California state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas and former California state representative Lorena Gonzalez joined grocery and retail store workers, criminal justice advocates, and researchers for an online press conference on Aug. 14.
On May 21, the California Senate passed a bill (SB 1446) titled the Retail Theft Prevention and Safe Staffing Act, which will protect workers and the public by ensuring safe staffing levels at grocery and drug-retail stores and better supervision of self-checkout machines. The bill will also require stores to provide notice on new consequential technology introduced in the workplace that is intended to eliminate, automate, or electronically monitor workers’ jobs.
The state’s General Assembly, though, is still considering the measure.
“While concerns with retail theft continue to grow, we must work to address the root causes of the problem, including the changing environment in which retail theft is taking place,” Smallwood-Cuevas said in a press release. “When workers’ safety is compromised, the legislature must act.”
The bill, however, has not come without opposition, so the following amendments have been proposed:
- Removing the prohibition on items that are locked or secured with anti-theft protections from going through self-checkout stations
- Removing the requirement that employers, as part of their Workplace Violence Prevention Plans, address self-checkout machines as a potential workplace hazard
- Increasing flexibility for workers staffing the self-checkout area to perform additional tasks and duties, while still requiring one person in the self-checkout area to be alleviated of all other duties to assist customers at all times
Staffing issues in the self-checkout area appear to be a problem. Self-checkout often leads to understaffed workplaces, resulting in customer disrespect and bullying, according to the report titled “Please Wait, Help is on the Way: Self-Checkout, Understaffing, and Customer Incivility in the Service Sector” by the Shift Project at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Furthermore, the study said workers are 14% more likely to never or rarely be treated with respect by customers if self-checkout is available in their stores.
Other key findings in the report include:
- 53% of workers reported that their stores are always or often understaffed
- 61% of workers report there is always or often insufficient staff to get the work done if they work in stores with self-checkout
- In workplaces that were always understaffed, 26% of workers reported that customers never or rarely treated them with respect
- 25% of workers report feeling bullied by customers in their interactions if they work in workplaces that were less consistently understaffed
“Self-checkout promises labor savings and convenience, but when we look at the data, we find that self-checkout instead leads to problematic understaffing that sets up both workers and customers for toxic interactions,” said Daniel Schneider, Malcolm Wiener professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Shift Project. “Workers, and the public more broadly, need a voice in shaping technology in the workplace and the future of work for us all.”
