Rock Talk

This week I found out something that took me by surprise and at the same time left me scratching my head in disbelief. As some readers have noted, I have been out of the job market for sometime. This all started when I made the choice to stay home with my son. My wife had a job that paid much better than mine, so she worked while I was home with my son.

This week I was called by a MAJOR retailer to come in for a job interview with them. After being left waiting 30 minutes beyond the time scheduled for my interview, I completed the process and was offered a conditional position with them. The manager very nicely said to me “Hey, good news. We can offer you $xx.xx and hour.” Now mind you, I am not going to get into the real numbers but it was WAY below what I expected for the position offered. She then says to me, “We could have given you more but there is a penalty for beingout of work so long.”

Now you got the part where I was being a responsible parent right? Taking care of MY CHILD, right? And here I am being told they are going to pay me less as a penalty for doing so. Now I ask you, does this make sense to you? Well needless to say I did not accept the position and I am not sure if I will continue to shop with this retailer since I now know of this policy.

It is a policy that can only benefit the retailer and hurt the employee. Some of the folks that will be or have been effected by this may be single parents that NEED the income. In my situation, I NEEDED that job but with the reduction that came from this policy, I would not have been making enough to pay for the gas to get there.

My point in all this is to say this, “To the retailers and businesses that dominate the market both here in the US and globally, your people are your business. You need to think of them and treat them as the valued resource that they are. Pay a fair wage for a fair days work and those same people will spend some of those dollars back with you.” In an economy such as this, it is starting to be almost a burden to drive to work with the full prices so high. What will we all do if the wages continue to fall, the costs keep going up, and the law makers continue to sit on their asses and do NOTHING.

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