March 28, 2024
Editorial

WORK THIS WAY … OR ELSE

When unemployment creeps up and finding another job is made more difficult by the high cost of gas, the balance of power in the worker-employer relationship tips toward the employer. Don’t like the dozen new tasks heaped onto your workday? There’s the door, the boss may say. Workers conclude, rightly, that they are fortunate to have a job and are happy to work harder if it means remaining employed. That doesn’t mean that they should tolerate unlawful situations, however.

This supply and demand dynamic is at the heart of the nation’s market-based economy. And the balance often tips toward the employee when there is a labor shortage, as was seen in the 1990s when signing bonuses and profit-sharing were offered to some workers.

The equalizer in this seemingly fickle relationship is the body of labor laws, both state and federal. The laws, many of which date to the early 20th century, mostly are based in health and safety concerns. Required bathroom and meal breaks are extensions of those concerns. The employer gains by adhering to these laws, because a worker who gets a break is more productive upon returning to duty. Whether the economy is robust or anemic, there should be little tolerance for employers who thumb their noses at labor laws.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. learned this lesson the hard way late last month, when a judge ruled the world’s largest retailer broke Minnesota labor laws more than 2 million times over six years. Employees in stores in Minnesota were routinely forced to work through lunch and rest breaks without being paid, a judge ruled. And the violations were willful, District Judge Robert King said, according to a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

One of the four named plaintiffs in the class action suit, Nancy Braun, said the store failed to assign a replacement for her as the cook and waitress at the store’s grill counter. According to the newspaper, “In several instances no one came [to replace her] in time for her to go to the bathroom. ‘I would end up soiling myself,’ said Braun … ‘Sometimes I’d have other clothes with me in my locker, or they would say to me, ‘We have clothes in the store you can buy.'”

The store failed to ensure that tens of thousands of rest and meal breaks for other workers were provided, and it failed to pay workers for some 70,000 training sessions. An internal audit that discovered this warned of “adverse consequences” and was sent to 50 senior Wal-Mart managers, the newspaper reported.

While these are especially egregious and appalling violations, and do not necessarily reflect Wal-Mart management values, they do illustrate the pressure service sector employees may face in a weak economy. It’s hard to imagine that a company’s bottom line would be affected by meeting these requirements. By investing in working conditions that provide for decency in the workplace and that respect the dignity of people, the business must gain more than it loses.


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