"It Just Requires Listening to Workers"

"In France and Germany, the retail industry offers living-wage union jobs, with stable schedules and comprehensive training programs—not because their bosses are saints, but because they apply a business model that prioritizes job quality above maximizing hours and cutting costs.                                                                                                                                       "In the United States, big corporate retailers treat employees as disposable, interchangeable widgets, and pay accordingly cheap wages. Degrading the real value of their labor pushes the workforce into a precarious cycle of economic insecurity, as well as high turnover, which is costly and unproductive for the company. European retail sectors, however, manage to avoid this cyclical exploitation, through business models and industrial policy that see a business's value as a function of how much it invests in cultivating a productive, content workforce."

At The Nation, Michelle Chen argues that "a workplace is only as good for workers as the politics of the community surrounding it."