Sue Reich has worked for 27 years at Shopko, a Midwest retailer that does not sell clothes, shoes, household items and electronics, until one day longer existed his employer. Shopko than 14,000 people in 26 states occupied, filed for bankruptcy last year and closed all of its stores last summer after they could not find a buyer. The same thing is happening all over the country that sales apocalypse continues to detail. In 2019, retailers like Payless ShoeSource, Dress Barn and Barneys stores closed 9200; Payless just cut 16,000 jobs. Already this year, including chains of closures and layoffs Macy, Pier 1 and Fairway announced. Employment in retail trade in January fell by 8 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the new Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday morning, at the same time, jobs in transport and storage, key areas for e-commerce were 28 percent. Department stores have 241,000 people in the last five years shed, according to BLS data, and clothing stores to cut 67,000 jobs. But there is no national uproar as Reich workers lose their jobs, no movement for people to protect boost job to demand the end of branch closures or find funding to ensure that these workers for better jobs in the end. Sure there was a @SaveBarneys campaign, but is traded on nostalgia, vintage TV commercials and magazine ads, rather than focusing on the treatment of workers, and failed. The high-end retailer that bankruptcy last year was presented, was to Authentic Brands Group, which has started closing stores and liquidation in November. Compare this to have riots, the small loss of jobs in areas such as production or extraction surrounded. If the carrier, an air conditioning company that is moving 1,400 jobs in Mexico, then-candidate Donald J. Trump picked up in his stump speech on and eventually reached an agreement some of the jobs in Indiana to keep. “We heard the politicians for the loss of Talk and manufacturing and mining factories, but does not have the same level of protest for the losses of sales retail jobs were,” says Nicole Mason, president of the Institute for Women Policy Research think a tank based in Washington, DC. “I would say that one of the reasons why we are not talking about it is that it has an impact especially women.” Nearly 80 percent of the cashiers were women in 2018, according to data IWPR. As online shopping grows, and employment in the fields is growing, shrinking retail jobs for women, while men grow jobs – has found a ‘analysis IWPR that retail lost 54,300 jobs from 2016 to 2017 work ; While men have gained 106,000 at this time, it has lost 160.300 jobs for women. close in the past, when factories or jobs moving overseas, the government has stepped in to protected workers who lost their jobs. The adjustment program Federal Trade Assistance (TAA), first approved in 1962 and in 1974, expanded in 2002 and 2009 to help workers whose jobs have been displaced due to trade; It provides training subsidies and a weekly income to people who have run out of unemployment benefits. To find the workers more than 50 new jobs to low-wage than they were preparation can also money from a wage insurance program will receive their new income supplement. But these funds are not available for retail sales workers. “Why are not interested in trade, can not get that monthly salary,” says Liz Skenandore, a specialist of career services at Great Lakes Training and Development in Wisconsin that deals with a steady stream of redundant workers in the retail sector. “It would be ideal if there was a Category, Sie have been affected by the Internet ‘”. In 1980, after a series of plant closures in Rust Belt, a group of Ohio legislators to the law of depressed warning that employers i have to provide in advance of mass layoffs and plant closures and pay back wages, if they are not doing this warning. in high demand fields around the same time, under pressure from the unions, Manufacturing Extension Partnership Congress created programs that use federal, state and private dollars retraining displaced workers for production jobs. We could not get another thing, Sue Reich, when he was fired from Shopko Severance. He says he has spent decades working for the company, and was told that if they worked through the liquidation process, they would receive severance pay. But Shopko never Reich or workers as it pays about a small amount for vacation days that he had not taken. “And ‘every month is a challenge,” says Reich, who works to find another job scrambled eggs and now part-time at a credit union, even if it did not become a full-time job, as he had hoped. Her husband, a saw operator in a factory overtime so that the family can pay their bills. In contrast, the thousands of workers who have jobs at places like General Motors and Ford last year months lost Severance received, based on the amount of time they had worked for the company. Sun Capital, a private equity company which owned Shopko, did not respond to a request for comment TIME. It is no coincidence that it is government policy to protected workers in sectors such as manufacturing. These are the industries that have been unionized for a long time, and worked in the 1980s and 1990s, negotiated commercial contracts in the United States such as NAFTA, trade unions and representatives elected from districts that had factories in danger of losing, says Kate Bronfenbrenner, professor Cornell University School of Industrial and labor relations. They made sure that all trade agreements include programs to support workers that would be displaced. In order to sell trade agreements, he had the Congress to fund retraining programs and employee support Settle. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist who served in the Department of Labor under President Clinton, said that the administration is trying implemented training program of universal dislocated workers in 1990 who had helped retrain every worker displaced, but could not get broad support. But retail does not disappear because of a trade agreement, but because the way consumers buy things changed. tech like Amazon should not negotiate with Congress to sell things online; they could do it just to get started. This means that there is no election that guarantees delivered retail workers standing up, they need to do in order to get a bill. “When people lose their jobs in the service and retail are women and people of color, and there is no part of the Congress for them such as bill of trade negotiations,” says Bronfenbrenner. closure of factories are visually vibrations; rough. abandoned factories dotting landscapes in the United States; Detroit, entrepreneurs made a business tours to the ruins of giving. Retail meltdown is flashy and visually, but it is hidden inside the American centers. TIME recently went through a shopping center in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who had lost a Shopko and Payless store, and there were twice as many free shops such as those operations. The lights were out in much of the shopping center, which was cordoned off with tape, crime, and the only foot traffic were training women in long dresses and wide corridors for the movement in the cold winter months on foot. As more retail sudden layoffs happen, Jack Raisner, a law professor at the University of St. John, he says, opening for the states or the federal government provides more security for employees to hand over the details. He recently helped New Jersey passed a law that apply the law updated WARN more employees of the retail sector that are similar bills in other states that want to inspire you. The bill of the New Jersey law was signed last month, was a response to mass layoffs, hundreds of Toys “R” US workers leave who had worked for the holidays with the promise of severance pay, without such payment, he says. It is said that every company that employees of at least 50 people in the state are required to give 90 days notice of a mass layoff; without such notice, it must pay at least four weeks to pay back all the dismissed workers. If you do not give more than 90 days in advance, the employer must pay employees also stopped a week for each year that pay have worked there. “The man in the street after years of service, without anything a horror and a tax on the public,” says Raisner. He also worked with Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Chuck Schumer of New York for Fair Warning law for the production since 2019, the national level of the WARN Act would update. The bill was introduced in November. “The fear of these redundancies is unchanged despite what everyone says this economy,” says Raisner. “I think it’s a real popular movement interest in something happening on this.” Although business owners in New Jersey say the new law of the state company comes to the state is a deterrent, broader protection for selling retail workers in the form of retraining or rehabilitation programs could be good for the economy bigger. As technology has changed the nature of work, people who have more education or increase their skills are getting better positioned for the types to do jobs that computers and robots can not do. This in turn increases the productivity rate of the nation and its economy. Now, technological change is happening faster than ever; McKinsey estimates that means more than 375 million workers (14 percent of the global workforce) should change professions by 2030, automation is growing. In the retail sector, where the average hourly wage for people who are not managers are only $16.86, workers laid off for six months to two years do not work have the means to stop to get a certification or a degree in another field. “For the most part, these workers paycheck to paycheck, and the idea of being out of work, it’s scary,” says Anthony Snyder, CEO Fox Valley workforce find the development board in northeastern Wisconsin, the off set helps new jobs workers. That’s why many young workers are in what is called the Snyder “retail merry-go-round” in which dissolves their employer or closes, find another job related to business and then get laid off from him, also. Amanda Padgett was on this merry-go-round for years. Padgett, 36, mother of two, was released from Shopko last year. Before that, he worked at an ice cream shop and a call center for a nationwide sales retail chain that has put its employees by all. With each new version, he wanted to go back to school and a degree in something that could get me out of retail sales of a medical coder or a Radiology Tech would receive. But as long as she needs the rent, the food payable on the table and take care of their children, they need to bring in a paycheck, those in another low-wage job takes, minimum wage that goes to the end . When he heard rumblings last year that was closed Shopko Padgett says, “all I could think was, here we go again ‘.” The United States has systematically divested of resources for low-wage workers, without a great financial help cushion, back to school. Federal investment in training of workers have fallen by 40 percent over the past 15 years, when adjusted for inflation, according to the National Skills Coalition, a group that advocates for worker training. This means offer many employment centers-funded state condition classes how to use a building curriculum or a computer, rather than the type of long-term measures that would normally help people change jobs, says Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, a senior fellow at the National Skills coalition. “You have many workers seeking such interventions cards to find out who can offer them that are relevant to the lives of workers and the needs of the industry is important,” says Bergson-Shilcock. “But at the same time, they do it with less and less money from the federal level.” There are some scattershot examples of states that seek to help workers in particular retail. In Wisconsin, a subsidy for displaced workers to detail will pay for the rehabilitation of high-demand sectors as well as help with the mortgage payments and cover books, transportation and child care for the classroom. It has helped people like Ginger Gillis, 42, who has for 14 years for entering Shopko data until the company closed. Gillis always wanted to go to school, but could not run the financial; It is now a degree in architectural technology from East Wisconsin Technical College to get. But Gillis has an advantage: her husband has a good job, which means that they do not concern must have an income while you go back to school. Many retail workers “do not have a nest egg so that the next sales retail job to run before we can even talk about,” says Snyder, Fox Valley Workforce Development Board. Only 27 of 400 retail workers displaced in his district have the benefit of the grant, and even then, he has the money to go to give out. “There are not enough money, we all operate with the biggest investment we serve lack,” he says. Other countries have very robust safety nets for redundant workers, whether in retail or other sectors. In Canada, workers whose jobs guaranteed to avoid mass layoffs severance pay, if you do not announce at least eight weeks in advance of the employer and end if they have worked for an employer for five or more years. In European countries such as Sweden, laid-off workers receive financial support, a labor consultant, and the money for the redevelopment, provided they are members of a union that about 70 percent of Swedish workers. In the United States this type are almost only to workers in a union available that some contraction of the labor force (compared with only 10.3 percent of the workers association in 2019 American members) harvest but the workers union of a strong support the benefits. Some partnerships between social partners started for the new jobs of low-wage workers training, even before losing their jobs. The building partnership skills in California, proposed a local association, an agreement with dozens of companies agree that the payroll company could take a small amount retraining workers efforts towards the rear. UNITE HERE, a union, the service employees in Las Vegas, was negotiating with the casinos to request represented as MGM Resorts International that she is aware of the union to new technologies and training guarantee for all dismissed workers. The question now is whether the government in the protection of retail sales workers step how did the production workers, even if non-union retail. Economists generally agree that the retail trade to go through, you know what he was doing, says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce. Manufacturing was once a third of the workforce; It is now eight percent. “No doubt,” he says, “that the retail sector is closer.” Image copyright by Paul Hennessy / NurPhoto-Getty Images
retail workers seek escape the Merry-Go-Round ‘as Jobs Disappear and Prospects Dim
