This is one of those articles where conservatives can say WE TOLD YOU SO.
Last year Amazon instituted a $15/hour minimum wage, otherwise known to liberals as a ‘living wage’, across the board. This included Whole Foods as well.
Due to some good reporting from The Guardian, we now know that Amazon slashed hours at Whole Foods after instituting this new living wage, often times offsetting the increase that employees had gotten:
THE GUARDIAN – In response to public pressure and increasing scrutiny over the pay of its warehouse workers, Amazon enacted a $15 minimum wage for all its employees on 1 November, including workers at grocery chain Whole Foods, which it purchased in 2017.
All Whole Foods employees paid less than $15 an hour saw their wages increase to at least that, while all other team members received a $1 an hour wage increase and team leaders received a $2 an hour increase.
But since the wage increase, Whole Food employees have told the Guardian that they have experienced widespread cuts that have reduced schedule shifts across many stores, often negating wage gains for employees.
Employees in Illinois:
“My hours went from 30 to 20 a week,” said one Whole Foods employee in Illinois.
Workers interviewed for this story were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation.
The Illinois-based worker explained that once the $15 minimum wage was enacted, part-time employee hours at their store were cut from an average of 30 to 21 hours a week, and full-time employees saw average hours reduced from 37.5 hours to 34.5 hours. The worker provided schedules from 1 November to the end of January 2019, showing hours for workers in their department significantly decreased as the department’s percentage of the entire store labor budget stayed relatively the same.
“We just have to work faster to meet the same goals in less time,” the worker said.
An internal email shared by the employee from their department manager cited the across-the-board shift cuts as “the direct result of guidance from our regional team”.
Employees in Maryland, Oregon:
In Maryland, another Whole Foods worker said their regional management is forcing stores to cut full-time employee schedules by four hours, to 36 hours a week. “This hours cut makes that raise pointless as people are losing more than they gained and we rely on working full shifts,” the worker said.
Another Whole Foods employee in Oregon noted: “At my store all full-time team members are 36 to 38 hours per week now. So what workers do if they want a full 40 hours is take a little bit of their paid time off each week to fill their hours to 40. Doing the same thing myself.”
This is what happens when liberal values meet reality, and it proves what conservatives have been saying for decades. You can’t just arbitrarily increase people’s salaries to absurd levels without having to make cuts or increases somewhere else. In this case it looks like Whole Foods decided to cut worker hours instead of increasing prices.
It’s just like with taxes. You raise them on businesses to make them pay their fair share, they responded by cutting workers or increase prices – or both! – in order to make ends meet.
Let’s do some math based on what’s reported above. I don’t know what Whole Foods was paying its part-time workers, but let’s assume they were paying them $10/hr. At 30 hours that’s $300 in earnings. Increase the minimum wage to $15 and cut their hours to 21 and now they’re being paid $315. It almost cancels the entire increase out. If they were paying them $11/hr before the increase, then after the increase they are actually being paid $15 less.
The bottom line is that it’s clearly kabuki theater for Amazon to raise their minimum wage to $15 per hour, because many of their employees just aren’t getting paid extra money to help them live better lives because their hours have been severely cut. Not to mention how frustrating it must be to have to do the same amount of work in less time.