questions for plan c retail comrades
hiya,
thanks for writing and circulating the two reports about working in retail.
http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/creatures-of-the-night-changes-in-the-labour-process-at-sainsburys/
http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/saboteurs-on-the-tills/
there has been some exchange between iww members and some of us in west london regarding work in retail, would be great to broaden and intensify the discussion. i currently work as a delivery driver for tesco, bringing online shops to peoples' kitchens. there will be a longer report about this job soon.
let's start with some concrete questions about the development of online grocery shopping. you wrote:
- “The STI department [online shopping] is one of Sainsbury’s largest in terms of labour force, and also one of its most profitable. Our store has upwards of 40 online shoppers, around 15 drivers, 5 marshals, 4 team leaders, 3 managers, and 1 department head."
i just wondered whether you have some figures about this, in terms of how many people work in online shopping and how many in traditional supermarkets. i read both sainsburys and tesco annual financial reports (i know that this sounds sad, why would you inflict this on yourself :-), but they don't distinguish between different departments when listing their their shop-floor staff.
sainsbury's say, though: sainsbury total workforce is 162,700; they have 247,000 online orders per week. in 2015 total sales were distributed amongst departments, as follows: 70% supermarket, 20% convenience, 5% online; online sales are growing fastest (around 10 per cent last year).
i assume that in your store there will still be more than 60 - 70 traditional store workers - probably more like 400 if it is a big store? as far as i am aware sainsbury's has only one warehouse that is solely dedicated to online shoppers, most of the online shopping is done in supermarkets. it would be important to understand their strategies better:
a) is online shopping / home delivery actually more profitable? fair enough, if they have separate warehouses they might save money on rent, compared to higher rents inner-city supermarkets; but the ratio between workers and clients in online shopping / home delivery seems to be way worse compared to traditional self-shop plus 'check out' model:
our warehouse solely dedicated to online shopping employs in total 1,400 people: around 600 drivers (260 vans), the rest personal shoppers and admin staff. many of the workers are on part-time, but then this is also true for traditional stores. in total the warehouse delivers shoppings for 3,000 customers in north london per day. the weekly turn-over in sales is around £1.5 million that is a ratio of only slightly more than 2 customers per worker! perhaps the individual shops tends to be bigger when done online, but there is a limit to this, too. (i think an average tesco express shop is only around £7, whereas online shopping will be more like £40). according to their own statistic, an average morrisons supermaket has a similar amount of customers (22,000 per week), but won’t employ more than 400 to 500 people.
so a lot might have to do with ‘competing for the margins’, meaning, keeping up the arms race in providing ‘all-round customer service’. only online-grocery companies like ocado make little profits, but their share values are pretty good - dot.com bubble and all. when you look at their financial reports, most supermarkets are pretty tangled up in real estate and bank business, e.g. tesco and sainsbury’s make 10 per cent of their total profits with banking services. sainsburys has various real estate developments going (supermarkets plus apartment blocks). all in all, it is quite difficult to disentangle their actual profit sources.
b) is it more productive to have dedicated online shopping warehouses or to do the personal online shopping as part of a traditional supermarket? sainsburys has only one warehouses solely dedicated to online shopping. like asda or iceland most of the online shopping is done within the traditional warehouses. tesco has various online warehouses, e.g. there are four major warehouses for london - but also operates from their megastores, e.g. the megastore in feltham has 20 or so online delivery vans. would be important to understand how they make these decisions. obviously investment levels would be lower for having personal shoppers running through the normal supermarkets, but then productivity will be lower: in a warehouse you can arrange things according to pick-rate, whereas in a supermarket you are confined by strategies of how make customers spend more (or make their shopping more convenient). things work different again with iceland, where customers do their own shopping, but don’t have to carry it home etc.
- “The worker has a handset computer and a unique log-in which they use to receive a shopping list for up to 8 different customer orders in one of 4 sections of the shop. The time given for a shop is measured by the handset at roughly 2 items picked a minute.” “We find out our productivity numbers and pick rate once a week”.
How do you find out about the pick-rate? Are there print-outs? If so, are these anonymous? In the Sainsbury’s warehouse where we worked, pick-rates were in your face the whole time: on TV screens in the warehouse itself, on print-outs in the briefing area, sometimes supervisors would walk through the warehouse and telling you your rate for the last hour, next day you would be told by text message if your rate was below or above 95% etc. Is the pick-rate a big topic amongst colleagues?
Also, would be good to know more about the wages: do personal shoppers and check-out workers get the same? what about those guys who stack the shelves? Are there discussions about the fact that e.g. Lidl pays higher wages, though they are portrayed as ‘discounters’? what do people say about this?
- “Under the ‘new system’ the night shift have to leave their rollers and crates with stock at the end of the aisle, and walk back and forth carrying the stock in their arms while STI line their trolleys in the middle of the aisle and work from there.”
I guess there is some potential for tension between the night-shift stackers and the shoppers - getting in each others way and things. How is the relationship between you guys? I can also imagine a gender division here, night-shift stackers probably more likely to be male, whereas at least in our warehouse personal shoppers are half women and men. and do the ‘traditional store check-out workers’ see the ‘online shopping’ as a potential threat to their job? are there discussions around this?
- “Now the bosses will have no ability to interfere with what the computer allocates in terms of shopping./Ambient 1 and 2 are now mixed shops, frozen and chilled stay the same. This means a much broader coverage of the store in one shop, which will likely lead to a drop in items picked per hour.”
So why do you think did they change the system: the productivity is lower and the bosses have less technological control to confine you to particular parts of the supermarket? Is the new system in place yet and what has actually changed?
The second article was fun to read, but it was more of a rant than a strategical assessment of what can be done at work and what not. The text remains a bit contradictory, in particular when it comes to the potential for collective steps:
- “But it always remains at the level of bitching. You never organise together. Your collective dissatisfaction never seems to manifest into collective resistance.”
- “It smashes all of your misconceptions about ‘fighting unions’ and makes you realise that, in large part, since the 80’s unions have become shells, actively suppressing any possibility of worker-led action in the workplace.”
So yes, if there is only ‘bitching’, then the union does not have to suppress too much ‘worker-led action’.
What about the composition of the work-force? You mention age - but what about (migrant) backgrounds? In our warehouse roughly 50 per cent of shop-floor workers, drivers and lower managers are Asian (some born here, but many are more recent migrants), 30 per cent are from Caribbean background (way less amongst management), 15 per cent are eastern European, 5 per cent are white-British (though more amongst the drivers, perhaps 10 per cent). Compared to other warehouses it has more of a ‘UK working class’ feel to it, people are more confident, in particular language-wise. Most workers will be in USDAW, but people are pretty pissed off with the bonus cuts USDAW agreed to. Tesco is seen a bit like ‘family’ (though with bad parenting skills), not only in a bad ‘corporatist’ way - people stick around, enjoy the employees’ shop and its cheap thrills, become quite friendly with each other after a while.
Which leads to my last question: did you have a debate within Plan C what to do at these particular workplaces in concrete and perhaps within the retail sector in general? While the Deliveroo organising is largely based on the fact that a) ‘workers are not treated as workers’ (disadvantages of self-employment) and b) a certain sub-culture around couriers - would a similar initiative (RebelRoo) etc. work in the big supermarkets? perhaps with a bit more exchange within IWW we could think of a small newsletter along similar lines…