Essential employees deserve better | greenhouse brands

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The pandemic has proven that essential employees deserve better compensation for the stress they are under. Courtesy of: Creative Commons Photo credit: Clarissa Arceo

Minimum wage employees deserve better starting with higher wages. This includes our fast food, retail and grocery associates.

Much love for our essential employees emerged at the start of the pandemic. Almost every corner had a banner that read “we love our essential employees”.

Now, on almost every corner, a sign asking for help is displayed in the windows of our local Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart and pizzerias.

The term “essential” became a key feature in the early 40s to decide who was going to work and who was not.

Low-wage workers have thus become essential and included in the campaign of appreciation for people who risk their lives to earn a living.

As the pandemic dragged on, videos began to go viral on social media of minimum wage workers speaking out about their horribly treated work experiences by customers, along with videos for evidence.

One of the most recent viral videos shows former Merrill Lynch employee James Iannazzo in Fairfield, California yelling at teenagers at a local smoothie shop.

Lynch, 48, demanded to know who made her drink after her child had an allergic reaction.

He shouted racial slurs at the teenagers, threw the drink at one of the young girls and tried to enter their kitchen.

Although Lynch was later fired from his job, as some companies started doing as videos like this went viral, that’s just not enough.

California’s minimum wage was just officially raised to $15 an hour in early 2022.

In 2020, Statista’s research department reported that about 48% of employees working at hourly rates at or below minimum wage were between the ages of 16 and 24.

The majority of the workers making and serving your caramel macchiatos, Big Macs and packing your groceries for the third time this week are young adults.

These are the same people who receive racial and misogynistic slurs and incorrect orders hurled at them from left to right.

In the summer, I got a job as a barista to earn some extra cash; I thought it would be a decent part-time job to help pay my school expenses.

I left my job at Dunkin’ for several reasons.

My leaving sign should have been the former employee telling me I wouldn’t like to work there the day I was hired, or maybe it should have been the woman who threw her drink at me in the drive-thru after calling me a racial slur during my first week on the job.

I quit my job because I was completely exhausted at the end of each shift, especially when I had to work in the morning. Not only were we constantly understaffed and hiring intermittently, but we were busy.

Employees worked outside of our job description as crew being paid less than minimum wage and ended up taking overtime even when we had already worked the limit of our contracts.

Customers argued with managers, grew angry and impatient, and sometimes became verbally abusive; It was overwhelming.

Many of my [former] colleagues quit for similar reasons and said they would never work for minimum wage again.

What happened to the statement “we love our essential employees?”

4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in November 2021, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

As Jobs began to hire, many blamed workers for being ungrateful for not wanting to work anymore.

Did you know that two minimum wage jobs are not enough to cover the cost of living in California, even for one individual? There is no state, county, or city in the country where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Minimum wage workers deserve better; Better treatment, better benefits, better work environments, and better compensation for what they’re going through.

Being harassed and threatened by strangers who are probably twice their age is not worth the $14 an hour and no benefits.

So how do we get our minimum wage workers the justice they deserve? We start by paying these valuable people their fair value.

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