Aeropostale's 2013 Annual Report

Many companies favor employing part-time workers over full-time workers in order to reduce costs and ensure flexibility. By doing so, they are able to avoid the added expenditure of providing health benefits to their employees. Ultimately, this means that essentially twice the number of workers are hired to replace full time workers. However, due to an almost constant pressure to reduce payroll, which in the retail industry “consumes between ten and twenty percent of total revenue”, many employers are constantly looking for opportunities to cut their employees’ hours (Lewis). Consequently, many retail stores hire too many employees and distribute hours poorly among them, therefore, forcing part-time workers to: face financial problems, manage

In their 2013 Annual Report, Aeropostale stated that they “implemented a workforce management system which enables more efficient store payroll planning” as a business strategy (Aeropostale 3). This means that the company is utilizing staff optimization technology that allows them to monitor sales more closely and send employees home if daily sales are low, or require employees to be on call and only come if there is work. During on-call shifts, employees have to call in ahead of time to see whether or not they will be needed. A similar case is Caprice Taylor at Club Monaco, a high-end clothing and apparel retailer, whose “ scheduled shifts at the Manhattan store were not guaranteed. Instead, she was given call-in shifts, which required her to call the store two hours before she was scheduled to arrive to see if she was needed. Most often, she was not” (Eaton). Since there is an uncertainty to whether or not they will be called into work, employees are forced to schedule their personal lives around work. If they make prior plans and are needed, then they must cancel; if they do not make plans in anticipation of working, but are not needed, then, they have wasted a day. “Retail watchers say big-box stores and shopping-mall stalwarts are increasingly hiring workers for on-call shifts, a trend that cuts labor costs for employers, but leaves workers [like Taylor] struggling to get by”