Have We Seen the End of the 8-Hour Day?

Nathan Schneider on April 22, 2015 - 3:34PM ET

A glance across the exhibit halls of the National Retail Federation's annual conference gives little indication that this sector is the country's largest employer. Inside the glass-walled Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Midtown Manhattan, the human fray shuffles beneath a skyline of towering displays that compete with one another to present the most alluring glimpse of a spotless, angular, automated future. They announce countless machines for point of sale, for payments, for disembodied experience. Mixed among them, one slowly begins to notice, is trace evidence of actual retail workers—for instance, a "gamified" console "to help sales associates personalize in-store shopper interaction." Another display summarizes the prevailing ambition: "Sell more…manage less."

Somewhere on that floor this past January, Carrie Gleason was rapt in conversation with a salesman from Workplace, a British firm whose software allows managers to optimize workers' shifts hour by hour for maximum profit. She plied him with detailed questions, discovering in the process that the software can schedule only four weeks ahead, and that it really works best day-to-day. He walked her through both the worker-facing mobile version and the managers' back end. When he tried to seal some kind of deal, Gleason explained a bit about the nature of her interest—without exactly volunteering the fact that she happens to be a labor organizer.