Posted on 08/04/2019 4:54:16 AM PDT by Enlightened1
Lowe’s Cos. told thousands of store workers this week their jobs were being eliminated as the company outsourced tasks such as assembling barbecue grills and janitorial services.
The home-improvement chain notified maintenance staff and assemblers that put together grills, wheelbarrows and other products that they were being laid off, according to the company and employees. Those roles will be taken over by third-party companies
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
We stopped shopping there when they made it harder for military to get a discount. We don’t have a right to a discount, but Home Depot gives one generously.
Half the people at lowes don’t seem to work anyway.
You nailed it. My son-in-law works as a private contractor for Lowes here in NJ and he said the same thing several months ago. They actually asked him to train them. He abruptly refused!
I went into a Lowe’s the other day and there were no cashiers, only self-checkouts that didn’t take cash. I told a manager I was paying cash and she had to open a register for me. I asked why they didn’t hire more people and she said they are trying but people don’t want to start at $13 an hour and the ones that do, fail the drug test.
You can keep your job 2 months longer if you train your replacement. Lovely.
They could raise their starting pay or get rid of the drug testing and solve their hiring problem.
“”Outsourcing” means that they will fire US citizens and hire illegal contractors who will work for half the price.”
While you are probably right it’s worth discovering why the layoffs are happening. Government regulation at all levels make having employees expensive. As an employer, you must comply with federal, state, county and city rules. Every rule adds a cost that must be mortised across your entire workforce. So, the accountant goes to work and figures out what it costs above pay and benefits to have an employee. Then the accountant figures out how much money each employee has to earn to cover his cost. Someone who deals with commercial customers and writes orders for hundreds or thousands of dollars per hour easily pulls his weight. A janitor or grill assembler doesn’t. That isn’t because cleaning the place or assembling a grill aren’t valuable contributions. It’s because regulations add so much overhead that the people doing those tasks are not adding anything to the bottom line. Their tasks can be more cheaply exported to an outside supplier. The outside suppliers will be smaller and therefore subject to less regulation, so they can actually make a profit doing those tasks. Whether the outside supplier hires citizens or illegals is a separate issue. But it is not an issue Lowe’s is concerned with.
If we don’t want companies to outsource labor then we need to reduce the ridiculous number of laws, regulations and taxes imposed on hiring Americans.
$13? They aren’t worth $8.
“”Outsourcing” means that they will fire US citizens and hire illegal contractors who will work for half the price. “
That’s exactly right.
Your lower working bees are the cheapest employees.
You kill your back bone then you entire operation will suffer.
Still there is NO EXCUSE for a cooperation to fire Americans and hire illegals.
That is fine and I will shop some where else.
I’m not going to support a corporation that does this.
“They could raise their starting pay or get rid of the drug testing and solve their hiring problem. “
The drug testing is about liability. If a guy gets high, knocks over a pallet on the top level with a forklift, and it kills somebody in the next aisle, Lowe’s could be sued out of business. Lowe’s is a warehouse and there are plenty of opportunities in a warehouse to injure yourself or others. Also, given the drugs on the street now, the user doesn’t know if he is going to get mildly happy, have a heart attack or go into a killing rage. Lowe’s doesn’t want to find out.
In my long work life I found that, as a general rule, drug and alcohol users make really bad employees. They are less reliable, less available, and very incomplete in doing their tasks. If I found out Lowe’s did not test and Home Depot did, I’d switch my $30,000 a year account over there.
We quickly figured out a way to work together, holding the boxes and stuffing the sticks, to easily finish the job in 15 minutes, or less. Everyone was happy. My dad had the butter boxed, and my sister and I each had our quarter.
I'm sure Lowes has learned the same. I'll bet the Lowes contractors are able to finish the outsourced jobs for a fraction of the time and cost of the in-store workers.
Try making eye contact with a Home Depot worker; in my experience they dart into the nearest aisle. Must be a crappy job - though it may be fun playing hide-and-seek all day.
Lowes nor Home Depot has everything that I need on a particular task. They may have 80% of it, but never everything.
Got to one, or the other and you end up at both, and still only get 95% of what you need. The rest has to be improvised or acquired elsewhere (Amazon, usually).
I was in lowes yesterday, and I paid cash at the automated checkout, and they wanted my telephone number to complete the sale. I refused and it required a manager over-ride.
I told the manager “you sell home repair/improvement products, not data mining”, stick to that.
What year was that?
The sad truth is that full-time employees are a huge expense for companies, and they are always looking for ways to eliminate them. Work still has to be done, but some third party can do it for less with either contractors or an army of part-timers/per diem workers. We were warned that ObamaCare would aggravate this situation, and it definitely did.
For what it’s worth, any time someone points to a roaring stock market as a sign of a good economy, remember that the best way for a company to shoot up its stock price is to shed American workers. The shareholders may benefit and sing the praises of the economy, but the average Joe is left with nothing.
Excellent comment.
I don’t see this as so much an illegal alien problem and a government regulation problem. Health benefits are part of that, but it’s bigger than that. Government makes it hard for businesses to function — they’ve got regulations for everything!
I go to either since they are about the same distance.
Usually I wind up ordering from Amazon or someone else anyway.
Some oddball threaded bolts and nuts aren’t on the shelf.
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