No, customer service workers do not have it easy
by Jennifer Kesler
Every once in a while, one of my fellow Americans blows my mind with her assumption that customer service workers get insurance, paid sick days and paid vacation, and at least $10/hour. These assumptions are often of no consequence, but on some occasions they’re offered in justification of why no one should be trying to improve working conditions for minimum and near-minimum wage employees, or why we should feel free to take out our frustrations on $6/hour clerks. That’s when these assumptions do harm.
As we head into this holiday season, during which many shoppers will have more contact with customer service shop and restaurant employees than at any other time of the year, allow me to clarify a few things.
- Most people who work at shops, restaurants, hotels, non-union grocers, etc., do not get any sort of paid time off. If they’re sick and they stay home, they don’t get paid for those hours/days.
- They are forced by law to take vacation of at least one week per year, but employers are not forced to pay them. Many seek temp work during that “vacation” week because they can’t live without every penny of their normal income.
- They rarely have insurance benefits, and if they do, they almost surely pay far more for it than the average office worker.
- They rarely get 40 hours a week, which means many of them need to work more than one job to make ends meet.
- When the store needs to save money, it cuts employee hours. This means suddenly the 25 hours you were depending on may become 16 – or you may even find yourself with an unexpected week off. Not good if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
- If you are terminated for any reason – including a layoff through no fault of your own – you don’t get a dime in severance pay or anything else. You’re just out of a job.
- There’s rarely any sort of retirement account for these workers.
- THESE ARE NOT EASY JOBS. I can’t stress this enough - these jobs are stressful, they demand true mult-tasking and lots of skills, and very often expose workers to confrontations with customers in which they are expected to somehow uphold store policy without irritating a customer who wants to cheat the system. If you’re not an asshole, you probably have no idea how “wrong” customers can be – they even engage in verbal abuse and various forms of harassment. And in most of these jobs, management will not back up the employee – they will instead let the customer run rough-shod over store policies, even to the extent of cheating the store, or get away with sexual harassment, and perhaps even demand the employee apologize for not kissing the ass of a customer who wanted to, for example, return an item a dog had clearly chewed to pieces 3 years after it was purchased.
- Retail workers generally make no more than a dollar above minimum wage.
- Restaurant workers generally make better money than retail workers, but still far less than most office workers make (excepting clerical workers, who are also paid dismally, but sometimes get some benefits).
- A disturbing trend in retail in the past 20 years has been not to pay commissions – which would inspire healthy competition, but to count each worker’s sales and give more hours per week to the workers who sell more. This inspires stress and panic as people compete for the right to “keep” their hours. Companies who engage in this are trying to get $50k/year salesperson quality out of workers making $6.
- These workers usually get a store discount, which is just not as great as it sounds when you’re working to pay rent and put food in your mouth.
If you think people on the bottom of the job ladder enjoy the same stuff you do, only with less income, you are deeply mistaken. Please at least give them some respect when you interface with them – they’re not getting much else. And if someone talks about raising minimum wage or other measures that might improve the lot of these workers, you don’t have to agree with their proposals (some of which are bound to be useless), but at least come at the issue with the understanding that there is actually a problem when jobs that weren’t designed to be someone’s sole living have become that for too many people. Understand there are regions where these are the only jobs available to all but a select lucky few; that there are disabled people stuck with these jobs because no office employers will make a few minor adjustments to accommodate them; that there are people stuck in these jobs because they needed to earn a living right out of high school and can’t afford to quit the job to go to college and can’t get a better job without college; and so on.
And surely we can agree that no matter what sort of work a person does, they deserve to be treated like human beings rather than enhancement tools for your shopping/dining/traveling experience.
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Posted in Class, Featured Articles on December 1, 2008 
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December 2nd, 2008 at 9:45 am
Your article is succinctly to the point and perfectly timed in light of the recent death of the poor 34 year old Wal-Mart worker who was stampeded to death by impatient shoppers on Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving. He was trampled as he was trying to unlock the doors of the store to let the customers in.
The epitome of assholian customer behavior was displayed when the inconsiderate, self-absorbed Christmas shoppers complained about the store closing for half the day due to the worker’s death, and the injury sustained by a 28 year old pregnant woman who was also trampled in the public’s mad rush to get the best deal on some stupid gadget. The entitlement attitudes of those who think everything is all about them knows no bounds; or as you put it, the public often regards customer service workers as “enhancement tools” for their shopping and dining experience.
A major part of the problem is the fact that we live in a society that labels some people as less “worthy” and less “deserving” as others, a society that labels some groups of disenfranchised people as “trash”.
Once any individual or group of people is relegated to the status of “untermentchen” (German: meaning “sub-human”), the public at large views them as disposable. Given our propensity for disposable items ranging from paper plates to Pampers, it is no surprise that our society thinks nothing of mistreating certain people and treating them as cheap disposable commodities.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:09 am
That was one of the most shameful moments in human history. I’m not engaging in hyperbole there – this was a poignant demonstration of what monsters average people are, when they feel they’ve been excused temporarily from behaving like civilized creatures. Because that’s what these people were: normal folks. Not serial killers. Not drive-by shooters. Not escaped convicts. Just ordinary folks.
That is what human beings are really like, deep down. That doesn’t mean things are hopeless and we can’t do better – we do, most of the time. But we need a culture that demands we do better, and uniformly punishes acts of selfishness whether they result in a death at Wal-Mart or corporate executives raking in millions from this latest catastrophe (they caused) in the world economy. I see a direct relationship here: we’ve got a couple of generations now who’ve never seen a major player in the power structure held accountable for his or her misdeeds. We KNOW there’s a set of rules for the rich/powerful and another set entirely for the rest of us. We’re disillusioned and angry, and NOW they’re destroying what prosperity any of us were managing to enjoy. We should be trampling CEOs on Wall Street instead of workers at Wal-Mart, but (sadly) abuse usually gets passed on rather than returned to the server.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
They are forced by law to take vacation of at least one week per year, but employers are not forced to pay them.
….
How is that legal? I mean, obviously it is, but I’m left confused.
Customer service jobs up here pay shite and get buckets of abuse. It’s like the theory is that anyone can do the job, so no one who does it matters as a human being, and if you did matter you wouldn’t be working there anyway. Walking into Zellers, a big Canadian retailer, is so depressing because of everything about the store – the colours, the lighting, the merchandise and the employees wearing awful uniforms and an air of exhaustion – that I can’t imagine working there.
Whenever we start having financial difficulties I get the shakes at the idea of going back to working in customer service in general and convenience stores in particular. I was in far more danger from the public working in a gas station (I was robbed twice, once at gunpoint, once at knife point) than I was when I worked at a bar, since bars tend to have security.
Jennifer, is there a way to subscribe to comments without having to comment? Hoyden has that option.
December 2nd, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I’ve never understood forcing employers to give time off but not pay for it. It probably evolved to address one issue of working conditions, but then no one examined the whole thing holistically. I think employees should at least have the option of signing away the vacation in order to keep their wages going, if that’s what they feel they need to do.
Wordpress doesn’t offer a way to subscribe to comments without first commenting, but I’ll look for a plugin that does that. Meanwhile, you CAN subscribe to the comments feed RSS (see link top of sidebar), if you use a feedreader at all. (I would offer to burn it to Feedburner so you can get email updates, but that service has been 100% unreliable lately, so I’m not convinced you’d get them.)
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Woohoo, Anna, I found a plugin for subscribing without commenting!
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Yayes!
I hope you will add it to Hathor – I have little to say right now but do so love the conversation over there. You have a great group of commentors.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:38 pm
I just did! Turned out the solution was very easy!
December 13th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Great post! My Mother was just telling me about her friend who is a customer care representative who gets paid $12.50 per hour. Many people would be like, wow, I would take that in this economy. But, she is a 57 year old woman who has worked all of her life! She has also not had a raise in 6 years! Talk about sexism, wage discrimination, etc! When my Mother was telling me this story I asked, “has she asked why she has not received a raise?” My Mother said that she had not because she needs her health insurance and does not want to lose her job. Plus she lives in Michigan and since our economy is the worst in the nation she can’t quit or risk getting fired. I feel bad for her and the thousands like her.