Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Does employee happiness affect where you shop?

Retail Action Plan just released a study of who is working at our stores (other than the managers) and how happy they are.


Some info from the executive summary:
Almost 60 percent of the retail workforce is hired as part-time, temporary or holiday, and only 17 percent of workers
surveyed have a set schedule. The vast majority, seventy percent, only knows their schedules within a week. For workers with other primary responsibilities such as family or school, childcare and the pursuit of education become a significant challenge. Nationally, the number of retail employers who are working part-time “involuntarily” has expanded from 644,000 in 2006 to 1.5 million in 2010.

Of course, if you work part time, you don't get health care, and companies are trying to avoid paying those costs by rotating their workers enough so that they don't meet the mandated hours that require coverage.
 
Store like Abercrombie and Fitch, Forever 21, Uniqlo, Club Monaco, Tommy Hilfigger, and Target came out on the bottom for how they treat their employees.

Does that affect your decision to shop there?

I'm not sure if it will affect where I shop. Of course, I think people should be paid a living wage and given enough hours to support themselves, but there are so many other factors to consider when choosing where to shop.
For instance:
Should we pay more attention to this or to the company's environmental practices?
What about the quality of the clothes?
What about the cost?
What about the manufacturing and child labor?
What about whether they carry products tested on animals?
It's easy to knock stores off your list--there are so many justifiable reasons not to shop at most of the big name retailers we normally go to. It's harder to find viable alternatives.

I don't have a solution. The economy of scale that big retailers makes them unbeatable on prices even if they did adhere to the most stringent human rights and environmental guidelines, so I don't think the answer would ever be for people to stop shopping at them altogether.
Better laws would be a good starting point, but it's so hard and slow to get those passed, and non-unionized retail workers don't have the lobbyists or clout needed to combat the business owners who have a vested interest in knocking laws like that down.

Thoughts?

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