our store has been hiring people like crazy this week...

The other day I came across some social media content, a picture of a “help wanted” sign at a nationally recognizable grocery chain. The sign included a little spiel along the lines of “We know that many people are being laid off work right now and so we are hiring. Come apply with us!”

The interpretation of whoever created this post was along the lines of “oh, isn’t this a nice company. They are helping take care of people who are out of work.”

My feelings were a little more nuanced.

Our store has been hiring people like crazy this week. A couple times an hour they are calling over our radios for a supervisor to come to the office for another interview, a wave that we haven’t seen since Christmas.

We do need some more help, at least in the grocery department where I work. We actually had two folks quit all of a sudden the other week and have yet to replace them and when I left at the end of my shift yesterday yet again the pasta and canned soup aisles were barren from people stocking up. But the rate at which they are hiring new folks seems to go beyond those needs. I'm pretty sure it amounts to the higher ups preparing to replace us when we inevitably get sick en masse.

We’ve been behind on work before and really in my time we have only ever been completely caught up one or two days ever. There have never been enough human-hours scheduled into the work day to get it all done. At no point did the store consider hiring more help or give more hours to the staff we already have. All we ever got was a “work faster” or a “this un-doable amount of labor needs to be finished by today.”

Not only do I think the extra work created by the hoarders is not enough to explain the seemingly huge number of folks being brought on board all of a sudden, I certainly wouldn’t attribute the hiring spree to any kind of benevolence towards the working class brought on by this moment.

The needs of working class folks has never been a concern for the people who run the chain of stores I work at. We who work there know through past experience that they’re again and again fine cutting hours when folks have bills to pay.

Corporations don’t do anything unless they believe they will benefit. So why hire now?

I truly believe that a huge percentage of us employees are going to get sick (and that's why I've been advocating time and a half hazard pay). There have been no real changes in how things are done, no protective gear, no hand sanitizer. We’ve had more folks shopping than we’ve seen since the holiday season. It all adds up to one outcome. The only question is how many get sick and when.

It doesn’t seem like the higher ups care at all about “flattening the curve” as it were for us employees. Something as simple as restocking the shelves during off hours could accomplish that goal. It wouldn’t be that hard to have ⅔ of folks come in and do the bulk of the non-customer interaction work when there are less people around..

It looks like rather than flatten the curve or (try to keep employees from getting sick at all) this company plans to overwhelm the curve, to staff up to such an extent that even if half of us or more are sick at any given time they will still have enough people to operate. This is probably what makes the most business sense to them and in the end they are a business.

I wish I could be as optimistic as that social media post was but I haven’t seen any effort to protect us workers already here, so why should I believe the hiring blitz to be anything other than a cold calculation?