cutting hours

Our chain is cutting the number of work hours folks are scheduled for. As I follow the online community of co-employees it seems to have slowly been spreading but picked up steam as of late.

While a couple weeks ago the company did increase our pay by $2 an hour, for most folks the cut in hours has meant their pay check isn't getting bigger and for some its even shrinking. From what I've read other locations have already been hit hard by this. One person even shared that a hand full of employees were in tears at their store because after being regularly scheduled for 40 hours the next week they were scheduled for 4...

I've seen it some at our store. One guy in my department who has been with the company 17 years went from 5 days a week to 3. Another coworker from guest services went from 4 or 5 days a week to 2. I personally have been semi-immune to cuts (so far) being both able to work in pick up orders and one of the few people in the grocery department willing to endure the harsh work of our walk in freezer.

It seems our store was for a time shielded from the biggest cuts in hours. I forget the exact wording of the designation but we are classified as "Super-ultra high volume" or something like that. In addition to all our in store business we also ship out a lot of orders since the size of our store means we carry a larger number of items than other stores.

But that seems to be coming to an end. I overheard management talking to each other yesterday, one of them said that next week no one will be getting 40 hours. Another supervisor was flummoxed when he had been promised 1,100 hours for his department next pay period but only received 750.

The number crunching doesn't add up to me. We keep falling behind in the grocery department (one of the reasons we are allowed to be open) and still have literally thousands of pounds of food piled up in the back room that could be going out for purchase at the same time they're cutting the number of hours we have to work. Customers get frustrated when the shelves are empty and it doesn't really make sense why they have to be.

My supervisor gave me a review the other day, a check in on how I'm doing and a discussion of skills I am going to be trained on. Her analysis of my competency boiled down to this: everything is good, work faster. I talked to a coworker who had a review the same day and got the same exact comment.

They can tell us to work faster all they want but the reality is even if I was able to there is too much to get done in the amount of time they give us to do it.

The corporation needs to be less tightfisted with how much they are letting people work, not only for the well being of their employees but for the functionality of their store.