The Atlantic: How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap by 6ixStringJack

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The Atlantic: How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, May 14, 2025 17:23
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Sunday, May 11, 2025 2:30 PM

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-part-time-jobs-became-a-tr
ap/ar-AA1Ewivq

Great read and nothing I haven't been saying for 20 years.

Thanks for finally speaking up about it now though.

I guess that was partly because you know that AI is coming for your job and partly because Democrats are no longer in power that you decided to finally write about it, but I'll still take the exposure to the idea.

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Sunday, May 11, 2025 4:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I should note that you failed to mention the Barack Obama's administrations part in all of this. Not sure if that's because you're still hiding the truth or your just completely unaware of it. Most of what the Big Corps are able to get away with on the scheduling today is a direct result of the Obama administration's actions and regulations on part-time employment.

Because he forced the rule that any employee working over 30 hours per week somewhere be offered health insurance by the company. This did not result in one single additional American getting health insurance, of course. All that did was make the companies cut their part-time help from 39 or less hours per week to 29 or less hours per week. If those employees were lucky, they at least got some additional staff to make up for it, but in the cases of companies like KMart that were sinking and hadn't given a raise to their employees for the last decade they were around did not hire anybody new to make up for this lack of man hours overnight.

Then, to add insult to injury, none of these companies actually monitored the hours that their management was putting together in the schedules and they all made it incumbent upon the wage-slaves to monitory their own weekly hours and they'd be the ones to get written up and have their jobs threatened for taking the extra hours above 29 that their manager put on the schedule without speaking up about it.

Many people who were somehow successful in their struggle to work 39 hours per week without health insurance and paying the bills, were now completely unable to do that anymore without finding a second job and working with two HR scheduling departments that both considered themselves the top priority in the employee's life. I worked with a lot of these people.

Not only were none of the problems that Democrats were claiming to fix actually ever addressed, but all these policies did was make lives even harder for the poorest workers in the country while incentivizing the Corps to put in place new policies that would hurt these people even more.

And they walked away from it. Patted each other on the backs and gave each other blowjobs and never thought about it again or checked up on it 10 years later to see what fruits their actions bore.

Geez... And they wonder why black people voted against them so fucking hard this last election.

Hmmmmmmmmm.....

It's why I didn't stick around when they got rid of the night shift at my last job. I had a great schedule there, made into an ultimate schedule after 1.5 years of proving my worth. I worked 6 8-11 hour shifts in a row, and they trusted me enough to let me decide how long I wanted to work over 8 hours on any given day or just clock out when everyone else did. Nobody ever once bothered me a second time about it (as in, a day shift manager wondering why I was still there and they hadn't seen me before). They were thrilled to see somebody doing extra help and getting a lot more done that they weren't expecting to have been getting done.

And after the 6th day, I had 8 straight days off. That was my set schedule every two weeks for the last 8 months and the last 3 night managers I had.

To avoid going over 30 hours, this was set right in the middle of the split on the week, so despite working 60 hours on average in 6 days, there was no overtime or even going over the point where they'd have to offer me insurance. It was on me to make sure I didn't go over 29 hours in a week. If I did, I would get written up. I never got written up.

Why would they give me this schedule? Because despite the fact that out of "fairness" everyone gets the same starting pay and the same 2% yearly increase no matter if they are the best or the worst employee in the building, I got 5 times more work done than the 2nd best employee did and everybody knew it. Nobody ever bitched about favoritism and even the regular employees smiled when I finally came back after 8 days knowing that their job for the next 6 just got easier. And the management loved when I came back. Just coming in and seeing them smiling and coming up to me every week like they were seeing an old friend they were longing to meet again... I could have done that the rest of my life for the peanuts they were paying me and I would have been cool with it.

And the fact that I'm never close to living paycheck to paycheck and I make no bones about letting management know I'm fine working one 4 hour shift per week if they don't find a way to give me a schedule that I want since they have nothing more to offer me in terms of promotions or higher pay bumps than the lesser employees.

Save your money kids. I guaranty you the ability to not be bullied around by a boss that knows you need that job to survive is worth far more than almost any discretionary expenditures you're making today instead of putting away at least 6 months worth of bills after getting your debts paid off.

But if I wanted to stay and go to the day shift? Completely different story...

They did away with human interaction in the scheduling at all, making everything completely "fair" for everybody. No more set times. No more set days. No more set hours. No more set lengths of shifts.

They could give you 8 hours on a Saturday night, then give you a 4 hour early shift on Sunday morning which wouldn't even leave you an 8 hour sleep in between, only to not give you a single hour for the rest of the week.

It was all done by computers, and no managers could have any input into it because that might end up being considered favoritism if there was a human element involved. So we're going to let an uncaring machine that understands nothing of human beings spit out schedules like code, and all of the little ants have their marching orders they need to follow. Fuck their lives, because the corps know very well they need the job.

And after outright rejecting the new terms they were offering me to stay on, they were sure to let me know on my way out the door that they just might fight my unemployment claim. But I just let them know that they would be wasting their money after trying to force a significant change of job duties on me while also laying me off as part of a nation-wide company effort. There's not a single court even in my deep red state that's going to entertain that argument out of them, so I didn't bother wishing them luck since it would never go beyond the "threatening looking legal notice" stage, where they have some 3rd party rent-a-lawyer outfit like TALX put out a scary looking 2-page letter full of legalese in a failed attempt to impress and intimidate me.

They did not fight the unemployment claim. That letter never even came.

And people wonder where customer service went and why employees at so many stores just suck now. Why should they be any better when they're treated like fucking cattle?

Take that wage-slavery your pretending is a job and shove it up your ass.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, May 12, 2025 8:05 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN

In the long delay between your posts, I wasted that time reading that article.
That bimbo is stupid. It was Obama who changed the definition of full time from 40 hour weeks to 30 hour weeks. Businesses did not do that, Obamination did.

Her numbers for Target at $15 per hour show 31,200 for 40 hours, which would be $23,400 for 30 hours. So the figure she quoted for average ($27,090) shows that they were possibly all full time employees.

A long way of showing Libtards cannot math.

Also, the title says Atlantic, but the linkies all say msn.

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Monday, May 12, 2025 9:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:
In the long delay between your posts, I wasted that time reading that article.
That bimbo is stupid. It was Obama who changed the definition of full time from 40 hour weeks to 30 hour weeks. Businesses did not do that, Obamination did.

Well apparently you didn't read my posts in between the time I made them or afterward. Very first sentence from the very first paragraph from my 2nd post...

Quote:
I should note that you failed to mention the Barack Obama's administrations part in all of this.

I then went on...

Quote:
Not sure if that's because you're still hiding the truth or your just completely unaware of it. Most of what the Big Corps are able to get away with on the scheduling today is a direct result of the Obama administration's actions and regulations on part-time employment.

Because he forced the rule that any employee working over 30 hours per week somewhere be offered health insurance by the company. This did not result in one single additional American getting health insurance, of course. All that did was make the companies cut their part-time help from 39 or less hours per week to 29 or less hours per week. If those employees were lucky, they at least got some additional staff to make up for it, but in the cases of companies like KMart that were sinking and hadn't given a raise to their employees for the last decade they were around did not hire anybody new to make up for this lack of man hours overnight.

Then, to add insult to injury, none of these companies actually monitored the hours that their management was putting together in the schedules and they all made it incumbent upon the wage-slaves to monitory their own weekly hours and they'd be the ones to get written up and have their jobs threatened for taking the extra hours above 29 that their manager put on the schedule without speaking up about it.

... and on... but why repost the whole thing again here? Just read it.

Quote:
Her numbers for Target at $15 per hour show 31,200 for 40 hours, which would be $23,400 for 30 hours. So the figure she quoted for average ($27,090) shows that they were possibly all full time employees.

A long way of showing Libtards cannot math.

I got a good chuckle when I double checked your math and came up with the same conclusion. At this point who can tell if that was a self-own or manipulation of an audience she know isn't going to check any of her math anyhow.

That's on the face value though. What you're not considering is that she's talking about a national figure and companies like Target are not paying one set amount beyond a stated minimum or the official minimum wage nationwide. A huge portion of that $30k+ figure is going to be because of states where minimum wages and/or the cost of living is much higher too. I guaranty you nobody in Indiana here is making what they're making in California to do the same job, even if they are now starting out at $15 per hour.

You're also definitely not taking into account that Management, probably up to the level of Store Manager at least is considered an "Employee" of the company. The last job I had, the store manager was making over $200k the same year that I made $14,000.

That's not considering also all the higher paying full time team lead positions either.

There are a ton of variables here, and the fact that the minimum nationwide there is now $15, that's burning the candle from both ends. Much less chance of a good number of people getting full time with a $15 minimum than there would be with the national minimum wage of $8.25 or whatever stupid low number it is right now.

Let's see if the internet has any guess at the actual number...

.....

AI just says this...

Quote:
It's difficult to give a precise number for part-time employees at Target without exact data. However, Target has a total workforce of approximately 415,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees. While a precise percentage of part-time employees isn't publicly available, it's reasonable to assume a significant portion is part-time, given that Target hires for various needs, including seasonal and on-demand positions.

I've worked mostly in retail when I worked in the last 20 years. I can say that from my experience that's very true.

When I worked at KMart there were only 6 people in the building who got full time and benefits. But that was a near-dead company who hadn't given an employee a raise in the last 10 years before they closed up shop.

The other place I worked had team leads and some overnight people that were full time. But other than that, the only full time positions in the store were management and the small HR dept. None of the cashiers, stockers or cart boys were offered full time. Not even people who knew how to use the forklifts got it unless they were at least a team lead.

And back when I was overnight and they did offer me full time, it didn't come with a single cent more per hour. They were paying quite a few dollars less than $15 at the time and they wanted me to make that job my life and keep me overnight 5 nights every week for peanuts, and then charge me for health insurance on top of it. Nah.

So.... I know what you're saying and she used an absolutely awful example to try to make her point there, but in reality she's not wrong on this issue despite her math failure. Or, you could give her the benefit of the doubt and maybe she figured her readers already knew all that stuff I just said above and it would go without saying? I know I give people a lot more credit for thinking than I usually should, so that possibility wouldn't be out of the question.

And once again, regardless of your personal opinions about this woman, it's still a good thing that she's writing the article. This is an issue that never gets talked about from either side.

I don't care who the fuck started the problem.

Somebody fix the fucking problem already.

The more people talking about it the better.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, May 12, 2025 11:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

And once again, regardless of your personal opinions about this woman, it's still a good thing that she's writing the article. This is an issue that never gets talked about from either side.

I don't care who the fuck started the problem.

Somebody fix the fucking problem already.

The more people talking about it the better.

Nobody will fix this problem for the workers. They either fix it themselves, or else it won't be fixed. This is not news. It started after the Civil War, when freed slaves were underpaid. Ending slavery required violence. Ending low pay will also be violent. It is the American way.

More recently, there was a book in 2001 about it called Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. Quoting from it, there are many low-paid life stories. From the author's life:

Quote:
The last time anyone had urged me to forsake my normal life for a run-of-the-mill low-paid job had been in the seventies, when dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sixties radicals started going into the factories to "proletarianize" themselves and organize the working class in the process. Not this girl. I felt sorry for the parents who had paid college tuition for these blue-collar wannabes and sorry, too, for the people they intended to uplift. In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away; it was close enough, in any case, to make me treasure the gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life. My sister has been through one low-paid job after another - phone company business rep, factory worker, receptionist - constantly struggling against what she calls "the hopelessness of being a wage slave." My husband and companion of seventeen years was a $4.50-an-hour warehouse worker when I fell in with him, escaping eventually and with huge relief to become an organizer for the Teamsters. My father had been a copper miner; uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines or for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.

Download the book for free from https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Barbara+Ehrenreich+Nickel

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 13, 2025 12:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Always so violent.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Tuesday, May 13, 2025 6:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Always so violent.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, my mentioning of the end of slavery being violent didn't get you to think. The anti-slavery faction were not the ones who ended slavery. It was the foolish slave-owners who ended it by their greedy grab for total control of the United States, which would have meant slavery in all states. That was the violent shove that made the anti-slavery faction fight back rather than politely accept things as they are, slavery in some places but not everywhere. The anti-slavery people were waiting for the slaves to free themselves, but then the slave-owners got too self-important and decided that the anti-slavery people would also become slaves who must make the dreams/desires of slave-owners become universal. That was too much for the anti-slavery people to tolerate. The anti-slavery people finally got mad enough to kill the slave-owners.

The book Nickel and Dimed ended with the prediction that the wage-slaves will do all the work of ending slavery because the anti-wage-slavery people won't be of much help:

Quote:
Someday, of course - and I will make no predictions as to exactly when - they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.

Did I mention that slavery ended peaceful everywhere, but with a few exceptions? The USA and Haiti are two exceptions and both still have serious problems leftover from the violent transitions in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025 7:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't care who the fuck started the problem.

Somebody fix the fucking problem already.

The more people talking about it the better.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Here is another problem that won't get fixed peacefully. It will require violence and massive force:

“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents,” the report states. “Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier.”

What is the reason the problem won't get fixed? Money: "Americans pay ca. twice as much as other industrialized nations . . ." The healthcare system is charging prices that are two times too high but the system likes that, which is why it won't be changed peacefully. For the same reason, employees are being unpaid. The system likes that, which is why it won't be changed peacefully.

US for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last
https://angrybearblog.com/2024/09/us-for-profit-healthcare-system-stil
l-ranks-dead-last

A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System
Comparing Performance in 10 Nations
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mi
rror-mirror-2024

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 14, 2025 5:23 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I don't care who the fuck started the problem.

Somebody fix the fucking problem already.

The more people talking about it the better.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix wrote at http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=20&tid=66756&mid=12185
82#1218582

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Actors better get used to that.

The budgets are going to come way, way down.

I just hope they can still afford to live in California, let alone pay for their own lunches, like the rest of Americans not working cushy government jobs have to do.

Boo hoo Alan

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Problems that require money to solve aren't solved because the solution offends people like 6ix.

Either those Americans who could effortlessly solve a problem will prefer to greedily keep the money all for themselves or else they hate the people who have the problem, which means they surely don't want to pay, even if the solution's cost was very affordable.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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