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Slavery 21st Century
You thought it was over, think again
december 12, 2018
Slavery did not end it was merely outsourced,
reconfigured, and made politically correct
The Global Slavery Index
published on Thursday by Walk Free Foundation, describes modern slavery as a complex and often hidden crime that crosses borders, sectors and jurisdictions. The US number, the study estimates, is almost one hundredth of the estimated 40.3 million global total number of people it defines as being enslaved.
headlines and issues
*Revealed: Google's 'two-tier' workforce training document
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US airport workers struggle to make ends meet as industry profits soar
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Workers Are Fighting Retail Robber Barons – and Winning
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Dangerous, Low-Paid World of Nail Salons
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*New York labor leaders: Amazon has 'record of routinely mistreating workers'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: Restricting breaks keeps poultry industry workers living in fear
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US retail workers face long hours, poor pay and 'anxiety through the roof' on Black Friday
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Our new column from inside Amazon: 'They treat us as disposable'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CALIFORNIA IS USING INMATE LABOR TO FIGHT ITS DEADLY WILDFIRES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*House Democrats plan to grill Labor Department officials about tip and child labor policies
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Meet the Janitors Taking On Big Pharma to Win a Livable Wage
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Chicago Creates New Office of Labor Standards to Combat Wage Theft
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Legacy of Slavery Is Alive in the South as Black Women Workers Face Horrendous Conditions
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
Revealed: Google's 'two-tier' workforce training document
Exclusive: internal document shows how Google employees are trained to treat temps, vendors and contractors
Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
the guardian
Wed 12 Dec 2018 01.00 EST
Google staff are instructed not to reward certain workers with perks like T-shirts, invite them to all-hands meetings, or allow them to engage in professional development training, an internal training document seen by the Guardian reveals.
The guide instructs Google employees on the ins and outs of interacting with its tens of thousands of temps, vendors and contractors – a class of worker known at Google as TVCs.
“Working with TVCs and Googlers is different,” the training documentation, titled the The ABCs of TVCs, explains. “Our policies exist because TVC working arrangements can carry significant risks.”
The risks Google appears to be most concerned about include standard insider threats, like leaks of proprietary information, but also – and especially – the risk of being found to be a joint employer, a legal designation which could be exceedingly costly for Google in terms of benefits.
Google’s treatment of TVCs has come under increased scrutiny by the company’s full-time employees (FTEs) amid a nascent labor movement at the company, which has seen workers speak out about both their own working conditions and the morality of the work they perform.
American companies have long turned to temps and subcontractors to plug holes and perform specialized tasks, but Google achieved a dubious distinction this year when Bloomberg reported that in early 2018, the company did not directly employ a majority of its own workforce.
According to a current employee with access to the figures, of approximately 170,000 people around the world who now work at Google, 50.05% are FTEs. The rest, 49.95%, are TVCs.
The two-tier system has complicated labor activism at Google. After 20,000 workers joined a global walkout on 1 November, the company quickly gave in to one of the protesters’ demands by ending forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment – but only for FTEs.
On 5 December, the walkout organizers published an anonymous open letteraddressed to Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, from “TVCs at Google”. The letter detailed some of the material concerns that TVCs face due to Google’s differential treatment, including lower wages and “minimal benefits”.
But beyond financial inequality, the letter focused on disparate access to information. “Google routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives,” the letter states. “When the tragic shooting occurred at YouTube in April of this year, the company sent real-time security updates to full-time employees only, leaving TVCs defenseless in the line of fire. TVCs were then excluded from a town hall discussion the following day.”
Red badges v white badges
Matt was on his way to a “whole team” meeting for a project he was working on when he noticed that one of his co-workers, a test engineer, was still at his desk. “You should come,” Matt, a Google software engineer, recalls saying, only to be told that the meeting was not actually for the whole team: temps, vendors and contractors were not allowed.
“The guy sits with us,” Matt told the Guardian of his co-worker. (Matt asked not to be identified by his real name because he is not authorized to speak to the media.) “Like literally next to my desk. He’s got better knowledge than me about parts of the project, to be honest … It changes the dynamic a lot.”
While excluding his co-worker from an important meeting bothered Matt, leaving the TVC out in the cold was the proper procedure, according to The ABCs of TVCs. “When we share strategic or proprietary information with TVCs through meetings or communications, it can create both co-employment and information security risks for Alphabet,” the document states.
The training instructs Google employees not to invite TVCs to all-hands meetings, team offsites, or the company’s weekly “TGIF” meeting, where employees vote on questions to post to top executives. Indeed, according to two current employees, the company often employs security guards to stand outside all-hands meetings, admitting those whose employee badges are white (FTEs) and keeping TVCs, whose badges are red, outside. The security guards themselves are subcontracted and wear red badges.
The training document includes a number of other common scenarios that Google employees might encounter when working with TVCs. One slide asks whether “Gary” should reward his vendor team with Google T-shirts after they complete a major task.
“Gary should not reward them with shirts,” the document explains, because “swag, bonuses, and other gifts are considered taxable income to the individual”. Instead, Gary is advised to send a thank-you email or write a positive comment on G+, the social network used internally at Google.
Another scenario involves a Googler noticing that a TVC has listed Google as their employer on LinkedIn, illustrated with a LinkedIn profile of “Tom Temp” claiming to be a “Staffing Coordinator – Google”.
“Since TVCs are not Alphabet employees, they may not represent themselves as such on resumes or external sites (e.g. social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc),” the document states. Googlers are encouraged to either “address it with the temp directly”, report the TVC via an anonymous form, or report the TVC to their direct employer.
Other rules address paying for expenses (“their travel should not, under any circumstances, be paid for using a Gcard”), dealing with medical issues, and handling the ambitions of a TVC who wants to take professional development courses (“training beyond what they need to do their jobs is considered an employee benefit … they may not enroll in or attend soft skill or professional development trainings”).
‘It’s all about saving money’(greed)
Throughout the training document, the “risk” that TVCs pose to Google is raised numerous times. The document names three types of risks: deviation from the “code of conduct”, such as concerns about harassment or discrimination; risks to security and privacy; and the risk of “co-employment”.
It is this third type of risk that earns the most attention in the document. “Co-employment is a relationship between two or more employers in which each has actual or potential legal rights and duties with respect to the same employee,” the document explains. “If found to be a joint employer of a TVC by an agency or court, then Alphabet could be liable for employer obligations, as well as acts and omissions leading to employment related legal claims.”
The legal designation of employees is a frequent issue in Silicon Valley, where the multibillion-dollar valuations of startups like Uber and Lyft rely on classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.
But while Uber and Lyft have thus far been able to maintain a legal distinction between the software engineers in their corporate headquarters and the armies of drivers working in their own vehicles, there is a major precedent for a tech giant getting in trouble over the TVCs in its own offices.
Microsoft spent much of the 1990s embroiled in a dispute over its expansive use of “permatemps” who often performed similar work to Microsoft employees, but without the access to employment benefits or stock options. In 2000, Microsoft agreed to pay a $97m settlement over a massive class-action lawsuit brought by permatemps.
That settlement was estimated to cover an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 individuals, far fewer than the number of TVCs currently on Google’s books.
To Matt, this is the real reason that he was tasked with learning The ABCs of TVCs. “It’s all about saving money,” he said. “If someone sues them, they want to point at all this fake shit and say, ‘Hey look, there’s such a big difference, see?’
“We are legally in the clear to treat people like garbage.”
The guide instructs Google employees on the ins and outs of interacting with its tens of thousands of temps, vendors and contractors – a class of worker known at Google as TVCs.
“Working with TVCs and Googlers is different,” the training documentation, titled the The ABCs of TVCs, explains. “Our policies exist because TVC working arrangements can carry significant risks.”
The risks Google appears to be most concerned about include standard insider threats, like leaks of proprietary information, but also – and especially – the risk of being found to be a joint employer, a legal designation which could be exceedingly costly for Google in terms of benefits.
Google’s treatment of TVCs has come under increased scrutiny by the company’s full-time employees (FTEs) amid a nascent labor movement at the company, which has seen workers speak out about both their own working conditions and the morality of the work they perform.
American companies have long turned to temps and subcontractors to plug holes and perform specialized tasks, but Google achieved a dubious distinction this year when Bloomberg reported that in early 2018, the company did not directly employ a majority of its own workforce.
According to a current employee with access to the figures, of approximately 170,000 people around the world who now work at Google, 50.05% are FTEs. The rest, 49.95%, are TVCs.
The two-tier system has complicated labor activism at Google. After 20,000 workers joined a global walkout on 1 November, the company quickly gave in to one of the protesters’ demands by ending forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment – but only for FTEs.
On 5 December, the walkout organizers published an anonymous open letteraddressed to Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, from “TVCs at Google”. The letter detailed some of the material concerns that TVCs face due to Google’s differential treatment, including lower wages and “minimal benefits”.
But beyond financial inequality, the letter focused on disparate access to information. “Google routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives,” the letter states. “When the tragic shooting occurred at YouTube in April of this year, the company sent real-time security updates to full-time employees only, leaving TVCs defenseless in the line of fire. TVCs were then excluded from a town hall discussion the following day.”
Red badges v white badges
Matt was on his way to a “whole team” meeting for a project he was working on when he noticed that one of his co-workers, a test engineer, was still at his desk. “You should come,” Matt, a Google software engineer, recalls saying, only to be told that the meeting was not actually for the whole team: temps, vendors and contractors were not allowed.
“The guy sits with us,” Matt told the Guardian of his co-worker. (Matt asked not to be identified by his real name because he is not authorized to speak to the media.) “Like literally next to my desk. He’s got better knowledge than me about parts of the project, to be honest … It changes the dynamic a lot.”
While excluding his co-worker from an important meeting bothered Matt, leaving the TVC out in the cold was the proper procedure, according to The ABCs of TVCs. “When we share strategic or proprietary information with TVCs through meetings or communications, it can create both co-employment and information security risks for Alphabet,” the document states.
The training instructs Google employees not to invite TVCs to all-hands meetings, team offsites, or the company’s weekly “TGIF” meeting, where employees vote on questions to post to top executives. Indeed, according to two current employees, the company often employs security guards to stand outside all-hands meetings, admitting those whose employee badges are white (FTEs) and keeping TVCs, whose badges are red, outside. The security guards themselves are subcontracted and wear red badges.
The training document includes a number of other common scenarios that Google employees might encounter when working with TVCs. One slide asks whether “Gary” should reward his vendor team with Google T-shirts after they complete a major task.
“Gary should not reward them with shirts,” the document explains, because “swag, bonuses, and other gifts are considered taxable income to the individual”. Instead, Gary is advised to send a thank-you email or write a positive comment on G+, the social network used internally at Google.
Another scenario involves a Googler noticing that a TVC has listed Google as their employer on LinkedIn, illustrated with a LinkedIn profile of “Tom Temp” claiming to be a “Staffing Coordinator – Google”.
“Since TVCs are not Alphabet employees, they may not represent themselves as such on resumes or external sites (e.g. social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc),” the document states. Googlers are encouraged to either “address it with the temp directly”, report the TVC via an anonymous form, or report the TVC to their direct employer.
Other rules address paying for expenses (“their travel should not, under any circumstances, be paid for using a Gcard”), dealing with medical issues, and handling the ambitions of a TVC who wants to take professional development courses (“training beyond what they need to do their jobs is considered an employee benefit … they may not enroll in or attend soft skill or professional development trainings”).
‘It’s all about saving money’(greed)
Throughout the training document, the “risk” that TVCs pose to Google is raised numerous times. The document names three types of risks: deviation from the “code of conduct”, such as concerns about harassment or discrimination; risks to security and privacy; and the risk of “co-employment”.
It is this third type of risk that earns the most attention in the document. “Co-employment is a relationship between two or more employers in which each has actual or potential legal rights and duties with respect to the same employee,” the document explains. “If found to be a joint employer of a TVC by an agency or court, then Alphabet could be liable for employer obligations, as well as acts and omissions leading to employment related legal claims.”
The legal designation of employees is a frequent issue in Silicon Valley, where the multibillion-dollar valuations of startups like Uber and Lyft rely on classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.
But while Uber and Lyft have thus far been able to maintain a legal distinction between the software engineers in their corporate headquarters and the armies of drivers working in their own vehicles, there is a major precedent for a tech giant getting in trouble over the TVCs in its own offices.
Microsoft spent much of the 1990s embroiled in a dispute over its expansive use of “permatemps” who often performed similar work to Microsoft employees, but without the access to employment benefits or stock options. In 2000, Microsoft agreed to pay a $97m settlement over a massive class-action lawsuit brought by permatemps.
That settlement was estimated to cover an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 individuals, far fewer than the number of TVCs currently on Google’s books.
To Matt, this is the real reason that he was tasked with learning The ABCs of TVCs. “It’s all about saving money,” he said. “If someone sues them, they want to point at all this fake shit and say, ‘Hey look, there’s such a big difference, see?’
“We are legally in the clear to treat people like garbage.”
US airport workers struggle to make ends meet as industry profits soar
Airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017 but some tips-dependent workers at major hubs are making less than minimum wage
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Fri 7 Dec 2018 06.00 EST
Carlos Batista has worked at Orlando international airport for 12 years as a wheelchair attendant, a job where he often doesn’t make the federally required minimum hourly wage due to being classified as a tipped worker. Instead, the independent contractor he works for pays him $5.23 an hour, and attendants are not allowed to solicit passengers for tips.
“A lot of people don’t know we live off tips, so we get thank yous, and the average wheelchair assist from counter to gate takes 45 minutes to an hour,” Batista said. “We’re the face of the airport. We take care of mothers and family members who need assistance with wheelchairs and bags.”
Due to his low wages, Batista can only afford to rent a room from his uncle. He said high baggage fees now meant air travelers carry less luggage, resulting in fewer tips while his wages have remained stagnant.
Batista’s problems – and those of thousands of workers like him – are symptomatic of the air travel industry. As the airlines and airport companies seek to boost profits, they have increasingly relied on low-cost air carriers and contractors that drive down wages, eliminate benefits and infringe workers’ rights, according to a recent report by Airport Workers United.
The report noted airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017, a fourfold increase since 2013. Nearly half those profits are made by US-based airlines. The International Air Transport Association predicted in 2018 expenditures on air travel would grow by more than $70bn.
The airport industry is also booming from an increase in airline passengers. In 2016, global airport revenues were over $160bn, with 39.4% generated from sources such as retail concessions and parking. In 2018, US airports experienced a record number of air travelers for the summer and Thanksgiving holiday.
But those profits do not trickle down to the workers that generate them. In the United States, airports have cuts jobs and outsourced them to contractors despite increases in the number of travelers. An October 2013 study conducted by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley found that between 2002 to 2012, outsourced baggage handler jobs increased from 25% to 84%, while wages during that period for baggage handlers dropped by more than 45%.
Another example is 67-year-old Aleida Diaz who started working at Orlando international airport this summer as a wheelchair attendant when she decided to stay in Florida after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, where she worked as an English teacher.
“Sometimes you don’t even make the minimum wage with the tips,” Diaz said. She too makes $5.23 an hour plus tips. “It’s very hard because I have to eat, pay my rent, my electric bills, and I’m barely making ends meet.” Her son is going to be deployed to Afghanistan on 2 January, but the independent contractor who she works for did not allow her to take time off to spend with him due to the busy holiday season.
In 2003, customer service agent Janice Woods’s employer at Miami international airport switched to an independent contractor. She makes around $15 an hour, but her hours and benefits were drastically cut. “They cut hours to make us part-time,” Woods said. She has worked at the airport for 19 years. “They used to offer vacation, sick days, health, dental, vision and flight benefits.”
The contractor eliminated benefits, and her healthcare plan now has a hefty deductible. Woods added, “I was sick last year and the beginning of this year. If it wasn’t for my family to come up and pay my bills … I wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet.”
Klassie Shepard, an airplane cabin cleaner working for an independent contractor at San Francisco international airport, has also struggled even though San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“In 2017, working full-time at SFO, I was homeless. I would sleep at the airport on the blue chairs in the terminals with a blanket over me,” Shepard said. “I wasn’t making enough to be able to afford rent by myself.”
In November 2018, Shepard was fired. Her employer said she walked off the job but Shepard explained she felt dizzy, tried to call a supervisor who didn’t answer and then flagged down a police officer who called an ambulance and took her to hospital. Shepherd, with help from the Service Employees International Union, is working to get her job back.
A spokesperson for San Francisco international airport said: “Our records show medical personnel being dispatched to an airport service company break room around that date and time, but we do not have any additional detail on the circumstances.”
Low wages and poor benefits in the airport industry have contributed to thousands of airport workers relying on government assistance. A June 2017 report published by the Economic Roundtable found that more than 116,000 US airport workers receive food stamps, more than 23,000 received cash welfare benefits, and over 194,000 out of roughly 664,000 airport workers in the United States rely on Medicaid.
Mark Souder, who has worked maintenance at Baltimore-Washington international airport for eight years, used government assistance to help pay for his prescription drug medicine when a new independent contractor, Menzies Aviation, took over and changed his health insurance plan. Under the new plan, specialty medication was not covered, leaving Souder, who is HIV positive, to figure out how to pay for his pills.
“It was covered for seven years, then Menzies took over,” Souder said. The Maryland Aids Drug Assistance Program eventually agreed to cover his medication costs for a year, but Souder is unsure what is going to happen when that ends on 31 December. He could face crippling costs or a lack of vital medicines.
Orlando international airport did not respond to requests for comment. Miami international airport and Menzies Aviation also did not respond to a request for comment.
“A lot of people don’t know we live off tips, so we get thank yous, and the average wheelchair assist from counter to gate takes 45 minutes to an hour,” Batista said. “We’re the face of the airport. We take care of mothers and family members who need assistance with wheelchairs and bags.”
Due to his low wages, Batista can only afford to rent a room from his uncle. He said high baggage fees now meant air travelers carry less luggage, resulting in fewer tips while his wages have remained stagnant.
Batista’s problems – and those of thousands of workers like him – are symptomatic of the air travel industry. As the airlines and airport companies seek to boost profits, they have increasingly relied on low-cost air carriers and contractors that drive down wages, eliminate benefits and infringe workers’ rights, according to a recent report by Airport Workers United.
The report noted airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017, a fourfold increase since 2013. Nearly half those profits are made by US-based airlines. The International Air Transport Association predicted in 2018 expenditures on air travel would grow by more than $70bn.
The airport industry is also booming from an increase in airline passengers. In 2016, global airport revenues were over $160bn, with 39.4% generated from sources such as retail concessions and parking. In 2018, US airports experienced a record number of air travelers for the summer and Thanksgiving holiday.
But those profits do not trickle down to the workers that generate them. In the United States, airports have cuts jobs and outsourced them to contractors despite increases in the number of travelers. An October 2013 study conducted by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley found that between 2002 to 2012, outsourced baggage handler jobs increased from 25% to 84%, while wages during that period for baggage handlers dropped by more than 45%.
Another example is 67-year-old Aleida Diaz who started working at Orlando international airport this summer as a wheelchair attendant when she decided to stay in Florida after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, where she worked as an English teacher.
“Sometimes you don’t even make the minimum wage with the tips,” Diaz said. She too makes $5.23 an hour plus tips. “It’s very hard because I have to eat, pay my rent, my electric bills, and I’m barely making ends meet.” Her son is going to be deployed to Afghanistan on 2 January, but the independent contractor who she works for did not allow her to take time off to spend with him due to the busy holiday season.
In 2003, customer service agent Janice Woods’s employer at Miami international airport switched to an independent contractor. She makes around $15 an hour, but her hours and benefits were drastically cut. “They cut hours to make us part-time,” Woods said. She has worked at the airport for 19 years. “They used to offer vacation, sick days, health, dental, vision and flight benefits.”
The contractor eliminated benefits, and her healthcare plan now has a hefty deductible. Woods added, “I was sick last year and the beginning of this year. If it wasn’t for my family to come up and pay my bills … I wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet.”
Klassie Shepard, an airplane cabin cleaner working for an independent contractor at San Francisco international airport, has also struggled even though San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“In 2017, working full-time at SFO, I was homeless. I would sleep at the airport on the blue chairs in the terminals with a blanket over me,” Shepard said. “I wasn’t making enough to be able to afford rent by myself.”
In November 2018, Shepard was fired. Her employer said she walked off the job but Shepard explained she felt dizzy, tried to call a supervisor who didn’t answer and then flagged down a police officer who called an ambulance and took her to hospital. Shepherd, with help from the Service Employees International Union, is working to get her job back.
A spokesperson for San Francisco international airport said: “Our records show medical personnel being dispatched to an airport service company break room around that date and time, but we do not have any additional detail on the circumstances.”
Low wages and poor benefits in the airport industry have contributed to thousands of airport workers relying on government assistance. A June 2017 report published by the Economic Roundtable found that more than 116,000 US airport workers receive food stamps, more than 23,000 received cash welfare benefits, and over 194,000 out of roughly 664,000 airport workers in the United States rely on Medicaid.
Mark Souder, who has worked maintenance at Baltimore-Washington international airport for eight years, used government assistance to help pay for his prescription drug medicine when a new independent contractor, Menzies Aviation, took over and changed his health insurance plan. Under the new plan, specialty medication was not covered, leaving Souder, who is HIV positive, to figure out how to pay for his pills.
“It was covered for seven years, then Menzies took over,” Souder said. The Maryland Aids Drug Assistance Program eventually agreed to cover his medication costs for a year, but Souder is unsure what is going to happen when that ends on 31 December. He could face crippling costs or a lack of vital medicines.
Orlando international airport did not respond to requests for comment. Miami international airport and Menzies Aviation also did not respond to a request for comment.
Workers Are Fighting Retail Robber Barons – and Winning
BY
Mike Ludwig, Truthout
PUBLISHED
December 6, 2018
A small group of Walmart workers recently publicly confronted Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress who is probably the world’s richest woman. Earlier this year, Walmart increased the starting wage for store associates to $11 an hour, but competitors Amazon and Target agreed to $15, which is still not enough to make ends meet in many parts of the United States. Would Walmart follow their lead?
Walton attempted to deflect the question, saying, “That’s not my job.” The workers pressed Walton for an answer, pointing to Walmart CEO Greg Foran, who recently thanked the Walton family for their role in past pay increases during a recent meeting with investors in October. That sent a flustered Walton into a hasty retreat.
Foran also told investors that, in some areas of the country, $11 is still “the right amount to pay” a starting Walmart associate. Organization United for Respect (OUR), a nonprofit group that advocates for better wages and conditions at Walmart, used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to take Foran to task.
In every state in the country, a Walmart associate working full time (which Walmart defines as 34 hours per week) at $11 does not make enough money to cover the basic costs of living for an individual, not to mention a family, according to the group’s analysis. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
“There are two major trends in retail: Corporations are squeezing people harder every day, and people are fighting back within that context to make some real gains happen,” said OUR co-director Andrea Dehlendorf, in an interview.
Last week, Walmart workers confronted Alice Walton again, this time with a demonstration demanding better pay held outside her Manhattan penthouse. They also paid a visit to the penthouse of Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart’s ecommerce arm. He reportedly bought his penthouse in Manhattan for $44 million.
Madeline Chambers, who works 32 hours a week at Walmart in North Carolina and lives on the brink of homelessness with her two children, was one the activists involved.
“Last year, four of the Walton family members made $12.7 billion in a single day,” Chambers said in a statement after the protests. “It would take a Walmart associate like me more than 650,000 years working full time to make that much.
Retail’s Race to the Bottom
The retail sector is experiencing “disruption,” to use the corporate buzzword. Companies with household names like Sears and Toys ‘R Us are going under as Wall Street hedge funds cash in on their debt. Retail behemoths Walmart and Amazon are duking it out over the emerging ecommerce market, where websites and robots are supposed to be changing the way we shop. Well, that’s the view from executive suite, at least.
Things look much different from the floors of sprawling superstores and vast fulfillment warehouses full of merchandise, where tens of thousands of people are working under the grueling conditions of the holiday rush to fuel mega-fortunes enjoyed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Waltons of the world. Thousands of families are struggling to make ends meet now that Toys ‘R Us is out of business, and Sears and Kmart are closing stores across the country.
With the rise of online shopping and automation, big retailers appear to be in a race to the bottom. Conditions in retail warehouses and shipping centers are infamous, particularly during the holiday season, when temporary laborers are hired to meet an explosion in consumer demand. In the high-tech “centers” run by Amazon, wearable surveillance technology is used to ensure every Amazon Prime package is delivered on time.
Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, said safety has always been a problem in the high-pressure warehouse environment, but now the risks are psychological as well as physical. Workers lose sleep because they feel like Amazon is “always watching,” and they can’t “turn it off when they go home.”
“People are getting hurt because they are moving too quickly,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center (WWRC), in an interview. “In some cases, it’s a traditional manager yelling at you, in others cases it’s Amazon surveillance technology whispering in your ear, saying ‘go faster.'”
In the face of corporate expansion, activists from the retail sector are winning notable victories. About 33,000 workers lost their jobs as Toys ‘R Us went out of business last year, and $75 million in severance pay was lost in bankruptcy. By then, the company had been taken over by Wall Street lenders and hedge funds.
Former Toys ‘R Us workers, many of them mothers who spent years with the company, organized with a group called Rise Up Retail to pressure investors that liquidated the company to deliver $20 million in financial assistance. The campaign has inspired former Sears employees to launch a similar effort aimed at Wall Street.
Carrie Gleason, a policy director at Rise Up Retail, said Wall Street’s role in liquidating Sears and Toys ‘R Us reveals that robotic automation and online shopping at Amazon and Jet.com are not the only factors contributing to “disruption” in the retail sector that has pushed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs.
“We are seeing all these iconic American companies go under from crushing debt that they can’t pay back [to Wall Street],” Gleason said, in an interview. “These are man-made disasters that could have been avoided.”
Retail Protests Spread
Walmart is not the only major retailer facing protests now that the holiday shopping season is underway. Workers and activists are taking on the retail robber barons, creating a disruption of their own.
Across Europe, where many Amazon employees are unionized, Amazon workers marked Black Friday with a wave of strikes to protest conditions at shipping and sorting warehouses known as “fulfillment centers.” On “Cyber Monday,” the online shopping version of Black Friday, activists held protests across New York City against Amazon’s plans to build a major corporate headquarters in Queens, thanks in part to lucrative tax subsidies.
A broad coalition opposed the Amazon deal in New York, including housing rights groups concerned about gentrification and those opposed to subsidizing a wealthy company at taxpayer expense. Unions and labor groups said flatly that a company with Amazon’s labor standards does not deserve tax breaks — or to do business in New York City to begin with — citing a “disturbing pattern” of injuries and deaths in Amazon warehouses.
“We shouldn’t be paying for them to pay workers less; they should not even be able to open,” said Chelsea Connor, the communications director for the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), in an interview.
The same goes for Walmart, which is absent from the five boroughs, largely due to community opposition and concerns over pay scale and labor standards. However, the company recently gained a foothold in New York with a warehouse in the Bronx for Jet.com, the Walmart ecommerce business founded by Lore.
Unions at Amazon and Walmart?
Whole Foods, the brick-and-mortar prize of the Amazon empire, heard rumblings of unionization in September, when groups of employees backed by the RWDSU circulated a letter urging fellow workers to consider unionization in the face of job cuts resulting from Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of the grocery chain.
Like Walmart, Amazon is known for swiftly crushing labor organizing efforts. Within weeks, a 45-minute training video distributed by Amazon among team leaders was leaked to the media. The video urged would be union-busters to be wary of “spies” and keep an ear out for fellow workers using “union words” like “living wage.” “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either,” the video states, adding that unions are “not in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates.”
Amazon was already under fire for poor working conditions and paying so little that considerable numbers of employees rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food assistance to survive, essentially forcing taxpayers to subsidize Bezos’s massive fortune. Soon, the company announced a base wage increase to $15 an hour — but simultaneously cut stock awards and other incentives that were popular among many workers.
It’s not hard to imagine that, after working long hours in a fulfillment center or attempting to survive on an $11 hourly wage, retail employees are left with little time and energy to advocate for their rights, much less organize collectively and form a union. Unions have made few inroads at retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart, which spare no expense in fighting off labor organizers, according to Chelsea Connor, the communications director at RWDSU.
“It’s institutional insofar that these are major corporations that have a lot of money to spend on union-busting lawyers,” Connor said, adding that retail employees of brands like Zara and Guitar Center are members of RWDSU. “Amazon and Walmart have a lot more money to spend than Guitar Center even, though that is a multimillion-dollar corporation.”
In the absence of unions, groups like OUR, Rise Up Retail and WWRC work to fill the gaps, providing resources and support through training programs and even an app that allows workers to pool answers to questions about company policy and workplace rights. Such “worker centers” may receive some union backing, but they do not collectively bargain with employers like unions do. Instead, they help workers navigate company policies and advocate for better conditions with activist campaigns.
“Our model is to be an organization that supports people and builds community, so that people are able to improve their jobs and connect with each other, and then work collectively to advocate for change in the sector,” Dehlendorf said.
Connor said Sears, Kmart and Toys ‘R Us are going under because they failed to invest in their employees and the stores they work at. Cashiers and customer service representatives were not treated with the same respect as those working for other retailers, no matter how hard they worked. Stores became dull and disorganized. The quality of the customer’s shopping experience plunged, driving business toward ecommerce and away from traditional shopping centers.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Connor said.
Employees at the massive warehouses that fuel online shopping for Amazon and Walmart do not interact with paying customers, so their employers have fewer incentives to invest in keeping them happy and healthy, according to Connor. Still, union organizing remains a huge challenge. Both companies are behemoths with large facilities spread out in rural areas. Part-time and seasonal employment is very common. Workers are spread out across the country, and many don’t stick around long enough to organize in the first place.
“Amazon is so big, it’s going to take big, coordinated efforts, sort of like Fight for $15 and things like that,” Connor said. “Amazon and Walmart think they can fix things by raising the minimum wage to $15, but $15 is not enough. We can do better.”
Unions are making progress in retail. The RWDSU has had success organizing younger retail workers at brands such as Zara and Guitar Center, which still run much of their business out of brick-and-mortar stores rather than online.
Millennials working retail are showing a significant and growinginterest, with the young employees of H&M clothing stores in New York City recently organizing with the RWDSU, along with retail workers for medical marijuana companies and Babeland, a popular sex toy store.
Across every industry and sector last year, the biggest gains in union membership were among workers under the age of 35, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This makes sense. Millennials are much lessfinancially well off than previous generations. Meanwhile, the Trump era has seen a new spirit of protest and activism.
Connor said the labor movement is getting younger every day, and if it can keep up with the times, then the momentum can spread deeper into the retail sector.
“I do think that the era of ‘unions are cool again’ is coming,” Connor said.
Walton attempted to deflect the question, saying, “That’s not my job.” The workers pressed Walton for an answer, pointing to Walmart CEO Greg Foran, who recently thanked the Walton family for their role in past pay increases during a recent meeting with investors in October. That sent a flustered Walton into a hasty retreat.
Foran also told investors that, in some areas of the country, $11 is still “the right amount to pay” a starting Walmart associate. Organization United for Respect (OUR), a nonprofit group that advocates for better wages and conditions at Walmart, used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to take Foran to task.
In every state in the country, a Walmart associate working full time (which Walmart defines as 34 hours per week) at $11 does not make enough money to cover the basic costs of living for an individual, not to mention a family, according to the group’s analysis. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
“There are two major trends in retail: Corporations are squeezing people harder every day, and people are fighting back within that context to make some real gains happen,” said OUR co-director Andrea Dehlendorf, in an interview.
Last week, Walmart workers confronted Alice Walton again, this time with a demonstration demanding better pay held outside her Manhattan penthouse. They also paid a visit to the penthouse of Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart’s ecommerce arm. He reportedly bought his penthouse in Manhattan for $44 million.
Madeline Chambers, who works 32 hours a week at Walmart in North Carolina and lives on the brink of homelessness with her two children, was one the activists involved.
“Last year, four of the Walton family members made $12.7 billion in a single day,” Chambers said in a statement after the protests. “It would take a Walmart associate like me more than 650,000 years working full time to make that much.
Retail’s Race to the Bottom
The retail sector is experiencing “disruption,” to use the corporate buzzword. Companies with household names like Sears and Toys ‘R Us are going under as Wall Street hedge funds cash in on their debt. Retail behemoths Walmart and Amazon are duking it out over the emerging ecommerce market, where websites and robots are supposed to be changing the way we shop. Well, that’s the view from executive suite, at least.
Things look much different from the floors of sprawling superstores and vast fulfillment warehouses full of merchandise, where tens of thousands of people are working under the grueling conditions of the holiday rush to fuel mega-fortunes enjoyed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Waltons of the world. Thousands of families are struggling to make ends meet now that Toys ‘R Us is out of business, and Sears and Kmart are closing stores across the country.
With the rise of online shopping and automation, big retailers appear to be in a race to the bottom. Conditions in retail warehouses and shipping centers are infamous, particularly during the holiday season, when temporary laborers are hired to meet an explosion in consumer demand. In the high-tech “centers” run by Amazon, wearable surveillance technology is used to ensure every Amazon Prime package is delivered on time.
Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, said safety has always been a problem in the high-pressure warehouse environment, but now the risks are psychological as well as physical. Workers lose sleep because they feel like Amazon is “always watching,” and they can’t “turn it off when they go home.”
“People are getting hurt because they are moving too quickly,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center (WWRC), in an interview. “In some cases, it’s a traditional manager yelling at you, in others cases it’s Amazon surveillance technology whispering in your ear, saying ‘go faster.'”
In the face of corporate expansion, activists from the retail sector are winning notable victories. About 33,000 workers lost their jobs as Toys ‘R Us went out of business last year, and $75 million in severance pay was lost in bankruptcy. By then, the company had been taken over by Wall Street lenders and hedge funds.
Former Toys ‘R Us workers, many of them mothers who spent years with the company, organized with a group called Rise Up Retail to pressure investors that liquidated the company to deliver $20 million in financial assistance. The campaign has inspired former Sears employees to launch a similar effort aimed at Wall Street.
Carrie Gleason, a policy director at Rise Up Retail, said Wall Street’s role in liquidating Sears and Toys ‘R Us reveals that robotic automation and online shopping at Amazon and Jet.com are not the only factors contributing to “disruption” in the retail sector that has pushed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs.
“We are seeing all these iconic American companies go under from crushing debt that they can’t pay back [to Wall Street],” Gleason said, in an interview. “These are man-made disasters that could have been avoided.”
Retail Protests Spread
Walmart is not the only major retailer facing protests now that the holiday shopping season is underway. Workers and activists are taking on the retail robber barons, creating a disruption of their own.
Across Europe, where many Amazon employees are unionized, Amazon workers marked Black Friday with a wave of strikes to protest conditions at shipping and sorting warehouses known as “fulfillment centers.” On “Cyber Monday,” the online shopping version of Black Friday, activists held protests across New York City against Amazon’s plans to build a major corporate headquarters in Queens, thanks in part to lucrative tax subsidies.
A broad coalition opposed the Amazon deal in New York, including housing rights groups concerned about gentrification and those opposed to subsidizing a wealthy company at taxpayer expense. Unions and labor groups said flatly that a company with Amazon’s labor standards does not deserve tax breaks — or to do business in New York City to begin with — citing a “disturbing pattern” of injuries and deaths in Amazon warehouses.
“We shouldn’t be paying for them to pay workers less; they should not even be able to open,” said Chelsea Connor, the communications director for the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), in an interview.
The same goes for Walmart, which is absent from the five boroughs, largely due to community opposition and concerns over pay scale and labor standards. However, the company recently gained a foothold in New York with a warehouse in the Bronx for Jet.com, the Walmart ecommerce business founded by Lore.
Unions at Amazon and Walmart?
Whole Foods, the brick-and-mortar prize of the Amazon empire, heard rumblings of unionization in September, when groups of employees backed by the RWDSU circulated a letter urging fellow workers to consider unionization in the face of job cuts resulting from Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of the grocery chain.
Like Walmart, Amazon is known for swiftly crushing labor organizing efforts. Within weeks, a 45-minute training video distributed by Amazon among team leaders was leaked to the media. The video urged would be union-busters to be wary of “spies” and keep an ear out for fellow workers using “union words” like “living wage.” “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either,” the video states, adding that unions are “not in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates.”
Amazon was already under fire for poor working conditions and paying so little that considerable numbers of employees rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food assistance to survive, essentially forcing taxpayers to subsidize Bezos’s massive fortune. Soon, the company announced a base wage increase to $15 an hour — but simultaneously cut stock awards and other incentives that were popular among many workers.
It’s not hard to imagine that, after working long hours in a fulfillment center or attempting to survive on an $11 hourly wage, retail employees are left with little time and energy to advocate for their rights, much less organize collectively and form a union. Unions have made few inroads at retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart, which spare no expense in fighting off labor organizers, according to Chelsea Connor, the communications director at RWDSU.
“It’s institutional insofar that these are major corporations that have a lot of money to spend on union-busting lawyers,” Connor said, adding that retail employees of brands like Zara and Guitar Center are members of RWDSU. “Amazon and Walmart have a lot more money to spend than Guitar Center even, though that is a multimillion-dollar corporation.”
In the absence of unions, groups like OUR, Rise Up Retail and WWRC work to fill the gaps, providing resources and support through training programs and even an app that allows workers to pool answers to questions about company policy and workplace rights. Such “worker centers” may receive some union backing, but they do not collectively bargain with employers like unions do. Instead, they help workers navigate company policies and advocate for better conditions with activist campaigns.
“Our model is to be an organization that supports people and builds community, so that people are able to improve their jobs and connect with each other, and then work collectively to advocate for change in the sector,” Dehlendorf said.
Connor said Sears, Kmart and Toys ‘R Us are going under because they failed to invest in their employees and the stores they work at. Cashiers and customer service representatives were not treated with the same respect as those working for other retailers, no matter how hard they worked. Stores became dull and disorganized. The quality of the customer’s shopping experience plunged, driving business toward ecommerce and away from traditional shopping centers.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Connor said.
Employees at the massive warehouses that fuel online shopping for Amazon and Walmart do not interact with paying customers, so their employers have fewer incentives to invest in keeping them happy and healthy, according to Connor. Still, union organizing remains a huge challenge. Both companies are behemoths with large facilities spread out in rural areas. Part-time and seasonal employment is very common. Workers are spread out across the country, and many don’t stick around long enough to organize in the first place.
“Amazon is so big, it’s going to take big, coordinated efforts, sort of like Fight for $15 and things like that,” Connor said. “Amazon and Walmart think they can fix things by raising the minimum wage to $15, but $15 is not enough. We can do better.”
Unions are making progress in retail. The RWDSU has had success organizing younger retail workers at brands such as Zara and Guitar Center, which still run much of their business out of brick-and-mortar stores rather than online.
Millennials working retail are showing a significant and growinginterest, with the young employees of H&M clothing stores in New York City recently organizing with the RWDSU, along with retail workers for medical marijuana companies and Babeland, a popular sex toy store.
Across every industry and sector last year, the biggest gains in union membership were among workers under the age of 35, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This makes sense. Millennials are much lessfinancially well off than previous generations. Meanwhile, the Trump era has seen a new spirit of protest and activism.
Connor said the labor movement is getting younger every day, and if it can keep up with the times, then the momentum can spread deeper into the retail sector.
“I do think that the era of ‘unions are cool again’ is coming,” Connor said.
CIRCA 1870: A CARTOON SATIRISING THE SWEATSHOPS OF THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY. ORIGINAL ARTIST: BY JOHN LEECH FROM PUNCH MAGAZINE. (PHOTO BY RISCHGITZ/GETTY IMAGES)
The Dangerous, Low-Paid World of Nail Salons
BY
Bryce Covert, Truthout
PUBLISHED
November 29, 2018
Whether nail salon employees get good pay, time off and fair treatment at work currently varies widely depending on the salon they work for.
Sarah, a Vietnamese Californian (who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid negative consequences at work), got into the nail salon industry six years ago so she could help ease her family’s financial problems. She was having trouble finding a job with her psychology degree, all while trying to support two children alongside her husband. So, she took a job as a manicurist as a “fast way of finding money,” she said.
In her current salon in West Hollywood, she makes a bit over minimum wage plus tips. “It gives me a chance to put food on my table and pay the bills,” she said. But it can get tough for her family to get by. “Sometimes we have to take out … a little loan here and there,” she said. “But pretty much, we’re surviving.”
Her current job also gives her some leniency in taking breaks and sick days when she needs them. Others haven’t been so generous. Past salons she worked in didn’t always pay her minimum wage or offer her sick days. Once, Sarah says, her daughter had an emergency doctor’s appointment and her boss said to her, “I know you have things to take care of, but we really need you today.”
So, she faced a dilemma. “I had a choice: either it’s my daughter or it’s my job,” Sarah said. She was luckily able to call her husband and have him take her. “Thank god my husband had time to take care of the girls.”
Even her current job comes with problems nail salon workers commonly face. In the hot summer season, when demand spikes, she may work intense and long hours. As the weather cools, those hours drop off, and now she’s working an average of about 30 a week. She just became an Uber driver to supplement her income.
The US government counted 126,300 nail salon workers across the country as of 2017, but that is almost certainly an undercount. In California and New York alone, there were 137,338 certified manicurists, according to a report released November 27 by the UCLA Labor Center on the nail salon industry across the country.
One thing is clear: it’s a booming industry. Total revenue for nail salons was $4.4 billion in 2015, 15 percent higher than the year before it. It’s forecast to reach $5.7 billion by 2020. Employment in the industry is also expected to grow 13 percent over the next decade.
And yet, the boom times often don’t filter down to the workers themselves. Nearly four out of five nail salon employees earn what amounts to two-thirds of median wages for full-time US workers. That’s a much higher share than the 33 percent rate for all industries in the country. Full-time nail salon employees earn less than half of what workers make in other industries on average: $9.06 an hour versus all others’ $20.18. “These findings are not unexpected; because the price of manicures and pedicures is so low, those providing the services are bound to earn low wages,” the report notes.
“A mani/pedi can be as low as $20,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which organizes nail salon workers and fights for workplace change by partnering with owners and pushing for new policies. “Think about how low that is. You wonder how much is the worker actually getting paid.”
Worse, many may not get the pay that they’re owed. Thirty percent are self-employed, including independent contractors, which is three times higher than the national average. Some may actually be independent, renting space in salons to serve their own clients, but “there are concerns that many manicurists are purposely misclassified to avoid labor laws and protections,” the report notes. Employers can shirk wage and hour obligations by classifying workers as independent contractors even if they should be labeled regular employees. Without employee status, salon workers “are being denied … paid sick leave, breaks, having their lunch break, workers comp,” Fu said. “Those are important benefits … that they deserve.”
Benefits are generally scarce. Nationally, 62 percent of workers get health insurance through work, but just 42 percent of nail salon workers do, according to the report. Over a quarter instead get coverage through public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
In New York City, for example, a survey of Nepali workers in nail salons found they were being paid as little as $30 a day while working nine to 12 hours a day. Few got overtime and many couldn’t take breaks unless the flow of customers was slow. Over a quarter couldn’t take sick days, and those who did take them didn’t get paid. In California, 61 percent of Vietnamese salon employees reported making less than minimum wage and 89 percent were not paid overtime.
Despite the low pay and infrequent benefits, these jobs are not side hustles for the women who hold them. The vast majority of people in the industry are like Sarah: The typical worker is a foreign-born woman between the ages of 25 and 44, and she works full time, year-round. Workers’ wages don’t just support themselves, but others: nearly two-thirds have at least one child, while a third are heads of their households.
“As with any worker, a big part of what they’re trying to do is really provide for their children, provide for their families and make sure that they have a roof over their heads,” Fu said.
Many workers take pride in what they do, seeing it as an art. But they’re not paid on par with that quality of work. “We want this industry to treat workers with dignity and treat them with respect and … provide them with the wages where they can really flourish and succeed,” Fu said.
Then there are the health dangers. Sarah tries to take breaks when she can so she doesn’t get exposed to the fumes of the chemicals she works with for too long. She washes her hands frequently and uses gloves when they’re available. But she doesn’t always know what she’s being exposed to. “It’s a lot of things we come in contact with,” she said. “We need to be more aware of what we’re working with.”
Most commonly, nail salon employees are exposed to the “toxic trio”: toluene, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate, all of which are common in nail polish. Disinfectants like alcohol can also cause skin disease and infections. Workers take these chemicals in through inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption while they scrub feet and paint nails.
Chemical exposure often leads to health issues. Exposure to these chemicals may be associated with allergies, eye and skin irritation, eczema and reproductive problems. In some surveys of salon workers, more than 60 percent report suffering skin conditions. Another survey found that people who work with acrylic nails are more likely to have health problems, such as irritation, allergies, pain, coughing, nausea, difficulty breathing and miscarriage. A study in California found that rates of lung cancer were elevated among manicurists, while another in Canada found that workers who regularly applied nail polish had a tenfold greater risk of contracting lupus than other workers.
There’s also the regular wear and tear on the body of such physical work: sitting in uncomfortable postures for long periods of time often leaves workers with strain and fatigue, and many report hand, neck, lower back, shoulder and wrist pain.
Yet regulation of these chemicals or of workplace practices is scarce, and many workers fear speaking out. There are “a lot of barriers, including language barriers, cultural barriers, fear of retaliation,” Fu said, as well as “mistrust of the government.” Given that immigrants dominate the workforce, those with uncertain status may fear going public.
But policy makers are taking notice. One success story was the passage of a bill in California this year that requires chemicals used by salon workers to come with the same ingredient labels that consumer cosmetic products have. Another bill passed by the state in 2016 required salons to post signs in workers’ languages about their rights. “It’s like a first step — just because there’s a sign up doesn’t mean the salon is going to make the changes,” Fu pointed out. The state also has a Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Program, created by a bill passed in 2016, which certifies and promotes salons that commit to safe practices.
New York passed its own reforms after The New York Times published an in-depth investigation into the industry. These reforms included new state regulations for safety and labor standards and its own New York Healthy Salons Coalition to recognize businesses that follow best practices. As part of that coalition, a worker center named Adhikaar has helped train more than 1,000 workers about their health and rights.
But more needs to be done. “There are a lot of cultural shifts that need to happen that will take time,” Fu said. To get there, it will require “a really comprehensive approach through partnerships with government agencies, through continual outreach and education to the community—not just to workers, but also to employers.”
Sarah, a Vietnamese Californian (who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid negative consequences at work), got into the nail salon industry six years ago so she could help ease her family’s financial problems. She was having trouble finding a job with her psychology degree, all while trying to support two children alongside her husband. So, she took a job as a manicurist as a “fast way of finding money,” she said.
In her current salon in West Hollywood, she makes a bit over minimum wage plus tips. “It gives me a chance to put food on my table and pay the bills,” she said. But it can get tough for her family to get by. “Sometimes we have to take out … a little loan here and there,” she said. “But pretty much, we’re surviving.”
Her current job also gives her some leniency in taking breaks and sick days when she needs them. Others haven’t been so generous. Past salons she worked in didn’t always pay her minimum wage or offer her sick days. Once, Sarah says, her daughter had an emergency doctor’s appointment and her boss said to her, “I know you have things to take care of, but we really need you today.”
So, she faced a dilemma. “I had a choice: either it’s my daughter or it’s my job,” Sarah said. She was luckily able to call her husband and have him take her. “Thank god my husband had time to take care of the girls.”
Even her current job comes with problems nail salon workers commonly face. In the hot summer season, when demand spikes, she may work intense and long hours. As the weather cools, those hours drop off, and now she’s working an average of about 30 a week. She just became an Uber driver to supplement her income.
The US government counted 126,300 nail salon workers across the country as of 2017, but that is almost certainly an undercount. In California and New York alone, there were 137,338 certified manicurists, according to a report released November 27 by the UCLA Labor Center on the nail salon industry across the country.
One thing is clear: it’s a booming industry. Total revenue for nail salons was $4.4 billion in 2015, 15 percent higher than the year before it. It’s forecast to reach $5.7 billion by 2020. Employment in the industry is also expected to grow 13 percent over the next decade.
And yet, the boom times often don’t filter down to the workers themselves. Nearly four out of five nail salon employees earn what amounts to two-thirds of median wages for full-time US workers. That’s a much higher share than the 33 percent rate for all industries in the country. Full-time nail salon employees earn less than half of what workers make in other industries on average: $9.06 an hour versus all others’ $20.18. “These findings are not unexpected; because the price of manicures and pedicures is so low, those providing the services are bound to earn low wages,” the report notes.
“A mani/pedi can be as low as $20,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which organizes nail salon workers and fights for workplace change by partnering with owners and pushing for new policies. “Think about how low that is. You wonder how much is the worker actually getting paid.”
Worse, many may not get the pay that they’re owed. Thirty percent are self-employed, including independent contractors, which is three times higher than the national average. Some may actually be independent, renting space in salons to serve their own clients, but “there are concerns that many manicurists are purposely misclassified to avoid labor laws and protections,” the report notes. Employers can shirk wage and hour obligations by classifying workers as independent contractors even if they should be labeled regular employees. Without employee status, salon workers “are being denied … paid sick leave, breaks, having their lunch break, workers comp,” Fu said. “Those are important benefits … that they deserve.”
Benefits are generally scarce. Nationally, 62 percent of workers get health insurance through work, but just 42 percent of nail salon workers do, according to the report. Over a quarter instead get coverage through public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
In New York City, for example, a survey of Nepali workers in nail salons found they were being paid as little as $30 a day while working nine to 12 hours a day. Few got overtime and many couldn’t take breaks unless the flow of customers was slow. Over a quarter couldn’t take sick days, and those who did take them didn’t get paid. In California, 61 percent of Vietnamese salon employees reported making less than minimum wage and 89 percent were not paid overtime.
Despite the low pay and infrequent benefits, these jobs are not side hustles for the women who hold them. The vast majority of people in the industry are like Sarah: The typical worker is a foreign-born woman between the ages of 25 and 44, and she works full time, year-round. Workers’ wages don’t just support themselves, but others: nearly two-thirds have at least one child, while a third are heads of their households.
“As with any worker, a big part of what they’re trying to do is really provide for their children, provide for their families and make sure that they have a roof over their heads,” Fu said.
Many workers take pride in what they do, seeing it as an art. But they’re not paid on par with that quality of work. “We want this industry to treat workers with dignity and treat them with respect and … provide them with the wages where they can really flourish and succeed,” Fu said.
Then there are the health dangers. Sarah tries to take breaks when she can so she doesn’t get exposed to the fumes of the chemicals she works with for too long. She washes her hands frequently and uses gloves when they’re available. But she doesn’t always know what she’s being exposed to. “It’s a lot of things we come in contact with,” she said. “We need to be more aware of what we’re working with.”
Most commonly, nail salon employees are exposed to the “toxic trio”: toluene, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate, all of which are common in nail polish. Disinfectants like alcohol can also cause skin disease and infections. Workers take these chemicals in through inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption while they scrub feet and paint nails.
Chemical exposure often leads to health issues. Exposure to these chemicals may be associated with allergies, eye and skin irritation, eczema and reproductive problems. In some surveys of salon workers, more than 60 percent report suffering skin conditions. Another survey found that people who work with acrylic nails are more likely to have health problems, such as irritation, allergies, pain, coughing, nausea, difficulty breathing and miscarriage. A study in California found that rates of lung cancer were elevated among manicurists, while another in Canada found that workers who regularly applied nail polish had a tenfold greater risk of contracting lupus than other workers.
There’s also the regular wear and tear on the body of such physical work: sitting in uncomfortable postures for long periods of time often leaves workers with strain and fatigue, and many report hand, neck, lower back, shoulder and wrist pain.
Yet regulation of these chemicals or of workplace practices is scarce, and many workers fear speaking out. There are “a lot of barriers, including language barriers, cultural barriers, fear of retaliation,” Fu said, as well as “mistrust of the government.” Given that immigrants dominate the workforce, those with uncertain status may fear going public.
But policy makers are taking notice. One success story was the passage of a bill in California this year that requires chemicals used by salon workers to come with the same ingredient labels that consumer cosmetic products have. Another bill passed by the state in 2016 required salons to post signs in workers’ languages about their rights. “It’s like a first step — just because there’s a sign up doesn’t mean the salon is going to make the changes,” Fu pointed out. The state also has a Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Program, created by a bill passed in 2016, which certifies and promotes salons that commit to safe practices.
New York passed its own reforms after The New York Times published an in-depth investigation into the industry. These reforms included new state regulations for safety and labor standards and its own New York Healthy Salons Coalition to recognize businesses that follow best practices. As part of that coalition, a worker center named Adhikaar has helped train more than 1,000 workers about their health and rights.
But more needs to be done. “There are a lot of cultural shifts that need to happen that will take time,” Fu said. To get there, it will require “a really comprehensive approach through partnerships with government agencies, through continual outreach and education to the community—not just to workers, but also to employers.”
New York labor leaders: Amazon has 'record of routinely mistreating workers'
As Amazon looks to come to town, labor leaders tore into the company’s record on worker treatment in a new report
Erin Durkin in New York
the guardian
Wed 28 Nov 2018 15.22 EST
As Amazon looks to come to town, New York labor leaders tore into the company’s record on worker treatment in a new report issued on Wednesday.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and city lawmakers said Amazon’s record of grueling conditions for warehouse workers and opposition to union organizing should make the tech giant unwelcome in the city.
The company plans to open a massive new office in Long Island City, Queens – splitting its planned second headquarters between there and Arlington, Virginia. The plan, backed by the mayor and governor, has sparked a backlash and protests in the city.
“Amazon has a record of routinely mistreating and exploiting its workers at all levels, whether they are employed in its corporate offices or in its warehouses,” said the RWDSU president, Stuart Appelbaum. “Amazon has operated as an anti-worker, union-busting company across the United States and across Europe.”
At least nine workers have died at Amazon facilities since 2013, the union’s report says.
It cites reports that there were so many calls for medical help at a Pennsylvania warehouse during a heatwave that the company had ambulances stationed outside, and accusations, denied by Amazon, that UK workers were urinating in bottles because they were too afraid to take a bathroom break.
The company has also consistently fought efforts to unionize, releasing a training video to teach managers to find “warning signs” of union organizing and hiring a law firm that specializes in opposing unionization, the union notes, citing published reports.
On Black Friday, there were demonstrations outside Amazon warehouses in the UK and strikes in Germany, Italy and Spain.
Jonathan Westin, head of New York Communities for Change, which organizes low-wage workers, said with more shoppers skipping brick-and-mortar stores to buy online, warehouse jobs like the ones offered by Amazon represent the future of retail work.
“Warehouses are the new retail jobs,” he said. “It is the future of where jobs are going in this country and we need to hold them accountable.”
Amazon’s New York move does not require approval from lawmakers, since the state is using a legal maneuver to avoid the typical zoning vote.
But state senator Michael Gianaris threatened lawsuits if financial incentives for Amazon are not put through the state budget process. “The law is the law, and if they try and bypass required procedures there will be lawsuits. So this is far from a done deal,” he said.
The company is set to receive about $2.8bn in tax breaks and cash subsidies from the state and city.
Not all city unions are fighting the Amazon project. The influential building workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU, has hailed the project, saying it will bring “thousands of good union jobs that will build, maintain and secure this complex”.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about Amazon’s hostility to unions, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he believes the city’s union-friendly attitudes will rub off on the company.
“I am very happy that Amazon will benefit from being in an environment that’s pro-union and we’ll start to see why this union town works so well,” he said at a press conference this month. “We’re always going to be supportive of the union movement.”
But state senator-elect Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district is set to house an Amazon fulfillment center, said the company should be pressed to commit to a card check neutrality agreement, meaning they would not oppose any effort to organize a union.
“No union, no Amazon,” she said.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and city lawmakers said Amazon’s record of grueling conditions for warehouse workers and opposition to union organizing should make the tech giant unwelcome in the city.
The company plans to open a massive new office in Long Island City, Queens – splitting its planned second headquarters between there and Arlington, Virginia. The plan, backed by the mayor and governor, has sparked a backlash and protests in the city.
“Amazon has a record of routinely mistreating and exploiting its workers at all levels, whether they are employed in its corporate offices or in its warehouses,” said the RWDSU president, Stuart Appelbaum. “Amazon has operated as an anti-worker, union-busting company across the United States and across Europe.”
At least nine workers have died at Amazon facilities since 2013, the union’s report says.
It cites reports that there were so many calls for medical help at a Pennsylvania warehouse during a heatwave that the company had ambulances stationed outside, and accusations, denied by Amazon, that UK workers were urinating in bottles because they were too afraid to take a bathroom break.
The company has also consistently fought efforts to unionize, releasing a training video to teach managers to find “warning signs” of union organizing and hiring a law firm that specializes in opposing unionization, the union notes, citing published reports.
On Black Friday, there were demonstrations outside Amazon warehouses in the UK and strikes in Germany, Italy and Spain.
Jonathan Westin, head of New York Communities for Change, which organizes low-wage workers, said with more shoppers skipping brick-and-mortar stores to buy online, warehouse jobs like the ones offered by Amazon represent the future of retail work.
“Warehouses are the new retail jobs,” he said. “It is the future of where jobs are going in this country and we need to hold them accountable.”
Amazon’s New York move does not require approval from lawmakers, since the state is using a legal maneuver to avoid the typical zoning vote.
But state senator Michael Gianaris threatened lawsuits if financial incentives for Amazon are not put through the state budget process. “The law is the law, and if they try and bypass required procedures there will be lawsuits. So this is far from a done deal,” he said.
The company is set to receive about $2.8bn in tax breaks and cash subsidies from the state and city.
Not all city unions are fighting the Amazon project. The influential building workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU, has hailed the project, saying it will bring “thousands of good union jobs that will build, maintain and secure this complex”.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about Amazon’s hostility to unions, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he believes the city’s union-friendly attitudes will rub off on the company.
“I am very happy that Amazon will benefit from being in an environment that’s pro-union and we’ll start to see why this union town works so well,” he said at a press conference this month. “We’re always going to be supportive of the union movement.”
But state senator-elect Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district is set to house an Amazon fulfillment center, said the company should be pressed to commit to a card check neutrality agreement, meaning they would not oppose any effort to organize a union.
“No union, no Amazon,” she said.
Revealed: Restricting breaks keeps poultry industry workers living in fear
At Sanderson Farms in Texas, workers report being reprimanded for bathroom breaks and increasing pressure to increase productivity
Milli Legrain in Bryan, Texas
the guardian
Mon 26 Nov 2018 06.00 EST
"The not using the restroom thing was really the last straw for me,” said Vivian Valadez, 36, after working for less than three months for Sanderson Farms, the third largest poultry provider in the United States.
With only two scheduled breaks per eight-hour shift, Valadez explained how a handful of workers in her area had invented “their own little restroom schedule” to relieve themselves outside official break time. They took it in turns to stand in for each other, while “trying to hurry up” to limit the effect on the rest of the poultry line.
One day Valadez got reprimanded by a supervisor on her way back from the bathroom. Even though she claims her own manager “was never really around”, the supervisor told Vivian she had to “wait until he came back around” to ask for his permission.
In an interview with the Guardian, a former Sanderson Farms supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous, described how she and her peers were encouraged to ignore worker requests for bathroom breaks.
“A superintendent would sometimes tell us to leave the area when workers were likely to go to the restroom. That way they couldn’t ask us for permission to go,” she said. “So at times we would remove ourselves from the area,” said the employee.
Valadez left the processing plant in Bryan, Texas in 2016. But workers today say conditions haven’t improved. Two years later, she still remembers the incident that led to her resignation. “Nobody is going to tell me when I can and can’t go to the restroom. So I didn’t go back after that,” she said.
As a former worker and a US citizen who is not the family breadwinner, Valadez was more willing than others to speak publicly about her experience. Poultry processing mainly attracts unskilled immigrant workers, African Americans, single mothers or even felons who are more vulnerable and fear employer retaliation.
The poultry industry “has created a culture to keep people living in fear,” said Brandon Hopkins of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) who represents workers at Sanderson Farms as well as other poultry giants including JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride.
In his 10 years as a union representative in Texas and Louisiana, he says he has “had employees go to the bathroom on themselves because they are so scared of getting in trouble that they don’t leave the line”.
The bathroom access problem is industry-wide but Sanderson Farms executives emphatically deny it affects their employees. “That would be a violation of our policies,” said Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer and spokesman for the company. “Any supervisor who was found to have done that would be terminated immediately,” he added.
But current employees claim that any restroom request outside the authorized 12-minute break and 30-minute unpaid lunch break is at the supervisor’s discretion.
“I tried not to drink water because I knew my supervisor wasn’t going to let me go. Not even if I was peeing on myself,” said one worker who had worked at Sanderson Farms.
A former supervisor claimed pressure from her own managers to turn out more chicken was immense. “I say I’m a supervisor but I’m really just doing what I’m told,” she said. “And I get into trouble if I don’t.”
Having started off as a worker herself, she experienced firsthand the humiliation of having a bathroom request denied. “The workers complain a lot and I understand. Sometimes they have to wait 30 or 40 minutes and they won’t let them use the restroom.”
“Sometimes they make you wait so long that you don’t want to go any longer,” she added.
That is not the only problem. The plant employs 1,400 workers and restrooms are located far from workstations. “If I run, I can get there in three minutes,” said one employee. “But if I go at a regular pace it takes me four or five.”
“I know because I’ve timed myself,” she said.
“So the 12-minute break is really only eight,” added another.
Cockrell did concede that the issue of bathroom breaks had been brought to his attention. “That allegation has been raised from time to time, particularly by labor unions during negotiations. But we categorically deny that. It would be a violation not only of our policies and OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards] but of basic human dignity,” he said.
The UFCW’s Brandon Hopkins disagreed: “Sanderson Farms’ answer is that any time anybody wants to use the bathroom, they can. We both know that is not true.”
Conditions across the poultry industry are notorious for high turnover rates. Others argue that employees should be grateful for the job. “With no skills they are making $12.50 an hour,” said Brodrick Ross, a workforce specialist at the state-run Texas Workforce Commission, that acts as a first point of contact for low-skilled workers looking for employment.
According to documents seen by the Guardian, the entry-level wage – which includes a competitive benefits package – is $12.20 per hour and rises to $13.55 after a year on the job. Workers say it’s the highest-paying job in the area.
OSHA inspected the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan in June and again in September after a complaint was filed by the Centro de Derechos Laborales, a local group that advocates for Hispanic worker rights. The government body has six months to investigate.
One employee from Mexico noticed that conditions improve drastically during OSHA visits. “Today was unusual,” she said. “They gave us three breaks instead of two.”
“We stopped work at 4.30pm and they gave us a break at 3.15pm. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that OSHA came.”
A former supervisor also noticed that working conditions were significantly better whenever there was an inspection. “They put less chicken on the line. Everything looks slower and people look more relaxed, ” she said.
OSHA issued its first citation against a company for violating a worker’s rightto use the restroom in 1997. For Debbie Berkowitz a lifelong workers’ advocate, currently at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington, DC, this was a watershed moment. But for many poultry workers across the United States, over 20 years later, the issue is still unresolved.
OSHA standards state that employees should be able to use the restroom whenever they need to – within reason.
“If they are on the line, and they need to go to the bathroom, they shouldn’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes or so,” said Berkowitz.
Labor laws also make clear that lack of bathroom access is a health risk. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that cause them to urinate more often are particularly vulnerable.
Pedro Guerrero, a worker with diabetes who left the Sanderson Farms plant in 2012 after hanging chickens on the line for two years remembers the time his manager confronted him for going to the bathroom. “My supervisor asked me where I was going,” Guerrero recalls. “Can’t you wait until the break?” he said. “Do you want me to do it in my pants?” replied Guerrero, pulling on his pants zipper.
The 60-year-old worker from the Mexican state of Jalisco who became a US citizen over 20 years ago, harbors bitter memories over the discrimination he suffered at the plant. He claims that US-born workers would regularly go to the restroom “to text or fool around”, while he was verbally harassed by his manager.
Experts say restricted bathroom access disproportionately affects women due to urinary tract infections, menstruation and pregnancy. Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed complaints against Case Farms in North Carolina and Fieldale Farms in Georgia alleging sexual discrimination for restricted bathroom access for two female poultry plant workers.
At Sanderson Farms, a current employee showed me a doctor’s note asking her supervisor to let her use the restroom as needed. “We would ask permission to use the restroom. They would ask us to wait. And then sometimes they would forget,” she said.
An Oxfam report from 2015 and a Government Accountability Office studyfrom 2017 confirm that lack of bathroom access runs across the poultry industry.
Labor experts link the issue to a push for increased productivity and increased line speeds following a rise in consumer demand for chicken in the 80s and 90s.
More specifically they say the issue is symptomatic of the industry’s high turnover rate. “It’s about staffing. They don’t have enough staff to replace a worker who needs to go to the bathroom,” said Berkowitz.
Employees complain of the line speed interfering with their ability to take breaks. One worker, who resigned this summer and now works at a local bank, tearfully recalled how, as a newly arrived untrained worker at Sanderson Farms, she was put under intolerable pressure by her supervisor to “pack 60 chicken drumsticks per minute”. She was later told by another supervisor that “the requirement was 45”.
In a recent move, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it was allowing poultry processing plants that meet certain criteria to increase their line speed even further.
The overall line speed at Sanderson Farms in Bryan, Texas, is a well-kept secret. But union representatives think the plant already runs “one of the faster lines in the industry”.
“It’s hard,” says Vivian Valadez, thinking of her former colleagues. “It’s hard for them. I’m not there any more.”
With only two scheduled breaks per eight-hour shift, Valadez explained how a handful of workers in her area had invented “their own little restroom schedule” to relieve themselves outside official break time. They took it in turns to stand in for each other, while “trying to hurry up” to limit the effect on the rest of the poultry line.
One day Valadez got reprimanded by a supervisor on her way back from the bathroom. Even though she claims her own manager “was never really around”, the supervisor told Vivian she had to “wait until he came back around” to ask for his permission.
In an interview with the Guardian, a former Sanderson Farms supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous, described how she and her peers were encouraged to ignore worker requests for bathroom breaks.
“A superintendent would sometimes tell us to leave the area when workers were likely to go to the restroom. That way they couldn’t ask us for permission to go,” she said. “So at times we would remove ourselves from the area,” said the employee.
Valadez left the processing plant in Bryan, Texas in 2016. But workers today say conditions haven’t improved. Two years later, she still remembers the incident that led to her resignation. “Nobody is going to tell me when I can and can’t go to the restroom. So I didn’t go back after that,” she said.
As a former worker and a US citizen who is not the family breadwinner, Valadez was more willing than others to speak publicly about her experience. Poultry processing mainly attracts unskilled immigrant workers, African Americans, single mothers or even felons who are more vulnerable and fear employer retaliation.
The poultry industry “has created a culture to keep people living in fear,” said Brandon Hopkins of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) who represents workers at Sanderson Farms as well as other poultry giants including JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride.
In his 10 years as a union representative in Texas and Louisiana, he says he has “had employees go to the bathroom on themselves because they are so scared of getting in trouble that they don’t leave the line”.
The bathroom access problem is industry-wide but Sanderson Farms executives emphatically deny it affects their employees. “That would be a violation of our policies,” said Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer and spokesman for the company. “Any supervisor who was found to have done that would be terminated immediately,” he added.
But current employees claim that any restroom request outside the authorized 12-minute break and 30-minute unpaid lunch break is at the supervisor’s discretion.
“I tried not to drink water because I knew my supervisor wasn’t going to let me go. Not even if I was peeing on myself,” said one worker who had worked at Sanderson Farms.
A former supervisor claimed pressure from her own managers to turn out more chicken was immense. “I say I’m a supervisor but I’m really just doing what I’m told,” she said. “And I get into trouble if I don’t.”
Having started off as a worker herself, she experienced firsthand the humiliation of having a bathroom request denied. “The workers complain a lot and I understand. Sometimes they have to wait 30 or 40 minutes and they won’t let them use the restroom.”
“Sometimes they make you wait so long that you don’t want to go any longer,” she added.
That is not the only problem. The plant employs 1,400 workers and restrooms are located far from workstations. “If I run, I can get there in three minutes,” said one employee. “But if I go at a regular pace it takes me four or five.”
“I know because I’ve timed myself,” she said.
“So the 12-minute break is really only eight,” added another.
Cockrell did concede that the issue of bathroom breaks had been brought to his attention. “That allegation has been raised from time to time, particularly by labor unions during negotiations. But we categorically deny that. It would be a violation not only of our policies and OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards] but of basic human dignity,” he said.
The UFCW’s Brandon Hopkins disagreed: “Sanderson Farms’ answer is that any time anybody wants to use the bathroom, they can. We both know that is not true.”
Conditions across the poultry industry are notorious for high turnover rates. Others argue that employees should be grateful for the job. “With no skills they are making $12.50 an hour,” said Brodrick Ross, a workforce specialist at the state-run Texas Workforce Commission, that acts as a first point of contact for low-skilled workers looking for employment.
According to documents seen by the Guardian, the entry-level wage – which includes a competitive benefits package – is $12.20 per hour and rises to $13.55 after a year on the job. Workers say it’s the highest-paying job in the area.
OSHA inspected the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan in June and again in September after a complaint was filed by the Centro de Derechos Laborales, a local group that advocates for Hispanic worker rights. The government body has six months to investigate.
One employee from Mexico noticed that conditions improve drastically during OSHA visits. “Today was unusual,” she said. “They gave us three breaks instead of two.”
“We stopped work at 4.30pm and they gave us a break at 3.15pm. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that OSHA came.”
A former supervisor also noticed that working conditions were significantly better whenever there was an inspection. “They put less chicken on the line. Everything looks slower and people look more relaxed, ” she said.
OSHA issued its first citation against a company for violating a worker’s rightto use the restroom in 1997. For Debbie Berkowitz a lifelong workers’ advocate, currently at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington, DC, this was a watershed moment. But for many poultry workers across the United States, over 20 years later, the issue is still unresolved.
OSHA standards state that employees should be able to use the restroom whenever they need to – within reason.
“If they are on the line, and they need to go to the bathroom, they shouldn’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes or so,” said Berkowitz.
Labor laws also make clear that lack of bathroom access is a health risk. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that cause them to urinate more often are particularly vulnerable.
Pedro Guerrero, a worker with diabetes who left the Sanderson Farms plant in 2012 after hanging chickens on the line for two years remembers the time his manager confronted him for going to the bathroom. “My supervisor asked me where I was going,” Guerrero recalls. “Can’t you wait until the break?” he said. “Do you want me to do it in my pants?” replied Guerrero, pulling on his pants zipper.
The 60-year-old worker from the Mexican state of Jalisco who became a US citizen over 20 years ago, harbors bitter memories over the discrimination he suffered at the plant. He claims that US-born workers would regularly go to the restroom “to text or fool around”, while he was verbally harassed by his manager.
Experts say restricted bathroom access disproportionately affects women due to urinary tract infections, menstruation and pregnancy. Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed complaints against Case Farms in North Carolina and Fieldale Farms in Georgia alleging sexual discrimination for restricted bathroom access for two female poultry plant workers.
At Sanderson Farms, a current employee showed me a doctor’s note asking her supervisor to let her use the restroom as needed. “We would ask permission to use the restroom. They would ask us to wait. And then sometimes they would forget,” she said.
An Oxfam report from 2015 and a Government Accountability Office studyfrom 2017 confirm that lack of bathroom access runs across the poultry industry.
Labor experts link the issue to a push for increased productivity and increased line speeds following a rise in consumer demand for chicken in the 80s and 90s.
More specifically they say the issue is symptomatic of the industry’s high turnover rate. “It’s about staffing. They don’t have enough staff to replace a worker who needs to go to the bathroom,” said Berkowitz.
Employees complain of the line speed interfering with their ability to take breaks. One worker, who resigned this summer and now works at a local bank, tearfully recalled how, as a newly arrived untrained worker at Sanderson Farms, she was put under intolerable pressure by her supervisor to “pack 60 chicken drumsticks per minute”. She was later told by another supervisor that “the requirement was 45”.
In a recent move, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it was allowing poultry processing plants that meet certain criteria to increase their line speed even further.
The overall line speed at Sanderson Farms in Bryan, Texas, is a well-kept secret. But union representatives think the plant already runs “one of the faster lines in the industry”.
“It’s hard,” says Vivian Valadez, thinking of her former colleagues. “It’s hard for them. I’m not there any more.”
US retail workers face long hours, poor pay and 'anxiety through the roof' on Black Friday
Workers face increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without extra compensation during holidays
Michael Sainato in Albany
the guardian
Fri 23 Nov 2018 01.00 EST
Nicholas Oates started working at an Amazon fulfillment center in Kansas City, Missouri, in August last year, a few months before Amazon’s ‘peak season’ began in late November, when Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales kick off holiday shopping.
That year, 45% of all US online transactions on Thanksgiving Day and 54.9% of all online transactions on Black Friday were made through Amazon. On Cyber Monday, Amazon sold over 64m items , making up a significant portion of the record $6.59bn in total sales for the day. Amazon noted it was their biggest sales day in company history.
This year, Amazon expanded their Black Friday sale to “Black Friday Deals Week”, encompassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and offering different sales on a daily basis.
To help meet such demand during this year’s peak season, Oates, 25, said he was already working 60 hours a week.
Oates explained that as the work volume increases, Amazon workers are not allowed to use personal time and vacation time use is discouraged.
Amazon announced earlier this year a plan to hire 100,000 temporary employees for the 2018 holiday season, though that number has decreased from previous years. The reduction has been attributed to automation and an increased reliance on robots in Amazon fulfillment centers.
Oates says the robots on the warehouse floor often wind up knocking items to the ground, slowing down the work assembly and making it more difficult for workers to keep up picking items.
“It’s a depressing work culture because I’ve seen countless people get chewed up and spit out at this job. One of the biggest, depressing realizations is after I survived peak season, I couldn’t recognize my department anymore. So many people were gone.”
Oates is currently homeless, living out of his car in the Amazon fulfillment center parking lot while working full-time. Oates said he’s struggling with depression. “My quality of sleep has been horrible, I’ve only been getting four to five hours of sleep a night tops,” he said.
Shannon Allen, another Amazon employee who has worked at a fulfillment center in Haslet, Texas, since May 2017, said Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales include many more large items and appliances, which make it more difficult for Amazon workers to keep up with the pace demanded by management.
“When people order the larger items, it makes it a little more strenuous on everybody because mass quantities of larger items are not something that we normally deal with every day,” Allen said.
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said the company’s “number one priority is to ensure a positive and safe working environment”.
“In recent years, thousands of seasonal associates have gone on to join Amazon on a longer-term basis after the holiday season” the statement said.
The National Retail Federation projects overall holiday season sales to increase by 4.1% in 2018. Increasingly, these sales are shifting toward online retail over brick and mortar retail; in 2017, online sales on Black Friday saw an 18% increase from the previous year, while the number of people who shopped in brick and mortar retail stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday decreased by 4% .
Though Black Friday shopping is trending toward online retail, millions of Americans will still shop in person at brick and mortar retail stores, where workers face substantial increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without any additional compensation.
“You don’t get to enjoy Thanksgiving because of Black Friday right after,” said Ludmiala Blanco, an employee for 25 years at a CVS in Los Angeles, California.
“People are very demanding, we have huge lines, and we are understaffed for most of the time people rush in.”
She noted only full-time employees receive time and a half extra compensation for working holidays like Thanksgiving Day but isn’t offered at all on Black Friday.
“It’s really stressful. It’s chaos everywhere. Having to keep up with the pace management expects you to work at, dealing with the mess and the customers, my anxiety is through the roof,” said Noemi Castro, a three-year employee at K-Mart in Los Angeles, California, who is working the morning shift on Black Friday this year.
The director of labor education research at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, Kate Bronfenbrenner, explained these trends are persistent throughout the retail industry.
“There is a very human, personal cost,” Bronfenbrenner said. She noted in the 1980s many places did not open on holidays and were closed on Sundays. “We have moved to a world where the biggest shopping days of the year are on holidays.”
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has made efforts to compete with Amazon on Cyber Monday while hosting Black Friday sales at their retail stores across the country.
Walmart does not offer holiday pay or additional compensation to workers on days like Black Friday.
Walmart has faced increasing pressure from workers to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. In the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Stop Walmart Act introduced last week to push Walmart to raise their wages, Walmart workers are planning protest events outside of the Walmart billionaire heiress Alice Walton’s New York City Penthouse and Walmart.com headquarters in San Bruno, California, on Cyber Monday.
Kristi Branstetter, a Walmart employee for more than seven years at a store outside of Kansas City, Missouri said: “Retail workers are giving up their time, time with their family to serve customers and we are not making money for ourselves, but making money for the executives and the Waltons who are sitting at home.”
That year, 45% of all US online transactions on Thanksgiving Day and 54.9% of all online transactions on Black Friday were made through Amazon. On Cyber Monday, Amazon sold over 64m items , making up a significant portion of the record $6.59bn in total sales for the day. Amazon noted it was their biggest sales day in company history.
This year, Amazon expanded their Black Friday sale to “Black Friday Deals Week”, encompassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and offering different sales on a daily basis.
To help meet such demand during this year’s peak season, Oates, 25, said he was already working 60 hours a week.
Oates explained that as the work volume increases, Amazon workers are not allowed to use personal time and vacation time use is discouraged.
Amazon announced earlier this year a plan to hire 100,000 temporary employees for the 2018 holiday season, though that number has decreased from previous years. The reduction has been attributed to automation and an increased reliance on robots in Amazon fulfillment centers.
Oates says the robots on the warehouse floor often wind up knocking items to the ground, slowing down the work assembly and making it more difficult for workers to keep up picking items.
“It’s a depressing work culture because I’ve seen countless people get chewed up and spit out at this job. One of the biggest, depressing realizations is after I survived peak season, I couldn’t recognize my department anymore. So many people were gone.”
Oates is currently homeless, living out of his car in the Amazon fulfillment center parking lot while working full-time. Oates said he’s struggling with depression. “My quality of sleep has been horrible, I’ve only been getting four to five hours of sleep a night tops,” he said.
Shannon Allen, another Amazon employee who has worked at a fulfillment center in Haslet, Texas, since May 2017, said Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales include many more large items and appliances, which make it more difficult for Amazon workers to keep up with the pace demanded by management.
“When people order the larger items, it makes it a little more strenuous on everybody because mass quantities of larger items are not something that we normally deal with every day,” Allen said.
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said the company’s “number one priority is to ensure a positive and safe working environment”.
“In recent years, thousands of seasonal associates have gone on to join Amazon on a longer-term basis after the holiday season” the statement said.
The National Retail Federation projects overall holiday season sales to increase by 4.1% in 2018. Increasingly, these sales are shifting toward online retail over brick and mortar retail; in 2017, online sales on Black Friday saw an 18% increase from the previous year, while the number of people who shopped in brick and mortar retail stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday decreased by 4% .
Though Black Friday shopping is trending toward online retail, millions of Americans will still shop in person at brick and mortar retail stores, where workers face substantial increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without any additional compensation.
“You don’t get to enjoy Thanksgiving because of Black Friday right after,” said Ludmiala Blanco, an employee for 25 years at a CVS in Los Angeles, California.
“People are very demanding, we have huge lines, and we are understaffed for most of the time people rush in.”
She noted only full-time employees receive time and a half extra compensation for working holidays like Thanksgiving Day but isn’t offered at all on Black Friday.
“It’s really stressful. It’s chaos everywhere. Having to keep up with the pace management expects you to work at, dealing with the mess and the customers, my anxiety is through the roof,” said Noemi Castro, a three-year employee at K-Mart in Los Angeles, California, who is working the morning shift on Black Friday this year.
The director of labor education research at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, Kate Bronfenbrenner, explained these trends are persistent throughout the retail industry.
“There is a very human, personal cost,” Bronfenbrenner said. She noted in the 1980s many places did not open on holidays and were closed on Sundays. “We have moved to a world where the biggest shopping days of the year are on holidays.”
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has made efforts to compete with Amazon on Cyber Monday while hosting Black Friday sales at their retail stores across the country.
Walmart does not offer holiday pay or additional compensation to workers on days like Black Friday.
Walmart has faced increasing pressure from workers to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. In the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Stop Walmart Act introduced last week to push Walmart to raise their wages, Walmart workers are planning protest events outside of the Walmart billionaire heiress Alice Walton’s New York City Penthouse and Walmart.com headquarters in San Bruno, California, on Cyber Monday.
Kristi Branstetter, a Walmart employee for more than seven years at a store outside of Kansas City, Missouri said: “Retail workers are giving up their time, time with their family to serve customers and we are not making money for ourselves, but making money for the executives and the Waltons who are sitting at home.”
Our new column from inside Amazon: 'They treat us as disposable'
In The Amazon Diaries, our anonymous insider takes us behind the scenes at an Amazon fulfillment center where workers are ‘an extension of the machine’
Anonymous
the guardian
Wed 21 Nov 2018 03.01 EST
Welcome Amazonians. It is always Day 1. Are you ready to make a difference?
It was my first day as a seasonal Amazon worker, hired just prior to peak season. Our site operations manager was like many Amazon managers: an ex-military white male, in his late 40s and wearing straight-fit jeans and a T-shirt with “Amazon Military” emblazoned on the front. He drew a line alongside an inverted pyramid, writing “least important” on the bottom and “most important” higher up, with the word “customer” scrawled along the very top.
“Where do you think Jeff Bezos sees himself on this chart?”
Silence. He points to the bottom of the pyramid.
“Jeff sees himself as the least important person in the company. What this company cares about is the customer promise, and putting our customers first.
“Where do you think our associates are?”
Silence.
“Here! Jeff sees you at the very top! You, the associates, are the closest to the customers. It is up to you, every day, to uphold our customer promise. As front line associates, you are the most important part of this company!”
As I headed to our training session wearing my new orange associate work-vest and wearing my white badge designating me as a “seasonal” employee, I was approached by a co-worker in a fancy, blue and green-lined “Ambassador” vest and a blue badge that signified he has been “converted” to a non-seasonal Amazon worker.
“Did they give you the pyramid crap?”
I nodded.
“That’s a load of shit.” We laughed, but I wasn’t quite sure I understood.
“Welcome to Amazon,” he said.
The inverted pyramid has stuck with me as an Amazon fulfillment associate. In some ways it’s on point. It’s important to take a step back and realize what an Amazon fulfillment center really is. Prior to Amazon, the sale of stuff largely took place through physical stores. Enter a store and there can be dozens of employees, stocking shelves, managing the check-out counter, controlling inventory. The pace and rhythm of the day, at least compared to fulfillment centers, can be relatively relaxed.
At Amazon, by contrast, we are not retail workers. We are factory workers.
A single fulfillment center can contain 1,500-2,000 full-time workers, stowing, picking, packing, unloading, sorting, palletizing and delivering hundreds of thousands of items every day. Centers are filled with the whirl, grind, and moan of conveyor belts, the incessant drone of a forest of Kivabots moving shelves.
We work hard, and diligently, to make Amazon run. While our collective efforts produce astounding results, we are supervised ever more intensively. Through the use of digital trackers and indicators, our workday is managed down to the second, with each task timed based on a “rate” set by managers who push us ever faster. Work is often organized to keep workers from talking or even taking breaks, with this time considered “off-task”. Like factory workers on the assembly line, we are essentially extensions of the machine.
When you recognize that we are what keeps Amazon going, and the most important part of the business, putting us at the top of the pyramid is right. Workers – whether the engineers or the hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees – are the backbone of the business and the source of astounding wealth. Without us there is no Amazon Prime, no advertising revenue, no streaming video, no HQ2.
However, the pyramid analogy is also fitting because at the time this place feels like a pyramid scheme. After a few months at the company, it becomes clear to most of us that management doesn’t regard us a crucial contributors to its success. In reality, they treat us like disposable parts.
It doesn’t take long before you’ve see blown backs, boxes falling on people’s heads, carpal tunnel in your coworkers’ wrists, and balky knees that never get better. You’ve seen workers compensation claims repeatedly denied and efforts to address safety issues given low priority. You’ve seen sexism, racism, and ageism in a promotion culture tainted with favoritism. You’ve seen write-ups unfairly distributed and used to manipulate workers. You’ve seen an emotionally toxic culture, where the stress of meeting productivity targets leads managers to treat workers like things, to be pushed harder and faster without regard for the emotional or personal cost. You’ve arrived home exhausted, too worn out to spend time with your kids or friends. And you’ve noticed that the wealth we produce is being accumulated by our boss – the modern world’s richest man – while our wages barely keep us afloat. Amazon’s much-touted new minimum wage of $15 is not enough to propel hundreds of thousands of us into the middle class.
Those of us as at the bottom of the pyramid put our bodies and lives on the line, but those at the top of the pyramid are hung out to dry.
The closer you are to doing the actual work of making this company run, the more your self-respect is attacked.
Every other week, this column will seek to understand the complexity of life inside Amazon, and explore the effects Amazon has on our lives and on our broader community. Throughout, I want to remain consistent on one thing: Amazon workers deserve respect. As the people who make this company run, we are unique. And only if we are united will we be able to transform our company and our communities into the ones we want.
It was my first day as a seasonal Amazon worker, hired just prior to peak season. Our site operations manager was like many Amazon managers: an ex-military white male, in his late 40s and wearing straight-fit jeans and a T-shirt with “Amazon Military” emblazoned on the front. He drew a line alongside an inverted pyramid, writing “least important” on the bottom and “most important” higher up, with the word “customer” scrawled along the very top.
“Where do you think Jeff Bezos sees himself on this chart?”
Silence. He points to the bottom of the pyramid.
“Jeff sees himself as the least important person in the company. What this company cares about is the customer promise, and putting our customers first.
“Where do you think our associates are?”
Silence.
“Here! Jeff sees you at the very top! You, the associates, are the closest to the customers. It is up to you, every day, to uphold our customer promise. As front line associates, you are the most important part of this company!”
As I headed to our training session wearing my new orange associate work-vest and wearing my white badge designating me as a “seasonal” employee, I was approached by a co-worker in a fancy, blue and green-lined “Ambassador” vest and a blue badge that signified he has been “converted” to a non-seasonal Amazon worker.
“Did they give you the pyramid crap?”
I nodded.
“That’s a load of shit.” We laughed, but I wasn’t quite sure I understood.
“Welcome to Amazon,” he said.
The inverted pyramid has stuck with me as an Amazon fulfillment associate. In some ways it’s on point. It’s important to take a step back and realize what an Amazon fulfillment center really is. Prior to Amazon, the sale of stuff largely took place through physical stores. Enter a store and there can be dozens of employees, stocking shelves, managing the check-out counter, controlling inventory. The pace and rhythm of the day, at least compared to fulfillment centers, can be relatively relaxed.
At Amazon, by contrast, we are not retail workers. We are factory workers.
A single fulfillment center can contain 1,500-2,000 full-time workers, stowing, picking, packing, unloading, sorting, palletizing and delivering hundreds of thousands of items every day. Centers are filled with the whirl, grind, and moan of conveyor belts, the incessant drone of a forest of Kivabots moving shelves.
We work hard, and diligently, to make Amazon run. While our collective efforts produce astounding results, we are supervised ever more intensively. Through the use of digital trackers and indicators, our workday is managed down to the second, with each task timed based on a “rate” set by managers who push us ever faster. Work is often organized to keep workers from talking or even taking breaks, with this time considered “off-task”. Like factory workers on the assembly line, we are essentially extensions of the machine.
When you recognize that we are what keeps Amazon going, and the most important part of the business, putting us at the top of the pyramid is right. Workers – whether the engineers or the hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees – are the backbone of the business and the source of astounding wealth. Without us there is no Amazon Prime, no advertising revenue, no streaming video, no HQ2.
However, the pyramid analogy is also fitting because at the time this place feels like a pyramid scheme. After a few months at the company, it becomes clear to most of us that management doesn’t regard us a crucial contributors to its success. In reality, they treat us like disposable parts.
It doesn’t take long before you’ve see blown backs, boxes falling on people’s heads, carpal tunnel in your coworkers’ wrists, and balky knees that never get better. You’ve seen workers compensation claims repeatedly denied and efforts to address safety issues given low priority. You’ve seen sexism, racism, and ageism in a promotion culture tainted with favoritism. You’ve seen write-ups unfairly distributed and used to manipulate workers. You’ve seen an emotionally toxic culture, where the stress of meeting productivity targets leads managers to treat workers like things, to be pushed harder and faster without regard for the emotional or personal cost. You’ve arrived home exhausted, too worn out to spend time with your kids or friends. And you’ve noticed that the wealth we produce is being accumulated by our boss – the modern world’s richest man – while our wages barely keep us afloat. Amazon’s much-touted new minimum wage of $15 is not enough to propel hundreds of thousands of us into the middle class.
Those of us as at the bottom of the pyramid put our bodies and lives on the line, but those at the top of the pyramid are hung out to dry.
The closer you are to doing the actual work of making this company run, the more your self-respect is attacked.
Every other week, this column will seek to understand the complexity of life inside Amazon, and explore the effects Amazon has on our lives and on our broader community. Throughout, I want to remain consistent on one thing: Amazon workers deserve respect. As the people who make this company run, we are unique. And only if we are united will we be able to transform our company and our communities into the ones we want.
California is using inmate labor to fight its deadly wildfires
The inmates are paid just $1 an hour.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
NOV 11, 2018, 9:36 AM
As wildfires rage across California and the death toll rises, hundreds of inmates in California prisons are risking their lives to be paid just $1 an hour to help fight the flames.
In Northern California, the Camp Fire erupted on November 8 in the hills north of Sacramento and became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday night, it had taken 23 lives. At the same time, the Woolsey Fire is raging in Southern California and has killed two people.
California has a long history of using prison labor to fight wildfires, and this year is no different. At least 200 inmate firefighters from 16 different crews are among the thousands of people fighting the Camp Fire, according to local reporters.
Incarcerated individuals have been brought from six different conservation camps and are being paid far below the salary of non-incarcerated firefighters to help control the dangerous flames.
Inmate firefighters are also helping to fight the Southern California fires, according to reports which say that three tried to escape but were caught.
California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was not immediately available for comment, but the department has highlighted its role in fighting wildfires in the past. In July, the department tweeted that “inmate firefighters serve a vital role” in fighting the state’s wildfires.
“Today, more than 2,000 volunteer inmate firefighters, including 58 youth offenders, are battling wildfire flames throughout CA,” the department wrote.
According to WBUR, inmates make up nearly 40 percent of California’s firefighters, saving the state $100 million per year.
The state’s practice of using inmate firefighters dates back to World War II, when the firefighter workforce across California was depleted because of the war.
According to local reporters, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has said it has “authority to operate 39 conservation camps statewide and 196 fire crews year round due to the cooperative efforts with the CDCR and the Division of Juvenile Justice.”
Across California, 29 counties operate 44 conservation camps for adult inmates, one for juvenile offenders, and three adult offender camps that house females. According to reports, the camps can house up to 4,522 adult inmates and 80 juveniles. A majority of the camps are managed by both the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Participation in the camps is voluntary, and minimum-custody inmates have to earn the right to work at the camps by having a nonviolent record. The inmates are trained by California officials and are paid, on average, $2 a day. That pay jumps up to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires.
By comparison, inmates in California typically earn between eight cents and 95 cents an hour.
Some inmates have said that fighting fires is a coveted job and allows incarcerated individuals to challenge themselves while spending time in nature. But the New York Times reported in August 2017 that the state’s roughly 250 female-inmate firefighters risk their lives for the volunteer position. The Times details the story of a 22-year-old inmate who was killed while fighting a fire less than two months before her three-year sentence was set to end.
For that type of grueling and dangerous work, many female inmates said the pay is insufficient.
‘‘The pay is ridiculous,’’ 35-year-old La’Sonya Edwards told The Times during a break from clearing a fire road. ‘‘There are some days we are worn down to the core. And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do.’’
The article noted that “Edwards makes about $500 a year in camp, plus whatever she earns while on the fire line, which might add up to a few hundred dollars in a month; the pay for a full-time civilian firefighter starts at about $40,000.”
The job isn’t just dangerous for female inmates. In April, a male inmate firefighter in Northern California collapsed and died during a training hike during his first day on the job.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told WBUR that inmate firefighters are a “uniquely vulnerable part of the workforce.”
“When prisoners do volunteer to work it’s especially important that we make absolutely sure that they’re making a free and uncoerced and truly voluntary choice,” he said. “And that’s especially important when the work they’re doing is very dangerous, like fighting wildfires.”
In Northern California, the Camp Fire erupted on November 8 in the hills north of Sacramento and became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday night, it had taken 23 lives. At the same time, the Woolsey Fire is raging in Southern California and has killed two people.
California has a long history of using prison labor to fight wildfires, and this year is no different. At least 200 inmate firefighters from 16 different crews are among the thousands of people fighting the Camp Fire, according to local reporters.
Incarcerated individuals have been brought from six different conservation camps and are being paid far below the salary of non-incarcerated firefighters to help control the dangerous flames.
Inmate firefighters are also helping to fight the Southern California fires, according to reports which say that three tried to escape but were caught.
California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was not immediately available for comment, but the department has highlighted its role in fighting wildfires in the past. In July, the department tweeted that “inmate firefighters serve a vital role” in fighting the state’s wildfires.
“Today, more than 2,000 volunteer inmate firefighters, including 58 youth offenders, are battling wildfire flames throughout CA,” the department wrote.
According to WBUR, inmates make up nearly 40 percent of California’s firefighters, saving the state $100 million per year.
The state’s practice of using inmate firefighters dates back to World War II, when the firefighter workforce across California was depleted because of the war.
According to local reporters, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has said it has “authority to operate 39 conservation camps statewide and 196 fire crews year round due to the cooperative efforts with the CDCR and the Division of Juvenile Justice.”
Across California, 29 counties operate 44 conservation camps for adult inmates, one for juvenile offenders, and three adult offender camps that house females. According to reports, the camps can house up to 4,522 adult inmates and 80 juveniles. A majority of the camps are managed by both the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Participation in the camps is voluntary, and minimum-custody inmates have to earn the right to work at the camps by having a nonviolent record. The inmates are trained by California officials and are paid, on average, $2 a day. That pay jumps up to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires.
By comparison, inmates in California typically earn between eight cents and 95 cents an hour.
Some inmates have said that fighting fires is a coveted job and allows incarcerated individuals to challenge themselves while spending time in nature. But the New York Times reported in August 2017 that the state’s roughly 250 female-inmate firefighters risk their lives for the volunteer position. The Times details the story of a 22-year-old inmate who was killed while fighting a fire less than two months before her three-year sentence was set to end.
For that type of grueling and dangerous work, many female inmates said the pay is insufficient.
‘‘The pay is ridiculous,’’ 35-year-old La’Sonya Edwards told The Times during a break from clearing a fire road. ‘‘There are some days we are worn down to the core. And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do.’’
The article noted that “Edwards makes about $500 a year in camp, plus whatever she earns while on the fire line, which might add up to a few hundred dollars in a month; the pay for a full-time civilian firefighter starts at about $40,000.”
The job isn’t just dangerous for female inmates. In April, a male inmate firefighter in Northern California collapsed and died during a training hike during his first day on the job.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told WBUR that inmate firefighters are a “uniquely vulnerable part of the workforce.”
“When prisoners do volunteer to work it’s especially important that we make absolutely sure that they’re making a free and uncoerced and truly voluntary choice,” he said. “And that’s especially important when the work they’re doing is very dangerous, like fighting wildfires.”
House Democrats plan to grill Labor Department officials about tip and child labor policies
Now that Democrats have the House, they plan to hold the Labor Department accountable.
CASEY QUINLAN - thinkprogress
NOV 10, 2018, 10:39 AM
After winning back the House on Tuesday, Democrats plan to grill Labor Department officials about some of their proposals, which they have safety and transparency concerns about.
Democrats have long had questions about the U.S. Department of Labor’s approach on issues such as child labor in health care jobs and not informing the public about an analysis that did not favor one of their proposed regulations on tipping.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), who will be chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, told Bloomberg Law about his plans and said, “If you’re having a regulatory change, the law requires you to produce the evidence to support the change.”
In December, the department proposed a rule rescinding parts of Obama-era tip regulations and allow employers who pay the minimum wage to take workers’ tips. The department said it would allow “back of the house” workers, such as dishwashers and cooks, who don’t typically receive tips, to be part of a tip-sharing pool. But the rule wouldn’t actually prevent employers from just keeping the tips.
According to Economic Policy Institute research, tipped workers would lose $5.8 billion a year in tips as a result of this rule. Women in tipped jobs would lose $4.6 billion annually.
After doing an internal analysis of the proposal, Department of Labor decided to scrub it from its proposal after it also discovered workers would be robbed of billions of dollars. Staff then changed the methodology to get a more favorable analysis, but Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team were reportedly unsatisfied with even that analysis, so with the approval of the White House, they took it out. Later reports from Bloomberg showed that White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) staff said the proposal of changes to tipped worker pay rules should include professional estimates of the impact for tipped workers but Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, worked with Acosta to scrap the analysis entirely, Bloomberg Law first reported.
In December, Saru Jayaraman, president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a non-profit that advocates for improvement of wages for low-wage restaurant workers, said the proposed rule would push a majority-women workforce “further into financial instability, poverty, and vulnerability to harassment and assault.”
Democrats on the committee, as well as other Democrats in Congress, wrote a letter to the department in February stating that if the department withheld the analysis, it “raises serious questions about the integrity of the Department’s rulemaking process.” They also demanded more information about meetings and further communication about the analysis.
Democrats also wrote a letter to Acosta and Mulvaney in August citing their concerns about a department proposal to allow teenagers to work more hours in health care positions that under current regulations, are considered unsafe for them. The department has said that exempting power-driven patient lifts from these regulations makes sense because use of the equipment would be “safer for workers than the alternative method of manually lifting patients.”
The department has said that teenagers would have to receive 75 hours of training and at least 16 hours of supervision by a nurse in the proposed rule.
But in their August letter, Democratic lawmakers said they want scientific reviews from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
“While we believe in expanding job opportunities for young workers, I am sure you would agree that this should not be done at the expense of their health, safety, and lives,” Democratic members of Congress wrote.
Democrats have long had questions about the U.S. Department of Labor’s approach on issues such as child labor in health care jobs and not informing the public about an analysis that did not favor one of their proposed regulations on tipping.
Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), who will be chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, told Bloomberg Law about his plans and said, “If you’re having a regulatory change, the law requires you to produce the evidence to support the change.”
In December, the department proposed a rule rescinding parts of Obama-era tip regulations and allow employers who pay the minimum wage to take workers’ tips. The department said it would allow “back of the house” workers, such as dishwashers and cooks, who don’t typically receive tips, to be part of a tip-sharing pool. But the rule wouldn’t actually prevent employers from just keeping the tips.
According to Economic Policy Institute research, tipped workers would lose $5.8 billion a year in tips as a result of this rule. Women in tipped jobs would lose $4.6 billion annually.
After doing an internal analysis of the proposal, Department of Labor decided to scrub it from its proposal after it also discovered workers would be robbed of billions of dollars. Staff then changed the methodology to get a more favorable analysis, but Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team were reportedly unsatisfied with even that analysis, so with the approval of the White House, they took it out. Later reports from Bloomberg showed that White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) staff said the proposal of changes to tipped worker pay rules should include professional estimates of the impact for tipped workers but Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, worked with Acosta to scrap the analysis entirely, Bloomberg Law first reported.
In December, Saru Jayaraman, president of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a non-profit that advocates for improvement of wages for low-wage restaurant workers, said the proposed rule would push a majority-women workforce “further into financial instability, poverty, and vulnerability to harassment and assault.”
Democrats on the committee, as well as other Democrats in Congress, wrote a letter to the department in February stating that if the department withheld the analysis, it “raises serious questions about the integrity of the Department’s rulemaking process.” They also demanded more information about meetings and further communication about the analysis.
Democrats also wrote a letter to Acosta and Mulvaney in August citing their concerns about a department proposal to allow teenagers to work more hours in health care positions that under current regulations, are considered unsafe for them. The department has said that exempting power-driven patient lifts from these regulations makes sense because use of the equipment would be “safer for workers than the alternative method of manually lifting patients.”
The department has said that teenagers would have to receive 75 hours of training and at least 16 hours of supervision by a nurse in the proposed rule.
But in their August letter, Democratic lawmakers said they want scientific reviews from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
“While we believe in expanding job opportunities for young workers, I am sure you would agree that this should not be done at the expense of their health, safety, and lives,” Democratic members of Congress wrote.
Meet the Janitors Taking On Big Pharma to Win a Livable Wage
BY GEORGE FISH - in these times
11/2/18
Forty-eight Indianapolis janitors and supporters, including two Indianapolis City-County Council members, were arrested while staging a sit-in October 25 at the intersection next to the corporate headquarters of Eli Lilly, Indiana’s richest corporation.
The pharmaceutical giant is Indianapolis’s leading corporate philanthropist, currently spearheading a $13 million United Way campaign to alleviate poverty, in a city where 1 in 5 residents lives in poverty.
But among the city’s poor are the subcontracted janitors who clean Eli Lilly’s buildings, who start at a meager $9.75 an hour.
At the rally, Lilly janitors shared stories. One speaker had been left homeless—unable to afford a security deposit and first month’s rent combined, despite full-time work. A whopping 88 percent of the city’s union janitors can’t afford the health insurance offered.
“Our lives, our children, and our future are at stake,” said Clarence Jones, one of the Lilly janitors who spoke at the rally.
As Lilly goes, so goes Indy
A month prior, 44 Indianapolis janitors and supporters were arrested after staging a sit-in at a busy downtown street intersection during the September 25 evening rush hour.
Six hundred janitors are fighting for a new contract. They’re members of the Indianapolis branch of Service Employees (SEIU) mega-local Local 1, employed by janitorial contractors to clean downtown Indy’s posh commercial offices, as well as the Eli Lilly campus.
Targeting Lilly plays an important role in activists’ campaigns, because as Lilly goes, so does the vast majority of Indianapolis businesses. The union says Lilly could easily make sure the workers who clean its buildings make a living wage and have decent health insurance, though a company spokesperson told the Indy Star that since the janitors are employed by a subcontractor, Lilly can’t be involved in negotiations.
The September and October actions were carefully negotiated beforehand with the police, who blocked off oncoming traffic. Officers read the demonstrators their Miranda rights and escorted them to waiting vehicles for arraignment. SEIU will pay the arrestees’ fines. These bits of political theater were designed to not just to inform the public and garner extensive media coverage (which they did), but also to demonstrate to the downtown building managers, Eli Lilly, and the janitorial contractors that the union means serious business in this contract fight.
Union janitors in Indianapolis average only $10.70, lower than in nearby cities. They often have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, even though the city’s downtown office rental rates are the highest in the region. Few members of the largely Latino and Black workforce work full-time hours; they often get shifts of only four to six hours a night.
Contract, round two
Eight of the 12 major downtown janitorial contractors, including the contractor for Eli Lilly, are covered under a master contract with SEIU. Unionizing took a decade of hard fighting. The first contract, negotiated hastily in 2015, left much to be desired in terms of wages and benefits.
In this round, janitors are pushing for comprehensive, affordable health care for themselves and their families, full-time work, paid sick days, and a $13 hourly starting wage by the end of the new contract, in 2021. Last year the Indianapolis City-County Council passed a resolution providing a $13 “living wage” to all municipal employees. For a start, the union is demanding an immediate raise of 75 cents an hour, which would raise the starting wage from $9.75 to $10.50.
Since February, SEIU Local 1 and its supporters have organized several large demonstrations, drawing support from the local Steelworkers, Auto Workers, UNITE HERE, and Letter Carriers. College students have traveled from 60 miles away to join the actions, which have also garnered support from Jobs with Justice, Our Revolution, and local immigrant rights groups. The support helped push the Indianapolis City-Council Council to pass a resolution calling for a $13-an-hour wage for the janitors.
Negotiations began on August 7. The contractors still haven’t offered full-time employment to all who want it, and while concessions were made on health care, the contractors balked at going higher than a $10.70 an hour starting salary for the life of the contract. The union is hopeful that their recent highly-visible actions will get them to budge.
Saving union jobs
Last year the janitors union waged a months-long battle to save jobs. The Gold Building, one of downtown Indy’s major office buildings, had dropped its union contractor in favor of the fiercely anti-union contractor Bulldog, slashing wages and working conditions for the janitors who stayed.
The local organized the affected janitors to demand the return of a union contractor, sought support from office workers in the building, and helped members transfer to union janitorial jobs elsewhere.
The union even trained supporters for a civil disobedience action at the Gold Building. The day before the scheduled action, however, building managers caved in and agreed to bring back the previous union contractor. The planned protest rally turned into a victory rally.
About a month later, when the union contractor resumed operating janitorial services at the Gold Building, Local 1 held a welcoming demonstration for the union janitors returning to their former jobs. That also served as an outreach opportunity to new hires.
The pharmaceutical giant is Indianapolis’s leading corporate philanthropist, currently spearheading a $13 million United Way campaign to alleviate poverty, in a city where 1 in 5 residents lives in poverty.
But among the city’s poor are the subcontracted janitors who clean Eli Lilly’s buildings, who start at a meager $9.75 an hour.
At the rally, Lilly janitors shared stories. One speaker had been left homeless—unable to afford a security deposit and first month’s rent combined, despite full-time work. A whopping 88 percent of the city’s union janitors can’t afford the health insurance offered.
“Our lives, our children, and our future are at stake,” said Clarence Jones, one of the Lilly janitors who spoke at the rally.
As Lilly goes, so goes Indy
A month prior, 44 Indianapolis janitors and supporters were arrested after staging a sit-in at a busy downtown street intersection during the September 25 evening rush hour.
Six hundred janitors are fighting for a new contract. They’re members of the Indianapolis branch of Service Employees (SEIU) mega-local Local 1, employed by janitorial contractors to clean downtown Indy’s posh commercial offices, as well as the Eli Lilly campus.
Targeting Lilly plays an important role in activists’ campaigns, because as Lilly goes, so does the vast majority of Indianapolis businesses. The union says Lilly could easily make sure the workers who clean its buildings make a living wage and have decent health insurance, though a company spokesperson told the Indy Star that since the janitors are employed by a subcontractor, Lilly can’t be involved in negotiations.
The September and October actions were carefully negotiated beforehand with the police, who blocked off oncoming traffic. Officers read the demonstrators their Miranda rights and escorted them to waiting vehicles for arraignment. SEIU will pay the arrestees’ fines. These bits of political theater were designed to not just to inform the public and garner extensive media coverage (which they did), but also to demonstrate to the downtown building managers, Eli Lilly, and the janitorial contractors that the union means serious business in this contract fight.
Union janitors in Indianapolis average only $10.70, lower than in nearby cities. They often have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, even though the city’s downtown office rental rates are the highest in the region. Few members of the largely Latino and Black workforce work full-time hours; they often get shifts of only four to six hours a night.
Contract, round two
Eight of the 12 major downtown janitorial contractors, including the contractor for Eli Lilly, are covered under a master contract with SEIU. Unionizing took a decade of hard fighting. The first contract, negotiated hastily in 2015, left much to be desired in terms of wages and benefits.
In this round, janitors are pushing for comprehensive, affordable health care for themselves and their families, full-time work, paid sick days, and a $13 hourly starting wage by the end of the new contract, in 2021. Last year the Indianapolis City-County Council passed a resolution providing a $13 “living wage” to all municipal employees. For a start, the union is demanding an immediate raise of 75 cents an hour, which would raise the starting wage from $9.75 to $10.50.
Since February, SEIU Local 1 and its supporters have organized several large demonstrations, drawing support from the local Steelworkers, Auto Workers, UNITE HERE, and Letter Carriers. College students have traveled from 60 miles away to join the actions, which have also garnered support from Jobs with Justice, Our Revolution, and local immigrant rights groups. The support helped push the Indianapolis City-Council Council to pass a resolution calling for a $13-an-hour wage for the janitors.
Negotiations began on August 7. The contractors still haven’t offered full-time employment to all who want it, and while concessions were made on health care, the contractors balked at going higher than a $10.70 an hour starting salary for the life of the contract. The union is hopeful that their recent highly-visible actions will get them to budge.
Saving union jobs
Last year the janitors union waged a months-long battle to save jobs. The Gold Building, one of downtown Indy’s major office buildings, had dropped its union contractor in favor of the fiercely anti-union contractor Bulldog, slashing wages and working conditions for the janitors who stayed.
The local organized the affected janitors to demand the return of a union contractor, sought support from office workers in the building, and helped members transfer to union janitorial jobs elsewhere.
The union even trained supporters for a civil disobedience action at the Gold Building. The day before the scheduled action, however, building managers caved in and agreed to bring back the previous union contractor. The planned protest rally turned into a victory rally.
About a month later, when the union contractor resumed operating janitorial services at the Gold Building, Local 1 held a welcoming demonstration for the union janitors returning to their former jobs. That also served as an outreach opportunity to new hires.
Chicago Creates New Office of Labor Standards to Combat Wage Theft
BY
Bryce Covert, Truthout
PUBLISHED
November 1, 2018
Pay in restaurants isn’t usually high to begin with, but line prep cook Juan Sandoval says he rarely even gets the full pay he’s due.
Sandoval, who has worked in the Chicago restaurant scene for six years, told Truthout that his employers frequently fail to pay him time-and-a-half for working overtime hours above 40 hours a week. Right now, he said, he’s working 12 hours a day, yet he’s only getting paid $900 a week — what he’s owed for each regular hour, but minus the extra $400 he should get for overtime.
That missing $400 creates hardship not just for him and his two children, ages 17 and 19, but also for the siblings he often supports financially. “It leaves you with less money and also leaves you less time,” he said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “So, it’s less money for your family and less time for your family.”
If he got paid correctly for his extra hours, he could cut his schedule down a bit more and go to culinary school. He could spend more time with his children. “When I don’t spend time [with them] it runs the risk of them being influenced by other people, me not being able to be as much of a role model,” he said.
But he hasn’t reported his mistreatment to anyone. “I wasn’t really sure where to go,” he said.
That’s why he got involved in a campaign to create a labor rights agency to closely regulate workplaces like his. “After many years of experiencing this kind of mistreatment, discrimination and rejection, I decided that it was really enough,” he said. “I felt an urge to really do something.”
His decision to speak out just paid off. On Wednesday, October 31, Chicago took a big step forward toward protecting city residents’ workplace rights: The city council approved the creation of a brand-new Office of Labor Standards charged with enforcing all of the city’s employment laws.
There are already enforcement agencies — the state department of labor, as well as the city’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs — but this one will go further. For one thing, the state department of labor has less than 10 investigators for the entire state of Illinois and its more than 6 million-person workforce. The new Chicago office, by contrast, will start out with five staff members, and advocates hope it will only expand from there as more cases come in. The office will also have subpoena power with the ability to audit an entire company accused of mistreatment. And because every Chicago business needs a license to operate, the office will have power over all of them to deny, revoke or suspend licenses when it uncovers misbehavior.
“That’s a real lever,” noted Adam Kader, worker center director at Arise Chicago, a workers’ rights organization that generated the idea for the new office in the first place, adding that it’s a lever that the state doesn’t have.
The Office of Labor Standards will also have more tools at its disposal. As of December 2017, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection had only investigated about a quarter of the 550 minimum wage complaints it had received. It is simply outmatched by the scale of the problem. “We knew we couldn’t expect an agency to be tasked with additional enforcement and given no additional resources,” Kader said. The new Office of Labor Standards will be in charge of making sure workers actually get these benefits and any others implemented in the future.
“Enforcement … is very limited if it’s only complaint-driven,” Kader said. The workers most vulnerable to abuse are also often the ones least likely to report what they’ve experienced. One way the new office will combat this problem is by having the authority to investigate mistreatment that shows up in the news or is reported by community groups like Arise. It will also have the power to expand a single, individual complaint into a company-wide investigation.
That’s meaningful for Sandoval. “I will turn in a complaint now, knowing that there’s an office in place,” he said, adding that the office will make him “feel safer and also more confident to report abuses against bad employers.” He’s particularly excited about the power the office will have to expand an investigation into an individual’s complaint to the entire workplace. “It allows people to say ‘Yes, me too, me too,’ and as a group there will be more power.”
Similar agencies already exist in New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, which have also passed enhanced rights for workers, including paid sick leave. In New York, the Office of Labor Policy & Standards wagedan 18-month education campaign to make sure city workers were aware of the new benefit and then went out and enforced that right with the power to investigate complaints, including subpoena power and the ability to impose civil penalties. It’s focused on low-wage workplaces, such as car washes, restaurants and retail stores. Meanwhile, Seattle created its agency after passing a $15 minimum wage increase, and it now engages in directed investigations that proactively monitor industries to see if they are violating workers’ rights before receiving any complaints.
Arise Chicago learned from what they’ve accomplished. “We took inspiration from those three cities,” Kader said. His organization traveled to Seattle to meet with advocates there and met with people from New York in Chicago.
He now hopes that other cities will take inspiration from what was just accomplished in his city. “Solidifying dedicated staff and resources for local enforcement is going to be a game changer,” Kader said. “I hope it signals to other cities that this is a viable way to protect workers and residents.” It may not be feasible in every city to do exactly what Chicago just did. But in the places where it is possible, “we want to be a resource in the same way San Francisco, Seattle and New York were for us,” he said.
“The end goal is not just taking care of our workers in our city,” Kader added. “We want to see this as part of a broad movement of local power for workers.”
The creation of Chicago’s office follows the passage of a series of worker-driven laws improving pay and benefits for its low-wage employees. In 2013, the city passed an ordinance to combat wage theft, which means that a business owner who steals employee wages could have his license revoked, making Chicago the largest city at the time to have such a policy; in 2014 it passed a minimum wage increase that put the wage floor at $12 an hour this year and will rise to $13 next year; and in 2016, it passed an ordinance requiring workers be able to earn up to five sick days a year. Arise Chicago was heavily involved in campaigning for all three.
But having rights on paper doesn’t always mean that employers follow the new rules. “The new protections are critical to improving local working conditions and decreasing poverty, but are useless if not enforced,” Arise Chicago said in a press release. Even as the organization was pushing for these laws, “the mantra of Arise Chicago was, ‘Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement,’” Kader said.
The effort to create the new office came from the grassroots, driven by demand from workers themselves, who led a two-year campaign for it. “The community has had a hand in shaping the structure of this agency at the ground level,” Kader said. The organization met with more than 30 Chicago city council members, including members who lived or worked in their wards. “We were tenacious about securing those meetings,” Kader said. “It was the first time we’ve ever really done that extensive work with elected officials.” They got lawmakers to agree to the concept of an agency early on, and then worked with the city council, a group of attorneys from across the country and workers to develop the language of the bill creating the new office.
“We do feel the eyes of other cities on us and we wanted to make sure that we kept the bar high so that subsequent efforts could also be high,” Kader said. “We wanted to make sure it was as strong as possible.”
The new office will also be ready should new rights and benefits pass. Fair scheduling is already on the horizon in Chicago, and advocates might even contemplate trying to pass local paid family leave in the next few years. “Passing laws like that would be unthinkable if we don’t have a solid enforcement agency in place,” Kader said. “We wanted to pass this Office of Labor Standards and have it in place so that subsequent laws could … be properly enforced.”
The Office of Labor Standards will also give workers a closer connection to the local government that represents them. “To see the government serving them, being able to count on the government, is so meaningful,” he said. “Being able to affirm the role of government [in] legitimizing workers’ claims is definitely meaningful. It’s profound.”
Sandoval, who has worked in the Chicago restaurant scene for six years, told Truthout that his employers frequently fail to pay him time-and-a-half for working overtime hours above 40 hours a week. Right now, he said, he’s working 12 hours a day, yet he’s only getting paid $900 a week — what he’s owed for each regular hour, but minus the extra $400 he should get for overtime.
That missing $400 creates hardship not just for him and his two children, ages 17 and 19, but also for the siblings he often supports financially. “It leaves you with less money and also leaves you less time,” he said, speaking in Spanish through a translator. “So, it’s less money for your family and less time for your family.”
If he got paid correctly for his extra hours, he could cut his schedule down a bit more and go to culinary school. He could spend more time with his children. “When I don’t spend time [with them] it runs the risk of them being influenced by other people, me not being able to be as much of a role model,” he said.
But he hasn’t reported his mistreatment to anyone. “I wasn’t really sure where to go,” he said.
That’s why he got involved in a campaign to create a labor rights agency to closely regulate workplaces like his. “After many years of experiencing this kind of mistreatment, discrimination and rejection, I decided that it was really enough,” he said. “I felt an urge to really do something.”
His decision to speak out just paid off. On Wednesday, October 31, Chicago took a big step forward toward protecting city residents’ workplace rights: The city council approved the creation of a brand-new Office of Labor Standards charged with enforcing all of the city’s employment laws.
There are already enforcement agencies — the state department of labor, as well as the city’s Department of Consumer and Business Affairs — but this one will go further. For one thing, the state department of labor has less than 10 investigators for the entire state of Illinois and its more than 6 million-person workforce. The new Chicago office, by contrast, will start out with five staff members, and advocates hope it will only expand from there as more cases come in. The office will also have subpoena power with the ability to audit an entire company accused of mistreatment. And because every Chicago business needs a license to operate, the office will have power over all of them to deny, revoke or suspend licenses when it uncovers misbehavior.
“That’s a real lever,” noted Adam Kader, worker center director at Arise Chicago, a workers’ rights organization that generated the idea for the new office in the first place, adding that it’s a lever that the state doesn’t have.
The Office of Labor Standards will also have more tools at its disposal. As of December 2017, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection had only investigated about a quarter of the 550 minimum wage complaints it had received. It is simply outmatched by the scale of the problem. “We knew we couldn’t expect an agency to be tasked with additional enforcement and given no additional resources,” Kader said. The new Office of Labor Standards will be in charge of making sure workers actually get these benefits and any others implemented in the future.
“Enforcement … is very limited if it’s only complaint-driven,” Kader said. The workers most vulnerable to abuse are also often the ones least likely to report what they’ve experienced. One way the new office will combat this problem is by having the authority to investigate mistreatment that shows up in the news or is reported by community groups like Arise. It will also have the power to expand a single, individual complaint into a company-wide investigation.
That’s meaningful for Sandoval. “I will turn in a complaint now, knowing that there’s an office in place,” he said, adding that the office will make him “feel safer and also more confident to report abuses against bad employers.” He’s particularly excited about the power the office will have to expand an investigation into an individual’s complaint to the entire workplace. “It allows people to say ‘Yes, me too, me too,’ and as a group there will be more power.”
Similar agencies already exist in New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, which have also passed enhanced rights for workers, including paid sick leave. In New York, the Office of Labor Policy & Standards wagedan 18-month education campaign to make sure city workers were aware of the new benefit and then went out and enforced that right with the power to investigate complaints, including subpoena power and the ability to impose civil penalties. It’s focused on low-wage workplaces, such as car washes, restaurants and retail stores. Meanwhile, Seattle created its agency after passing a $15 minimum wage increase, and it now engages in directed investigations that proactively monitor industries to see if they are violating workers’ rights before receiving any complaints.
Arise Chicago learned from what they’ve accomplished. “We took inspiration from those three cities,” Kader said. His organization traveled to Seattle to meet with advocates there and met with people from New York in Chicago.
He now hopes that other cities will take inspiration from what was just accomplished in his city. “Solidifying dedicated staff and resources for local enforcement is going to be a game changer,” Kader said. “I hope it signals to other cities that this is a viable way to protect workers and residents.” It may not be feasible in every city to do exactly what Chicago just did. But in the places where it is possible, “we want to be a resource in the same way San Francisco, Seattle and New York were for us,” he said.
“The end goal is not just taking care of our workers in our city,” Kader added. “We want to see this as part of a broad movement of local power for workers.”
The creation of Chicago’s office follows the passage of a series of worker-driven laws improving pay and benefits for its low-wage employees. In 2013, the city passed an ordinance to combat wage theft, which means that a business owner who steals employee wages could have his license revoked, making Chicago the largest city at the time to have such a policy; in 2014 it passed a minimum wage increase that put the wage floor at $12 an hour this year and will rise to $13 next year; and in 2016, it passed an ordinance requiring workers be able to earn up to five sick days a year. Arise Chicago was heavily involved in campaigning for all three.
But having rights on paper doesn’t always mean that employers follow the new rules. “The new protections are critical to improving local working conditions and decreasing poverty, but are useless if not enforced,” Arise Chicago said in a press release. Even as the organization was pushing for these laws, “the mantra of Arise Chicago was, ‘Enforcement, enforcement, enforcement,’” Kader said.
The effort to create the new office came from the grassroots, driven by demand from workers themselves, who led a two-year campaign for it. “The community has had a hand in shaping the structure of this agency at the ground level,” Kader said. The organization met with more than 30 Chicago city council members, including members who lived or worked in their wards. “We were tenacious about securing those meetings,” Kader said. “It was the first time we’ve ever really done that extensive work with elected officials.” They got lawmakers to agree to the concept of an agency early on, and then worked with the city council, a group of attorneys from across the country and workers to develop the language of the bill creating the new office.
“We do feel the eyes of other cities on us and we wanted to make sure that we kept the bar high so that subsequent efforts could also be high,” Kader said. “We wanted to make sure it was as strong as possible.”
The new office will also be ready should new rights and benefits pass. Fair scheduling is already on the horizon in Chicago, and advocates might even contemplate trying to pass local paid family leave in the next few years. “Passing laws like that would be unthinkable if we don’t have a solid enforcement agency in place,” Kader said. “We wanted to pass this Office of Labor Standards and have it in place so that subsequent laws could … be properly enforced.”
The Office of Labor Standards will also give workers a closer connection to the local government that represents them. “To see the government serving them, being able to count on the government, is so meaningful,” he said. “Being able to affirm the role of government [in] legitimizing workers’ claims is definitely meaningful. It’s profound.”
The Legacy of Slavery Is Alive in the South as Black Women Workers Face Horrendous Conditions
BY ELI DAY - in these times
MONDAY, OCT 29, 2018, 11:23 AM
When Priscilla Smith found herself in Brazil this past May, speaking at an international conference of domestic workers, the distance from her life as a caregiver in North Carolina seemed almost too extraordinary to believe.
“It was like a dream. I was extremely nervous,” she tells In These Times. “But to know that these women are fighting for the same causes from all around the world [and] to see how passionate and strong they are gave me a sense of pride to know that I was chosen by an organization as powerful as [the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA)] to represent them.”
In recent years, Smith had thrown herself completely into this work, fighting alongside her fellow domestic workers for the treatment and benefits they know they deserve.
A new report, Pay, Professionalism & Respect, put out by the National Domestic Workers Alliance We Dream in Black program and the Institute for Policy Studies Black Worker Initiative, shines a spotlight on the untold workplace humiliations, abuses and outright cruelties inflicted on black women in one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries. It’s a story of mistreatment closing in on all sides: from workers teetering on the brink of homelessness to rampant wage theft and workplace injury to unrestrained sexual harassment and bigotry in the workplace.
“I ended up homeless for eight months,” Diane Heller, a caregiver who’s bounced between her hometown of Chicago, IL and Atlanta and Savannah, GA, says in the report. “I was a live-in and the client was horrendous. She screamed and yelled a lot and kicked me out on the coldest day of the year. I had to go to a shelter, and it was a living hell.”
Despite growing demand for caregivers of all stripes—nannies, housekeepers and home health aides—poverty haunts every corner of the industry. This is especially true in the South. In North Carolina, for example, median income for home health aides is $19,680. And in the Atlanta metropolitan area, maids and housekeepers making the median wage are taking home just $19,380. Both are well below the federal poverty line for a family of four, $25,100.
The indignities don’t stop at poverty wages. Many caregivers, who spend much of their waking lives caring for the nation’s most physically vulnerable, find it impossible to secure care themselves. Lurika Wynn of Durham, for example, has made veteran healthcare work her passion. Yet her years working in the field have been financially and physically perilous. Speaking of her workplace injuries and lack of health insurance, she says “I have torn ligaments, plus I have nerve pain from lifting and pulling. ... I’m never going to [get workers’ comp] for it. When this back is done, I’m out.”
Wynn is not alone. There are over two million domestic workers in the United States, but few of them enjoy any benefits to speak of. As the report notes, “only 12.2% of in-home workers nationally receive health insurance from their job, compared with 50.6% in other professions.” And across the country, “less than 2% of domestic workers receive retirement or pensions benefits from their primary employer.”
“It's pitiful,” Smith says. “And it's unfair. It's not that the money isn't there. The money is in this field. They just choose not to put it” towards health care.
But the report offers more than a catalog of abuses. Alongside every outrage, the spotlight is also placed on the growing power of black domestic workers to overcome them.
“We're really focused on raising the floor for black domestic workers,” says Celeste Faison, the Director of Black Organizing at NDWA who also heads up strategy for their We Dream in Black program. With outposts in five states—Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida—We Dream in Black has emerged as an important vehicle for empowering black domestic workers and caregivers to change their lives.
But on top of winning robust labor protections and decent wages and benefits for domestic workers, Faison places their struggle in a much longer lineage. “It's also about beginning to tear down the sets of belief and historical practices of devaluing black labor,” she says.
This approach elevates the country’s full history, warts and all. And the conditions facing black domestic workers are a perfect example of where that history collides with the present. “If you really want to trace the history of wealth inequity in this country you can use domestic work.”
Faison sketches a clear picture, from the days of the southern slave empire and long into its aftermath, all the way through the New Deal and right up to the present. At every step, black labor—and domestic workers in particular—held the wretched position of being caregivers to a nation that enslaved, mutilated and raped them while pilfering their wages, if there were wages to speak of, and refused to offer them the workplace dignity that popular struggle had won for scores of white workers under FDR.
“If you ask any black person they'll either say their grandmother or their great-grandmother or their great aunt was a domestic worker,” Faison says. “These were the jobs that were available for black women.” Fast forward to the present and “you can see the wealth inequities between black women and everyone else.”
As America’s most faithful voting bloc, it can be argued that black women are either the republic’s truest believers or the most unshakable in their commitment to see it do no further harm.
On first glance, it can be difficult to square this with the fact that, as the report reveals, large chunks of these women have been overlooked, or trampled underfoot, by the political class. Faison is both unsurprised and unswerving.
“The political channels don't have care work on their agenda,” she says. “It’s really up to black women and immigrant women ... to demand dignity and respect in their workplace.” She adds that there’s nothing mysterious about how to make that a reality. “How that happens is old-fashioned organizing.”
“It was like a dream. I was extremely nervous,” she tells In These Times. “But to know that these women are fighting for the same causes from all around the world [and] to see how passionate and strong they are gave me a sense of pride to know that I was chosen by an organization as powerful as [the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA)] to represent them.”
In recent years, Smith had thrown herself completely into this work, fighting alongside her fellow domestic workers for the treatment and benefits they know they deserve.
A new report, Pay, Professionalism & Respect, put out by the National Domestic Workers Alliance We Dream in Black program and the Institute for Policy Studies Black Worker Initiative, shines a spotlight on the untold workplace humiliations, abuses and outright cruelties inflicted on black women in one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries. It’s a story of mistreatment closing in on all sides: from workers teetering on the brink of homelessness to rampant wage theft and workplace injury to unrestrained sexual harassment and bigotry in the workplace.
“I ended up homeless for eight months,” Diane Heller, a caregiver who’s bounced between her hometown of Chicago, IL and Atlanta and Savannah, GA, says in the report. “I was a live-in and the client was horrendous. She screamed and yelled a lot and kicked me out on the coldest day of the year. I had to go to a shelter, and it was a living hell.”
Despite growing demand for caregivers of all stripes—nannies, housekeepers and home health aides—poverty haunts every corner of the industry. This is especially true in the South. In North Carolina, for example, median income for home health aides is $19,680. And in the Atlanta metropolitan area, maids and housekeepers making the median wage are taking home just $19,380. Both are well below the federal poverty line for a family of four, $25,100.
The indignities don’t stop at poverty wages. Many caregivers, who spend much of their waking lives caring for the nation’s most physically vulnerable, find it impossible to secure care themselves. Lurika Wynn of Durham, for example, has made veteran healthcare work her passion. Yet her years working in the field have been financially and physically perilous. Speaking of her workplace injuries and lack of health insurance, she says “I have torn ligaments, plus I have nerve pain from lifting and pulling. ... I’m never going to [get workers’ comp] for it. When this back is done, I’m out.”
Wynn is not alone. There are over two million domestic workers in the United States, but few of them enjoy any benefits to speak of. As the report notes, “only 12.2% of in-home workers nationally receive health insurance from their job, compared with 50.6% in other professions.” And across the country, “less than 2% of domestic workers receive retirement or pensions benefits from their primary employer.”
“It's pitiful,” Smith says. “And it's unfair. It's not that the money isn't there. The money is in this field. They just choose not to put it” towards health care.
But the report offers more than a catalog of abuses. Alongside every outrage, the spotlight is also placed on the growing power of black domestic workers to overcome them.
“We're really focused on raising the floor for black domestic workers,” says Celeste Faison, the Director of Black Organizing at NDWA who also heads up strategy for their We Dream in Black program. With outposts in five states—Massachusetts, New York, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida—We Dream in Black has emerged as an important vehicle for empowering black domestic workers and caregivers to change their lives.
But on top of winning robust labor protections and decent wages and benefits for domestic workers, Faison places their struggle in a much longer lineage. “It's also about beginning to tear down the sets of belief and historical practices of devaluing black labor,” she says.
This approach elevates the country’s full history, warts and all. And the conditions facing black domestic workers are a perfect example of where that history collides with the present. “If you really want to trace the history of wealth inequity in this country you can use domestic work.”
Faison sketches a clear picture, from the days of the southern slave empire and long into its aftermath, all the way through the New Deal and right up to the present. At every step, black labor—and domestic workers in particular—held the wretched position of being caregivers to a nation that enslaved, mutilated and raped them while pilfering their wages, if there were wages to speak of, and refused to offer them the workplace dignity that popular struggle had won for scores of white workers under FDR.
“If you ask any black person they'll either say their grandmother or their great-grandmother or their great aunt was a domestic worker,” Faison says. “These were the jobs that were available for black women.” Fast forward to the present and “you can see the wealth inequities between black women and everyone else.”
As America’s most faithful voting bloc, it can be argued that black women are either the republic’s truest believers or the most unshakable in their commitment to see it do no further harm.
On first glance, it can be difficult to square this with the fact that, as the report reveals, large chunks of these women have been overlooked, or trampled underfoot, by the political class. Faison is both unsurprised and unswerving.
“The political channels don't have care work on their agenda,” she says. “It’s really up to black women and immigrant women ... to demand dignity and respect in their workplace.” She adds that there’s nothing mysterious about how to make that a reality. “How that happens is old-fashioned organizing.”
funnies
