Let’s Do Lunch

In-House Audit Says Wal-Mart Violated Labor Laws blares the New York Times. Gimme a break, who doesn’t work more hours than they’re supposed to these days? Typical of the Times to get the news and miss the real story.

The story is not about Wal-Mart. Of course, they are selling products almost entirely made offshore and driving U.S. companies out of business…or into offshoring…like lemmings running to the sea.

But that’s not the point. Nor is it a great big deal that unpaid overtime is a fact of life at one of America’s largest employers with 1.2 million workers in 3500 stores. According to the audit of a single week’s work by 25,000 of said employees, 15,000 missed at least one lunch and more than 2 breaks in a 40-hour week.

Now I don’t know how long a lunch or a break is, but let’s say together it’s 90 minutes. That’s about 22,500 hours total in a week. Divided by 40 and you get 562.5 work weeks. In other words another 560 workers. That’s over 2 percent more people employed, if things weren’t so “jobless.” The survey also showed high-spirited entrepreneurialism among American youth; over 1300 minors broke the rules by working during school hours, too late at night or too many hours.

The point is that this audit puts the lie to all that talk about productivity gain, doesn’t it? Because that gain is based on the voluntary record keeping of companies, dutifully turned into the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There the numbers are crunched and munched…but no manner of manipulation can make truth from bad data. And just like Wal-Mart, I am certain that virtually no company keeps an honest count of the hours worked for the wages paid. (None of the ones I worked at ever did.)

Why would they? The fat-cat’s bonuses are all based on increased efficiency…translated to the bottom line, so it behooves all the suits involved to keep this dirty little secret at the heart of the jobless recovery down low, out of sight, covered up.

But this is precisely why the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers no longer reflect anyone’s actual reality. This jobless recovery, where companies are making more goods for less and reaping greater profit (and this is just the domestic situation, not the offshoring matter), is jobless precisely because those who are working are working longer and not just harder…or more efficiently. They just aren’t getting paid for it.

Wal-Mart says it’s just that people just forget to punch in or out. Sure, that must be it in a place where you get docked if you “forget” to punch in or out three times a week. I worked in a joint with a punch clock once. Trust me, you forget no more than once a year or you get in trouble for it.

The bottom line is that this court-sealed internal audit of Wal-Mart is a nice piece of hard evidence that the BLS ways of measuring productivity are plain wrong. Out of date. Poppycock.

That isn’t a crime. But when you look around and notice how many friends and former colleagues are out of work or severely underemployed “consultants” or working really long hours now just to keep their jobs, now you can see why. Those new jobs that were supposed to be generated by our so-called recovery? They are the “second jobs,” the unpaid overtime, of working Americans everywhere. ¶ 11:40 AM