Amazon Continues Hurting Their Workers
Amazon is slowly rolling out news to part-time workers at over 400 of its Whole Foods Grocery Retail locations that the company plans on eliminating healthcare benefits offered to all part-time employees. The decision will impact around 1,900 workers.
Whole Foods has already been transitioning many workers to part-time. Both full-time and part-time workers have experienced significant cuts to their weekly schedules.
“They hardly hire any entry-level positions at full-time anymore. When a full timer quits they get replaced by part-time,” a Whole Foods worker told me. “The majority of the workforce isn’t on Whole Foods insurance because they literally can’t afford it,” they added in response to company claims that the decision only impacts a small number of workers.
“I personally was tricked into cutting from full time to part time, with the promise that I’d eventually be re-hired at full time, and that’s clearly never happening, and so I was already slated to lose my insurance before this announcement came down,” the worker added.
Another worker who has been with the company for 15 years said the benefits cuts are “devastating,” and they work for Whole Foods part-time primarily to provide health insurance to herself and her children.
49,000 GM workers represented by United Auto Workers are set to go on strike at midnight tonight. The strike will affect GM plants in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, New York, Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. The most recent union contract expired on Sunday, and General Motors is pushing to slash healthcare coverage for workers. Workers are also pushing for changes to the two-tiered wage system that was offered as a union concession during the 2008 recession, but remains in place and pits older workers against younger workers. GM is also increasingly relying on temp workers.
Nestlé is pushing to expand their bottled water operations in Florida, despite drastic conservation efforts required to improve degraded Florida’s Springs
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/opinion/bottled-water-is-sucking-florida-dry.html