Help wanted now! What full employment looks like in one Wisconsin city
On a Thursday evening in late May, the crew cleaned up the Wendy’s restaurant one last time and then defiantly walked out.
They left this hand-lettered sign in the window:
“Due to this corporation’s refusal to pay a living wage and deal with problems before it’s too late, the employees you would have dealt with today have all walked off the job. We wish you all the best.”
The move would have rattled management anywhere, but here in a suburb of Wausau, Wis., it was especially troubling. In a city with an unemployment rate below 3 percent and companies struggling to find someone – almost anyone – to keep their operations going, any threat of similar actions would reverberate ominously through executive suites. Would other workers lay down their restaurant spatulas and factory tools to protest long hours and low pay?
Not exactly. The assistant manager who led the revolt soon found another job – at Arby’s, per her Facebook page. (She declined to be interviewed for this story.) The restaurant owner, a Florida-based company that owns 180 Wendy’s in nine states, scrambled to open the restaurant the next day, apparently with employees pulled from other cities. Within six days, it was training a crew and operating close to normal hours. Instead of resorting to confrontation, Wausau is so far forging a more cooperative path as the worker shortage tips the balance of power away from management and toward labor. As expected, companies are quietly raising wages and improving benefits. But they’re also hiring and training people they wouldn’t have considered before: ex-convicts, homeless people, former drug users. The shift toward greater inclusion is occurring in the middle of another momentous change: the retirement of baby boomers and the rise of Millennials, who by 2020 will make up half of the US workforce. These forces are combining to force employers to rethink how they hire and retain
