Supermarkets employing more people but not giving out hours.

[Lilmaubetden]

My son got a job working at a small supermarket. It’s a big chain, but of smaller stores.

During the interview he was promised 24 hours! But when he got the contract, he was given 8 hours a week. But they assured him that there would be more.

There hasn’t been more. In fact, there’s been less. They change his hours the night before without telling him, e.g. on the Monday afternoon he left work after doing 4 hours and was next due in on Thursday for his next 4 hours…but sometime that evening they swapped his shift to the following morning 6-10am. They did not tell him.

They rang him the next morning to ask where he was and then told him that he’d be put down as unauthorised absence for his second shift. Luckily he had screen shot his rota, so they put him down as authorised instead.

They won’t give him any additional hours. They say they haven’t got them. Yet they keep employing more people? Why?

AIBU thinking that this is a disgusting way to treat your staff. DS is 19 and desperately trying to save for uni.

They don't want to give more hours, they prefer having more people on fewer hours. They had to give everyone a pay rise recently and they want to claw that money back by cutting labour hours every month. I work for a big supermarket and I know for a fact this is true.
However, at my store they don't change staff hours or cut them, you have your hours and that's that. They get around it by offering no overtime and not employing new people unless they can help it. There used to be lots of overtime, but not since the minimum wage increased.

Thank you everyone. It’s been enlightening.

I wonder how people in this sort of job manage to survive? … and it’s opened my eyes as to why some people never get off benefits or bother to get a job. Why would you? It’s quite shocking.

Exactly and there is the my post from yesterday about not being able to save for a pension. You just cant. With all the threats about there not being a state pension later on what are they expected to do. We already have retired pensioners who are homeless or facing homelessness on the streets cos they cant afford to pay their rent and could never buy their own home or save for a private pension because they were in these types of jobs!

We survive because we are not the ones paying the bills. Most are either working around children or are young and still live with parents etc. Just to clarify. We are not all dirt poor, though I'm sure some must be. I have a mortgage and a car etc.

Fair point.

a lot of retail companies like to have plenty of staff on minimal hours but who are available any day/ time and at a moments notice to cover holidays/ sickness and other absences. I had to give up my 12 hrs a week retail job as the management disciplined me for not being available on a certain day because I was working my other job that has set days and times and was 20 hrs a week. I worked fixed days and times for them also, but they wanted me to cover someone on sick leave on a saturday which was not my normal working day for them- I offered to cover other shifts including sunday instead but they expected me to not go in to my other job and be available that saturday.
They then changed my permanent days and times that I had worked for five years to clash with my other job, essentially forcing me into quitting working for them.

Many many times i have tried to explain this on the benefits/tax credits threads where the benefit bashers keep wanging on about how you should get several part time jobs if you cant get a full time one. Many times i tried to explain that there would come a time when the jobs would clash Always fell on deaf ears.

And as for disciplining you for not keeping yourself available?? An employer who does this is behaving like a fucking pimp. There i said it!

Agree, all the part time jobs I have had expected some level of covering other members of staff. It always seems to be expected that you will pick up the slack. Also supermarkets and the like are not so desperate for staff that they will just hire anyone. If someone has been long term unemployed or doesn't have any relevant experience then they are very unlikely to get an interview in my experience. The attitude that retail jobs are the bottom of the barrel is almost as infuriating as the attitude towards benefits claimants

I cant get over the fact that @dancinfeet was disciplined for not being on call and yet not paid to be, They really do want it both ways

Where I work there can be similar issues with hours. I have my contract hours and used to be able to pick up extra, as did my colleagues- there were loads up for grabs! But as time has gone on, our responsibilities have increased exponentially, our morale has decreased, people go off sick for weeks at a time or longer, no one covers these shifts and there are apparently bans by regional management to give out any extra hours, at all for weeks on end. In fact in the run up to Christmas, when we were at our busiest, an instruction came down to store managers to request colleagues took time off unpaid. During a cost of living crisis. In the weeks before Christmas. Some people did, many didn’t know they had a choice apparently.

As for them messing up your son’s work hours, sounds like messy management- someone has swapped him/taken him off and not bothered to tell the duty manager for that shift. Who was then probably tamping about it. Glad he’d got that screenshot.

I once got a job in the warehouse of a well-known high street toy shop, which was advertised as fixed shifts, including 6am-2pm, which fitted around my partner's job, meaning that we'd always have one of us to do school drop-off and school pick-up. On day 1 of the induction, the manager told the group that if we weren't able to commit to total flexibility, meaning changing shift hours with less than 24 hours notice, we should leave the building right then. So I'd have been switched to 2pm until 10pm or 10pm until 6am.

I left.

No other choice, because we absolutely couldn't have committed to arranging after-school childcare for one or two days at a time with less than a day's notice. The worst thing was that I'd already cancelled another interview for a different job, because it was on the same day as the induction. I felt they'd completely wasted my time. If I'd been told at interview, I would have said not to progress my application further.

I work in a supermarket and while it's not that bad it's not particularly good either. When I first started a long time ago they wanted full availability which is a ridiculous concept. Now they bleat on about work/life balance but don't put their money where their mouth is.
We have a thing where we ask customers for feedback 🤢 and our boss was reading some out today and every single one was complaining that staff members are always doing other tasks and have to actively be sought out to serve which is true but it seems profit comes even before customers these days.
I am retiring soon and can't wait. They want more and more from less staff and it's taking a toll. We also have deliveroo and Uber and we're told to prioritise them over physical customers but I don't because how rude is it to ignore someone actually stood there to go and get an online delivery? If I was a customer and was practically ignored I would take my money and shop elsewhere. Sorry it's been a long week.

My friend found the same thing. PT job, asked at interview if it could be ft and told almost certainly. Left after 6 months as almost never had the contracted hours offered. Bonkers.

Exactly this.
All extra hours in our large Tesco that topped up the minimal contracts, have been "paused" since the start of May to drive down labour costs.
If it carries on much longer, I'll have to claim UC whilst looking for an extra job. Unfortunately, I'm already contracted to work weekends in Tesco, so it won't be easy getting a shift or two in the service industry, as they mostly require weekends.

The government needs to create policies whereby the minimum employment contracts are equal to living wage in hours. Anyone wanting to work less can then opt out.

Didn't want to reading run but even Tesco now have a minimum of 16 hour a week contracts for new starters, especially for home shoppers now. How frustrating for you both. Can he be multiskilled to another department or even another store as overtime if possible?

@Lilmaubetden

Does this store begin with M ?

I don't understand why they employ Students and Six formers and then mess them about . These youngsters have course work to do and revision . Why don't they employ people who are fully flexible and have no commitments ?

These stores don't care about their staff as they can get rid of them and get someone else in , likewise management , usually fresh from Uni who often work way above their hours for no extra pay . They end up burning out through stress , quit and then the whole process starts again .

My DS works nights. He has the same issue with rotas chopping and changing and only gets them a few weeks in advance so it is hard to plan.

But nights are set hours, usually 9 or 10 hours. Is that something he might consider swapping over to?

The pay is a bit more as well.

I think they are giving 4 hours at a time so they don’t have to pay for any breaks. I think
this is bad

This shit needs to be tackled before they start fucking around with benefits. If an employer wants someone to be on call fucking pay them to be

It's utterly disgusting isn't it how they treat people/workers these days? 30+ years ago people would have gone out on strike for this shit. No WAY would it have been tolerated. This is why several people I know stay in jobs they're not keen on (customer service.) The 23 year old completely inexperienced manager is shit, and some customers are arseholes, but they won't leave, because they have been there since before 2010, and they have an employment contract with 24 to 32 hours a week guaranteed. At their age (50+) they will struggle to find anything with a similar contract.

The people who have come since the early to mid 2010s have got 4 to 8 hour contracts. They do sometimes get 18 to 24 hours, and they occasionally get 30-34 hours, but they do have some weeks with just 4-8 hours, and the employer doesn't have to give them any more than their contracted hours. It messes up their finances so badly that after a while they just start refusing the hours and go and sign on to full time benefits.

So they were willing to work 24 hours a week or more, but their employer wouldn't guarantee their hours. OR when their shifts should be. As someone said earlier, it's hard to plan your life when you don't know when you're going to be working!!! Two people I know are fortunate that they have a reasonable amount of hours, and fixed shifts, (happened many years ago, early 2010s and is in their contract so any new manager can't alter it.)

As I said, pre early 1990s, this would never have happened. There would have been strikes. I remember a factory my brother worked in (in the 1980s,) trying to drop the days from 5 to 4 a week, and the union threw it out and said there would be strikes if they took the food out of their workers mouths. Some places don't even have a union now. And as some people have said, some places pull this shit now to avoid playing national insurance, and sick pay, and so people have less holidays, and less rights. Fucking disgusting.

So they were willing to work 24 hours a week or more, but their employer wouldn't guarantee their hours. OR when their shifts should be. As someone said earlier, it's hard to plan your life when you don't know when you're going to be working!!! Two people I know are fortunate that they have a reasonable amount of hours, and fixed shifts, (happened many years ago, early 2010s and is in their contract so any new manager can't alter it

Its impossible to plan things like doctors appointments around this too Coupled with the fact its a struggle to get a GP appointment to start with its not hard to see how more people are getting sick

I work in a supermarket and yes all of them treat the youngest ones like crap because they know they need and want the hours. It’s awful. Turnover is insane as is the amount of exhausted looking 18yos that suddenly get called in for long shifts being told they can go home when everything is done (which is sometimes two hours after they were logged to finish). If they complain- tiny hours. Hope it gets easier for your ds and he gets some money banked x

Exactly this. It will, at least in part, be a direct result of the last budget. The Government reduced the employers NI threshold from £9,100 to £5,000, so many employers who use a pool of low hours workers workers to give flexibility (flexibility that many employees like too) will now be actively chosing to employ more people on fewer hours if they can to reduce cost to keep as many people below £5,000 as they can.

Miceland