Large Fierce Mammal

INTRODUCTION

“Cracks in the Foundation” refers to the rickety parts of the societal fabric that have been under scrutiny by the ongoing investigative efforts of the LFM Home Office Of Pestilential and Legal Affairs (HOOPLA). What you will read today is the second and final segment of a short series dealing with the value of human time and effort as it is seen in action rather than words, and that is in turn a subset of a larger study of such cracks as we have observed them widen to the point where most can no longer be plugged even by something as magnificently huge as the ass of the elephant in the room.

Before we begin, I will put before you, Goode Reader, the following three axioms that I will posit as True:

1. In the course of a long life, the Wise Man will be prepared to abandon his luggage several times.
2. In pursuit of happiness, do not offer disrespect to anyone who will be cutting your hair or handling your food.
3. If your customers don’t complain about your prices now and then, you aren’t charging enough.

PREVIOUSLY ON “CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION“

Cracks in the Foundation — The Matter of a “Living Wage”: Part the First

PROLOGUE

“… When I was 15 years old I got a summer job with what used to be called National Sea Products just outside Lunenburg, standing for eight hours at a stretch, in a shed built on a concrete wharf protruding into Lunenburg harbour, skinning pickled herring fillets and packing them in a neat, radial pattern in large wooden barrels. The smell of marinade permeated my hands to the point where I think I can still smell it after all these years, and I had the indescribable joy of working cheek by jowl with a pair of skeletal twins whose intellectual capacity made the banjo playing kid in Deliverance look like a Nobel Prize winner but without the musical gift. I remember that they were annoying in that manner peculiar to people who combine idiocy with a complete inability to shut up, but I was on a mission to pay for flying lessons, and so I skun my herring with added passion, all the while fantasizing about two narrow, empty spaces in the production line, and a couple of herring barrels being rolled out the door that weighed a little heavier than all the rest.” ~ The Best Marinated Herring I’ve Ever Tasted

A component of our Cracks in the Foundation series, this is the second and final installment of our look into the concepts of “minimum” wage, “living” wage, and what happens when they both come to mean same thing. As a cautionary note, some of what you are about to read may be triggering to the indignation of readers either unable or unwilling to absorb statements of reality without invalidating them as ideologically motivated criticism uttered absent suggestions of improvement where shortcomings may be identified here. In point of fact, we have no suggestions for improvement; only things we will and will not tolerate, and if at any point in this discussion, Goode Reader, you find yourself at risk of believing I am taking this discussion down some ideological rabbit hole, let me pause here to assure you that here at HOOPLA we view all ideologies with equal disdain, preferring to base our analyses on the H. L. Mencken Principle —

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.”

TODAY’S BROADCAST

When last we convened, we looked at how my Father grappled with setting a value for the singular expertise he brought to his field. Setting aside the part played in his travails by a pleasantly conciliatory nature that too often marked him as a doormat, and the matter of being paid on time which is a universal Truth coming forward to us through history from the first days of prostitution, we still have the pesky Constant of determining suitably scaled compensation.

Unless you die before reaching adulthood, you’re going to have to grow up, and what that means will depend on your demographic as you transition from the unquestioned dependence of childhood, through the vehemently denied but still very real dependence of adolescence, into the state of “adulthood” which, for purposes of today’s discussion we will call “paying your own way”, also known as “independent”. For most, this will involve running face first into the sobering and (hopefully) character improving experience of having a quantitative value placed upon your efforts by persons and circumstances beyond your control.

You will find that the basic business model requires two players:

• The Provider — This may be a single person or mom and pop family operation, or it may be a large business employing hundreds of people, but the common thread, and the only one that matters, is which person, persons, or entity is setting the level of compensation that will be paid to those in the service of the enterprise to whom it falls to convey its services to the Customer — the Worker.
• The Customer — Again, this may be a single person, group, or business of any size that is the direct recipient of services obtained from the Provider. A distinction and potential point of confusion here is that the recipient may not actually be the direct source of payment for services received, as in a resident in a long-term care home whose placement and maintenance in the facility is billed to, and paid for by, a peripherally interested third party.

With this in mind then, we will further posit for purposes of today’s discussion that there are five basic structures most commonly used in the measuring out of value for service (Please note the exclusion of Unionized labour as a factor here is not an oversight but rather an intentional simplification for clarity. As you will see as we go forward, Union influences have no bearing on anything we will be talking about.):

1. Hourly, paid directly to the Worker (employee) based on a rate set by a Business (employer) multiplied by hours worked, funded from that portion of business revenue allocated to human resources (Example: most retail employment);
2. Hourly, charged by a Business directly to each Customer based on a rate set by the Business for the time expended by its Workers (employees) in the service of the Customer, a subset of which is paid directly by the Business to the employee as in 1 above (Example: big box automotive repair shop);
3. Hourly, charged directly by the Worker based on a rate set by an industry standard (Example: Worker direct to Customer as done by most independent repair businesses);
4. Flat rate for a routine and predictable service (Example: oil change and tire rotation); and
5. Hourly or flat rate at worker’s option, and charged directly to the customer based on job difficulty and a rate set at the sole discretion of the worker that can be expected to be above industry standard to a degree commensurate with worker reputation, experience, peerless ability, and unique qualifications.

No matter where you personally fit in this picture, pretty much everyone you will be dealing with shopping in any store selling anything will fit under item 1, Karen’s irate demands notwithstanding.

At the end of the day, the five structures set forth above are driven by the market in which an enterprise operates. Recruitment, training, maintenance, and retention of quality personnel (referred to these days as “Human Resources” or “HR”) has always been the largest investment in time and treasure a business may have to make, and it is natural that as technological innovation has come to permit, every effort is made to limit and, where possible, eliminate this exposure by:

• completely automating a service or function previously done by people (Example: automated teller machines (ATM) and self-checkouts);
• mechanizing a job to the point where one or two specialists can do the work of three to five times as many labourers working under a dedicated supervisor (Example: shipping and receiving, shelf stocking and inventory control, warehouse materials handling machinery); and
• replacing the skillset required to perform a task with sufficient automation to permit a Worker with entry-level skills to produce an output approximating a higher skill level absent specialized training or human supervision (Example: in-store bakeries, fast-food restaurants).

As this model took hold and evolved to become the established norm, the trend has been for businesses to place hiring emphasis on candidates with little to no experience in the opening available, preferring blank slates that can be overwritten as required. Also, making sure the majority of employees on staff are part-timers under the supervision of a small core of full-time supervisory staff limits the costs of health benefits because in most cases, part-timers are not eligible. Where once a job applicant bringing past job experience to an interview would have had a leg up, any such advantage is negated in favour of others lacking reasons to be looking for a higher starting wage.

This is the minimum wage economy that has come to define the interactions and expectations of Worker and Customer alike, molded by the marketplace to require the barest minimum of human engagement, and where unavoidable, involvement of Workers at the minimum, or at least minimal, level of aptitude and commensurate pay rate for the job being done.

“We see a symptom of this in the fact that fast food counters are staffed by a seemingly endless succession of rude, listless, resentful children who, in spite of an exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement, can’t be relied upon to perform the simplest of tasks free from constant supervision because far too many of them are employed under protest against the unfairness of the world. Another is the commonly held view that spending money year after year on losing lottery tickets represents a valid expression of investment in one’s future, and still another, that the “reality show” genre is real entertainment instead of something to be ridiculed out of existence.” ~ Art, Science, Life, and Reality – Certified Organic

Historically, the concept of a minimum wage grew out of the larger social concern of labour standards, defined by governments as a minimum framework that all (legitimate) employers must adhere to. My first personal experience with being formally employed at an hourly wage came in the summer of 1972 when at the age of 15 I went to work on the pickled herring line at the National Sea Products fish processing plant just outside Lunenburg. At the time and for many years afterward, “The Fish Plant” was the single largest employer in Lunenburg and its environs. The legally mandated minimum wage that year for a zero experience slog like me was $1.55 per hour before deductions but in keeping with the fishing industry standard for paying well, I was getting something closer to $1.75 for this entriest of entry level jobs.

For a student like me, saving for flying lessons and with aspirations for university beyond high school graduation, my availability to work was limited to after school, weekends, and summer break. The herring job being full-time as long as the fish kept coming, my name reaching the top of a waiting list diverted my path to stocking shelves and carrying out groceries at the IGA Store; one of three main grocery stores in the town, and the largest year-round employer of student labour. Here, minimum wage meant minimum wage, but the hours were more consistently sustainable through succeeding years of high school, I couldn’t still taste my job between the end of one work day and the start of the next, and my coworkers were drawn from a less tolerance testing demographic.

This was a time when entry level positions were occupied by temporary part-timers like me, and a smaller number of people who were, literally, entry level, starting their full-time employment at the lowest rung with the intention of staying long term. Their expectation was that with this would come knowledge and experience with accompanying raises in pay and job security. Up to a point at the IGA because a locally owned grocery store certainly isn’t dripping money, and its foundation of full-time employees was made up of people who came looking for community, consistency, enough money to live on, and with maybe a little to sock away. People like me came and went, always at the minimum wage, but it was never intended nor offered as a ‘living” wage to sustain full-time employees, and the model was duplicated in other businesses throughout the land, with many offering greater upward mobility for the ambitious.

But things changed.

Coming forward to more recent, antepandemic times, 2013 to be specific, Statistics Canada noted:

“In 2013 (as in 1997), youth, women and persons with a low level of education were the groups most likely to be paid at minimum wage … In 2013, 50% of employees aged 15 to 19 and 13% of those aged 20 to 24 were paid at minimum wage. Among women, the rate was 8% (compared with 6% among men); among the least-educated, specifically those with less than a high school diploma, the proportion was 20%, compared with less than 3% among university graduates.” ~ The ups and downs of minimum wage

And this became the way of things leading sporadically to cries to make minimum wage a “living” wage and thereby entrench what was initially an acknowledged basic value for service provided by entry level and minimally skilled workers as the gold standard for “… youth, women and persons with a low level of education …” whose definition of a raise is delivery on an election promise of an increase in the minimum. Cry as you might though, the minimum wage was never intended to be a level of financial contentment so much as an expression of we need someone to do this and if you’re going to do it I suppose we’ll have to pay you something. The rules say this is it so here you go, take it or leave it.

Under what one may define as “normal” operating conditions, the Worker, whether chief cook and bottlewasher or cog in the machine, must decide if he or she can live with the contents of the purse on offer, and the Customer will always have authority to decide on the shopping scale between great value for the money at one end, and priced out of the market on the other. But it doesn’t come simply and cleanly down to money alone because whether it be the Worker themselves or an entity employing any number of Workers, whoever or whatever serves the role of Provider as defined above must also set the bar for the Quality and Conduct of the people its Customers will interact with, and the Customer in turn must decide what level of incompetence, negligence, and lack of manners they are prepared to tolerate as a cost of doing business in any particular place and time. So this is a two way street, and here I will briefly yield the floor to Deputy U. S. Marshal Raylan Givens to clarify its navigation and set the stage for our wrap up:

EPILOGUE

When on 22 March 2020, the Government of Nova Scotia declared a State of Emergency as its initial reaction to the global pandemic, the state of affairs described above stopped working in any way other than simple appearance. After a brief period of general lock-down, relaxed restrictions opened the doors of retailers selling government defined “essentials” such as grocery stores and pharmacies, under limitations affecting hours of operation, maximum number of bodies in the store, measures to ensure physical spacing, requirements for personal protective equipment, and enhanced cleaning/decontamination measures. In keeping with the Great Truth that particularly holds sway in large organizations, shit rolled downhill, and so it came to pass that employees optimized by decades of economic evolution to the minimum standard to fit minimum wage by the 21st century definition had to be spooled up almost overnight to oversee Customers in outdoor lineups, maintain head counts to keep store occupancy below the new maximum, enforce mask use and physical distancing measures, constantly do hospital grade cleaning on checkout surfaces, grocery carts and baskets, door handles, and anything else that might harbour a potentially lethal contagion the nature of which changed with each daily provincial and federal government briefing.

What could possibly go wrong?