Market Basket
Well, they went and did it. As I write, roughly 20,000 part time associates at Market Basket–their hours next week have been cut to zero.
As I understand it Market Basket employs 25,000 people.
Market Basket’s new CEOs have claimed that the 8,000 part time associates in New Hampshire and 12,000 associates in Massachusetts, have not been laid off.
It’s a technicality, zero hours = no work, and the attorney generals in New Hampshire and Massachusetts are addressing the issue of associates receiving unemployment benefits.
Oy Veh.
Councilor Colin Van Ostern from New Hampshire writes/tweets, “Cutting 8,000 #MarketBasket part-timers from work next wk is economic equivalent of a natural disaster, that is how state must treat it.”
What is so creepy, is that the new Market Basket CEOs are letting the store managers do all their dirty work. The CEOs claim that no one is being laid off. Again, sort of a technicality.
And part time often is 25-35 hours a week, we are not talking about just a few hours here and there for 20,000 people.
So the workers stuck their necks out, and the CEOs and current Board of Directors said, “Off with their heads.”
“The impact of these cutbacks in hours will be devastating, if not crippling, to the majority of the company’s 25,000 employees. Again, it needs to be made clear, the only people striking are the drivers, warehouse workers and those who work in the offices at HQ. But these draconian cuts will impact the employees at all 71 stores.
Many of these employees are college and high school students, single parents and retirees on fixed incomes. These cuts will be crushing.
Which is exactly why Gooch, Thornton and Arthur S. are doing it. They want to rip the very heart out of this employee rebellion by hurting its most vulnerable participants.
They are intentionally punishing those workers who had the temerity to speak their minds and support Arthur T. and the strikers. These employees had the gall to stand up against what they believed to be a wrong being done to their former boss and their fellow workers. All the while, reporting for work every day and doing their jobs.
Their only “crime” is loyalty, a love of their company and their boss and exercising their First Amendment rights…” From Your Tewksbury Today. The entire article can be read here.