Today Macy’s went over their Reliability Program proposal in-depth and presented their healthcare proposals. 

• The Reliability Program would radically change the attendance system, so we asked a lot of questions. While are still assessing it, the answers to our questions were troubling. The biggest issues we have are:

• With no attendance credits, Macy’s said they can terminate employees based on “a pattern” of being “unreliable.”

• Managers have the sole power to approve or disapprove “occurrences” that negatively effect your “reliability percentage”. There is no appeal to change a negative to a positive.

• That means that you could actually be penalized for staying late and coming-in on an off day at a manager’s request, if they don’t agree with your dispute of the occurrence.

• The Reliability score is based on a percentage of the hours you work, so part-time employees are penalized more than full-time employees for the same occurrence.

There is too much to explain in this update, which is why you should come to our next set of bargaining update meetings (see below), to get the full details. We want to hear from you what your thoughts are.

Macy’s Makes Healthcare Proposals 

Macy’s has finally put some economic proposals on the table for our healthcare, but still no wage proposals. We asked lots of questions about their proposals and are expecting to get some answers back; but we can’t make any decisions on healthcare proposals, till we know what they are proposing for wages and other economic parts of the contract.  Our wage proposals are on the table, and so we look forward to hearing theirs at our next session on June 1.

“At first glance this Reliability Program doesn’t seem to benefit us much at all. The parts Macy’s sees as positive don’t outweigh the negatives by a longshot.” 

– Emily Hunter, Alderwood Support Staff