During the 2010 mid-terms the GOP ran mainly on the platform of job creation and, as a result of such promises, the GOP gained the majority in the House of Representatives. As the new Speaker of the House, John Boehner made the welcome claim that the primary goal of the Republican Party was to increase employment in the U.S.
His exact words were: "We're going to have a relentless focus on creating jobs."
The following, therefore, is a chronological list of legislation by the GOP beginning 2-10-2011 that I created for my own amusement. That it has reached its current imposing length, without one anecdotal citation of new employment as a result of Republican legislation, is simply shocking. Shame on these useless hypocrites.
There are those who choose to place the blame for high unemployment on Mr. Obama's shoulders, but keep in mind that it's the House that enacts legislation and controls the governmental purse-strings, not the President. The Stimulus package passed by the Democrats in 2009 helped the economy but would have been more effective if the GOP hadn't limited it to little more than a package of more useless tax breaks for the rich.
1-2-2012: Congress will return to session on January 17th. They will work for six whole days this month. Must be nice. Don't expect much Federal job creation during this period.
1-18-2012: Here we GO! On Tuesday, the 17th, the House selected a new, as-yet-unnamed, Sergeant-At-Arms. On the 18th the House will attempt, and fail, to vote down Mr. Obama's request for a debt increase. The House will then adjourn until Monday. No jobs were created.
1-20-2012: Congress is in recess until Monday. Have a nice weekend, everyone, and enjoy your food stamps. No jobs were created.
1-23-2012: Not much today. Just a panel discussion on doing business with the military, plus some GOP shenanigans called the Legally Binding Budget Act of 2011. Simply put, it's an attempt to make the president culpable for lousy budgets. No jobs were created.
1-27-2012: The House held hearings on Wednesday trying to cut retirement benefits for federal employees. They also redefined what an "aircraft" is. They then took Thursday off.No jobs were created.
1-30-2012: On Friday, the 27th, the House was in session for a whole four minutes. Aaaaand, the House is basically in recess until the 1st of February. No jobs were created.
2-1-2012: On Tuesday, the 31st, the House voted on a motion to consider the repeal of the CLASS Program, part of the Affordable Health Care Act aimed at helping low-income citizens get health care. It passed on party lines. Don't expect it to escape the Senate. No jobs were created.
2-17-2012: The House will presumably vote on and pass the payroll tax extension today. Then they'll leave town for ten days in order to celebrate Presidents Day. Cushy gig. No jobs were created.
2-20-2012: Congress is out this week on an extended Presidents Day vacation. Between now and April they're going to take four weeks off. Who the heck made this ridiculous schedule? (Hint: The majority party in the House. The idea being, I suppose, that the less Congress is in session, the less gets done.) No jobs were created.
2-27-2012: The Congressional Circus is back in action after a week off for President's Day, and today they'll be considering H.R. 4078, "The Regulatory Freeze of Jobs Act of 2012." It's worse than it sounds as its intent is "to provide that no agency may take any significant regulatory action until the unemployment rate is equal to or less than 6.0 percent." Cue the sad trombone sound.) No jobs were created.
3-2-2012: Yesterday the House spent most of the day debating and passing the San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Democrats, plus Olympia Snowe, fended off the execrable Blunt Amendment. Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner vows to continue contraception fight. .. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/boehner-vows-to-continue-contraception-fight/ .. Because it's all about jobs, right? No jobs were created.
3-7-2012: On Monday the House spent two whole hours naming two federal buildings and then adjourned. On Tuesday they shuffled paper all day regarding a Bureau of Reclamation bill involving hydropower development. No jobs were created.
3-9-2012: The House spent all day Thursday debating H.R. 3606, the "Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act". It is better known as the "Reopening American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act". What it actually is, is a financial market deregulation bill. What it REALLY is, is a fake jobs bill. No jobs were created.
3-12-2012: Last Friday, March 9th, members of the House attended a hearing in Saranac Lake, NY, to discuss a farm bill. No jobs were created.
On Monday, March 12th, the House has scheduled a single hearing on (Are you ready?) "Explosion of Federal Regulations Threatening Jobs and Economic Survival in the West"... in Elko Nevada. DAMN those regulations! No jobs were created.
3-14-2012: The House is in another recess until Tuesday, the 20th of March. (In case you don't know, the GOP wrote this schedule. It was designed to ensure that as little legislation would get done as possible.) No jobs were created.
3-19-2012: The House is theoretically in session. They're back in Washington but nothing much is scheduled this week except for hearings. They might as well be painting their bedroom's black and listening to Led Zeppelin albums. No jobs were created.
3-21-2012: On Monday, the 19th, the House was called to order at 4PM. They then spent the next four hours arguing a bill that would allow Israeli nationals to receive nonimmigrant visas. No jobs were created.
3-23-2012: For the past two days the House has been debating H.R. 5, the "HEALTH" bill, which is actually about tort reform. No jobs were created.
3-26-2012: The House took last Friday off. No jobs were created.
3-28-2012: The House debated FCC transparency, baby monitors, and a transportation bill but nothing of note passed. No jobs were created, either.
3-30-2012: The House voted to end Medicare, again, but at least they signed a 90-day extension to the transportation bill. No jobs were created.
4-2-2012: The House vacated the premises early last Friday and won't be back in session until the 16th of April. No jobs will be created.
4-9-2012: The House has scheduled a series hearings this week. No jobs will be created.
4-16-2012: The House is back in session but it's mostly just nuts-and-bolts stuff this week. Although a vote on another corporate tax cut bill (H.R. 9) is in the offing.
4-18-2012: The House voted down the Buffet Rule, awarded Lena Horne a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal, then argued the rest of the day about rules to "enhance" hunting, fishing, and shooting. No jobs were created.
4-23-2012: The House was in pro forma session. No jobs were created.
4-25-2012: The House spent the day dealing with the legislative version of cleaning their room. In this case it meant passing bills that dealt with adjustments to the boundaries of parklands, land swaps, and the like. No jobs, or anything remotely like them, were created.
4-27-2012: The House pased a couple of suspension bills (The DATA Act and the Small Business Credit Availability Act). They also passed CISPA, which is distressing, but the prez has promised a veto. Looking forward to that. Oh, and no jobs were created.
4-30-2012: On Friday the House approved a bill that lowers the interest on student loans, but tacked on a rider which guts the Health Care Act. It's designed to result in a presidential veto, at which point Republicans can claim that Mr. Obama doesn't care about student loans.
Fuck these people! Fuck these people! Fuck these horrible, greedy, useless, poisonous bags of scum!
[PLEASE NOTE: my red]
5-2-2012: The House is in recess until 5-7-2012. No jobs will be created.
5-9-2012: The House is back in session but they only passed a handful of suspension bills. No jobs were created.
5-14-2012: Last Thursday the House passed the Sequestration Replacement Act, designed to fatten the Pentagon coffers at the expense of the elderly and the poor. It is destined to die in the Senate. No Jobs were created.
5-16-2012: The House was not in session on Monday, but on Tuesday the legislators busied themselves passing noncontroversial suspension bills. Ho-hum. No jobs were created, but you already knew that.
5-18-2012: The House passed a watered-down Violence Against Women Act. Basically, if you're an immigrant or a native American woman, you're fair game for any sadist. They'll pass a major defense funding bill tomorrow and then will take the next week off. No jobs were created.
5-21-2012: On Friday the House passed a bloated defense spending bill, even though they were obligated to cut defense spending as part of the Super Committee agreement. Not only did the new bill include discriminatory language .. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/18/1092792/-House-passes-642-billion-defense-bill-under-veto-threat- .. it also included an amendment allowing the government to institute propaganda against the American people. The president has vowed to veto this bill. No jobs were created unless you count the military contractors rolling in effluent streams of your tax dollars.
5-23-2012: Say it with me now: "The House is in recess until the 30th of May. Must be nice to have so many vacations. Oh, how I hate those indolent GOP swine."
6-1-2012: Another day, another abortion bill. This time the "Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act." Which was designed to stop abortions based on sex or race. Seriously. It failed. Apart from that bit of nonsense the day was one long last-minute rush to pass bills that pay the bills. No jobs were created.
6-4-2012: Last Friday three Democratic (Hahn, Kaptur, Tonko) amendments to increase funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy failed, while three Republican (Hultgren, Chaffetz, McClintock) amendments to reduce funding of energy efficiency and renewable energy also failed. No jobs were created.
6-6-2012: The House was not in session on Monday but on Tuesday it spent the day amending water and energy bills, mostly shuffling money from one account to another. It was not a job creating event.
In the meantime the GOP is still losing its shit over light-bulbs, .. http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/231117-house-votes-to-block-enforcement-of-light-bulb-standards .. voting to restrict funding for the application of energy-efficient lighting (Which the GOP evidently believes are manufactured in Hell itself.) Job creation was not in evidence. 6-11-2012: On Friday the House voted to cut funding for Open World Leadership Center, .. http://www.openworld.gov/about/?sub=1&lang=1 .. the Congressional Research Service, .. http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/ .. and the Washington Botanic Garden. .. http://www.usbg.gov/ .. But, on the bright side, they voted themselves funds to print some snazzy new pocket-sized editions of the U.S. Constitution to hand out to constituents. As always, no jobs were created.
(22) 5-6-2011: Pushing for spending caps tied to GDP. (That's a really, really REALLY bad idea.)
(23) 5-9-2011: Claimed credit for dropping oil prices because they passed a bill.
(24) 5-11-2011: Refuse to reduce oil subsidies.
(25) 5-13-2011: Stood helplessly and watched as Senator John Ensign made Bill Clinton look like a Carmelite nun.
(26) 5-16-2011: Attempt to retool Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare-killing bill.
(27) 5-17-2011: Prevented the raising of the federal debt limit. Let the catastrophic job loss begin.
(28) 5-18-2011: Watches Rome burn with their Wall Street pals.
(29) 5-19-2011: Filibustered bill to repeal oil subsidies.
(30) 5-20-2011: Rejected Goodwin Liu for judge simply because Mr. Obama nominated him.
(31) 5-23-2011: Abortion. Abortion. Abortion. As in "restrictions".
(32) 5-27-2011: Spent five hours debating NPR, five minutes debating Afghanistan.
(33) 5-27-2011: GOP releases their jobs plan. Hilarity ensues.
(34) 5-30-2011: Continue to hold the debt limit hostage in order to make more money for billionaires.
(35) 6-1-2011: Brought to the House floor a bill specifically blaming President Obama's 2012 budget for raising the statutory debt limit by $2.4 trillion dollars, a budget the very same Republican-led Congress earlier passed.
(36) 6-6-2011: Pulled from the floor a Democratic resolution to remove soldiers from Libya, because it just might have passed.
(37) 6-3-2011: Conceived a plan to replace three federal employees with just one federal employee. Yes, they're now actually reducing jobs.
(38) 6-9-2011. Nothing. They did absolutely nothing to create jobs. Not a damn thing.
(39) 6-13-2011. Nothing, though they're jabbering a lot about privatizing Social Security. Again. Sigh.
(40) 6-15-2011. Attempts to cut billions from needy seniors and hungry children in order to raise the defense budget... again.
(41) 6-17-2011. The GOP is censoring Democratic congressional newsletters because they're using the GOP's own words to define the excremental Ryan Budget. Nice.
(42) 6-20-2011: The GOP held a convention in New Orleans and hired an Obama look-alike to stand on stage and tell racist jokes. So +1 to the GOP for giving a man a job but -1,000,000 points for the kind of job it was.
(43) 6-22-2011: I'm sad to report that the GOP didn't do a dang thing to create jobs today, but I'll give them credit for not using senior citizens for skeet shooting practice.
(44) 6-24-2011: Yesterday the Democratic Congress stood up on its back legs and finally barked out what so many of us have been saying for the past six months--- that the Republican Congress is actively trying to stall the economy. There, was that so harrrrrrrd?
(45) 6-27-2011: The Republican Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling EIGHTEEN times for President Bush. Now the the GOP is holding collective their breaths and pitching fits, perfectly willing to cause world economic collapse just because that darned old spendthrift Obama wants to eliminate the corporate jet depreciation tax credit for their rich friends. Oy vey.
(46) 6-29-2011: Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) spent $9 million dollars of his own money in his race for a senate seat in 2010 but afterwards had his own company pay him back to the tune of $10 million in "deferred compensation". Is this illegal? Very probably, though it oddly resulted in one new American job: Senator Ron Johnson. So way to go, GOP! Only ten million more jobs to go.
(47) 7-1-2011: The GOP is on vacation until the 7th of July, even though a world-altering problem with the debt ceiling is looming. But don't worry, Democratic Senator Harry Reid and his left-wing pals are staying in Washington to get some real work done.
(48) The GOP was off for the 4th of July holidays.
(49) 7-6-2011: No new jobs to speak of but the GOP is working diligently to keep their true constituency, Wall Street fat cats, rolling in simoleons by attempting to roll back the financial reforms passed last year.
(50) 7-8-2011: Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's bright idea is to close tax loop holes.... and then give the accumulated monies back to the rich in the form of reduced taxes. That's our little non-job-makers!
(51) 7-11-2011: Speaker of the House John "Weepy-Boy" Boehner admits that not raising the debt limit will cost jobs. Ahhh, that explains everything. Atta boy, GOP!
(52) 7-13-2011: The GOP claims they passed 9 bills that would create 500,000 jobs. Except they didn't create jobs. They really, really didn't.
(53) 7-15-2011: Finally. The GOP is doing some investigating, but it's not about Wall Street or Rupert Murdoch. The target in their cross hairs this time is <groan> Planned Parenthood. Again. This is the official definition of insanity, you know.
(54) 7-18-2011: Not only does the GOP continue to insist on slashing federal spending, which will cost jobs, jobs and more jobs, but now they want to hack the Constitution.
(55) 7-20-2011: Are you ready? The GOP today passed a bill that would "amend the Securities Act of 1933 to specify when certain securities issued in connection with church plans are treated as exempted securities for purposes of that Act." Ooooh, I'm all a-tingle.
(56) 7-22-2011: While unemployment claims are rising again the GOP is putting the screws to small airports in order to kill union labor.
(57) 7-25-2011: Speaker of the House John Boehner walks out of a debt ceiling meeting because that mean old pwesident Obama wouldn't knife his health care plan. Poor widdle John.
(58) 7-27-2011: No new jobs but at least 4000 workers have hit the bricks as a result of the GOP's jihad against airport unions.
(59) 7-29-2011: The GOP wasted the past two days on its version of a debt ceiling bill that even its own party won't vote for. John Boehner is a miserable failure as both the Majority Leader and as a shepherd for these hard times.
(60) 8-1-2011: The GOP breaks out the fiddles while the economy burns. The tune they favor is the "Screw The Poor and the Elderly" polka, and they're hitting the coda HARD.
(61) 8-3-2011: The GOP is screwing everyone over by refusing to fund the FAA. As a result, airlines owners are currently pocketing millions in taxes that should go to the government.
(62) 8-5-2011: GOOD NEWS! The GOP has a plan to create 300,000 jobs.... no, wait. That's eliminate 300,000 jobs. Sorry.
(63) 8-8-2011: The GOP is on vacation but their henchmen continue to usurp the voting process by sending out phony absentee ballots.
(64) 8-10-2011: The GOP is proposing something called the REINS act which essentially gets rid of safety inspectors. So less jobs and more poison in your children's food. It's win-win, uh, lose-lose, uh, whatever!
(65) 8-12-2011: Employees of Boeing had their jobs illegally pulled out from underneath them. Guess which political party is doing their best to see that these employees don't have their day in court. Bingo!
(66) 8-15-2011: Yayyyy! Republican Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee (which investigates government corruption) is keeping his home district busy by securing millions of dollars for road and public works projects. I guess it was just a complete coincidence that most of the work is planned near properties Mr. Issa owns. Uh-oh.
(67) 8-17-2011: Republicans Darrell Issa and Dennis Ross introduced a bill in July that would accelerate the destruction of the USPS and put all of its employees, hundreds of thousands of good Americans, out of work.
Fuck Darrell Issa and fuck Dennis Ross! Fuck 'em until their ancestors rise from the dead and beg forgiveness for ever having sired the malevolent little bastards.
(68) 8-19-2011: Hey, look! Good old Darrell Issa, Republican, has hired a guy named Peter Haller to help effect new regulations for banks, like Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately, Mr. Heller used to be called Peter Simonyi when he was a vice president for (wait for it) Goldman Sachs. Oh, you can bet you boots there's nothing underhanded about hiding behind another name. Not a thing. Nada. Zip. Zero.
(69) 8-22-2011: The GOP has a new job-creation plan... to have one rammed down their throats. You see, the Democrats want to include a job-creation trigger in the new Super Committee that will require the Republican Party to vote either for or against it. To vote against it would be, uhhh, dumb but I wouldn't put anything past our little conservative pals. Stay tuned.
(70) 8-24-2011: The GOP has been quiet on the job front lately so I have a request of Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry...
Re-invest in your porno companies, Rick.
It doesn't have to be a large investment but at the very least you'd put a few porn stars back on the cock, uh, I mean clock. Heck, if you're lucky they might even name a new position after you, one that no doubt involves the same anal lube that keeps your hair in place.
(71) 8-26-2011: Hey! It's our old pal Darrell Issa again, and he's hired a very nice man named Kurt Bardella to work for him on the Oversight Committee... only it's the same Kurt Bardella he fired five months ago for breach of trust. Guess this leopard found some really effective spot remover.
(72) 8-29-2011: Suppose you have a job but you need help with your mortgage. There's still $30 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program but the GOP wants to re-route that money to the federal deficit. This means more people will lose their homes and perhaps become homeless. Eventually jobless. Nice work, GOP.
(73) 8-31-2011: When the GOP returns from vacation they plan on voting every week to gut every government regulation within arm's reach because, you know, "regulation costs jobs". What they refuse to acknowledge is that regulation has been proven to actually create jobs.
(74) 9-2-2011: After unbridled "success" wrecking the economy once again with their "debt-ceiling" stunt House and Senate Republicans are starting to mumble about stalling the upcoming Highway Bill, costing Americans almost 2 million jobs. (These bills have traditionally been passed by overwhelming margins.)
(75) 9-3-2011: A recent CNN poll reveals that those who self-identify as Republicans would rather the president focus on jobs, not the deficit, by a margin of 54%-44%. So why has the Republican Party not proposed one, single jobs bill in nine months?
Because they're not Republicans! They're shills for their corporate masters who they can't WAIT to get another Republican stooge in the White House so they can screw the American people all over again like they did from 2001-2009.
(76) 9-5-2011: The GOP is on a Labor Day break, which is sort of like atheists enjoying Christmas services with the Pope, so not much in terms of job creation is happening. For now, we'll just have to thank presidential candidate Mitt "Magic Underpants" Romney for hiring all of the workers who will be laboring to quadruple the size of his California beachfront mansion.
(77) 9-6-2011: Michelle Bachmann has a brilliant new answer for lots of high-paying jobs... slash the corporate tax rate to zero.... except corporate America is already paying an effective rate of zero. Even so, job creation is down the dumper. Back to the Etch-A-Sketch, Michelle.
(78) 9-8-2011: Presidential candidates Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Herman Cain have just announced their jobs programs. It's tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, and tax cuts for the rich. Why didn't we think of this before?
(79) 9-9-2011: Rick Perry wants to kill Social Security. He also wants to eliminate the FDA, the FCC, the U.S. Post Office and just about all other federal employees except the military, the Supreme Court and himself. It's kind of a jobs plan if you long for 12th century feudalism.
(80) 9-11-2011: On Friday President Obama outlined a job's plan that is seen by economists as win-win. The Republican response to the program is to whine about it.
(81) 9-12-2011: Not much governance today so I think I'll just make a little comparison... which two types of professions do you think result in more jobs? Wall Street commodity speculators, or educators? And which group do you think the GOP is doing its darndest to reduce in numbers?
(82) 9-14-2011: I gotta hand it to the GOP. In this bleak economy they've found a way to increase jobs... in hospital emergency rooms. What they're doing is trying to cut funding in the transportation bill for bike paths and pedestrian walkways, thus ensuring more mayhem on our streets and guaranteed employment for EMT workers. It's pure gee-nyuss I tells ya!
(83) 9-15-2011: Today the GOP-led House passed a bill that would make it easier to fire union workers, union organizers, or simply move jobs overseas in order to bust a union. In essence, an anti-jobs bill.
(84) 9-16-2011: The government has provided loans that help the auto industry create jobs, loans that helped keep the assembly of the Ford Focus and the Nissan Leaf right here on American soil. Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor plans to strip half that money to repair damage from Hurricane Irene... in HIS district.
(85) 9-16-2011: President Obama is trying to fast track job creation for a company called LightSquared and Republicans are pissed, evidently because the owner of the company had the audacity to donate to the Democratic Party. He, uh, ahem, also donated equally to the Republican Party.
(86) 9-19-2011: Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor is back with a pithy statement about Mr. Obama's jobs bill: "While an all or nothing approach might make sense to some communicators, I hope the President realizes it would be better to work together." This from a man whose stated job it is to say, and I quote, "No" to anything the president proposes. I hope he gets a painful boil on his uvula.
(87) 9-21-2011: The leaders of the Republican Party just sent a letter to the Federal Reserve saying "Keep unemployment high." Honestly, the letter says, in essence, "Hey, those guys out there in the ocean are drowning. Hide the life-preservers."
(88) 9-23-2011: Look! It's Darrell Issa, Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, creating jobs. He's stumping for a huge loan package on behalf of a company, Aptera, which makes electric cars. This is great news, especially for the green economy, although I wonder if Mr. Issa would be so ecstatic if the company in question wasn't a major contributor to his campaigns.
Oops.
One more thing... the day after sending the glowing recommendation to the Energy Department Mr. Issa conducted a hearing entitled "How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs." Double-oops.
(89) 9-26-2011: The GOP is being suspiciously quiet so I want to take this opportunity to show you just how badly the Bush administration fucked-over the American people. Here's a chart of the GNP for this country over the past 60 years:
See that massive drop in 2008, the only drop in over 60 years? That's the Bush administration shedding jobs in this country hand over fist, just so the GOP could have the corporate-owned media blame Mr. Obama.
As you can see the GNP has recovered and business in this country is doing fine but they're not hiring and they're not going to hire until Mr. Obama is gone. It's not enough for the Koch's of this world to reap absurd profits. They want it all.
(91) 9-30-2011: Here's a novel way that the GOP creates fewer jobs; Refusing to appoint federal judges. Only 62% of Mr. Obama's choice of judges (A record glacial pace) have been approved so far and some have had to undergo the process for over a year. As far as the GOP is concerned, the only good activist judge is a Republican-appointed activist judge.
(92) 10-3-2011: Does it come as a surprise to anyone that the GOP is trying to slash job-training programs?
(93) 10-5-2011: Today was the day the president's jobs' bill was introduced. It was blocked by not one, not two, but three parliamentary roadblocks by the GOP. They, of course, have the right to do that but the least the little bastards could do is create a jobs plan of their own as a counter-move. But they can't do that as it would expose them for the progress-blocking charlatans they are.
(94) 10-7-2011: The Republicans are thumping their chests in response to the President's jobs bill, hooting about the six jobs creation bills that they've passed and which are currently stalled in the Senate. But, y'see, there's good reason for them to be stalled. As in, they don't create jobs.
(95) 10-10-2011: Here is what the GOP is trying to get you to believe: As long as the country continues to shed jobs it will eventually create jobs.
The GOP isn't really that stupid and they don't think the public is really that stupid, they're just not going to do anything that might help the economy.
(96) 10-12-2011: Hey! Look at that! The GOP voted down President Obama's jobs bill. Good thing they had another jobs bill of their own ready to.... Oh, they didn't? Really? What a shock.
(97) 10-14-2011: The GOP wasted the day voting on a redundant anti-abortion bill that would doom pregnant women to a horrible death. They took this purely symbolic vote just to waste more time.
On the bright side, the GOP unveiled a jobs bills... if by "jobs" you mean destroying the environment, excising unions, off-shoring jobs, and making the rich even richer. This bill, according to many, would actually result in the loss of existing jobs.
I don't like imagery to get in the way of facts on this site but the following comic by Matt Bors was too beautifully on-target to keep to myself.
(98) 10-17-2011: Amtrak, for all its faults, carried a record number of riders last year, indicating an undeniable need for its service. Naturally, the GOP wants to cut its funding off at the knees, possibly resulting in killing it altogether. But who cares, right? Rich people don't ride public transportation.
(99) 10-19-2011: The House is on vacation this week so the Tea Party Nation is rising to the challenge of job-creation by, uh, demanding that businesses stop hiring. In their constipated little minds they feel that this will teach President Obama a lesson for being a socialist, or a dictator, or.... something.
(100) 10-21-2011: The Washington Post is firmly in the Conservative pocket but even they came right out and called the Republican jobs bill "ludicrous" today. Oh, snap!
(101) 10-24-2011: The GOP is still on vacation but that doesn't stop Republican congressman Paul Ryan from rolling up his sleeves and trying to cut Pell Grants. He thinks they're a scam even though he himself used government money to put himself through college. Thanks a heap, ya hypocrite.
(102) 10-31-2011: A new report revels that GOP "job-creating" spending cuts resulted in the loss of 370,000 jobs. Gosh, who'd-a-thunk?
(103) 11-2-2011: According to the AP the Republican jobs plan would create no jobs.
So what does the GOP spend the day doing? They voted to reaffirm that "In God We Trust" is the national motto, just in case someone missed the point that they no longer give a crap about doing anything useful.
(104) 11-4-2011: Yay! It's a GOP jobs bill! No, wait... sorry, they're just deregulating securities and calling it a jobs bill. My mistake.
(105) 11-7-2011: While the GOP stood around with their thumbs up their rumps the Democrats introduced an unemployment extension bill.
(106) 11-9-2011: One of the first things the GOP did after gaining the House after the 2010 mid-terms was change the schedule so that they'd work fewer days, only 109 days the entire year. The average sucker (That's you!) works 258 days a year. The House will be in session only 16 more days the rest of the year. Now you know why nothing gets done.
(107) 11-11-2011: The so-called "Super Committee" is supposed to be trying to find ways to cut the deficit, but the Republicans on the Committee are only interested in making the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would only hurt the economy. Nice going, ya pinheads.
(108) 11-14-2011: The House and Senate are on hiatus but presidential candidates Gingrich, Bachmann, and Perry want to, respectively, start a war against Iran, make America like China, and turn nuclear regulation over to the equivalent of McDonalds.
(109) 11-16-2011: The House is wasting your time pushing a bill that makes it even easier for people to carry concealed weapons from state-to-state. Can you say "Raw-Meat-Dog- Whistle?". Can you also say "Gabrielle Giffords?"
(110) 11-18-2011: The House is once again considering the "Balanced Budget Amendment", which sounds almost reasonable until you learn it could cost millions of jobs. Oy vey.
(111) 11-21-2011: The Republican half of the Supercommittee refuses to give up the Bush tax cuts. As long as the 1% keeps raking in the dough everyone else will suffer, and the rich just LOVE that.
(112) 11-23-2011: Though Newt Gingrich couldn't be elected dog-catcher, much less Chief Executive, he's shedding light on the next Great Frontier in GOP job creation... child labor. Yes, according to dear old Newt the little bastards have had it too easy all these years. That's nuclear class-warfare, folks.
(113) 11-25-2011: Rick Santorum, candidate for president, succinctly reminds us why the GOP isn't interested in creating jobs. It's because poor people are supposed to suffer, and making people suffer is the Christian thing to do.
(114) 11-28-2011: Thanksgiving holiday. Lots of football and turkey, not so much job-creation. See you Wednesday, amigos.
(115) 11-30-2011: The House did nothing today except postpone votes on suspension bills. Atta boy, GOP!
(116) 12-2-2011: The GOP just killed the payroll tax roll-back, which means they just raised taxes on anyone who gets a paycheck. This also means more money out of the pockets of the Average Joe and fewer jobs as there's less money to go around. I'll bet Speaker Boehner is just crying his eyes out.
(117) 12-5-2011: The GOP's idea to pay for the payroll tax cut is to cut food stamps and unemployment benefits, pitching it as a way to punish people who make over a million dollars. I kid you not.
(118) 12-7-2011: The GOP is wasting time gearing-up to oppose the nomination of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even though Mr. Cordray will probably be appointed during congressional recess.
(119) 12-9-2011: The U.S. Postal Service is going to cut 28,000 jobs because the Republican Party passed a law in 2006 requiring the PO to fund 75 years of retiree benefits in just ten years.
Fuck you, GOP, and damn you to Hell.
(120) 12-12-2011: Nearly 15% of workers are projected to be unemployed at some point in 2012. Way to keep that laser-like focus on jobs, GOP.
(121) 12-14-2011: The House spent the day passing a payroll tax-cut extension bill which, because it's packed to the gills with poison pills, has no chance of escaping the Senate alive. The little bastards knew it and passed the bill anyway just so they can say the Democrats vetoed a payroll tax-cut bill.
(122) 12-16-2011: Today the House wasted time debating the excremental SOPA bill, but it was ultimately tabled until the 16th of January. Call your congressman now and demand he oppose this wretched bit of legislation.
(123) 12-19-2011: The GOP is getting the hell out of Dodge for the holidays, but a quick accounting of their first year in charge of the House reveals they voted a record 191 times against environmental protection laws. That's almost one vote for every day they were in session. Yuck!
(124) 12-21-2011: Today the House leadership rejected without vote a Payroll Tax Cut bill that the Senate and House would have overwhelmingly voted for. If you need any further proof that the only thing the GOP cares about is how badly it can ruin the economy, this is it.
Wow. Just... wow.
Addendum: House Democrats today tried to force an up-or-down vote on the Payroll Tax bill but the Republican Speaker Pro-Temp ignored them. When Democrats protested John Boehner had C-SPAN cut the video and audio feed of the proceedings. Video can be seen here.
Double Wow.
(125) 12-25-2011: Our government is in recess for the holidays but stay tuned for Republican Job Creation Watch 2012. In the meantime, please be sure and share this site with your Twitter and Facebook pals.
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Sorry. No job creation here. In fact, if you want to really understand what the Republican Party is trying to tell you simply insert the phrase "corporate profits" every time they say "jobs".
I'll keep adding to this list until the Republican House does something to create jobs but I unhappily predict this is gonna be one lonnnnng list. After all, you don't get rid of a sitting president by helping the economy.
Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay
"People with college degrees still get jobs with better pay and benefits than those without, but many recent college graduates are finding it hard to land the kinds of jobs they had envisioned. David Thande, 27, who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, five years ago, works part time as a clerk in an Apple Store.
“I’m not even full time, so I spend about 45 minutes every day begging people for hours, checking if someone canceled, struggling to make it work,” Mr. Thande said, adding that he had fallen behind on paying back his student loans [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/student_loans/index.html ]." .. the above is an excerpt from your 4th block down .. below expands on it ..
Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay
Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency
Apple stores are renowned for design, service and revenues.
“I was earning $11.25 an hour,” he said. “Part of me was thinking, ‘This is great. I’m an Apple fan, the store is doing really well.’ But when you look at the amount of money the company is making and then you look at your paycheck, it’s kind of tough.”
America’s love affair with the smartphone has helped create tens of thousands of jobs at places like Best Buy and Verizon Wireless and will this year pump billions into the economy.
Within this world, the Apple Store is the undisputed king, a retail phenomenon renowned for impeccable design, deft service and spectacular revenues. Last year, the company’s 327 global stores took in more money per square foot than any other United States retailer — wireless or otherwise — and almost double that of Tiffany, which was No. 2 on the list, according to the research firm RetailSails.
Worldwide, its stores sold $16 billion in merchandise.
But most of Apple’s employees enjoyed little of that wealth. While consumers tend to think of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., as the company’s heart and soul, a majority of its workers in the United States are not engineers or executives with hefty salaries and bonuses but rather hourly wage earners selling iPhones and MacBooks.
About 30,000 of the 43,000 Apple employees in this country work in Apple Stores, as members of the service economy, and many of them earn about $25,000 a year. They work inside the world’s fastest growing industry, for the most valuable company, run by one of the country’s most richly compensated chief executives, Tim Cook. Last year, he received stock grants, which vest over a 10-year period, that at today’s share price would be worth more than $570 million.
And though Apple is unparalleled as a retailer, when it comes to its lowliest workers, the company is a reflection of the technology industry as a whole.
The Internet and advances in computing have created untold millionaires, but most of the jobs created by technology giants are service sector positions — sales employees and customer service representatives, repairmen and delivery drivers — that offer little of Silicon Valley’s riches or glamour.
Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas, but only 8 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job growth has for decades been led by service-related work, and any recovery with real legs, labor experts say, will be powered and sustained by this segment of the economy.
And as the service sector has grown, the definition of a career has been reframed for millions of American workers.
“In the service sector, companies provide a little bit of training and hope their employees leave after a few years,” says Arne L. Kalleberg, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. “Especially now, given the number of college kids willing to work for low wages.”
By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) .. http://topics.nytimes.com/your-money/retirement/401ks-and-similar-plans/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier .. contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.
But Apple is not selling polo shirts or yoga pants. Divide revenue by total number of employees and you find that last year, each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.
“These are sales rates for a consulting company,” said Horace Dediu, an analyst who blogged about the calculation .. http://www.asymco.com/2011/12/08/how-productive-is-an-apple-store-employee/ .. on the site Asymco. Electronics and appliance stores typically post $206,000 in revenue per employee, according to the latest figures from the National Retail Federation.
Even Apple, it seems, has recently decided it needs to pay its workers more. Last week, four months after The New York Times first began inquiring about the wages of its store employees, the company started to inform some staff members that they would receive substantial raises. An Apple spokesman confirmed the raises but would not discuss their size, timing or impetus, nor who would earn them.
But Cory Moll, a salesman in the San Francisco flagship store and a vocal labor activist, said that on Tuesday he was given a raise of $2.82 an hour, to $17.31, an increase of 19.5 percent and a big jump compared with the 49-cent raise he was given last year.
“My manager called me into his office and said, ‘Apple wants to show that it cares about its workers, and show that it knows how much value you add to the company, by offering a bigger raise than in previous years,’ ” Mr. Moll recalled.
Though a significant increase, Mr. Moll’s new salary of about $36,000 puts him on the low side of the wage scale at the other large sellers of Apple products, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, both of which offer commissions to sales staff at their stores.
In other areas, Apple has been a leader. Stores in a variety of fields have adopted the company’s retail techniques, like the use of roving credit-card swipers to minimize checkout lines, as well as the petting-zoo layout that encourages customers to test-drive products.
But Apple’s success, it turns out, rests on a set of intangibles; foremost among them is a built-in fan base that ensures a steady supply of eager applicants and an employee culture that tries to turn every job into an exalted mission.
This is why Apple can do something unique in the annals of retailing: pay a modest hourly wage, and no commission, to employees who typically have college degrees and who at the highest performing levels can move as much as $3 million in goods a year.
“When you’re working for Apple you feel like you’re working for this greater good,” says a former salesman who asked for anonymity because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. “That’s why they don’t have a revolution on their hands.”
These true believers skew young, as anyone who has ever set foot in an Apple Store knows. And the relative youth of this work force helps explain why people are likely to judge the company by a different set of standards when it comes to wages, says Paul Osterman, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.
“It’s interesting to ask why we find it offensive that Wal-Mart pays a single mother $9 an hour, but we don’t find it offensive that Apple pays a young man $12 an hour,” Mr. Osterman said. “For each company, the logic is the same — there is a line of people eager to take the job. In effect, we’re saying that our value judgments depend on the circumstances of the employee, not just supply and demand of the labor market.”
Managers often tell new workers that they hope to get six years of service, former employees say. “That was what we heard all the time,” says Shane Garcia, a former Apple Store manager in Chicago. “Six years.” But the average tenure is two and a half years, says a person familiar with the company’s retention numbers, and as foot traffic has increased, turnover rates in many stores have increased, too. Internal surveys at stores have also found surprising dissatisfaction levels, particularly among technicians, or “geniuses” in Apple’s parlance, who work at what is called the Genius Bar. Apple declined requests for interviews for this article. Instead, the company issued a statement:
“Thousands of incredibly talented professionals work behind the Genius Bar and deliver the best customer service in the world. The annual retention rate for Geniuses is almost 90%, which is unheard-of in the retail industry, and shows how passionate they are about their customers and their careers at Apple.”
That 90 percent figure sounds accurate to Mr. Garcia, who quit last July after four years with the company, overwhelmed by the work and unable to mollify employees and customers alike. Plenty of technicians do, in fact, like their jobs, which vary around the country, and which pay in the range of $40,000 a year in the Chicago area. Many technicians, though, wanted to leave but were unable to find equivalent work, according to Mr. Garcia and other former managers, in part because of the weak economy.
The problem for Apple Store employees, they said, wasn’t just the pace. It was the lack of upward mobility. There are only a handful of different jobs at Apple Stores and the most prestigious are invariably sought after by dozens of candidates. And a leap to the company headquarters is highly unusual.
Apple prohibits its staff from talking to the media, but several former employees who spoke for this article said they had fond memories of their jobs, and regarded them as ideal for people in their early 20s who aren’t ready for a full-on dive into the white-collar world.
And “Apple” can be a strong credential to have on a résumé, these people said. Technicians often move on to higher-paying jobs in information technology, they said, and sales staff have a leg up on the competition if they stay in retailing because “people know how grueling the job is,” as one former manager put it.
But other former employees have struggled to find work, or have moved into lateral jobs at other companies. And even those who used Apple as a launching pad described a gradual evolution, from team player to skeptic, as they discovered that there was a gap between what the job appeared to be (kind of hip) and what it was (frenetic and in many cases a dead end).
Kelly Jackson, who was a technician at an Apple Store in Chicago, was thrilled when she was hired two years ago. But she said she was even happier when she quit a year later, having found the work too relentless and the satisfactions too elusive.
“When somebody left, you’d be really excited for them,” says Ms. Jackson, who now works at Groupon. “It was sort of like, ‘Congratulations. You’ve done what everyone here wants to do.’ ”
Recruiting the Devoted
Skeptics outnumbered believers when Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief, pitched the Apple Store concept to his board in 2000. Ultimately, approval was given for just four stores.
Mr. Jobs hired a Target executive named Ron Johnson to help design and oversee the stores. He in turn hired eight people, one of whom was Denyelle Bruno, then an executive at Macy’s West. When she was first approached, she said, she was told next to nothing about the work.
That did not daunt Ms. Bruno, now an executive at Peet’s Coffee.
“I had grown up using Macs, and if it involved Apple and I could be involved,” she said, “it made me feel important.”
Ms. Bruno was one of the first hard-core Apple fans hired for the nascent chain. Many others would follow, and part of her job was to help recruit them. Initially, that involved walking into stores, including those operated by Sprint and AT&T, and scouting out promising employees.
Such solicitations were unnecessary after the first two stores opened, on May 19, 2001, in McLean, Va., and Glendale, Calif. Soon, so many people wanted to work at the stores that Mr. Johnson would compare applicants-to-openings ratios and boast that it was harder to land a job at an Apple Store than to get into Stanford, his alma mater.
Those applicants have for years submitted résumés through the company’s site. The time-intensive part, former managers say, is finding the right people amid the pile, and the candidates of choice are affable and self-directed rather than tech-savvy. (The latter can be taught, is the theory, while the former is innate.) The vetting has not changed much. It often starts with an invitation to a seminar, held in a conference room at a hotel.
The culling begins before the seminar starts.
“They turn away people who are three minutes late,” says Graham Marley, who attended his seminar in a hotel in Dedham, Mass., in 2009. “My dream my whole life was to work for Apple and suddenly, you can,” he said. “You’ve always been an evangelist for Apple and now you can get paid for it.”
One manager said it was common for people offered jobs to burst into tears. But if the newly hired arrive as devotees, Apple’s training course, which can range from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the job and locale, turns them into disciples.
Training commences with what is known as a “warm welcome.” As new employees enter the room, Apple managers and trainers give them a standing ovation. The clapping often bewilders the trainees, at least at first, but when the applause goes on for several lengthy minutes they eventually join in.
“My hands would sting from all the clapping,” says Michael Dow, who trained Apple employees for years in Providence, R.I.
There is more role-playing at Core training, as it’s known, this time with pointers on the elaborate etiquette of interacting with customers. One rule: ask for permission before touching anyone’s iPhone.
“And we told trainees that the first thing they needed to do was acknowledge the problem, though don’t promise you can fix the problem,” said Shane Garcia, the one-time Chicago manager. “If you can, let them know that you have felt some of the emotions they are feeling. But you have to be careful because you don’t want to lie about that.”
The phrase that trainees hear time and again, which echoes once they arrive at the stores, is “enriching people’s lives.” The idea is to instill in employees the notion that they are doing something far grander than just selling or fixing products. If there is a secret to Apple’s sauce, this is it: the company ennobles employees. It understands that a lot of people will forgo money if they have a sense of higher purpose.
That empowerment is important because aspiring sales employees would clearly be better off working at one of the country’s other big sellers of Apple products, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, if they were searching for a hefty paycheck. Both offer sales commissions.
“It’s not at all common but there are sales agents at Verizon who earn six figures,” says Jonathan Jarboe, who managed Verizon Wireless stores in Oklahoma until last summer. Several former Verizon Wireless managers said that annual pay ran from $35,000 up to $100,000 in rare cases, with the sweet spot in the $50,000 to $60,000 range.
At Apple, the decision not to offer commissions was made, Ms. Bruno said, before a store had opened. The idea was that such incentives would work against the company’s primary goals — finding customers the right products, rather than the most expensive ones, and establishing long-term rapport with the brand. Commissions, it was also thought, would foster employee competition, which would undermine camaraderie.
Tellingly, Apple doesn’t use the word “sales” to describe members of its sales team. They’re called “specialists.”
By minimizing the profit motive among employees, Apple does more than just filter out people interested primarily in money. It also reduces the number of middle-aged and older people on the payroll, said former managers. This isn’t about age discrimination, they said, so much as self-selection. Generally, an Apple employee is someone who can afford to live cheaply, is not bothered by the nonstop commotion of an Apple Store and is comfortable with technology.
People who fit that bill tend to be in their early or mid-20s, the former managers said. They typically don’t have children and many don’t have spouses, which means they are relatively inexpensive to cover with health insurance.
There is no shortage of college graduates eager to dedicate themselves to Apple’s vision, on Apple’s terms. That includes people like Asher Perlman, another former technician from a store in Chicago, who joined Apple three years ago, when he was 22.
“I’m happy with my time at Apple and where it landed me,” says Mr. Perlman, who now works in information technology. “I wouldn’t recommend it for my 35-year-old friend with a kid, but it works for someone who is 22 years old and doesn’t want to enter the business world yet.”
When Work Piles Up
The iPhone, which arrived in 2007, brought unprecedented crowds to Apple Stores. The company tried to hang on to its culture, but naturally it changed, and in many ways, say some former employees, for the worse.
Arthur Zarate, who joined Apple in 2004 and later worked as a technician at the store in Mission Viejo, Calif., says his training left him with a sense of ownership and pride. For a while, he loved the job, in large part because it delivered the simple and gratifying sense that he was helping people. There were time constraints on technicians — 20 minutes per customer — but because the store was rarely swamped, he usually had more time than that.
“My customers knew me by name,” he said. “That was a big deal.”
He had already begun to sour on the job when in 2007, he said, his store began an attendance system whereby employees accumulated a point for every day they did not come to work; anyone with four points in a 90-day period was at risk of termination.
“It was a perfectly good idea, but the thing that was terrible is that it didn’t matter why you couldn’t come to work,” Mr. Zarate said. “Even if you had a doctor document some medical condition, if you didn’t come to work, you got a point.”
Mr. Zarate, a former heavy smoker, said he was once out for two and a half weeks with severe bronchitis and was on the verge of dismissal when he e-mailed Ron Johnson, then the retail chief, who intervened on his behalf.
“I just wrote and said, ‘This isn’t fair. They don’t look at why you were out,’ ” he recalls. “And he saved my job.”
To meet the growing demand for the technicians, several former employees said their stores imposed new rules limiting on-the-spot repairs to 15 minutes for a computer-related problem, and 10 minutes for Apple’s assortment of devices. If a solution took longer to find, which it frequently did, a pileup ensued and a scrum of customers would hover. It wasn’t unusual for a genius to help three customers at once.
Because of the constant backlog, technicians often worked nonstop through their shift, instead of taking two allotted 15-minute breaks. In 2009, Matthew Bainer, a lawyer, filed a class action alleging that Apple was breaking California labor laws.
“State law mandates two 10-minute breaks a day,” Mr. Bainer said. “But geniuses had these lengthy queues of customers that made it all but impossible for them to stop even for a few minutes.”
The lawsuit was denied class certification in June of last year. Mr. Bainer pursued the matter in separate lawsuits and achieved what he described as “very favorable settlements” for 10 plaintiffs.
Not long after the class-action lawsuit was filed, a technician named Kevin Timmer who worked at the Woodland Mall store in Grand Rapids, Mich., noticed an added step when he logged onto a computer to punch out of work.
“This window popped up and it said something like, ‘By clicking this box I acknowledge that I received all my breaks,’ ” Mr. Timmer recalled. “The rumor was that was because some guy in California had sued.”
Mr. Timmer said he and other technicians in the store clicked the box even when they didn’t take any breaks. It wasn’t because management insisted they stick around. It was that any down time would slam already overburdened colleagues with even more work.
“We were all in the trenches together,” he said. “Nobody wanted to leave.”
With time limits, several former employees said, came another change at their stores. Technicians had always been able to spend a few hours of their shift in the repair room, providing a little away-from-customers time. In many stores, that ended. Walk-in demand for tech help was so great that when the bar was open, management at these stores decreed, it was to be staffed by any technician in the building. Repairs that could not be done at the bar would wait. As a result, the late shift in the repair room at these stores ended not at 10 p.m., but at midnight.
The pressure didn’t faze everyone. Multitasking, for instance, did not bother Asher Perlman.
“I’m a low stress kind of person to begin with and I didn’t find it unmanageable,” he said. “I know others did.”
As the crowds grew, the company’s “thank you” gestures started to seem a little tin-eared. Jordan Golson, who now blogs at MacRumors, .. http://www.macrumors.com/ .. a site that keeps tabs on all things Apple, said that for Christmas 2010, he and others at the store were given a fleece blanket and an insulated coffee thermos.
Mr. Zarate fared no better at one quarterly meeting for employees. Mr. Johnson made a videotaped appearance and referred to a wonderful surprise that managers were about to spring on everyone in the room. Free iPads for everyone was the expectation.“Then the lights went down, and we had a party in the store, with games and dancing,” Mr. Zarate said. “And we all got two tacos from a taco truck. That was our surprise. Two tacos.”
Rising to the Top
Like many who spoke for this article, Shane Garcia, the former Chicago manager, talked about Apple with a bittersweet mix of admiration and sadness. When he joined the company in 2007, he considered it a place, as he said, that “wanted you to be the best you could be in life, not just in sales.”
Three years later, his work life seemed tense and thankless. He had little expectation that upper management would praise or even notice his efforts.
Sales employees, Mr. Garcia and others noted, deal with stresses all their own. Though commissions are not offered, many managers keep close tabs on sales of warranties, known as Apple Care, and One to One, which is personal tutoring for a fee. Employees often had goals for “attachments” as these add-ons are called — 40 percent of certain products should include One to One, and 65 percent should include Apple Care.
For a sales employee who wanted to climb Apple’s in-store ladder — to technician or manager, for instance — those numbers were important. And in terms of keeping employees invested and striving, so were the rungs on that ladder, something that is true across retailing.
“There was always something being dangled in terms of different positions,” says Danielle Draper, a former manager at a store in Hingham, Mass. “‘You’ll need to do this if you want to become a creative,’ that kind of thing. There was never perfection. You could always tell someone they needed to work on something.”
At some point, employees either realize they won’t rise, or rise as high as they can.
“The disillusionment settles in not because of pay,” says Graham Marley, the former part-time salesman, “though pay is part of it. What happens is you realize that they want you to spend years there, but there is no actual career path.”
An exception is the job of manager, and Apple is often diligent about elevating from within its ranks of high achievers. Though not always. After the great influx that started with the iPhone, the company started plucking managers from stores like the Gap and Banana Republic. From employees who were around in the pre-2007 era, you can hear occasional laments about the gradual “Gapification of Apple.”
In recent years, the level of unhappiness at some stores was captured by an employee satisfaction survey known in the company as NetPromoter for Our People. It’s a variation of a questionnaire that Apple has long given to customers, and the key question asks employees to rate, on a scale of one to 10, “How likely are you to recommend working at your Apple Retail Store to an interested friend or family member?” Anyone who offers a nine or 10 is considered a “promoter.” Anyone who offers a seven or below is considered a “detractor.”
Kevin Timmer said the internal survey results last year at the Grand Rapids store were loaded with fives and sixes.
“We discussed it in a monthly meeting and our manager had tears in her eyes,” Mr. Timmer recalled. “She said something about how humbling these results were, that they want to fix any problems, that her door is always open, and so on.”
Similar figures were found in Chicago.
“By then,” Mr. Garcia said, “it wasn’t a surprise to upper management because it was clear that many geniuses wanted to leave. There was a ceiling. It wasn’t a glass ceiling because everyone could see it.”
Mr. Garcia would eventually quit Apple, and walk away from a job that paid a little more than $40,000 a year, when stress-related health issues sidelined him long enough to put his job at risk. He had no doubts that the company would easily find a replacement.
“There was never a shortage of résumés,” he said. “People will always want to work for Apple.”
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