Opinion: Recent strikes show the crisis in Americans’ working lives

Chances are slim that the dual strikes at Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses around the country disrupted your holiday season. By most accounts, packages arrived on schedule, while consumers jonesing for Iced Brown Sugar Oat Milk Shaken Espressos almost certainly managed to find sugar and succor elsewhere. Still, the issues at the heart of the strikes offer a way into understanding how fundamentally broken the terms of work are in the United States.

Whether you log shifts behind a counter, work a classroom or factory floor or sit at a desk, the current battles over opportunity have not only ensnared more Americans than ever, but have undercut the social mobility that was once essential to America’s concept of itself.

In 2023, an economic opportunity poll by Gallup found that 39% of Americans believed that they were failing to get ahead despite working hard. That figure in 2002: 23%. The failure of hard work to pay off in America makes our communities wobbly, our faith weak, our lives lonely, our politics toxic and our relationship with work masochistic and unsustainable.

In lobbying for a higher quality of life, for example, one of the top grievances raised by striking Starbucks workers was unpredictable scheduling, a popular practice in which employers don’t set worker schedules more than a few days (or even hours) in advance. “Employees in lower-wage industries are increasingly at the mercy of scheduling algorithms designed to maximize efficiency and minimize labor costs,” Rebecca Plevin noted last year. “When staffing doesn’t match expected customer demand, workers might be called in at the last minute or sent home early.” Anyone with email on their phone knows how work can bleed into off-hours, but for those working second or third jobs, enrolled in training, college or certification courses, providing steady childcare or simply hoping to spend time with family or friends, a lack of predictable hours makes the basic patterns of life erratic.

Problems like these tend to compound quickly. Although some cities, like Los Angeles, have passed predictive scheduling ordinances, that hasn’t solved the problem of workers not knowing how much income they’ll bring in each month. Known as income volatility, the phenomenon of fluctuating paychecks and family incomes has become at least twice as common since 1970 and now affects roughly a third of U.S. households.

Set off in part by the rise of gig work, “perma-lancing” and jobs without a set number of hours, the unreliable nature of wages has all kinds of consequences beyond sending families scrambling to adjust when the bottom of their budget falls out. “I have to beg my manager to ensure I’m scheduled for at least 20 hours of work a week,” Arloa Fluhr, a Starbucks barista in Illinois, wrote of her decision to strike last month. “If I don’t meet those 20 hours every week, I could lose my benefits and the health insurance I rely on to care for my three children, including my 10-year-old daughter, who has type 1 diabetes.”

Beyond the financial stress, unstable wages can make it impossible to save money, make long-term plans and get access to credit. A family with unpredictable earnings might qualify for public assistance one month and then breach the income threshold and be disqualified another. “Families close to the eligibility threshold for food stamps who had more volatile incomes were less likely to utilize this benefit in the years that they qualified for it,” a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found, adding that nearly 1 in 5 eligible families don’t sign up for food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).

And while many of the quality-of-life issues may sound academic or abstract, they manifest in fundamental problems of the everyday and in a degradation of experience for everyone, everywhere. Complaints of chronic employee overwork and understaffing aren’t limited to fulfillment centers, chain coffee shops or fast-food restaurants, but also are pervasive at hospitals, schools and air traffic control facilities. For obvious reasons, a staff retention problem at the Secret Service captured headlines last year. One recent workforce survey found that roughly half of all U.S. workers said their workplaces are understaffed, with 43% of workers considering leaving their jobs.

Ultimately, the shortcomings of our work standards hurt everyone, including executives focused on the bottom line. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup put a conservative price tag of a staggering $1 trillion on the replacement cost of employees who voluntarily leave their jobs in the United States each year. Including factors such as low morale and lost worker knowledge, lower productivity and recruitment and training expenses, it estimated that the “cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary.”

The context for the Amazon warehouse strikes highlights the absurdity of this dynamic. According to internal company documents made public in 2022, Amazon suffers from a 150% worker-attrition rate annually, roughly double the industry average. In simpler terms, only one out of every three workers hired by Amazon in 2021 managed to stay with the company for more than three months. This level of workforce bleed cost the e-commerce giant a mind-boggling $8 billion in profits. In addition to showing that twice as many workers were leaving voluntarily as would be expected, the documents also highlighted worries that the company might run out of potential hires in certain markets because it had cycled through so much of the workforce.

This brings us back to the strikes. Depending on where you live, the appearance of worker-led protests and work stoppages may seem like constant fixtures of the landscape. They’re not. Despite union visibility and record-high popularity in the U.S., membership in unions currently hovers at an all-time low. With more meaningful protections against wage theft or basic benefits like paid sick leave, guaranteed time off and affordable healthcare elusive, businesses largely maintain the power to dictate the terms of work culture in the United States. And as we’re all seeing, they’re doing a terrible job.

Adam Chandler is the author of “Drive-Thru Dreams” and the forthcoming “99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life,” from which this article is adapted.