When you treat employees like units of production....
Reason #15,234,867 why health insurance shouldn’t be tied to employment
If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
It’s a simple choice, really; when confronted with a choice between compassion or compounding the cruelty an individual has already been subjected to, how many of us would choose compassion? How many of us would endeavor to find ways to lessen that person’s suffering? And how many of us would try to do something POSITIVE to help that person get to a better place?
I doubt Rose Marie Counts’ expectations were sky-high. Life had already handed her a shit sandwich, and she’d had her fill. And now she was about to run up against her employer’s policies, which would be used to screw her over that much more.
Rose Marie Counts, a woman from Circleville, Ohio claims she had no choice but to leave her job at her local Sheetz because her teeth—many of which she are missing because she says her ex-husband knocked them out of her mouth—violated the convenience store’s “smile policy.”
“This company has no idea what I’ve been through,” Counts says via audio of a meeting she recorded with the store’s management. “I lost these front teeth because my ex-husband headbutted me because I forgot to turn the hall light out,” she explains. She posted the audio, accompanied by a written account of her dismissal, on Facebook.
So, the circumstances that resulted in her missing teeth didn’t matter to her employer. What did matter was that she couldn’t fit the required model of a happy, smiling Sheetz employee.
Just another unit of production kicked to the curb when she was no longer of use to the Machine.
“I was informed that policy states all Sheetz employees must have and remain with a perfect beautiful warm welcoming smile,” she detailed of the meeting with management. “The company defines my smile as unbeautiful because I still have work that needs to be done on them.” Counts has awaited permanent dentures (which Sheetz insurance would reportedly partially cover) for her damaged smile since the incident but claims her plan does not cover temporary dentures in the interim. As a result, she’s been forced to live with missing and broken teeth until a permanent procedure.
“Even though I am good at my job I can no longer be a frontline employee with the company because of my smile,” she wrote. On the audio, the manager can be heard telling her that while she heard “wonderful things” about her from customers, she was not to return to her role behind the register.
Once upon a time, flight attendants had to meet weight and appearance guidelines in order to work for airlines. Have one too many cheeseburgers during a layover, and a woman ran the risk of falling outside the bounds of “acceptable” beauty measures.
So those women who had trouble controlling their weight or weren’t naturally petite, slender, and “fuckable,” (because, let’s face it, that’s what the standards were about- Would men want to fuck you?) had trouble holding on to a job.
In Ms. Counts’ case, the problem wasn’t of her own doing. Her ex-husband had assaulted her. His headbutting her in the mouth had caused her to lose several teeth. If you’ve ever looked into having cosmetic dentistry of any sort done, it’s expensive, even if you have good dental insurance, which Ms. Counts did.
Business Insider also reported that the company is currently reviewing its “smile policy” but defended Counts’ manager, stating that she “was handling this type of situation for the first time.”
“This is in my opinion one of the biggest forms of discrimination that there can be,” Counts wrote. “Who are they to decide what beauty is. So I leave this job feeling like I’m not good enough again.”
Sheetz had the opportunity to support an employee in evident crisis, and they screwed the pooch. They had the opportunity to display compassion and kindness, which seems in line with the image they endeavor to present to the public. After all, what else does a smile represent?
Instead, they left Ms. Counts with only the option of spending what would’ve amounted to thousands of dollars she doesn’t have to keep her job.
If nothing else, this is reason #15,234,867 why health insurance shouldn’t be tied to employment. Ms. Counts’ former employer left her with a financially untenable option. As a retail employee, how could she be expected to lay out thousands of dollars for recontructive dental care? I’m sure she would’ve loved to do that if she had the money, but that’s just not possible on a retail salary.
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As a result, Ms. Counts is in a Catch-22 situation. She can’t afford to have the work done on her teeth that her employer requires to save her near-minimum-wage job. And she can’t make enough money to pay for the recontructive dental care she needs to save her job, because she was deemed to be in violation of Sheetz’s “smile” policy.
Why wouldn’t the store manager, when Ms. Counts informed her of the circumstances that resulted in her losing her teeth, offer to speak with her superiors to determine if the company could be of assistance?
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Or is “never pass on an opportunity to inflict abject cruelty” one of the key points in the Sheetz junior management manual?
And if the manager “was handling this type of situation for the first time,” why weren’t her superiors consulted to determine what resources might be available to assist an employee in crisis? Many employers now have Employee Assistance Programs, which may direct employees to available resources depending on their particular crisis.
What Sheetz and far too many other companies lose sight of is that their success isn’t because of the brilliance of their senior management. It’s because of the commitment and skill of their front-line employees- people like Rose Marie Counts. If not for those customer-facing front-line employees, those who to customers represent the face of a company, no business would succeed. You can train employees all you want, but if those people don’t buy into the mission, you’ll have no business.
Of course, this being America and our reality being that health care is a “survival of the fittest” scenario, Ms. Counts’ daughter has started a GoFundMe for her mother’s reconstructive dental care:
(As of 10.30am PST, 2.2.23)
Rose Marie Counts was, by all accounts, a good employee, someone that Sheetz should’ve valued as more than a unit of production. They had an opportunity to help a team member and a fellow human being in crisis. Instead, they fell back on their all-important, one-size-fits-all, inflexible policy, which evidently has no room for kindness or compassion.
Ms. Counts didn’t ask for any of this. This shit sandwich was served to her via her ex-husband’s forehead. You’d think her employer might’ve been able to display a modicum of compassion, but even that was too much to ask of Sheetz.
I don’t live within 1500 miles of a Sheetz location, but if stopping at one to gas up my car was an option, you can bet I’d keep driving until I found another convenience store to give my business to. If you live in a region with Sheetz locations available, I hope you’ll do the same.
Compassion isn’t bad business, and kindness doesn’t have to harm a company’s bottom line. Sometimes it can be a win-win situation. It’s too bad Sheetz’s management was too blind and soulless to understand that.
In corporate philosophy, there are no human beings. There are customers, from whom one extracts the profit stream; there are the interchangeable and disposable parts that are euphemistically called "employees"; and there are the machine operators known as "management."