Week 11 — Above the Floor: A Bookshop Prices Its First Hire — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — plan a job, price a hire, and weigh the legal floor on pay against what is fair.

This week you learned how a business plans, finds, hires, trains, evaluates, and pays its people; how a hiring plan prices a position; how the Fair Labor Standards Act sets a federal floor on pay; how ethics asks what is fair above that floor; how workers bargain as a group; and how the federal employment laws line up by year. In this assignment you plan one small bookshop's first hire, price it, weigh the wage against the federal floor, and explain the idea to someone who has never studied business. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Business Case Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The case is illustrative, built for this course and not real data. A small neighborhood bookshop is hiring its first part-time clerk. Like the coffee cart in this week's chapter, the case has no named people.

The bookshop's plan, line by line:

• The clerk's tasks, from the owner's job analysis: shelve new arrivals, ring up sales, and help customers find a title.
• The qualities the owner wants: reliable on weekend mornings, comfortable with a card reader, and happy to talk about books.
• Hours: 24 hours a week.
• Weeks worked: 40 weeks a year.
• Hourly wage the owner plans to pay: 15 dollars an hour.
• The federal minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938): 7.25 dollars an hour since 2009; a state may set a higher one.

Work these two problems, showing every step of the arithmetic:

1. What are the clerk's yearly wages, in dollars?
2. How many dollars a year above the federal floor does the bookshop's wage choice cost, for the same hours?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

• Problem 1: write one line of the clerk's job description and one line of the job specification from the case, and say which list each belongs on and why; then name one recruitment step and one selection step the bookshop could use, and say why each one fills the pool or chooses from it.
• Problem 2: say what federal law requires on the wage and why 7.25 dollars is a floor rather than one national number; apply one of the ethical-reasoning questions (is it legal; is it fair to everyone it touches; would I be comfortable if it were public) to the owner's wage choice; then give one reason an owner might pay above the floor and one reason an owner might pay near it, labelling each as a judgment.

Explain it to a non-expert

A cousin starting a first part-time job asks you, "My manager says the store pays the minimum wage. Does that mean 7.25 dollars an hour everywhere, and if it's legal, is it automatically fair?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains the minimum wage in everyday words, answers both parts of the question, and names one limit, including that the bookshop case is illustrative and that which minimum applies to a real job is a question for the Department of Labor or a state labor office, not for a classmate. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a neighbor who organizes volunteers for a community garden and asks whether putting up a flyer and choosing volunteers are the same step. Model answer: "Putting up the flyer is recruitment: it gets people interested so you have a group to pick from. Choosing who joins is selection: you look at who signed up, maybe ask a few questions, and decide. They are two different steps, and a great flyer still leaves you with the choosing to do. This is general advice about how hiring works, and a garden with special rules might do it differently."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your work. A reader should be able to rebuild every amount you report from the bookshop's hours, weeks, wage, and the federal minimum wage without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

• the two answers, each with every step of the arithmetic shown and the interpretation the task names for that problem;
• your message to your cousin, explaining the minimum wage, answering both parts of the question, and naming one limit; and
• a short list of the bookshop's figures, giving the hours a year, the yearly wages, the gap between the wage and the federal minimum per hour, and what the same hours would cost at the federal minimum alone, so your amounts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the bookshop's hiring plan and the federal floor with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a free spreadsheet to lay out the bookshop's figures. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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