milk mats, and only a few paper towels to dry them with instead, so I stood them up alongside the floor polisher, not realizing it was pretty dirty itself with hidden grease along its surfaces. So I had to redo a number of the mats.
Later, hours later in the break room as all this had a chance to sink in and I realized my lack of interest in the “promotion opportunity” may have led my supervisor to propose this little exercise – speculation on my part from the absurdity and timing of it – no verbal proof – but supported by the fact that he went home without ever checking in on my progress or wishing me a Merry Christmas - and never has said a word about it me in the 45 or so days since…hours later I began describing this whole situation to a couple of fellow employees in the employee break room – it was becoming a speech at this point – and as I pointed out the absurdity of Target’s Fortune 500 ranking (or is it top 100?) and the tools that I didn’t have – which could have been purchased that night in our store – and my stained tan jeans (Target has a dress code of red shirts and tan jeans, khakis supposedly, but they’ve loosened that, but they don’t supply them or give a uniform allowance), streaked with milk and grease, I turned around and realized that one of the team leaders had heard what she called “my rant” which I finished by throwing an aluminum ball of waste from my dinner across the room and into the large waste basket in the corner. We had a little chat afterword about reporting troubles “through the proper chain of command” (which I can’t imagine would have, or will do any good; these conditions are SOP at Target), and I don’t know to this day whether or not she informed the head of P-Fresh about my protest speech.
How Target’s food operations pass local, county, state and federal inspections, especially for this backroom operation, is beyond me. It is not even a 20th century operation, much less a 21st century one.
This testimony has grown too long and I will save and spare the Senator a similarly detailed description of the milk cooler operation, saving that for another day, saying in summary only that it is probably the most dangerous physical setting in the whole Target operation, and has gotten worse, not better over the past six months since the cooler now has expanded inventory (non-milk) that has been placed on large green rolling carts which further reduce the already far too inadequate working space.
But I must note that the combination of the traditional staff hour cutbacks which come in January and February seems to have been intensified by Target’s revenue drop in the wake of the electronic hacking; 8 hour shifts have shrunk to the new favorite, 5.5 hours or even an hour less, with only one 15 minute break. I call it an all-out “sprint.” Under better staffing hours P-Fresh was always a struggle to get all the tasks done correctly. Now it is an obvious impossibility and morale is crumpling and “call-outs” growing, which only makes matters worse.
I have said to myself if I were a 20 year old Olympic athlete I would still have a hard time getting all the tasks done in the diminishing hours allotted. “Fast, Fun Friendly?” No, “Frantic, Futile and Frazzled” is closer to the truth. It doesn’t have to be this way, but the business model and the “lean labor” imperatives constantly drive it in this direction.
Needless to say, I am in full support of local, state and national efforts to increase the minimum wage, and in other public writings and press commentaries I have said that the “bargaining” ought to begin at $15.00 per hour, a number fully justified (it should be between 16-22 dollars per hour) by economist Dean Baker’s analysis of the missing “labor share” of productivity increases, a number only made impractical by the failure of median wages to rise, and the opposition of the retail and service sector CEO’s to even this decency minimum of $10.10 per hour. (And as a final aside: Target does not pay its line workers Christmas bonuses, despite many of us having worked seven and eight consecutive day stretches.)
I hope I have helped to make the case not just for Target workers, but for all those in the service and retail sectors who may have to endure similar situations. As one co-worker expressed it in an unguarded moment in the employee break room, “how come Wal-Mart gets all the bad publicity, things aren’t much different at Target?”
This is not an easy piece of testimony for a worker in the private service sector of 2014 to write, knowing the power realities between labor and management, and the general lay of the political landscape. But if matters ever come to that point, I would stand by this testimony in a court of law, under oath.
Sincerely,
William R. Neil
Rockville, MD