Between the Economy, Massive Understaffing and Spiking Crime, Frontline Workers Are Still Getting Screwed

Just three years since the pandemic struck, frontline workers are facing a whole different basket of challenges —not just to their livelihoods but to their very lives.

Economic uncertainties, combined with a national spike in crime and ongoing labor shortages, are creating a recipe for disaster for public-facing workers — who were hailed as heroes not all that long ago but who, let’s face it, have always got, and continue to get, the short end of the stick.

Bottom line, employers are struggling mightily to hire people who have to interact with the public—the biggest reason being that prospective employees are scared out of their wits about managing hostile, even violent situations with the more unrestrained elements of what we quaintly refer to as “society.”

New data from Axonify, a frontline enablement platform out of Warterloo, Ontario, reveals that many frontline workers, across industries including retail, grocery and banking, feel they lack proper training to handle the most loaded situations. According to the report, based on a survey of 1,500 frontline workers in the U.S. during the month of April:

• Frontline workers fear going into work. Increased theft and customer violence has left retail and supermarket employees (40%) and finance workers (37%) scared to go into their places of employment.
• Their mental health is suffering. Four in 10 financial workers say seeing an increase in customers who show strong emotions and distress because of challenging financial situations has impacted their mental health, while more than half (55%) don’t think their employers are taking their well-being, including their mental health, into consideration.
• They want better training. Frontline finance workers (23%) and retail workers (21%) don’t think their employers give them the right tools and guidance to effectively manage tense situations with customers. That has led more than one-third (39%) of finance workers to feel less productive and more drained.

Remember when frontline workers—many of them making minimum wage, or close to it—got hazard pay, as Covid-19 rates soared and everybody feared for their lives—but not so much that it stopped them from going through the McDonald’s drive-thru? Well, that’s a workplace benefit that’s largely vanished, even though we are not fully out of the woods dealing with this pandemic, people are still dying, and frontline workers are literally begging for their lives.

So, dear frontline employees, the next time somebody calls you a “hero,” beware. And don’t get too used to being treated like one.