Retail workers in New York City earn a median of $9.50 an hour, most are part-time or temporary, and just 3 in 10 receive health insurance through their jobs, according to a new study of the city’s larger retailers.þþThe study, based on interviews with nonunion workers and released on Monday, largely found poverty wages and highly unstable schedules for the city’s retail employees, with less than a fifth having a set schedule each work week. The study said many workers had a hard time planning for, say, child care or classes because more than half learned their schedules a week or less before a work week would begin.þþThe study, “Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short,” was led by a City University professor and was based on face-to-face interviews with 436 nonunion employees of retail businesses, ranging from high-end establishments on Fifth Avenue to discount stores on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The researchers went to department stores, electronics stores, home centers, clothing stores, bookstores and others.þþThe report was financed by the Retail Action Project, an organization in Manhattan that is financed by unions and foundations; by City University’s Murphy Institute; and by the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. Two in five workers interviewed said the number of hours they worked each week always or often varied. One in five said they always or often had to be available for call-in shifts, with some workers saying they were assigned one or two days of work each week, but had to leave open another two or three days and call in those mornings in case their employers needed them.þþThe report said, “Guaranteed work hours are no longer the normal and just ‘getting on the schedule’ has become the reward for job performance.” Workers who rack up more sales per shift were often assigned more days.þþThe study said two in five of New York’s retail workers were full-time, slightly more than half were part-time, and the rest were temporary or holiday workers. The study found that about one in 10 part-time workers had a set schedule week to week, with many working 15 or 20 hours a week.“An extremely high number earn low wages that cannot even bring them to the federal poverty line,” said Stephanie Luce, the study’s main author and a professor of labor relations at the Murphy Institute. “The problem of low wages is exacerbated by low work hours. If large chains, with stores in the retail mecca of Manhattan, can’t create living-wage careers in this industry, we should be pretty pessimistic about the opportunities for millions of retail workers around the country.”þþThe study’s other author was Naoki Fujita, a researcher for the Retail Action Project.þþThe authors had interviewers question workers in all five boroughs in a total of 230 individual businesses, all with 100 employees or more.þþA worker told an interviewer that her manager once called her around 7 p.m. to tell her to go in at 6 the next morning. “For students and parents or people with two jobs, unstable schedules are particularly stressful,” the study said. About one in six workers said they held a second job.þþOf the roughly two-thirds of workers who do not receive health insurance from their employers, the study found, one in four have no health insurance, about one in three receive it through a relative and one in three through a government program, most often Medicaid.þþThe study found that fewer than half of those interviewed were entitled to paid sick days, and of those more than half said they never took any.þþThere was substantial evidence of wage and hour violations, the study concluded. About one in six workers said they had done work off the clock at least occasionally. More than one in three reported that they sometimes worked more than 10 hours a day, and a sizable number of them were not paid overtime when they did, as mandated by state law.þþOf all the part-time workers, the study found, about one in 10 received health benefits through their employer, and about one in four said they received paid sick days.þþAccording to the study, mean hourly pay was $10 in Manhattan, $9 in Queens, $8.50 in Brooklyn and $8 in the Bronx, with no figure available for Staten Island.þþSome workers complained that they were sometimes called in to work a shift, but would then be sent home after two hours because business was slow. The study found that just one in six of those workers said they were always paid — as state law requires — for a full four hours whenever they worked a shift of fewer than four hours.
Source: NY Times
