Return of the supermarket checker

We're glad to see that self-serve lanes in supermarkets are starting to disappear. Many customers apparently  prefer to deal with actual skilled people rather than machines.

And as @RL_Miller tweeted:

Grocery store jobs one of the few routes to middle class not requiring education beyond H.S. Heavily unionized. #coincidence

The Associated Press reports that supermarkets are getting rid of their do-it-yourself machines to improve customer service. 

Supermarket chains started introducing self-serve lanes about 10 years ago, touting them as an easy way for shoppers to scan their own items' bar codes, pay, bag their bounty and head out on their way. Retailers also anticipated a labor savings, potentially reducing the number of cashier shifts as they encouraged shoppers to do it themselves.

The reality, though, was mixed. Some shoppers loved them and were quick converts, while other reactions ranged from disinterest to outright hatred , much of it shared on blogs or in Facebook groups.

An internal study by Big Y found delays in its self-service lines caused by customer confusion over coupons, payments and other problems; intentional and accidental theft, including misidentifying produce and baked goods as less-expensive varieties; and other problems that helped guide its decision to bag the self-serve lanes.

Atrios comments,

It didn't seem to me that the additional capital costs would really be offset by labor cost reductions. They still require at least one hovering employee to deal with problems and card people for alcohol purchases. In addition, people aren't very fast at using the machines so you need a higher number of machines/user to speed people through the line. We may not see "supermarket cashier" as a super high skilled position, but the fact remains that doing it well, as with most things, does in fact require skill. A good cashier is fast and accurate, checking people out more quickly and more efficiently. So I'm not totally surprised that they're pulling back a bit, though I'm sure the next scheme promising a reduction in personnel will be embraced as soon as it comes along...

Join tweet chat on family leave tonight

Only 11 percent of workers in this country have access to paid family leave through their employers. The United States is the only developed country that does not ensure working parents can take job-protected, paid time away from work to be with a new child.

Working parents are speaking out tonight on how to build a family-friendly nation through paid family leave programs for new parents. The discussion should be of interest to anyone who supports worker rights.

The tweet chat at 9:30 p.m. ET is hosted by Working Mother and the National Partnership for Women and Families. They want to hear your stories about maternity and paternity issues, as well as ideas to push senators and representatives to make families a priority and enact paid parental leave standards.

Where and When: Tuesday, Sept. 27, 9:30-10:30 p.m.

#WMPaidLeave Tweet Chat via Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/@_workingmother_

Hosts: Follow @_workingmother_ and @NPWF #WMPaidLeave

There is also a petition to call on Congress to enact paid family leave. Sign it here.

Shop steward fired on trumped-up charges, gets job back

Rally Girl brings us this guest post:

Kathy Bowers, a member of Teamster Local 238 in Iowa City, Iowa, is back on the road after a long 15 months. The driver for Durham School Services, a school bus company, finally opened the doors to her bus earlier this week after being let go by the company more than a year ago.

Durham might argue the incident started in May of last year, but Bowers says otherwise. She believes the company, which is staunchly anti-union, targeted her when she became a shop steward. Bowers said,

They were looking for any and every reason to get rid of me. At one time, they were going to write me up for horse play because of the way I said good morning to a co-worker. I gave him a slight punch in the arm and the company said that behavior was ‘unbecoming to my position as a steward.’

So when Bowers backed her bus into a parking space, catching the mirror on another bus last spring, Durham jumped at the chance to fire Bowers for what it claimed was an accident. Bowers argued her case, but the company refused to listen.

That’s when Local 238 took the dispute to arbitration. Said Kimbra Wilson, business agent for the local:

This was something we knew we were going to fight. This really wasn’t an accident—there was no damage to the bus and no cost to the company. Instead of breaking off, the mirrors are designed to pop out and that’s exactly what the mirror did. The mirror was simply popped back into its bracket, but Kathy was fired.

The arbitration went to court. Durham stalled, prolonging the process, but Bowers never gave up hope. Finally, a decision in Bower’s favor was handed down in August. Bowers said,

I was ecstatic. I can honestly say that Durham was trying to bust the union. It was nice to see the union come through and show Durham that we aren’t going anywhere.

The arbitrator awarded Bowers back pay and demanded that she be returned to work immediately. Though Durham made Bowers fill out a new application, take tests and get a new DOT physical, she is now back where she belongs: behind the wheel. Again, here's Bowers:

I just love the kids. I really like talking to the kids that ride my bus and learning their interests. For me, bus driving is freedom—it’s not sitting behind a desk all day.

Today's Teamster News 09.27.11

Michael Moore helps to "Occupy Wall Street  CBS News   ...Protesters camping out in a lower Manhattan plaza to speak out against corporate greed and social inequality got a morale boost Monday from filmmaker activist Michael Moore, who told the crowd they were the start of something big...
Congress dodges shutdown after disaster aid fight  Associated Press   ...A bitterly divided and poll-battered Congress has nearly worked its way out of a nasty fight over disaster aid, but only by abruptly abandoning efforts to immediately refill almost empty federal disaster relief accounts...
Probe rattles Wisconsin politics  Politico   ...A criminal investigation has shaken Wisconsin political circles and touched off speculation that Gov. Scott Walker may be in its sights, according to numerous reports...
5 bidders in running to help Ohio unload turnpike  WFMJ.com   ...Republican Gov. John Kasich has said he wants to hire private consultants to help Ohio determine how to get the most benefit from the 241-mile toll road in northern Ohio...
Editorial: Unions, Michigan have no time for a right-to-work brawl  Detroit Free Press   ...Contract talks between the UAW and Detroit's Big Three appear to be wending their way fitfully toward a resolution....So it's an odd moment for anyone to claim that organized labor is the chief obstacle to Michigan's economic recovery, and a dangerous time to risk a Wisconsin-style showdown...
Fired prisons chief Ed Buss still talks; Gov. Rick Scott not happy  Tampabay.com   ...he was around long enough to make a series of skeptical statements about a privatization venture that was hatched by the Legislature, discussed only fleetingly in public and imposed on his former agency without ever seeking his expert opinion...

MO protests Chris Christie prez campaign visit

New Jersey's Gov. Gone Wild, Chris Christie, is touring three states in anticipation of a possible run for president. Or at least that's what the mainstream media is reporting. According to Bloomberg News,

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is urging Republican presidential candidates to take a harder line on spending and debt, began a national round of speeches and fundraising today as party donors urge him to reconsider a White House run in 2012.

Christie, 49, has been getting calls from party leaders and executives since Texas Governor Rick Perry stumbled in a nationally televised debate on Sept. 22...

The Fired Up! Missouri blog posted this photo of the reception Christie got today in Missouri:

Along with the comment,

It looks like some people in Missouri have also been paying attention to his actions in New Jersey.

Another Gov. Gone Wild, Indiana's Mitch Daniels, is also being touted as a possible presidential contender. Pundits are noticing that Christie and Daniels share similarities: attacking unions, slashing funding for essential state services and "reforming" education. Here's an alarming tidbit about Daniels' education "reform" in Indiana:

Daniels has already dramatically introduced enough competition in education that some public schools are now advertising on billboards.

Actually, Daniels and Christie share similarities with ALL governors and state lawmakers affiliated with ALEC, the legislative roach motel Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. In a letter to the editor of the Syracuse Post-Standard, reader George Wojtowycz on Friday warned "Beware corporate goals of group called ALEC."

Basically, it is a group of corporate executives and state legislators who are in each other’s pockets, and draft “model legislation,” whose only purpose is to help the corporate bottom line. These prototypes of legislation serve as the bases of many state bills that are entered into state legislatures for enactment into law as if they were independently conceived ideas.

People all over the country are paying attention to corporate-funded governance, it seems.

Suburban poor now outnumber urban poor

More bad news from the U.S. Census Bureau last week: Poverty rose in 88 of 100 metropolitan areas. Hardest hit were cities that lost manufacturing and those that experienced a housing boom-then-bust. Alan Berube at Brookings writes,

Over the first two years of the downturn, Sun Belt metro areas on the front lines of the housing market collapse—in Florida, the Intermountain West, and inland California—registered the largest increases in poverty rates. They were joined by a handful of metro areas in the nation’s manufacturing belt like Indianapolis and Cleveland. Several of these places continued to experience rising poverty from 2009 to 2010, but the most affected places included a broader set of metro areas in the Southeast like Columbia, Birmingham, and Nashville; in other parts of the West like Salt Lake City and Colorado Springs; and in previously better-off regions like Austin and Omaha.

The Atlantic notes the rapid rise of poverty in the suburbs during the aughts:

The 2010 data confirm that poor populations continued their decade-long shift toward suburban areas. From 2000 to 2010, the number of poor people in major-metro suburbs grew 53 percent (5.3 million people), compared to 23 percent in cities (2.4 million people). By 2010, suburbs were home to one-third of the nation’s poor population—outranking cities (27.5 percent), small metro areas (20.5 percent), and non-metropolitan communities (18.7 percent).

Another Brookings scholar, Scott Allard, writes that the suburbs are less able to take care of poor populations than cities:

In the wake of the Great Recession, demand is up significantly for the typical suburban provider, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of suburban nonprofits are seeing more clients with no previous connection to safety net programs. Needs have changed as well, with nearly 80 percent of suburban nonprofits surveyed seeing families with food needs more often than one year prior, and nearly 60 percent reporting more frequent requests for help with mortgage or rent payments.

Almost half of suburban nonprofits surveyed (47 percent) reported a loss in a key rev­enue source last year, with more funding cuts anticipated in the year to come. Due in large part to this bleak fiscal situation, more than one in five suburban nonprofits has reduced services available since the start of the recession and one in seven has actively cut caseloads. Nearly 30 percent of nonprofits have laid off full-time and part-time staff as a result of lost program grants or to reduce operating costs.

This is the legacy of bankers' greed and job-killing trade deals.

Rick Scott tells teleprompted teleprompter joke

We're just going to cross-post this from Wonkette.

Remember how every Republican and self-serious political journalist in America afew years ago had a mysterious collective aneurysm over their “discovery” that fraud wizard Barack Obama reads off a teleprompter to deliver speeches, just like every other politician has done since the invention of teleprompters? Ha ha, a literate Negro, that is a great joke to Republicans! Florida slob king Rick Scott still gets a chuckle when he thinks about it. Black people! Reading! That is a white guy’s job. Rick Scott will prove this important point by mocking Obama for reading off a teleprompter by, yes, reading his joke off a teleprompter. ZING!
TPM has the excerpt from Rick Scott’s speech to the Florida GOP P5 straw poll with a note that the transcript on the teleprompter apparently has the text of the joke underlined so Scott wouldn’t forget to emphasize the joke:
Good afternoon, and welcome to Presidency 5!

I have to admit, i was a little nervous When I looked out here.

i saw all the TV cameras and a teleprompter. I figured President Obama must be here – giving another speech about raising taxes!

Seriously, though, it’s great to see you all today.

HAR HAR we laughed so hard on that one. Rick Scott should go on a comedy tour. [TPM]