Hi, I was wondering if anyone else out there has the same thing happening at their store. Here, they're hiring a lot of new people in the front end (cashiers, but mostly lots of baggers). They do this and then spread all the hours out so everyone, including those with lots of seniority, are getting no hours at all. Someone told me that kroger is trying to prevent more people from accumulating the average (here its 20) hours in order to be eligible for insurance. I don't think its fair to hire lots of new people and have to cut everyones hours because of it. I see baggers that have about 6months - a year seniority (that are 18 years+ old) with open availability on every day and they still only get 12-15 hours
-- Edited by SCO on Friday 23rd of July 2010 12:15:06 AM
This is all I can say here in this issue. I am in local 540 and the meat department. We have nothing in our contract that states any employee has to have a minimum # of hours each week. I have known of a few times where they have brought in a lot of new people , for a new store, and then had to turn around and cut some of them to zero hours because they have not come close to the sales they expected. Now this is what I was always told a little over 10 years ago. Seems the Dallas area Local 1000 and local 540 had plenty of employees but almost all full time. The meat department was about 95% full time . I was always told that a company works better on a 40 % full time to 60 % part time staff because it gave a company flexibility to cover all shifts and meet the needs of customers and job requirements. They started , back then, to start to hire more part timers and try to cut out some full time spots so that they could be flexible on scheduling without over time. More hours and less over time. Problem comes in when they continuously hire more and more part timers and then find sales are not there and they got to cut back on help. Gotten worse with the key retailing where ELMS tells them how many hours and where to schedule them. Runs into a situation where some managers find to many part timers and not enough hours to give them. That is what I was always told over the years.
Well right now baggers have new job responsibilities besides front end . They now are suppose to condition, close meat depart, assemble patio furniture, and other jobs
Hours from each depart are taken to be given to these new hybrid baggers called utility clerks
CloseMeat department? What do they do to close? Under our contract ( local 540 in Dallas) you can not work the market unless you are in the market. Contract will not let others cross the local and work market unless you are the market and market only. No exceptions. Put a bagger over there to close the market for several houirs and the Company is just going to turn around and pay those hours back to the market people in overtime.
bug wrote:
Well right now baggers have new job responsibilities besides front end . They now are suppose to condition, close meat depart, assemble patio furniture, and other jobs
Hours from each depart are taken to be given to these new hybrid baggers called utility clerks
They are not working in the department basically they are cleaning with the meat being handled by the department and the cleaning handled by the utility clerks. And as they do not handle any product it does not violate any contract.
See now in the Dallas area that is a violation. Cleaning in the unly thing not mentioned in our contract and they tried that a few times ( having utility clerks clean the markets) but grievances was filed and won. Had a store that did that a year back and ended up having to pay back almost 200 hours of overtime to the market people that was there. Have 4 people split 200 hours of over time and the company stored that quickly.
Well in our area I'm in Northeast Ga it is not. I'm not happy about it either. They take hours from our department for these high school kids to condition and they are horrible and we have to fix it taking more time and in middle of them "working" if they are called up front they never finish they have no accountability and the front end is getting 130hrs from other departments they don't use for what it's for.
Well you can blame the head houncho running Kroger for that. Its a noted fact he dislikes the union.
Can not dispute that. Been on some contract teams and you can see that when they start getting down to economical issues. You can here them cry poverty. But Do not think they really want to get rid of the unions as much as wanting to control them. Houston HR people ( a few years ago) was hoping we could unionize wal-mat and level the playing feild.
