Turning ‘bad jobs’ into ‘good jobs’

A few years back I was chatting to an American friend about a job interview she had coming up. The job was a shop floor sales assistant at Trader Joes (a fancy supermarket – think Waitrose, but with cowboy flair). At the time I couldn’t understand why she was so excited, why she thought even getting an interview was a great achievement. It sounded like a good job, but she already had a good job in another supermarket.

This week I finally figured it out when I read an article by Zeynep Ton in the Harvard Business Review on ‘Why ‘Good Jobs’ Are Good For Retailers’. Ton’s article challenges the received wisdom that retail industry jobs have to be poor quality because of the business model, and one of his exemplars is Trader Joes.

The average American cashier makes $19,000 dollars a year. The starting salary at Trader Joe’s is between $40,000 and $60,000.If this wasn’t a blog, I’d retype that last sentence just for emphasis. More than twice the salary. Do those Trader Joe’s staff make twice the sales? No, they make three times as many sales per square foot as the average US supermarket worker.

At the less expensive end of the retail market Costco gets kudos for staff progression, with 98% of managers promoted from the existing workforce and almost twice the sales per square foot of their closest rivals. And Spanish chain Marcadona scores on security: instead of moving around staff schedules to meet shifting demand they cross-train their staff so they can shift work, not people. They outperform Spanish competitors by 18% and US competitors by 48%.

Pay, progression, security. The three things you need if you want work to really be a route out of poverty.

At JRF we spend a lot of our time talking about the hollowing out of the labour market, and the increase in low pay, insecure work. Last year’s Working Futures projections make it clear that this trend is set to continue. We talk about the quality of jobs available in local labour markets, and the need to create more good quality jobs, not just more jobs.

What Ton’s piece reminds us is that we don’t have to accept the poor quality jobs we’ve already got – mainstream businesses may assume that low pay and ‘flexible’ working hours are a necessary part of their business model, but that doesn’t mean they are right. We need to persuade our existing volume employers that ‘good jobs’ are good for business.