It has been a lot of years since average working people had any kind of serious leverage when it came to dealing with their employers.
Oh, individuals with specific skill sets sometimes can negotiate. But for the most part, in the age of Walmart, when your boss says jump, you had better not even ask how high. Just start doing your best frog impression and hope it’s what he wanted.
Some companies are better than others. For all the complaining folks on the left do about Chic-fil-A, it has always been a company that is willing to work with its people who have to work around school or second jobs. But there are too many like Walmart, which treats its hourly employees as if they are police officers or medical personnel and expects them to be on call 24/7 and have different schedules every week.
Your day off? Sorry, but Bubba called in sick and we need you to come in and work his shift.
COVID-19 changed that, at least in the short run.
An awful lot of businesses — particularly in the service industry — shut down or cut way back during the worst of the pandemic. Millions of workers lost their jobs and needed government help to keep from winding up cold and hungry on the streets.
With business returned, many of the employees didn’t.
Some quit because they lost the desire to be crapped on day after day by bad employers just to keep mediocre jobs.
Others who had been scared silly at the thought of changing jobs managed to learn that it wasn’t all that difficult to find something better than what they previously had.
Are we finally getting free from the idea of treating rich people like demigods? Maybe we’re not doing a complete 180, but the pendulum may be swinging just a little I think it reached its worst point a few years back when Republican Congressman Eric Cantor tried to say Labor Day was a holiday celebrating people who start their own businesses.
I don’t know if he got an unwelcome visit from a couple of burly Teamsters, but he did lose his seat in the next election cycle.
You might be surprised to learn that a Republican saint, particularly in the middle of the 19th century, spoke up for working people.
They didn’t call him “Honest Abe” for nothing.
As the pandemic wanes, employers are starting to realize that at least in the short run, they are competing for workers. Some of them are even offering the equivalent of signing bonuses to get people to work for them.
That sounds very nice, but changes that last a little longer than just emergency solutions might mean more in the long run.
Great Resignation?
How about just promising to treat employees as if their happiness matters?
Or at least as if they were human beings and not just cogs in a giant machine?
Imagine how much better a world that would be.