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Slavery 21st Century
You thought it was over, think again
June 17, 2019
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.
labor history - recommended reading
*THE SILK STRIKE OF 1913
*AMERICAN LABOR VIOLENCE: ITS CAUSES, CHARACTER, AND OUTCOME
headlines and issues
*Federal minimum wage sets record with no increase since 2009
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Uber is upset that its underpaid drivers are gaming the app for better pay
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Workers With Disabilities Are Making Cents Per Hour — and It’s Legal
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Nurse Beaten Unconscious in Iowa
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The gig is up: America’s booming economy is built on hollow promises by Robert Reich
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Ohio Hospital Attempts to Divide Striking Unionized Workers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Connecticut Workers Fought for a $15 Minimum Wage — and Won
(EXCERPT BELOW)
*'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft
(excerpt BELOW)
*NO, MR. PRESIDENT: CHINA DIDN'T STEAL OUR JOBS. CORPORATE AMERICA GAVE THEM AWAY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Want to help struggling college students? Support the low-paid staff who teach them.
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Is the gig economy a path to prosperity or the indenture of just getting by?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Hospital Workers in Toledo, Ohio, Strike for Safe Patient Care
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*GOP-LED EFFORTS TO CRUSH UNIONS HAVE A NEW TARGET: HOME HEALTH CARE WORKERS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No matter how much Uber exploits its workers, it still can’t make money
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Exclusive: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*TRUMP LABOR OFFICIALS ARE SECRETLY USING FORCED ARBITRATION TO GET CORPORATIONS OFF THE HOOK
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Uber, Lyft drivers on global strike just before Uber's IPO
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'It's because we were union members': Boeing fires workers who organized
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Software engineers at prominent tech firm say they were fired for trying to unionize: Report
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Most Restaurant Workers Don’t Earn Enough to Feed Their Own Families
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Black Walmart Workers Promised Raises But Were Instead Fired Over Their Criminal Records, Complaint Alleges
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE WORLD'S LARGEST HEDGE FUND BREAKS DOWN HOW THE US WORKFORCE GOT SCREWED OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'We're Broke, and Amazon Is Shouting About How Amazing They Are Because of This Raise'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Stop & Shop hit by strike as 31,000 workers walk off job
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US union seeks $100m in largest wage theft case involving federal contractor
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Harley Davidson workers in Wisconsin reject new labor contract
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
Federal minimum wage sets record with no increase since 2009
- *Baseline wage has remained unchanged at $7.25 an hour
- *Inflation has raised cost of living by 18% since last raise
Victoria Bekiempis in New York
The Guardian
Sun 16 Jun 2019 14.16 EDT
The US federal minimum wage has gone a record length of time without an increase, with the $7.25-an-hour base, remaining unchanged for nearly a decade as of Sunday.
For minimum-wage workers who have a 40-hour work week, and work 52 weeks without having any unpaid time off, this equates to just $15,080 annually, according to a CNN calculation.
Twenty-one states reportedly use the federal minimum wage as their base. Lawmakers approved the last increase on 24 July 2009.
The number stands in sharp contrast to what some researchers believe is an average living wage. Two working parents in a family of four would need to earn $67,146 to cover expenses. That equates to $16.14 an hour for each parent, CNN reported.
The record delay comes amid potentially significant economic growth.
The US has enjoyed roughly 10 years of economic expansion, which may soon become the longest such expansion in this country’s history, according to USA Today. Inflation, meanwhile, has led to a loss of purchasing power.
CBS reported that $7.25 in 2009 is valued at only about $6 in 2019. The cost of living has soared 18% since the last increase, per CBS’s report.
More than 24 cities and states have enacted higher minimum wages, however. In Massachusetts, for example, the baseline is $12 an hour. In New York City, workplaces with more than 11 employees must pay at least $15 an hour, per CBS.
Nearly every Democrat vying for their party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential election supports almost doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Some hopefuls have been visiting picket lines alongside McDonald’s workers, who were key to launching the Fight for $15 initiative that helped boost the minimum wage across some US states, CNBC said.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, reportedly vowed in 2017 that if Democrats regained control of the house, they would greenlight a $15 minimum “in the first 100 hours”.
The Raise the Wage Act, which would require a $15 minimum, has had neither a full House vote nor undergone a vote in the appropriate Senate committee, CNN points out.
The US minimum wage was first approved by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, to bolster the economy. At the time, it was 25 cents an hour, or about $4.45 in 2019 dollars. It has since been raised 22 times, CNN notes.
The second-largest time lapse in such an increase was marked in July 2007, after Congress failed to approve any increases since September 1997, CNN reported.
For minimum-wage workers who have a 40-hour work week, and work 52 weeks without having any unpaid time off, this equates to just $15,080 annually, according to a CNN calculation.
Twenty-one states reportedly use the federal minimum wage as their base. Lawmakers approved the last increase on 24 July 2009.
The number stands in sharp contrast to what some researchers believe is an average living wage. Two working parents in a family of four would need to earn $67,146 to cover expenses. That equates to $16.14 an hour for each parent, CNN reported.
The record delay comes amid potentially significant economic growth.
The US has enjoyed roughly 10 years of economic expansion, which may soon become the longest such expansion in this country’s history, according to USA Today. Inflation, meanwhile, has led to a loss of purchasing power.
CBS reported that $7.25 in 2009 is valued at only about $6 in 2019. The cost of living has soared 18% since the last increase, per CBS’s report.
More than 24 cities and states have enacted higher minimum wages, however. In Massachusetts, for example, the baseline is $12 an hour. In New York City, workplaces with more than 11 employees must pay at least $15 an hour, per CBS.
Nearly every Democrat vying for their party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential election supports almost doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Some hopefuls have been visiting picket lines alongside McDonald’s workers, who were key to launching the Fight for $15 initiative that helped boost the minimum wage across some US states, CNBC said.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, reportedly vowed in 2017 that if Democrats regained control of the house, they would greenlight a $15 minimum “in the first 100 hours”.
The Raise the Wage Act, which would require a $15 minimum, has had neither a full House vote nor undergone a vote in the appropriate Senate committee, CNN points out.
The US minimum wage was first approved by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, to bolster the economy. At the time, it was 25 cents an hour, or about $4.45 in 2019 dollars. It has since been raised 22 times, CNN notes.
The second-largest time lapse in such an increase was marked in July 2007, after Congress failed to approve any increases since September 1997, CNN reported.
Uber is upset that its underpaid drivers are gaming the app for better pay
Uber prefers to exploit its drivers (and customers) on its own terms; now, it's mad that they're fighting back
NICOLE KARLIS - Salon
JUNE 13, 2019 11:00PM (UTC)
A News station ABC7 in Arlington, Virginia, published a special report in May on how local Uber drivers were manipulating the Uber app while in the vicinity of Reagan National Airport, in order to artificially create "surge pricing" events — in which the rate for a rideshare spontaneously rises due to a lack of supply of drivers. Now, a second report published this week claims that more drivers from all across the country have come forward to share similar stories of organized rideshare price manipulation.
The reports explain that drivers manipulate the fares by turning off their rideshare apps at the same time — a collective effort that decreases supply when demand at the airport is high. When the apps are turned back on, the drivers all get a price surge on rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. Drivers say they can time this correctly by knowing when flights are arriving, according to the reports.
ABC7 says that drivers they spoke to publicly revealed the technique for the first time; according to the new report, other drivers around the country are upset the secret is out. In an Uber driver thread on Reddit, commenters say “Surge Club” is like “Fight Club,” meaning that the first rule is that you don’t talk about it.
Uber sent ABC7 a statement saying they “have taken steps to address fraudulent behavior ... engaging in this behavior may result in removal." The company said it can also be difficult to decipher what is a natural spike in prices, and a manipulated one.
There is, of course, an irony in Uber's words: typically, the company and its opaque algorithms control how much drivers get paid and how frequently a surge will occur, and the company can manipulate its own rules as much as it wants — yet it gets mad when drivers, the company's backbone, attempt to do the same on their own terms through a solidarity action.
It is unclear where else this is happening, but ABC7 said they had not found any evidence that it was happening at the D.C. area’s other two major airports, Dulles International Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
Some experts tell Salon such an idea is not that surprising, considering how little drivers make.
“Although hard to prove that drivers are intentionally manipulating the app to enjoy price surges, it is not surprising that they would,” Maria Figueroa, Director of Labor and Policy Research at The Worker Institute at Cornell’s ILR School, told Salon via email. “Based on findings from our research on platform drivers in New York, app rates are not high enough for drivers to make adequate earnings after covering all their expenses.”
Figueroa said lack of transparency is one of the biggest complaints from drivers, who sometimes argue that the companies Uber and Lyft can manipulate the platform to lower driver pay.
“It is possible to manipulate the app to trigger surge prices,” Figueroa said. “Surge pricing occurs when supply of drivers is low, or when demand for rides is very high. So, workers can reduce the supply of drivers by turning off the apps. When the surge pricing is triggered they can turn it back on.”
Moira Muntz, a spokeswoman for The Independent Drivers Guild, tells Salon the bigger picture is that drivers aren’t paid enough.
“Drivers across the country are struggling with pay that is often well below minimum wage while the app companies charge as much as they want and pocket the difference,” Muntz said. “App-based drivers in Washington DC make as little as $5 per hour, far less than the minimum wage.”
Muntz said these companies are often overcharging riders, underpaying drivers, and pocketing the difference.
“They are extracting that hard-earned money out of our communities to benefit wealthy investors,” Muntz said. “Drivers and riders need to organize together to win legislation to make this industry fair for everyone by requiring fair pay for drivers and capping the app commissions charged to riders.”
The reports explain that drivers manipulate the fares by turning off their rideshare apps at the same time — a collective effort that decreases supply when demand at the airport is high. When the apps are turned back on, the drivers all get a price surge on rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. Drivers say they can time this correctly by knowing when flights are arriving, according to the reports.
ABC7 says that drivers they spoke to publicly revealed the technique for the first time; according to the new report, other drivers around the country are upset the secret is out. In an Uber driver thread on Reddit, commenters say “Surge Club” is like “Fight Club,” meaning that the first rule is that you don’t talk about it.
Uber sent ABC7 a statement saying they “have taken steps to address fraudulent behavior ... engaging in this behavior may result in removal." The company said it can also be difficult to decipher what is a natural spike in prices, and a manipulated one.
There is, of course, an irony in Uber's words: typically, the company and its opaque algorithms control how much drivers get paid and how frequently a surge will occur, and the company can manipulate its own rules as much as it wants — yet it gets mad when drivers, the company's backbone, attempt to do the same on their own terms through a solidarity action.
It is unclear where else this is happening, but ABC7 said they had not found any evidence that it was happening at the D.C. area’s other two major airports, Dulles International Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
Some experts tell Salon such an idea is not that surprising, considering how little drivers make.
“Although hard to prove that drivers are intentionally manipulating the app to enjoy price surges, it is not surprising that they would,” Maria Figueroa, Director of Labor and Policy Research at The Worker Institute at Cornell’s ILR School, told Salon via email. “Based on findings from our research on platform drivers in New York, app rates are not high enough for drivers to make adequate earnings after covering all their expenses.”
Figueroa said lack of transparency is one of the biggest complaints from drivers, who sometimes argue that the companies Uber and Lyft can manipulate the platform to lower driver pay.
“It is possible to manipulate the app to trigger surge prices,” Figueroa said. “Surge pricing occurs when supply of drivers is low, or when demand for rides is very high. So, workers can reduce the supply of drivers by turning off the apps. When the surge pricing is triggered they can turn it back on.”
Moira Muntz, a spokeswoman for The Independent Drivers Guild, tells Salon the bigger picture is that drivers aren’t paid enough.
“Drivers across the country are struggling with pay that is often well below minimum wage while the app companies charge as much as they want and pocket the difference,” Muntz said. “App-based drivers in Washington DC make as little as $5 per hour, far less than the minimum wage.”
Muntz said these companies are often overcharging riders, underpaying drivers, and pocketing the difference.
“They are extracting that hard-earned money out of our communities to benefit wealthy investors,” Muntz said. “Drivers and riders need to organize together to win legislation to make this industry fair for everyone by requiring fair pay for drivers and capping the app commissions charged to riders.”
Workers With Disabilities Are Making Cents Per Hour — and It’s Legal
BY Jack Delaney, Truthout
PUBLISHED June 7, 2019
Imagine making cents on the dollar to toil in a warehouse, separated from the broader society, while repeatedly piecing together widgets or engaging in manual labor for some multinational corporation with which you’ve never interacted. For many Americans, the concept of making nickels and dimes for your labor in the richest nation in human history is incomprehensible. But for the tens of thousands of Americans making far less than minimum wage due to their disabilities, it is an all too familiar reality.
In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a monumental piece of legislation, was ratified and signed into law. Earning scorn from the business community and elitist politicians alike, the law created the right to a minimum wage, required overtime pay for some workers, and curtailed child labor. Yet, despite the law’s worker-conscious stipulations, it contains an antiquated provision that is being used by business executives today to pay subminimum wages to workers with disabilities.
Section 214(c) of the FLSA, which is known in disability policy circles as 14(c), allows employers that hire people with disabilities to pay their workers a subminimum wage. Section 214(c) of the FLSA states that workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” can be paid based on their “productivity” or on the “quality and quantity” of their labor. The underlying assumption is that workers with disabilities are less valuable than workers without disabilities and should thus be paid based on their productivity to incentivize employers to hire them.
Originally, 14(c) was intended to reduce the barriers to employment for people with disabilities, but over time employers have taken advantage of this provision. It certainly has not yielded equality for people with disabilities. Although some advocates say 14(c) advances employment outcomes, people with disabilities are disproportionately underemployed, unemployed or forced to live in poverty compared to the rates of the general population.
A Pipeline for Cheap Labor
Currently, there are over 1,400 firms holding 14(c) certificates in the US,collectively employing over 320,000 workers with disabilities. Certificate holders range from small operations with a sole employee working under 14(c) to large-scale operations with several hundred workers, and in a few cases, over a thousand. 14(c) certificate holders are known as Community Rehabilitation Programs, or more commonly, sheltered workshops. These organizations seek and receive contracts from large corporations to generate products and services that fund their operations.
Sheltered workshops also receive government funding through the AbilityOne Program, a program used to provide federal contracts for people with disabilities, while also receiving reimbursements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Almost half of 14(c) certificate holders participate in the AbilityOne Program. In other words, while sheltered workshops pay workers as little as a dollar an hour, taxpayer dollars through CMS reimbursements and AbilityOne government contracts are funding their operations.
At face value these organizations seem like a harmless force in American communities, but they are exploiting many vulnerable people. Many sheltered workshops’ workers make extraordinarily less than the minimum wage, sometimes even as low as 36 cents an hour. While their workers are compensated at sweatshop rates, sheltered workshop executives are often compensated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. PRIDE Industries, a Sacramento-based sheltered workshop, pays its CEO a salary of $792,132, while 906 workers are employed at subminimum wages.
14(c) is being used as a pipeline for cheap labor under the guise of “job creation” for an underserved population. Certificate holders act as a vessel for larger corporations to obtain inexpensive labor and form a symbiotic relationship based on revenue generation and exploitation masquerading as philanthropy. Unjustly, in addition to receiving little compensation, workers with disabilities are often held back from receiving promotions or placement at jobs with competitive wages in integrated settings.
Subminimum wages not only unjustly impact workers with disabilities — they also have an effect on total wages for all workers in a labor market. When labor’s costs are driven down, the wages of all workers are decreased and businesses yield higher profits. 14(c) is not only inequitable for the workers with disabilities, but also for the total labor force in a given market. Workers who are not categorized as having disabilities have to compete against labor that is almost costless for a corporation. Subminimum wages impact all workers’ wages.
Large multinational corporations like Firestone, Home Depot, Kohler, Kroger, Mary Kay, Raytheon, Time Warner Cable, Walmart and Honda, are heavily invested in 14(c). They are able to secure contracts where labor is only paid a dollar an hour. People with disabilities pay the economic price so corporations and executives can continue amassing wealth.
Sheltered workshops that hold 14(c) certificates are segregated in nature. At a glance, businesses holding 14(c) certificates may seem philanthropic, but people with disabilities, especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, have historically been segregated from the rest of society.
The use of subminimum wages is inherently inequitable and contradicts the very mission of the FLSA. The FLSA’s purpose was to promote worker protections and guarantee a minimum standard for labor.
Unfortunately, workers with disabilities are excluded from that guarantee.
14(c) is paternalistic and does not account for the skills and contributions of workers with disabilities. Social and scientific understandings of disability have certainly progressed since the inception of 14(c) in 1938. The disability service system in America is not only outdated, but also is skewed toward profit-generation, rather than community inclusion and fair compensation.
Proponents of the subminimum wage try to frame it as a civil rights issue and claim that the provision offers more choices to people with disabilities. Yet for many workers with disabilities, working for subminimum wages is not a choice. Because for-profit corporations only see people with disabilities as profitable when working for subminimum wages, 14(c) employment is often their only option for work.
The champions of the subminimum wage also argue that sheltered workshops and their executives do not have enough funds to pay their workers a decent wage and remain competitive, yet the sheltered workshop industry employs dozens of D.C. and state lobbyists to peddle influence in favor of this very issue.
Subminimum wage advocates also argue that 14(c) is used as a training program to get people with disabilities into the workforce. Yet a National Council on Disability report, citing an audit by the Government Accountability Office, found that less than 5 percent of 14(c) workers ever transitioned to a job found in the broader community or earned competitive wages.
No other classification or grouping of labor in the US is paid based on employees’ productivity or at a wage significantly lower than the minimum wage. Subminimum wages are a violation of the civil rights of people with disabilities. They amount to government-endorsed and corporate-sponsored discrimination.
Challenging Workplace Exploitation of People With Disabilities
The FLSA has been amended over 20 times since its ratification in the late 1930s, and yet 14(c) remains unaltered. Is a change coming? It’s possible: Advocates and organizers with disabilities are leading the way in challenging these harmful practices. Disability rights organizations and self-advocates (activists with disabilities) are pursuing litigation against corporations that are profiting off of overtly exploited labor. Cutting off the pipeline of cheap labor that allows multinationals to reap exuberant profits is an effective strategy and has the apologists for subminimum wages on their heels.
However, advocates and disability rights organizations should not be solely responsible for confronting these unjust labor practices. An enormous responsibility also lies with legislators, regulators, and the public. Policymakers must ensure that people with disabilities are not segregated and economically marginalized, while also ensuring disability services are appropriately funded. To promote fair wages and community integration, lawmakers must work to eliminate 14(c).
Solutions that reduce economic disparities and eliminate exploitation and segregation for workers with disabilities are long overdue. The public and members of Congress must support the Raise the Wage Act and the Transition to Competitive Employment Act, both of which would phase out subminimum wages over time and are meaningful steps in the moral direction. Policymakers and the public must also be aware that the euphemistically titled Workplace Choice and Flexibility for Individuals with Disabilities Act, or H.R. 5658, would promote state agency referrals to many 14(c) certificate holders that participate in the AbilityOne Program and continue to place people with disabilities in organizations that use 14(c) certificates. The holders of 14(c) certificates should not be allowed to receive government contracts while they pay out subminimum wages. H.R. 5658 has not yet been reintroduced in this Congress, but it is expected to make a return later this congressional session.
Another responsibility lies with employers: 14(c) certificate holders must discontinue the practice of subminimum wages. A vast majority of these organizations, funded by wealthy donors, taxpayers, and corporate contracts, certainly possess the funds to pay their workers with disabilities a respectable wage. For those that don’t, CEOs and executive staff should take a pay cut to promote the fulfillment and dignity for all of their workers, especially those with disabilities. The large for-profit corporations that fund 14(c) contracts must also discontinue the practice and work to include people with disabilities at fair wages and full employment.
The era of certificate holders and for-profit corporations benefiting from federally endorsed discrimination and poverty wages is rightfully coming to a head, and the capabilities of workers with disabilities are being realized. All working people must strive for a system that fully integrates workers with disabilities and workers without disabilities, with both receiving more equitable wages and benefits.
In 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a monumental piece of legislation, was ratified and signed into law. Earning scorn from the business community and elitist politicians alike, the law created the right to a minimum wage, required overtime pay for some workers, and curtailed child labor. Yet, despite the law’s worker-conscious stipulations, it contains an antiquated provision that is being used by business executives today to pay subminimum wages to workers with disabilities.
Section 214(c) of the FLSA, which is known in disability policy circles as 14(c), allows employers that hire people with disabilities to pay their workers a subminimum wage. Section 214(c) of the FLSA states that workers “whose earning or productive capacity is impaired by age, physical or mental deficiency, or injury” can be paid based on their “productivity” or on the “quality and quantity” of their labor. The underlying assumption is that workers with disabilities are less valuable than workers without disabilities and should thus be paid based on their productivity to incentivize employers to hire them.
Originally, 14(c) was intended to reduce the barriers to employment for people with disabilities, but over time employers have taken advantage of this provision. It certainly has not yielded equality for people with disabilities. Although some advocates say 14(c) advances employment outcomes, people with disabilities are disproportionately underemployed, unemployed or forced to live in poverty compared to the rates of the general population.
A Pipeline for Cheap Labor
Currently, there are over 1,400 firms holding 14(c) certificates in the US,collectively employing over 320,000 workers with disabilities. Certificate holders range from small operations with a sole employee working under 14(c) to large-scale operations with several hundred workers, and in a few cases, over a thousand. 14(c) certificate holders are known as Community Rehabilitation Programs, or more commonly, sheltered workshops. These organizations seek and receive contracts from large corporations to generate products and services that fund their operations.
Sheltered workshops also receive government funding through the AbilityOne Program, a program used to provide federal contracts for people with disabilities, while also receiving reimbursements from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Almost half of 14(c) certificate holders participate in the AbilityOne Program. In other words, while sheltered workshops pay workers as little as a dollar an hour, taxpayer dollars through CMS reimbursements and AbilityOne government contracts are funding their operations.
At face value these organizations seem like a harmless force in American communities, but they are exploiting many vulnerable people. Many sheltered workshops’ workers make extraordinarily less than the minimum wage, sometimes even as low as 36 cents an hour. While their workers are compensated at sweatshop rates, sheltered workshop executives are often compensated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. PRIDE Industries, a Sacramento-based sheltered workshop, pays its CEO a salary of $792,132, while 906 workers are employed at subminimum wages.
14(c) is being used as a pipeline for cheap labor under the guise of “job creation” for an underserved population. Certificate holders act as a vessel for larger corporations to obtain inexpensive labor and form a symbiotic relationship based on revenue generation and exploitation masquerading as philanthropy. Unjustly, in addition to receiving little compensation, workers with disabilities are often held back from receiving promotions or placement at jobs with competitive wages in integrated settings.
Subminimum wages not only unjustly impact workers with disabilities — they also have an effect on total wages for all workers in a labor market. When labor’s costs are driven down, the wages of all workers are decreased and businesses yield higher profits. 14(c) is not only inequitable for the workers with disabilities, but also for the total labor force in a given market. Workers who are not categorized as having disabilities have to compete against labor that is almost costless for a corporation. Subminimum wages impact all workers’ wages.
Large multinational corporations like Firestone, Home Depot, Kohler, Kroger, Mary Kay, Raytheon, Time Warner Cable, Walmart and Honda, are heavily invested in 14(c). They are able to secure contracts where labor is only paid a dollar an hour. People with disabilities pay the economic price so corporations and executives can continue amassing wealth.
Sheltered workshops that hold 14(c) certificates are segregated in nature. At a glance, businesses holding 14(c) certificates may seem philanthropic, but people with disabilities, especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, have historically been segregated from the rest of society.
The use of subminimum wages is inherently inequitable and contradicts the very mission of the FLSA. The FLSA’s purpose was to promote worker protections and guarantee a minimum standard for labor.
Unfortunately, workers with disabilities are excluded from that guarantee.
14(c) is paternalistic and does not account for the skills and contributions of workers with disabilities. Social and scientific understandings of disability have certainly progressed since the inception of 14(c) in 1938. The disability service system in America is not only outdated, but also is skewed toward profit-generation, rather than community inclusion and fair compensation.
Proponents of the subminimum wage try to frame it as a civil rights issue and claim that the provision offers more choices to people with disabilities. Yet for many workers with disabilities, working for subminimum wages is not a choice. Because for-profit corporations only see people with disabilities as profitable when working for subminimum wages, 14(c) employment is often their only option for work.
The champions of the subminimum wage also argue that sheltered workshops and their executives do not have enough funds to pay their workers a decent wage and remain competitive, yet the sheltered workshop industry employs dozens of D.C. and state lobbyists to peddle influence in favor of this very issue.
Subminimum wage advocates also argue that 14(c) is used as a training program to get people with disabilities into the workforce. Yet a National Council on Disability report, citing an audit by the Government Accountability Office, found that less than 5 percent of 14(c) workers ever transitioned to a job found in the broader community or earned competitive wages.
No other classification or grouping of labor in the US is paid based on employees’ productivity or at a wage significantly lower than the minimum wage. Subminimum wages are a violation of the civil rights of people with disabilities. They amount to government-endorsed and corporate-sponsored discrimination.
Challenging Workplace Exploitation of People With Disabilities
The FLSA has been amended over 20 times since its ratification in the late 1930s, and yet 14(c) remains unaltered. Is a change coming? It’s possible: Advocates and organizers with disabilities are leading the way in challenging these harmful practices. Disability rights organizations and self-advocates (activists with disabilities) are pursuing litigation against corporations that are profiting off of overtly exploited labor. Cutting off the pipeline of cheap labor that allows multinationals to reap exuberant profits is an effective strategy and has the apologists for subminimum wages on their heels.
However, advocates and disability rights organizations should not be solely responsible for confronting these unjust labor practices. An enormous responsibility also lies with legislators, regulators, and the public. Policymakers must ensure that people with disabilities are not segregated and economically marginalized, while also ensuring disability services are appropriately funded. To promote fair wages and community integration, lawmakers must work to eliminate 14(c).
Solutions that reduce economic disparities and eliminate exploitation and segregation for workers with disabilities are long overdue. The public and members of Congress must support the Raise the Wage Act and the Transition to Competitive Employment Act, both of which would phase out subminimum wages over time and are meaningful steps in the moral direction. Policymakers and the public must also be aware that the euphemistically titled Workplace Choice and Flexibility for Individuals with Disabilities Act, or H.R. 5658, would promote state agency referrals to many 14(c) certificate holders that participate in the AbilityOne Program and continue to place people with disabilities in organizations that use 14(c) certificates. The holders of 14(c) certificates should not be allowed to receive government contracts while they pay out subminimum wages. H.R. 5658 has not yet been reintroduced in this Congress, but it is expected to make a return later this congressional session.
Another responsibility lies with employers: 14(c) certificate holders must discontinue the practice of subminimum wages. A vast majority of these organizations, funded by wealthy donors, taxpayers, and corporate contracts, certainly possess the funds to pay their workers with disabilities a respectable wage. For those that don’t, CEOs and executive staff should take a pay cut to promote the fulfillment and dignity for all of their workers, especially those with disabilities. The large for-profit corporations that fund 14(c) contracts must also discontinue the practice and work to include people with disabilities at fair wages and full employment.
The era of certificate holders and for-profit corporations benefiting from federally endorsed discrimination and poverty wages is rightfully coming to a head, and the capabilities of workers with disabilities are being realized. All working people must strive for a system that fully integrates workers with disabilities and workers without disabilities, with both receiving more equitable wages and benefits.
Nurse Beaten Unconscious in Iowa
State law limits unions ability to bargain safety; putting public employees at risk
by Brian Young - ucommblog
May 29, 2019
Iowa’s decision to weaken collective bargaining for state employees is putting state employees at risk. This claim was made by the AFSCME Council 61 after a nurse was beaten unconscious at a state mental health facility.
The nurse, Tina Suckow who was attacked by the patient, was put in the hospital for weeks and required surgery. Although the attack happened in October, she is still recovering. After she was unable to come to work due to her injuries and the state denied her request for time off without pay, Suckow was fired.
According to AFSCME, a 2017 state law limits the ability of government employee unions to negotiate resolutions on issues other than salary, including safety matters. The law also resulted in changes in employee grievance procedures. The union believes that this change prevented them from being able to fairly represent Suckow.
“Any reasonable human being should have concern because if it’s OK for the state of Iowa to treat workers this way, then Casey’s can do it, Ruan can do it, any employer in the state of Iowa can do it,” said Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Iowa Council 61.
The union also has said that since the law took effect, terminations and forced resignations have tripled. They also warn that hospitals are becoming understaffed putting both workers and patients at risk.
The law, which was passed in 2017 with the help of big money groups backed by the Koch Brothers, was recently upheld in a 4-3 decision by the Iowa Supreme Court.
The nurse, Tina Suckow who was attacked by the patient, was put in the hospital for weeks and required surgery. Although the attack happened in October, she is still recovering. After she was unable to come to work due to her injuries and the state denied her request for time off without pay, Suckow was fired.
According to AFSCME, a 2017 state law limits the ability of government employee unions to negotiate resolutions on issues other than salary, including safety matters. The law also resulted in changes in employee grievance procedures. The union believes that this change prevented them from being able to fairly represent Suckow.
“Any reasonable human being should have concern because if it’s OK for the state of Iowa to treat workers this way, then Casey’s can do it, Ruan can do it, any employer in the state of Iowa can do it,” said Danny Homan, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Iowa Council 61.
The union also has said that since the law took effect, terminations and forced resignations have tripled. They also warn that hospitals are becoming understaffed putting both workers and patients at risk.
The law, which was passed in 2017 with the help of big money groups backed by the Koch Brothers, was recently upheld in a 4-3 decision by the Iowa Supreme Court.
The gig is up: America’s booming economy is built on hollow promises
Contract workers prop up big earners but under Trump’s anti-labor administration are ruthlessly exploited themselves
Robert Reich - The Guardian
Sun 2 Jun 2019 01.00 EDT
Uber just filed its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. Although it lost $1bn, investors may still do well because the losses appear to be declining.
Uber drivers, on the other hand, aren’t doing well. According to a recent study, about half of New York’s Uber drivers are supporting families with children, yet 40% depend on Medicaid and another 18% on food stamps.
It’s similar elsewhere in the new American economy. Last week, the New York Times reported that fewer than half of Google workers are full-time employees. Most are temps and contractors receiving a fraction of the wages and benefits of full-time Googlers, with no job security.
Across America, the fastest-growing category of new jobs is gig work – contract, part-time, temp, self-employed and freelance. And a growing number of people work for staffing firms that find them gig jobs.
Estimates vary but it’s safe to say almost a quarter of American workers are now gig workers. Which helps explain why the standard economic measures – unemployment and income – look better than Americans feel.
The jobs problem today isn’t just stagnant wages. It’s also uncertain incomes. A downturn in demand, change in consumer preferences, or a personal injury or sickness, can cause future paychecks to disappear. Yet nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
According to polls, about a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15% a decade ago. Such fears are fueling working-class grievances in America, and presumably elsewhere around world where steady jobs are vanishing.
Gig work is also erasing 85 years of hard-won labor protections.
At the rate gig work is growing, future generations won’t have a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation for injuries, employer-provided social security, overtime, family and medical leave, disability insurance, or the right to form unions and collectively bargain.
Why is this happening? Because it’s so profitable for corporations to use gig workers instead of full-time employees.
Gig workers are about 30% cheaper because companies pay them only when they need them, and don’t have to spend on the above-mentioned labor protections.
Increasingly, businesses need only a small pool of “talent” anchored in the enterprise – innovators and strategists responsible for the firm’s competitive strength.
Other workers are becoming fungible, sought only for reliability and low cost. So, in effect, economic risks are shifting to them.
It’s a great deal for companies like Uber and Google. They set workers’ rates, terms, and working conditions, while at the same time treating them like arms-length contractors.
But for many workers it amounts to wage theft.
If America still had a Department of Labor, it would be setting national standards to stop this.
Yet Trump’s Anti-Labor Department is heading in opposite direction. It recently proposed a rule making it easier for big corporations to outsource work to temp and staffing firms, and escape liability if those contracting firms violate the law, such as not paying workers for jobs completed.
On the other hand, California is countering Trump on this, as on other issues.
Last Wednesday, the California assembly passed legislation codifying an important California supreme court decision: in order for companies to treat workers as independent contractors, the workers must be free from company control, doing work that’s not central to the company’s business, and have an independent business in that trade.
(The bill is not yet law. It still has to pass the California Senate and be signed by the governor. And businesses are seeking a long list of exemptions – including ride-share drivers and many of high-tech’s contract workers.)
Whatever national rule eventually emerges for defining gig workers, they’ll need a different system of social insurance than was the case when steady full-time employment was the norm.
For example, they need income insurance rather than unemployment insurance. One model: If someone’s monthly income dips below their average monthly income from all jobs over the preceding five years, they automatically receive half the difference for up to a year.
They’ll also need a guaranteed minimum basic income – a subsistence-level cushion against earnings downturns. And universal health insurance and more generous social security, to make up for the unpredictability of work.
All of this should be financed by higher corporate taxes, ideally in proportion to a corporation’s use of gig workers.
Gig work is making capitalism harsher. Unless government defines legitimate gig work more narrowly and provides stronger safety nets for gig workers, gig capitalism cannot endure.
RELATED: The Uber drivers forced to sleep in parking lots to make a decent living
Uber drivers, on the other hand, aren’t doing well. According to a recent study, about half of New York’s Uber drivers are supporting families with children, yet 40% depend on Medicaid and another 18% on food stamps.
It’s similar elsewhere in the new American economy. Last week, the New York Times reported that fewer than half of Google workers are full-time employees. Most are temps and contractors receiving a fraction of the wages and benefits of full-time Googlers, with no job security.
Across America, the fastest-growing category of new jobs is gig work – contract, part-time, temp, self-employed and freelance. And a growing number of people work for staffing firms that find them gig jobs.
Estimates vary but it’s safe to say almost a quarter of American workers are now gig workers. Which helps explain why the standard economic measures – unemployment and income – look better than Americans feel.
The jobs problem today isn’t just stagnant wages. It’s also uncertain incomes. A downturn in demand, change in consumer preferences, or a personal injury or sickness, can cause future paychecks to disappear. Yet nearly 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
According to polls, about a quarter of American workers worry they won’t be earning enough in the future. That’s up from 15% a decade ago. Such fears are fueling working-class grievances in America, and presumably elsewhere around world where steady jobs are vanishing.
Gig work is also erasing 85 years of hard-won labor protections.
At the rate gig work is growing, future generations won’t have a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation for injuries, employer-provided social security, overtime, family and medical leave, disability insurance, or the right to form unions and collectively bargain.
Why is this happening? Because it’s so profitable for corporations to use gig workers instead of full-time employees.
Gig workers are about 30% cheaper because companies pay them only when they need them, and don’t have to spend on the above-mentioned labor protections.
Increasingly, businesses need only a small pool of “talent” anchored in the enterprise – innovators and strategists responsible for the firm’s competitive strength.
Other workers are becoming fungible, sought only for reliability and low cost. So, in effect, economic risks are shifting to them.
It’s a great deal for companies like Uber and Google. They set workers’ rates, terms, and working conditions, while at the same time treating them like arms-length contractors.
But for many workers it amounts to wage theft.
If America still had a Department of Labor, it would be setting national standards to stop this.
Yet Trump’s Anti-Labor Department is heading in opposite direction. It recently proposed a rule making it easier for big corporations to outsource work to temp and staffing firms, and escape liability if those contracting firms violate the law, such as not paying workers for jobs completed.
On the other hand, California is countering Trump on this, as on other issues.
Last Wednesday, the California assembly passed legislation codifying an important California supreme court decision: in order for companies to treat workers as independent contractors, the workers must be free from company control, doing work that’s not central to the company’s business, and have an independent business in that trade.
(The bill is not yet law. It still has to pass the California Senate and be signed by the governor. And businesses are seeking a long list of exemptions – including ride-share drivers and many of high-tech’s contract workers.)
Whatever national rule eventually emerges for defining gig workers, they’ll need a different system of social insurance than was the case when steady full-time employment was the norm.
For example, they need income insurance rather than unemployment insurance. One model: If someone’s monthly income dips below their average monthly income from all jobs over the preceding five years, they automatically receive half the difference for up to a year.
They’ll also need a guaranteed minimum basic income – a subsistence-level cushion against earnings downturns. And universal health insurance and more generous social security, to make up for the unpredictability of work.
All of this should be financed by higher corporate taxes, ideally in proportion to a corporation’s use of gig workers.
Gig work is making capitalism harsher. Unless government defines legitimate gig work more narrowly and provides stronger safety nets for gig workers, gig capitalism cannot endure.
RELATED: The Uber drivers forced to sleep in parking lots to make a decent living
Ohio Hospital Attempts to Divide Striking Unionized Workers
BY Roland Reed, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 31, 2019
Hospital workers at Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio, are now in the midst of their fourth week on strike. The registered nurses, tech staff and support staff, all unionized through United Automobile Workers (UAW), walked out on May 6, in protest of exploitative working conditions that put patient safety at risk, and degrading employee benefits.
It was just announced that negotiations took place over the holiday weekend, and each bargaining unit will be reviewing the new proposals.
Some of the most pressing issues still on the bargaining table revolve around staffing and on-call hours. “We just want the basic necessities to do our job. We don’t want the sun and the moon,” Beth DenBesten, a registered nurse and strike captain for UAW Local 2213, told Truthout. “We just want to be able to take care of our patients without having to work a shift, come in on-call and then have to work a shift the next day as well.”
The union offered a timeline for the on-call issue to give the hospital time to scale it back. The hospital said it would take 18 months to do it.
“In an effort to get an agreement, we said, ‘alright we’ll consider that,’ but if you don’t do it in 18 months then what?” said Brian Draper, a servicing representative for the tech and support staff. The hospital said that it would be contract time again so the union could just bring it up then.
Draper said the negotiations failed (which now include a federal mediator), and that Mercy Health expects the union’s bargaining committees to endorse a contract that would include concessions rather than just letting the workers vote on it for themselves. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case with Mercy Health’s negotiating.
From the bargaining table, it seems that Mercy Health was trying to divide the three units (nurses, tech staff and support staff) that are on strike. “The committees regrouped, and to us, it looked like they were trying to get one group to recommend it and not the other…. They’re trying to divide us…. We weren’t going to allow that,” Draper said.
The hospital has put up messages about resigning from the union and de-certifying the union, both of which can be found on the negotiations update page.
Meanwhile, Mercy Health has brought in replacement workers to do the work of the striking union workers, but is paying the replacement workers higher wages than those on strike. Most of these workers have been bussed in from out of town, stay at local hotels and are paid very well for crossing the picket lines. Between travel, overnight stays and work wages, the costs for replacement workers must be skyrocketing as the strike goes into day 25.
On top of replacement workers, Mercy Health just announced the hospital will be cutting 24 positions in its specialty pain clinic, according to the Toledo Blade. “Although these changes will affect approximately 24 job positions, we do not anticipate any job losses given the number of open positions available throughout other areas of the hospital,” Mercy Health said in a statement. There is no mention of the ongoing strike, and particularly that the given number of open positions has sky rocketed during the strike as Mercy aims to bring in replacements. This is a blatant unilateral decision from the hospital that makes workers compete with each other for jobs, and the threat of losing a job will incentivize accepting a contract that doesn’t meet the demands of safe staffing.
Workplace unity is integral to any strike, and especially one that is going into its fourth week.
“We’ve pulled together as a group. I didn’t realize we are as strong as we are together,” said DenBesten. “We just want to take care of our patients. That’s what we’re about. All of us, not just the nurses. The support staff, the techs, we all work together. We can’t do our jobs as nurses without them doing their jobs. We all are a team.”
The unity of the workers and the surrounding community support has been the strength of this strike. “I’m overwhelmed with the community support, the amount of support from other unions, the NAACP, politicians … the list is endless and it’s been overwhelming,” Pete Miller, chairman of St. Vincent’s support unit UAW Local 12, told Truthout. “I know the country is watching us. They’re [Mercy Health] trying to break the union. We have got to stick together.”
It makes sense that the hospital would pressure its employees to resign from the union or to go back to work individually, because a union’s strength comes from the collective action of its members. The solidarity of the striking workers is apparent on the picket line. This solidarity must explain Mercy’s reasoning to put up messages that are explicitly anti-union, and the soft threat of Mercy taking away the benefits the union has won in past years while the workers are on strike. Whether it’s cutting jobs, cutting back benefits, hiring replacement workers, bargaining in bad faith or posting anti-union propaganda, Mercy is showing no respect for the organization of its workers.
In Mercy Health’s statement on May 23 concerning the last negotiations, the hospital acknowledges that the UAW bargaining committee was willing to take the offer back to union membership, but Mercy Health isn’t satisfied with union leadership staying neutral on how to vote:
It is unfortunate that the UAW does not appear willing to recommend the Hospital’s offer. The Hospital’s last, best, and final offer from April was not recommended by the UAW and was therefore rejected by the members. Indeed, although the UAW represented that it would be neutral in its presentation of the last, best, and final offer, we received reports that the UAW presentation in the ratification meetings was negative.
It appears that the union leadership trusts the workers to vote for themselves, but Mercy Health does not.
It was just announced that negotiations took place over the holiday weekend, and each bargaining unit will be reviewing the new proposals.
Some of the most pressing issues still on the bargaining table revolve around staffing and on-call hours. “We just want the basic necessities to do our job. We don’t want the sun and the moon,” Beth DenBesten, a registered nurse and strike captain for UAW Local 2213, told Truthout. “We just want to be able to take care of our patients without having to work a shift, come in on-call and then have to work a shift the next day as well.”
The union offered a timeline for the on-call issue to give the hospital time to scale it back. The hospital said it would take 18 months to do it.
“In an effort to get an agreement, we said, ‘alright we’ll consider that,’ but if you don’t do it in 18 months then what?” said Brian Draper, a servicing representative for the tech and support staff. The hospital said that it would be contract time again so the union could just bring it up then.
Draper said the negotiations failed (which now include a federal mediator), and that Mercy Health expects the union’s bargaining committees to endorse a contract that would include concessions rather than just letting the workers vote on it for themselves. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case with Mercy Health’s negotiating.
From the bargaining table, it seems that Mercy Health was trying to divide the three units (nurses, tech staff and support staff) that are on strike. “The committees regrouped, and to us, it looked like they were trying to get one group to recommend it and not the other…. They’re trying to divide us…. We weren’t going to allow that,” Draper said.
The hospital has put up messages about resigning from the union and de-certifying the union, both of which can be found on the negotiations update page.
Meanwhile, Mercy Health has brought in replacement workers to do the work of the striking union workers, but is paying the replacement workers higher wages than those on strike. Most of these workers have been bussed in from out of town, stay at local hotels and are paid very well for crossing the picket lines. Between travel, overnight stays and work wages, the costs for replacement workers must be skyrocketing as the strike goes into day 25.
On top of replacement workers, Mercy Health just announced the hospital will be cutting 24 positions in its specialty pain clinic, according to the Toledo Blade. “Although these changes will affect approximately 24 job positions, we do not anticipate any job losses given the number of open positions available throughout other areas of the hospital,” Mercy Health said in a statement. There is no mention of the ongoing strike, and particularly that the given number of open positions has sky rocketed during the strike as Mercy aims to bring in replacements. This is a blatant unilateral decision from the hospital that makes workers compete with each other for jobs, and the threat of losing a job will incentivize accepting a contract that doesn’t meet the demands of safe staffing.
Workplace unity is integral to any strike, and especially one that is going into its fourth week.
“We’ve pulled together as a group. I didn’t realize we are as strong as we are together,” said DenBesten. “We just want to take care of our patients. That’s what we’re about. All of us, not just the nurses. The support staff, the techs, we all work together. We can’t do our jobs as nurses without them doing their jobs. We all are a team.”
The unity of the workers and the surrounding community support has been the strength of this strike. “I’m overwhelmed with the community support, the amount of support from other unions, the NAACP, politicians … the list is endless and it’s been overwhelming,” Pete Miller, chairman of St. Vincent’s support unit UAW Local 12, told Truthout. “I know the country is watching us. They’re [Mercy Health] trying to break the union. We have got to stick together.”
It makes sense that the hospital would pressure its employees to resign from the union or to go back to work individually, because a union’s strength comes from the collective action of its members. The solidarity of the striking workers is apparent on the picket line. This solidarity must explain Mercy’s reasoning to put up messages that are explicitly anti-union, and the soft threat of Mercy taking away the benefits the union has won in past years while the workers are on strike. Whether it’s cutting jobs, cutting back benefits, hiring replacement workers, bargaining in bad faith or posting anti-union propaganda, Mercy is showing no respect for the organization of its workers.
In Mercy Health’s statement on May 23 concerning the last negotiations, the hospital acknowledges that the UAW bargaining committee was willing to take the offer back to union membership, but Mercy Health isn’t satisfied with union leadership staying neutral on how to vote:
It is unfortunate that the UAW does not appear willing to recommend the Hospital’s offer. The Hospital’s last, best, and final offer from April was not recommended by the UAW and was therefore rejected by the members. Indeed, although the UAW represented that it would be neutral in its presentation of the last, best, and final offer, we received reports that the UAW presentation in the ratification meetings was negative.
It appears that the union leadership trusts the workers to vote for themselves, but Mercy Health does not.
Connecticut Workers Fought for a $15 Minimum Wage — and Won
BY Bryce Covert, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 28, 2019
...After the state legislature passed a bill to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2023, Gov. Ned Lamont signed it into law on Tuesday, May 28, 2019.
The push to increase Connecticut’s minimum wage to $15 an hour began five years ago, with the inception of the Fight for 15 movement that has staged a series of increasingly large strikes across the country to demand that wage floor. But in Connecticut, the movement hit “many years of frustration,” said Juan Hernandez, vice president of 32BJ SEIU in Connecticut, because “politics got in the way.” Lawmakers stood opposed, and the business lobby fought against increases, even arguing that raising it to $10.10 an hour would make companies flee the state.
That hasn’t happened. And ahead of last year’s elections, Fight for 15, SEIU, and other allied organizations made it clear to people running for the state legislature that raising the state minimum to $15 an hour had to be a priority if they wanted their support.
It worked. Lawmakers campaigned on the issue. Before the election, the state senate was split over whether to raise the wage, but supporters picked up six seats. Support increased in the house as well. And now “they delivered it,” Hernandez said. “That’s the way democracy works.”
Thanks to her involvement with that movement and the Fight for 15, Gilbert was in the state capitol watching when lawmakers in both the state house and the senate voted to approve the legislation. “Watching them vote was a miracle,” she said. When they finally voted yes, she jumped out of her seat and “smiled so hard, I’ve never smiled so hard,” she said. “I cried … I was completely shocked.”
“They heard us as one powerful voice,” she added. “We became so powerful that we touched the legislators’ hearts.”
With the vote and the governor’s signature, Connecticut joins a rare group: six other states — California, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have passed legislation to eventually raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour. With the addition of Connecticut, nearly a third of the country’s workforce now lives in a state with that wage floor, according to the National Employment Law Project.
Once her state’s $15 minimum wage goes into effect, Gilbert believes it will make a huge difference in her life. “Our rent would be paid and we wouldn’t have to worry; we would have more food,” she said. She hopes she’ll be able to buy clothes for herself (right now all of her spare money goes to bills), take her father out to eat and even buy a car. “I [won’t] have to worry and I’ll struggle less,” she said. “My dad wouldn’t have to see me cry as much as I do.”
Connecticut is already the fourth state this year to take this action, following New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland.
“It’s a movement that is growing and growing,” Hernandez said.
These legislative victories can be traced back to the influence of the Fight for $15, when fast-food workers in New York City first went on strike in 2012 to demand a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union. Since then, these states and a number of cities have made their demand a reality. Since its inception, the movement had secured $68 billion in raises for 22 million low-wage workers as of last year, thanks to minimum wage increases. When Gilbert got involved with the movement, “They gave me the reassurance that I didn’t have at the time to stand up and fight for something,” she said. “They gave me a voice when I didn’t have one and didn’t think I could have one.”
The demand for a $15 wage has even made its way to Congress, where this year, the House held the first-ever hearing on a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nationally. Hernandez hopes to bring it to the race for president. “We are making sure that candidates for president know that if they want our support, they need to support our issues, and $15 is one of our issues,” he said. “We hope that next year we regain the presidency and the new president will commit to do the same thing that we did here in Connecticut.”
Gilbert wants to see more places pass a $15 minimum wage. “I feel like everyone should have $15 an hour,” she said. “As much hard work as we put into our work … we deserve it.”
“We are the Robin Hood of this era,” Hernandez added. “The rich have more, and they could share that extra money with the people in the bottom.”
The push to increase Connecticut’s minimum wage to $15 an hour began five years ago, with the inception of the Fight for 15 movement that has staged a series of increasingly large strikes across the country to demand that wage floor. But in Connecticut, the movement hit “many years of frustration,” said Juan Hernandez, vice president of 32BJ SEIU in Connecticut, because “politics got in the way.” Lawmakers stood opposed, and the business lobby fought against increases, even arguing that raising it to $10.10 an hour would make companies flee the state.
That hasn’t happened. And ahead of last year’s elections, Fight for 15, SEIU, and other allied organizations made it clear to people running for the state legislature that raising the state minimum to $15 an hour had to be a priority if they wanted their support.
It worked. Lawmakers campaigned on the issue. Before the election, the state senate was split over whether to raise the wage, but supporters picked up six seats. Support increased in the house as well. And now “they delivered it,” Hernandez said. “That’s the way democracy works.”
Thanks to her involvement with that movement and the Fight for 15, Gilbert was in the state capitol watching when lawmakers in both the state house and the senate voted to approve the legislation. “Watching them vote was a miracle,” she said. When they finally voted yes, she jumped out of her seat and “smiled so hard, I’ve never smiled so hard,” she said. “I cried … I was completely shocked.”
“They heard us as one powerful voice,” she added. “We became so powerful that we touched the legislators’ hearts.”
With the vote and the governor’s signature, Connecticut joins a rare group: six other states — California, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have passed legislation to eventually raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour. With the addition of Connecticut, nearly a third of the country’s workforce now lives in a state with that wage floor, according to the National Employment Law Project.
Once her state’s $15 minimum wage goes into effect, Gilbert believes it will make a huge difference in her life. “Our rent would be paid and we wouldn’t have to worry; we would have more food,” she said. She hopes she’ll be able to buy clothes for herself (right now all of her spare money goes to bills), take her father out to eat and even buy a car. “I [won’t] have to worry and I’ll struggle less,” she said. “My dad wouldn’t have to see me cry as much as I do.”
Connecticut is already the fourth state this year to take this action, following New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland.
“It’s a movement that is growing and growing,” Hernandez said.
These legislative victories can be traced back to the influence of the Fight for $15, when fast-food workers in New York City first went on strike in 2012 to demand a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union. Since then, these states and a number of cities have made their demand a reality. Since its inception, the movement had secured $68 billion in raises for 22 million low-wage workers as of last year, thanks to minimum wage increases. When Gilbert got involved with the movement, “They gave me the reassurance that I didn’t have at the time to stand up and fight for something,” she said. “They gave me a voice when I didn’t have one and didn’t think I could have one.”
The demand for a $15 wage has even made its way to Congress, where this year, the House held the first-ever hearing on a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nationally. Hernandez hopes to bring it to the race for president. “We are making sure that candidates for president know that if they want our support, they need to support our issues, and $15 is one of our issues,” he said. “We hope that next year we regain the presidency and the new president will commit to do the same thing that we did here in Connecticut.”
Gilbert wants to see more places pass a $15 minimum wage. “I feel like everyone should have $15 an hour,” she said. “As much hard work as we put into our work … we deserve it.”
“We are the Robin Hood of this era,” Hernandez added. “The rich have more, and they could share that extra money with the people in the bottom.”
'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft
Interpreting a spoken request isn’t magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible
Julia Carrie Wong
the guardian
Wed 29 May 2019 02.00 EDT
“Do you believe in magic?” Google asked attendees of its annual developer conference this May, playing the seminal Lovin’ Spoonful tune as an introduction. Throughout the three-day event, company executives repeatedly answered yes while touting new features of the Google Assistant, the company’s version of Alexa or Siri, that can indeed feel magical. The tool can book you a rental car, tell you what the weather is like at your mother’s house, and even interpret live conversations across 26 languages.
But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.
“It’s smoke and mirrors if anything,” said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it’s human beings that are doing the work.”
The Google employee works on Pygmalion, the team responsible for producing linguistic data sets that make the Assistant work. And although he is employed directly by Google, most of his Pygmalion coworkers are subcontracted temps who have for years been routinely pressured to work unpaid overtime, according to seven current and former members of the team.
These employees, some of whom spoke to the Guardian because they said efforts to raise concerns internally were ignored, alleged that the unpaid work was a symptom of the workplace culture put in place by the executive who founded Pygmalion. That executive was fired by Google in March following an internal investigation.
But current and former employees also identified Google’s broad reliance on approximately 100,000 temps, vendors and contractors (known at Google as TVCs) for large amounts of the company’s work as a culprit. Google does not directly employ the workers who collect or create the data required for much of its technology, be they the drivers who capture photos for Google Maps’ Street View, the content moderators training YouTube’s filters to catch prohibited material, or the scanners flipping pages to upload the contents of libraries into Google Books.
Having these two tiers of workers – highly paid full-time Googlers and often low-wage and precarious workers contracted through staffing firms – is “corrosive”, “highly problematic”, and “permissive of exploitation”, the employees said.
“It’s like a white-collar sweatshop,” said one current Google employee. “If it’s not illegal, it’s definitely exploitative. It’s to the point where I don’t use the Google Assistant, because I know how it’s made, and I can’t support it.”
---
‘The definition of wage theft’
This dynamic created the incentive for temps to perform unpaid workManagers took advantage by making it clear they wouldn’t approve overtime for contract workers, while also assigning unrealistic amounts of work, current and former employees said.
The pressure to complete assignments was “immense”, said one Googler. “In this mixed stream of messages, I think a lot of people had to make their own calls, and given the pressure, I think people made different calls.”
The Googler described the overall effect as “gaslighting”, and recalled receiving messages from management such as, “If the TVCs want to work more, let them work more.” All seven current and former employees interviewed by the Guardian said they had either experienced or witnessed contract workers performing unpaid overtime.
“To my knowledge, no one ever said, you need to work TVCs above their contracts, but it was set up so that it was the only way to get the expected work done, and if anyone raised concerns they would be openly mocked and belittled,” said another current Googler.
“The 40-hour thing was just not respected,” said a former associate linguist. “It was made clear to us that we were never to log more than 40 hours, but we were never told not to work more than 40 hours.”
“The work that they assign often takes more than 8 hours,” they added. “Every week you fill out a timesheet. One person one time did submit overtime, and they were chastised. No punishment, but definitely told not to work overtime.”
A spokeswoman for Google said that it was company policy that temp workers must be paid for all hours worked, even if overtime was not approved in advance.
“Working off the clock is the very definition of wage theft,” said Beth Ross, a longtime labor and employment attorney. Ross said that both Google and Adecco could face liability for unpaid wages and damages under federal and state law.
---
‘Why do it?’
The disparity in wages and benefits between Google employees and contract workers is stark. Alphabet recently reported median pay of $246,804, and employees enjoy perks such as free meals, on-site yoga classes, free massages and generous benefits.
Amid increasing activism by Googlers and contract workers, Google recently announced improved minimum standards for US-based contract workers, including a minimum of eight paid sick days, “comprehensive” health insurance, and a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour by 2020. (A full-time job at that wage pays $31,200 a year; by comparison, Google charges its own employees $38,808 a year to place an infant in its onsite daycare facilities.)
Wages for contract workers on the Pygmalion team are well above the new minimum standard, usually starting around $25 an hour for associate linguists and going up to $35 an hour for project managers. But contractors complain about subpar benefits and other indignities.
The former project manager described Adecco’s benefits plan as “the worst health insurance I have ever had”. A current contract worker earning less than $60,000 annually said they were paying $180 each month in premiums for an individual plan with a $6,000 deductible. For families, the deductible is $12,000, according to documents reviewed by the Guardian. Google declined to comment on Adecco’s pay and benefits.
Googlers earn significantly more, and those on individual plans contribute between $0 and $53 for their health insurance and have a much lower deductible ($1,350), according to documents reviewed by the Guardian. Googlers with families pay up to $199 every two weeks, with a $2,700 deductible.
Others complained of a lack of trust and respect. In 2018, Google revoked the ability for contractors on Pygmalion to work while riding Google’s WiFi-equipped commuter buses, creating frustration for those who spent three to four hours a day traveling to the company’s Mountain View campus and could no longer work and count that time toward their shift. Google said it works to ensure that temps, vendors and contractors do not have over broad access to sensitive internal information for security reasons.
“Why do it?” a former associate linguist said of working unpaid overtime under these conditions. “I didn’t want to lose the job. Having Google on your resume is important to a career … Later on, I came to find out that you can’t say ‘Google’ on your resume. You have to say ‘Google by Adecco’.”
A weekend assignment
Both Google and Adecco recently launched investigations into the allegations of unpaid overtime in Pygmalion.
“Our policy is clear that all temporary workers must be paid for any overtime worked,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of people operations, in a statement to the Guardian. “If we find that anyone isn’t properly paid, we make sure they are compensated appropriately and take action against any Google employee who violates this policy.”
The current investigation was initiated after the company received a report of a possible policy violation in February 2019, the Google spokeswoman said. The company will provide appropriate compensation if need be and will take action up to and including terminations if policy violations are found, she added.
The spokeswoman also acknowledged that concerns about unpaid overtime were raised to human resources in 2017, but said that the company investigated and did not find any such cases at the time.
“We are committed to ensuring all employees are compensated for all time worked,” said Mary Beth Waddill, a spokeswoman for Adecco. “Our longstanding policy is that every employee is required to report time accurately – even if that time isn’t pre-approved – and they should feel encouraged to do so by their managers. If we learn that this is not the case, we will work with Google to take appropriate action.”
On Friday, 17 May, Adecco sent emails to current and former Pygmalion temps. Recipients were asked whether they reported all the hours they worked, and, if not, to estimate how many hours they worked unpaid. The emails requested a response by Monday, 20 May, though a Google spokeswoman said this week that the deadline has been extended.
A Google employee reacted: “They’re asking people to work on the weekend to recall unbilled overwork. It seems like it’s designed to discourage people from responding.”
Indeed, one former contract worker who left the company many months ago said they received the email but did not bother to respond. “After I left, I didn’t keep records of the hours I worked,” they said. “Even if I wanted to report overtime now, how could I?”
But to some of the Google employees responsible for making the Assistant work, the tagline of the conference – “Keep making magic” – obscured a more mundane reality: the technical wizardry relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.
“It’s smoke and mirrors if anything,” said a current Google employee who, as with the others quoted in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Artificial intelligence is not that artificial; it’s human beings that are doing the work.”
The Google employee works on Pygmalion, the team responsible for producing linguistic data sets that make the Assistant work. And although he is employed directly by Google, most of his Pygmalion coworkers are subcontracted temps who have for years been routinely pressured to work unpaid overtime, according to seven current and former members of the team.
These employees, some of whom spoke to the Guardian because they said efforts to raise concerns internally were ignored, alleged that the unpaid work was a symptom of the workplace culture put in place by the executive who founded Pygmalion. That executive was fired by Google in March following an internal investigation.
But current and former employees also identified Google’s broad reliance on approximately 100,000 temps, vendors and contractors (known at Google as TVCs) for large amounts of the company’s work as a culprit. Google does not directly employ the workers who collect or create the data required for much of its technology, be they the drivers who capture photos for Google Maps’ Street View, the content moderators training YouTube’s filters to catch prohibited material, or the scanners flipping pages to upload the contents of libraries into Google Books.
Having these two tiers of workers – highly paid full-time Googlers and often low-wage and precarious workers contracted through staffing firms – is “corrosive”, “highly problematic”, and “permissive of exploitation”, the employees said.
“It’s like a white-collar sweatshop,” said one current Google employee. “If it’s not illegal, it’s definitely exploitative. It’s to the point where I don’t use the Google Assistant, because I know how it’s made, and I can’t support it.”
---
‘The definition of wage theft’
This dynamic created the incentive for temps to perform unpaid workManagers took advantage by making it clear they wouldn’t approve overtime for contract workers, while also assigning unrealistic amounts of work, current and former employees said.
The pressure to complete assignments was “immense”, said one Googler. “In this mixed stream of messages, I think a lot of people had to make their own calls, and given the pressure, I think people made different calls.”
The Googler described the overall effect as “gaslighting”, and recalled receiving messages from management such as, “If the TVCs want to work more, let them work more.” All seven current and former employees interviewed by the Guardian said they had either experienced or witnessed contract workers performing unpaid overtime.
“To my knowledge, no one ever said, you need to work TVCs above their contracts, but it was set up so that it was the only way to get the expected work done, and if anyone raised concerns they would be openly mocked and belittled,” said another current Googler.
“The 40-hour thing was just not respected,” said a former associate linguist. “It was made clear to us that we were never to log more than 40 hours, but we were never told not to work more than 40 hours.”
“The work that they assign often takes more than 8 hours,” they added. “Every week you fill out a timesheet. One person one time did submit overtime, and they were chastised. No punishment, but definitely told not to work overtime.”
A spokeswoman for Google said that it was company policy that temp workers must be paid for all hours worked, even if overtime was not approved in advance.
“Working off the clock is the very definition of wage theft,” said Beth Ross, a longtime labor and employment attorney. Ross said that both Google and Adecco could face liability for unpaid wages and damages under federal and state law.
---
‘Why do it?’
The disparity in wages and benefits between Google employees and contract workers is stark. Alphabet recently reported median pay of $246,804, and employees enjoy perks such as free meals, on-site yoga classes, free massages and generous benefits.
Amid increasing activism by Googlers and contract workers, Google recently announced improved minimum standards for US-based contract workers, including a minimum of eight paid sick days, “comprehensive” health insurance, and a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour by 2020. (A full-time job at that wage pays $31,200 a year; by comparison, Google charges its own employees $38,808 a year to place an infant in its onsite daycare facilities.)
Wages for contract workers on the Pygmalion team are well above the new minimum standard, usually starting around $25 an hour for associate linguists and going up to $35 an hour for project managers. But contractors complain about subpar benefits and other indignities.
The former project manager described Adecco’s benefits plan as “the worst health insurance I have ever had”. A current contract worker earning less than $60,000 annually said they were paying $180 each month in premiums for an individual plan with a $6,000 deductible. For families, the deductible is $12,000, according to documents reviewed by the Guardian. Google declined to comment on Adecco’s pay and benefits.
Googlers earn significantly more, and those on individual plans contribute between $0 and $53 for their health insurance and have a much lower deductible ($1,350), according to documents reviewed by the Guardian. Googlers with families pay up to $199 every two weeks, with a $2,700 deductible.
Others complained of a lack of trust and respect. In 2018, Google revoked the ability for contractors on Pygmalion to work while riding Google’s WiFi-equipped commuter buses, creating frustration for those who spent three to four hours a day traveling to the company’s Mountain View campus and could no longer work and count that time toward their shift. Google said it works to ensure that temps, vendors and contractors do not have over broad access to sensitive internal information for security reasons.
“Why do it?” a former associate linguist said of working unpaid overtime under these conditions. “I didn’t want to lose the job. Having Google on your resume is important to a career … Later on, I came to find out that you can’t say ‘Google’ on your resume. You have to say ‘Google by Adecco’.”
A weekend assignment
Both Google and Adecco recently launched investigations into the allegations of unpaid overtime in Pygmalion.
“Our policy is clear that all temporary workers must be paid for any overtime worked,” said Eileen Naughton, Google’s vice president of people operations, in a statement to the Guardian. “If we find that anyone isn’t properly paid, we make sure they are compensated appropriately and take action against any Google employee who violates this policy.”
The current investigation was initiated after the company received a report of a possible policy violation in February 2019, the Google spokeswoman said. The company will provide appropriate compensation if need be and will take action up to and including terminations if policy violations are found, she added.
The spokeswoman also acknowledged that concerns about unpaid overtime were raised to human resources in 2017, but said that the company investigated and did not find any such cases at the time.
“We are committed to ensuring all employees are compensated for all time worked,” said Mary Beth Waddill, a spokeswoman for Adecco. “Our longstanding policy is that every employee is required to report time accurately – even if that time isn’t pre-approved – and they should feel encouraged to do so by their managers. If we learn that this is not the case, we will work with Google to take appropriate action.”
On Friday, 17 May, Adecco sent emails to current and former Pygmalion temps. Recipients were asked whether they reported all the hours they worked, and, if not, to estimate how many hours they worked unpaid. The emails requested a response by Monday, 20 May, though a Google spokeswoman said this week that the deadline has been extended.
A Google employee reacted: “They’re asking people to work on the weekend to recall unbilled overwork. It seems like it’s designed to discourage people from responding.”
Indeed, one former contract worker who left the company many months ago said they received the email but did not bother to respond. “After I left, I didn’t keep records of the hours I worked,” they said. “Even if I wanted to report overtime now, how could I?”
No, Mr. President: China didn't steal our jobs. Corporate America gave them away
Trump's trade war points the finger in the wrong direction. China behaved normally; corporate CEOs betrayed us
CODY CAIN - salon
MAY 27, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
China is not “stealing” American jobs.
President Trump loves to blame China for the job losses that have devastated American workers under globalization. But the truth is that Trump is blaming the wrong party. Trump’s reckless trade war against China is misguided and amounts to a colossal charade that will not solve the actual problem.
Yes, it is true that numerous American manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas to China, thereby leaving American workers jobless and suffering. But China did not steal these jobs.
No. These jobs were given to China. It was all legal and legitimate. China merely accepted the gift.
What would anyone expect China to do? Accepting these jobs was a perfectly rational course of action.
China was an underdeveloped nation with a large population of poor people willing to work for a fraction of the hourly wages of American workers. And then corporations came along and presented China with an attractive offer: We would like to build manufacturing plants in China and hire droves of your unemployed people to work there. What was China supposed to do? Naturally, China said yes.
This is hardly stealing.
It is true that these new jobs in China were intended to displace American workers. But does that concern belong to China? Does China have the responsibility to care for the well-being of American workers? Is China supposed to prioritize American workers over its own workers?
Of course not.
China is supposed to look out for itself and for its own workers, not for American workers. Thus it was perfectly proper for China to allow the manufacturing plants to be built in China and employ Chinese workers. China did not steal these jobs.
So if China is not at fault, then who is to blame for the devastation caused to American workers?
The answer is plain to see, and it lies within our own shores. The fault belongs squarely with corporate America.
It was corporate America that made these decisions. Corporate America decided to close their American plants and open new plants in China. Corporate America decided to lay off multitudes of American workers and ruin entire American communities.
And who profited from the destruction to American workers? It was the wealthy executives and shareholders of American corporations. They earned millions of dollars for themselves by cutting the costs of their workforce.
This is part of the larger trend of economic inequality that is eroding the entire middle class in America. Wealth is being shifted away from the workers down below and transferred up into the hands of the wealthy executives and shareholders at the top.
Trump blaming China is nonsense. China is not at fault. To be sure, China is hardly an angel and indeed engages in improper trade practices. But even if China agreed to whatever bone-headed demands Trump is seeking, the problem still would not be solved. The truth is that America cannot possibly compete against China on labor costs. The standard of living is much lower in China and thus Chinese workers are willing to accept wages far below living wages in America. So corporate America will continue to transfer more and more jobs to China and elsewhere. If we do not address this fundamental economic reality, then we will never solve the problem.
Trump blaming China has an insidious aspect to it as well. Focusing all the ire upon China is a grand misdirection that conceals the true culprit, namely, the super-rich corporate executives and shareholders in America.
This is part of Trump’s standard playbook. Trump falsely proclaims to be fighting for blue-collar workers, when in truth, Trump acts entirely in favor of the rich at the top.
Surprisingly, this seems to work. Some of the hard-working Americans who are being crushed by Trump’s idiotic trade war and who should be denouncing Trump, nonetheless praise him for standing up to China, believing that Trump is fighting for blue-collar jobs. It is painful to witness such good people falling victim to Trump’s despicable con job.
In order to actually save the middle class, we need to focus on the true cause of the problem. We must direct our great powers of reform where they belong — upon the wealthy executives and shareholders of corporate America who caused this problem in the first place.
The nature of the problem is that corporate America has no incentive to protect American workers. In fact, corporate America has every incentive to harm American workers by shifting their jobs overseas.
So the financial incentives must be reconfigured. If corporate America is going to ship American jobs overseas, it must not be permitted to pocket all the profits themselves and leave their displaced workers with nothing. Instead, corporations that send jobs offshore must be required to sufficiently compensate their displaced American workers. Executives and shareholders must not be permitted to enrich themselves unless and until their workers are financially secure.
Our society must favor people over profits, not profits over people.
President Trump loves to blame China for the job losses that have devastated American workers under globalization. But the truth is that Trump is blaming the wrong party. Trump’s reckless trade war against China is misguided and amounts to a colossal charade that will not solve the actual problem.
Yes, it is true that numerous American manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas to China, thereby leaving American workers jobless and suffering. But China did not steal these jobs.
No. These jobs were given to China. It was all legal and legitimate. China merely accepted the gift.
What would anyone expect China to do? Accepting these jobs was a perfectly rational course of action.
China was an underdeveloped nation with a large population of poor people willing to work for a fraction of the hourly wages of American workers. And then corporations came along and presented China with an attractive offer: We would like to build manufacturing plants in China and hire droves of your unemployed people to work there. What was China supposed to do? Naturally, China said yes.
This is hardly stealing.
It is true that these new jobs in China were intended to displace American workers. But does that concern belong to China? Does China have the responsibility to care for the well-being of American workers? Is China supposed to prioritize American workers over its own workers?
Of course not.
China is supposed to look out for itself and for its own workers, not for American workers. Thus it was perfectly proper for China to allow the manufacturing plants to be built in China and employ Chinese workers. China did not steal these jobs.
So if China is not at fault, then who is to blame for the devastation caused to American workers?
The answer is plain to see, and it lies within our own shores. The fault belongs squarely with corporate America.
It was corporate America that made these decisions. Corporate America decided to close their American plants and open new plants in China. Corporate America decided to lay off multitudes of American workers and ruin entire American communities.
And who profited from the destruction to American workers? It was the wealthy executives and shareholders of American corporations. They earned millions of dollars for themselves by cutting the costs of their workforce.
This is part of the larger trend of economic inequality that is eroding the entire middle class in America. Wealth is being shifted away from the workers down below and transferred up into the hands of the wealthy executives and shareholders at the top.
Trump blaming China is nonsense. China is not at fault. To be sure, China is hardly an angel and indeed engages in improper trade practices. But even if China agreed to whatever bone-headed demands Trump is seeking, the problem still would not be solved. The truth is that America cannot possibly compete against China on labor costs. The standard of living is much lower in China and thus Chinese workers are willing to accept wages far below living wages in America. So corporate America will continue to transfer more and more jobs to China and elsewhere. If we do not address this fundamental economic reality, then we will never solve the problem.
Trump blaming China has an insidious aspect to it as well. Focusing all the ire upon China is a grand misdirection that conceals the true culprit, namely, the super-rich corporate executives and shareholders in America.
This is part of Trump’s standard playbook. Trump falsely proclaims to be fighting for blue-collar workers, when in truth, Trump acts entirely in favor of the rich at the top.
Surprisingly, this seems to work. Some of the hard-working Americans who are being crushed by Trump’s idiotic trade war and who should be denouncing Trump, nonetheless praise him for standing up to China, believing that Trump is fighting for blue-collar jobs. It is painful to witness such good people falling victim to Trump’s despicable con job.
In order to actually save the middle class, we need to focus on the true cause of the problem. We must direct our great powers of reform where they belong — upon the wealthy executives and shareholders of corporate America who caused this problem in the first place.
The nature of the problem is that corporate America has no incentive to protect American workers. In fact, corporate America has every incentive to harm American workers by shifting their jobs overseas.
So the financial incentives must be reconfigured. If corporate America is going to ship American jobs overseas, it must not be permitted to pocket all the profits themselves and leave their displaced workers with nothing. Instead, corporations that send jobs offshore must be required to sufficiently compensate their displaced American workers. Executives and shareholders must not be permitted to enrich themselves unless and until their workers are financially secure.
Our society must favor people over profits, not profits over people.
Want to help struggling college students? Support the low-paid staff who teach them.
Why untenured faculty are a 2020 campaign issue.
STEPHANIE GRIFFITH - thinkprogress
MAY 26, 2019, 8:41 AM
LAS VEGAS – College lecturer Angela Edwards-Luckett teaches world religion, a subject she is passionate about. Her work is deeply rewarding, but it’s also financially precarious: She barely earns enough to get by.
With a husband on disability and $100,000 in college loans, Edwards-Luckett says her bills always seem to outstrip her income. Friends and acquaintances in her non-tenured faculty circle are in similarly dire straits, piecing together a bare-bones existence by working at various campuses across Florida.
“Some of my colleagues are teaching four classes at this college, two classes at that college,” the 51-year-old college lecturer told ThinkProgress. “And even when they add all of that up together, they still make less than $25,000 a year.”
Edwards-Luckett said life on a college adjunct’s income amounts to poverty, plain and simple. “A lot of us are depending on food banks and things like that, even during the semester,” she told ThinkProgress.
College education is very much in the spotlight as a 2020 campaign issue, and the Democratic presidential candidates have a raft of proposals to reduce student debt and lower the costs of tuition. Their plans cover everything from providing free community college to reining in for-profit colleges, from extending loan forgiveness to refinancing student loans.
But education advocates and labor activists say the focus on higher education reform shouldn’t only be about the kids: The 2020 candidates should also pay attention to the often deplorable conditions endured by legions of underpaid faculty members who teach them.
Twenty years ago, just one in four faculty jobs on college campuses was non-tenure track. Today the figure is three in four. Experts say, in fact, that the move to hire part time faculty American college campuses has been one of the most significant developments in higher education of the past generation.
The reliance on part-time adjuncts took off during the 1980s, at a time when budgets at public colleges were being slashed. As states defunded public higher education, lecturers were hired as a supplement to full-time faculty to pad out their course curricula.
But since then, the hiring of part-time faculty has snowballed. A 2014 congressional report found there were more than one million people currently working as contingent faculty and instructors at U.S. institutions of higher education “providing a cheap labor source even while students’ tuition has skyrocketed.”
In the past, the part-time teaching gigs were supplemental employment picked up by retired professors looking to make a little extra cash by teaching at the local university or community college. These days however, many colleges and universities rely primarily on adjuncts and other contingent faculty members, rather than full-time, tenure-track professors to educate their students.
If the development doesn’t worry politicians and government officials, it should.
“The trend should be of concern to policymakers both because of what it means for the living standards and work lives of those individuals we expect to educate the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, and other highly skilled workers, and what it may mean for the quality of higher education itself,” the report found.
One key 2020 issue affecting college lecturers is income inequality — something contingent faculty know plenty about, working on campuses with full time, tenured faculty who may earn several times their average annual pay.
Work, when part-time academic faculty members find it, usually comes without health insurance or job security — making even more likely that non-tenured professors teeter over the brink and into full-blown financial disaster. That’s the reason so many are organizing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that thousands of underpaid college faculty have formed or joined labor unions in recent years — most with American Federation of Teachers, the SEIU, the United Auto Workers and Unite Here — calling it “among the most important recent developments shaping higher education.”
Florida is one state where the ranks of unionized faculty and those seeking to form unions has swelled dramatically in recent years. SEIU, the service workers union, recently won a campaign to organize at Miami Dade College — a public college with one of the nation’s biggest enrollments, 165,000 students. Union organizers say there are some 3,300 adjunct professors who teach there.
Broadly speaking, unionization of part-time college faculty is long overdue, they said.
“Now more than ever, educators, including adjunct professors and graduate workers, need the ability to form their unions,” Heather Conroy, executive vice president SEIU International, the service workers’ union, told ThinkProgress.
“This is a ‘must do’ so they can advocate for their students and for the resources they desperately need to improve the quality of education in our country,” Conroy said.
“We need to ensure that teaching jobs are good jobs instead of poverty-wage jobs and that students have the opportunity to learn without being trapped under mountains of debt.”
Their precarious financial straits give adjunct faculty common cause with other part-time, low-paid workers, including many manual laborers like hotel workers, janitors, and food service workers. Several college adjuncts attended a conference in Las Vegas late last month where they pressed the case for the power of unions to improve their working conditions.
At the labor forum, sponsored by Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the college lecturers made common cause alongside service workers who work as airport security personnel, janitors, and food service employees (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent project of the CAP Action Fund.)
Many others are organized by SEIU’s, Faculty Forward unit specifically comprised of college faculty.
“It’s helping us to come together so that we can go in as a group and really push the college to give us what we’re asking for,” said Edwards-Luckett, who thinks the time is past due for colleges to pay non-tenured staff a living wage.
After all, “all over the country, these college and university presidents are getting bigger and bigger paid jobs,” she said.
Organizers said that since Faculty Forward launched in 2015, 30,000 graduate workers and adjunct professors have joined. All told, SEIU represents 57,000 graduate workers and adjunct professors on more than 60 campuses across the United States.
The problem of low pay and a lack of benefits is not quite as acute in a state like California, where non-tenured lecturers have been organized for years. But the challenge of piecing together a livelihood is compounded by the harrowing congestion, especially on the notorious highways in Southern California, as non-tenured faculty careen from campus to campus.
“They call them ‘freeway flyers’ in the Los Angeles area where I am. They fly around the freeway trying to cobble together a living,” John Griffin, 69, an adjunct at California State University, told ThinkProgress.
Griffin, with an MBA and a law degree, teaches management and marketing at Cal State, has found that as colleges try to cut costs, they hire more and more adjuncts, who he said typically are paid about half of what tenured faculty gets.
The California Faculty Association (CFA) has secured “some of the best benefits for the non-tenured adjuncts” of any of the organized units in the country, said Griffin, who lives in Ventura County and attended the conference in Las Vegas.
“In many places they’re just beginning to form unions. We try to hold ourselves out as a model. Here’s what can happen if you organize and come together.”
But even in comparatively progressive and unionized California “adjuncts actually wind up teaching substantially more students,” Griffin said. “Not only are 70% of our faculty adjuncts, but they also teach a much greater percentage of students.”
One insidious consequence of the large percentage of contingent faculty in higher education is that students in need of an advisor, or additional tutoring or support, aren’t able to get it when their instructors teach at multiple campuses. “You teach a class, you’re done,” Griffin said. “Most of them, they’re never around.”
Research has borne out the negative impacts of over-reliance on part-time college instructors, finding that it appears to negatively impact students’ academic performance and retention.
Doreen Mattingly, professor and chair of women’s studies and vice president of the California Faculty Association chapter at San Diego State said that on her campus, both tenured and non-tenured faculty are represented by the CFA.
Union membership has led to a better quality of life for many of the unionized lecturers, who get the opportunity to obtain a pension and qualify for health benefits. Still, she acknowledges, even though their plight is better than working as an adjunct in other states, it can be a grueling way of life.
“They have in the trunk of their car, each class in a file box,” Mattingly told ThinkProgress. “It’s a gig type of existence.”
Edwards-Luckett said she doesn’t necessarily anticipate being made a full professor at her campus in Florida, but said she would like to be fairly compensated for her work.
“You don’t have to make me full-time staff,” she told ThinkProgress, “but as a part-time worker you should still respect what I do.”
With a husband on disability and $100,000 in college loans, Edwards-Luckett says her bills always seem to outstrip her income. Friends and acquaintances in her non-tenured faculty circle are in similarly dire straits, piecing together a bare-bones existence by working at various campuses across Florida.
“Some of my colleagues are teaching four classes at this college, two classes at that college,” the 51-year-old college lecturer told ThinkProgress. “And even when they add all of that up together, they still make less than $25,000 a year.”
Edwards-Luckett said life on a college adjunct’s income amounts to poverty, plain and simple. “A lot of us are depending on food banks and things like that, even during the semester,” she told ThinkProgress.
College education is very much in the spotlight as a 2020 campaign issue, and the Democratic presidential candidates have a raft of proposals to reduce student debt and lower the costs of tuition. Their plans cover everything from providing free community college to reining in for-profit colleges, from extending loan forgiveness to refinancing student loans.
But education advocates and labor activists say the focus on higher education reform shouldn’t only be about the kids: The 2020 candidates should also pay attention to the often deplorable conditions endured by legions of underpaid faculty members who teach them.
Twenty years ago, just one in four faculty jobs on college campuses was non-tenure track. Today the figure is three in four. Experts say, in fact, that the move to hire part time faculty American college campuses has been one of the most significant developments in higher education of the past generation.
The reliance on part-time adjuncts took off during the 1980s, at a time when budgets at public colleges were being slashed. As states defunded public higher education, lecturers were hired as a supplement to full-time faculty to pad out their course curricula.
But since then, the hiring of part-time faculty has snowballed. A 2014 congressional report found there were more than one million people currently working as contingent faculty and instructors at U.S. institutions of higher education “providing a cheap labor source even while students’ tuition has skyrocketed.”
In the past, the part-time teaching gigs were supplemental employment picked up by retired professors looking to make a little extra cash by teaching at the local university or community college. These days however, many colleges and universities rely primarily on adjuncts and other contingent faculty members, rather than full-time, tenure-track professors to educate their students.
If the development doesn’t worry politicians and government officials, it should.
“The trend should be of concern to policymakers both because of what it means for the living standards and work lives of those individuals we expect to educate the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, and other highly skilled workers, and what it may mean for the quality of higher education itself,” the report found.
One key 2020 issue affecting college lecturers is income inequality — something contingent faculty know plenty about, working on campuses with full time, tenured faculty who may earn several times their average annual pay.
Work, when part-time academic faculty members find it, usually comes without health insurance or job security — making even more likely that non-tenured professors teeter over the brink and into full-blown financial disaster. That’s the reason so many are organizing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that thousands of underpaid college faculty have formed or joined labor unions in recent years — most with American Federation of Teachers, the SEIU, the United Auto Workers and Unite Here — calling it “among the most important recent developments shaping higher education.”
Florida is one state where the ranks of unionized faculty and those seeking to form unions has swelled dramatically in recent years. SEIU, the service workers union, recently won a campaign to organize at Miami Dade College — a public college with one of the nation’s biggest enrollments, 165,000 students. Union organizers say there are some 3,300 adjunct professors who teach there.
Broadly speaking, unionization of part-time college faculty is long overdue, they said.
“Now more than ever, educators, including adjunct professors and graduate workers, need the ability to form their unions,” Heather Conroy, executive vice president SEIU International, the service workers’ union, told ThinkProgress.
“This is a ‘must do’ so they can advocate for their students and for the resources they desperately need to improve the quality of education in our country,” Conroy said.
“We need to ensure that teaching jobs are good jobs instead of poverty-wage jobs and that students have the opportunity to learn without being trapped under mountains of debt.”
Their precarious financial straits give adjunct faculty common cause with other part-time, low-paid workers, including many manual laborers like hotel workers, janitors, and food service workers. Several college adjuncts attended a conference in Las Vegas late last month where they pressed the case for the power of unions to improve their working conditions.
At the labor forum, sponsored by Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the college lecturers made common cause alongside service workers who work as airport security personnel, janitors, and food service employees (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent project of the CAP Action Fund.)
Many others are organized by SEIU’s, Faculty Forward unit specifically comprised of college faculty.
“It’s helping us to come together so that we can go in as a group and really push the college to give us what we’re asking for,” said Edwards-Luckett, who thinks the time is past due for colleges to pay non-tenured staff a living wage.
After all, “all over the country, these college and university presidents are getting bigger and bigger paid jobs,” she said.
Organizers said that since Faculty Forward launched in 2015, 30,000 graduate workers and adjunct professors have joined. All told, SEIU represents 57,000 graduate workers and adjunct professors on more than 60 campuses across the United States.
The problem of low pay and a lack of benefits is not quite as acute in a state like California, where non-tenured lecturers have been organized for years. But the challenge of piecing together a livelihood is compounded by the harrowing congestion, especially on the notorious highways in Southern California, as non-tenured faculty careen from campus to campus.
“They call them ‘freeway flyers’ in the Los Angeles area where I am. They fly around the freeway trying to cobble together a living,” John Griffin, 69, an adjunct at California State University, told ThinkProgress.
Griffin, with an MBA and a law degree, teaches management and marketing at Cal State, has found that as colleges try to cut costs, they hire more and more adjuncts, who he said typically are paid about half of what tenured faculty gets.
The California Faculty Association (CFA) has secured “some of the best benefits for the non-tenured adjuncts” of any of the organized units in the country, said Griffin, who lives in Ventura County and attended the conference in Las Vegas.
“In many places they’re just beginning to form unions. We try to hold ourselves out as a model. Here’s what can happen if you organize and come together.”
But even in comparatively progressive and unionized California “adjuncts actually wind up teaching substantially more students,” Griffin said. “Not only are 70% of our faculty adjuncts, but they also teach a much greater percentage of students.”
One insidious consequence of the large percentage of contingent faculty in higher education is that students in need of an advisor, or additional tutoring or support, aren’t able to get it when their instructors teach at multiple campuses. “You teach a class, you’re done,” Griffin said. “Most of them, they’re never around.”
Research has borne out the negative impacts of over-reliance on part-time college instructors, finding that it appears to negatively impact students’ academic performance and retention.
Doreen Mattingly, professor and chair of women’s studies and vice president of the California Faculty Association chapter at San Diego State said that on her campus, both tenured and non-tenured faculty are represented by the CFA.
Union membership has led to a better quality of life for many of the unionized lecturers, who get the opportunity to obtain a pension and qualify for health benefits. Still, she acknowledges, even though their plight is better than working as an adjunct in other states, it can be a grueling way of life.
“They have in the trunk of their car, each class in a file box,” Mattingly told ThinkProgress. “It’s a gig type of existence.”
Edwards-Luckett said she doesn’t necessarily anticipate being made a full professor at her campus in Florida, but said she would like to be fairly compensated for her work.
“You don’t have to make me full-time staff,” she told ThinkProgress, “but as a part-time worker you should still respect what I do.”
Is the gig economy a path to prosperity or the indenture of just getting by?
Democrats participate in a public cringe about going too far left, too fast, and working people get the gig economy
BOB HENNELLY - salon
MAY 19, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
One of the best things that American capitalism has going for it is the myth machine that’s programmed generations of school age Americans to believe that our collective national story is a narrative of remarkable broad-based socio-economic progress.
It’s like that warm and fuzzy inner glow we get from Disney’s Epcot Center where we can trace “early man” executing cave drawings through the printing of the Gutenberg Bible all the way to today’s driverless car.
It’s all very patriotic and cuts down on the odds of incubating young radicals who might threaten capital’s established order or be in too much of hurry to make things better now. The one thing you don’t want to teach them is labor history because then they will know just how bad its been and for how long.
Yeah, people died for the cause of labor rights in the fervent hope something might get better. Owners didn’t just say “oh, you don’t want to bring your 11-year-old to work with you anymore and you want Sunday off? No problem.”
The cover story for the great disappearance of unions goes something like this: “Yes, at one time back in the era of black and white movies American workers were terribly exploited but then they organized unions and several Frank Capra movies later, the workers won their struggle and we got the minimum wage and the forty-hour week, but we really don’t need unions in modern times.”
Or, so we were told.
We know just how violently exploitative slavery was as an institution but how many Americans know that by some historical estimates half to three-quarters of European immigrants that came to the colonies had some form of indenture price hanging over their head.
Capital has been kicking labor’s ass since it wore powdered wigs in this country and the data shows it hasn’t let up since, as the widening wealth and income gap demonstrates.
Scroll forward a few hundred years, the entire recorded history of the country and according to a 2018 Federal Reserve Report on the Economic Well Being of the U.S. Household in the 21st century “four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”
So that’s the great wheel of progress? More like the randomness of the wheel of fortune. At least when you were indentured there was a chance you might get free food and shelter.
In the 2020 debate for the Democratic nomination, the constant refrain we hear from the moderators of the cable debate is that the greatest danger Democrats face is the perilous prospect they will go too far left, too fast.
If anything, we have been moving too slow for too long and we can see it in the data related to the growing affordability crisis that’s been documented by the United Way across the country with its analysis of the working poor in several states.
The national non-profit takes a detailed look at the local cost of living and wages for families they define as asset limited income constrained but employed (ALICE). In California 48 percent of the state’s families are either poor or struggle week-to-week to get by. In Florida, it is 46 percent. In Ohio, 42 percent are in that ALICE cohort. In New York, 45 percent either live below poverty or are struggling on the edge over which they will plummet after one major unexpected expense.
We did not get to these numbers overnight. This is the consequence of decades of permitting corporations to grow larger and larger as the union movement shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Fifty years ago, almost a third of Americans were in a union while today it is just one in ten. Is it any wonder that since the 1970s wages have declined or stayed flat as worker productivity skyrocketed along with the cost of living?
As I have written in this space before, there are signs of a grass roots labor union revival born out of something that has been brewing for several Presidential election cycles. It is driven by data that shows this generation of young adults are on track to be the first that won’t do better than their parents economically.
For me it appears to be most evident In New York State that has a bit of a head start with one of the highest concentrations of organized labor in the country. In the next few weeks the state’s union movement is hoping to right what New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento, believes is a “decades old disgrace” with the passage this session of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act (S-2837/A-2750).
In the 1930s America’s farmworkers were excluded from the landmark protections extended to the rest of the nation as codified during the New Deal. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Practices Act expressly exempted them, along with domestic workers.
These landmark reforms codified the concept of overtime and a minimum wage.
“People think we all took these huge leaps forward, but these reforms were not universal,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor and labor historian at the City of New York’s Graduate Center. “It depended on your race and gender and the farmworker and domestic worker cutouts were to get southern Congressional Democrats on board who did not want to see black workers covered.”
During the eighty-plus years since, resistance to farmworkers organizing and gaining legal work place protections has remained intense with less than one percent of the workforce being able to benefit from union membership.
In New York State’s the drive to, at long last, provide farmworkers with labor rights they have been denied for decades is led by 33-year-old State Senator Jessica Ramos, who was first elected last year and chairs the State Senate Labor Committee.
“We must ensure that farmworkers are granted the rights that all other workers in our state are afforded — a day off, overtime pay, unemployment benefits and the right to collectively bargain,” she said in an email exchange.
Ramos has held hearings across the state to raise the visibility of the issue and is trying to forge a consensus. “I am talking to all stakeholders in this issue and I have toured the state talking to farmers and farmworkers alike,” she said. “Farm work isn’t like a nine-to-five office job and is greatly impacted by inclement weather. I hope to come to an agreement and pass the bill by the end of session.”
Ramos has worked for two unions and sees advancing labor’s interests as central to her agenda. “Despite having the highest union density in the country, there are too many unorganized and disorganized industries in New York,” said Ramos. “As the daughter of immigrants, one of whom is a former member of the now-defunct International Lady Garment Workers Union, I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility in bridging the gap between born and raised New Yorkers like me and immigrants like my parents.”
The New York State AFL- CIO’s Cilento believes the farmworker labor standards bill, long a state labor priority, is now closer than it has ever been to becoming law
.“Farmworkers don’t have the right to overtime pay which means a farmworker can work 60,70, 80 hours a week at the discretion of their employer for as long as the employer sees fit,” Cilento said “And because they don’t have a right to join a union, to collectively bargain. they don’t have any say on the matter.”
Yet, even as the state AFL-CIO was lobbying hoping to finally deliver for farmworkers, Cilento said he saw a bigger challenge ahead for organized labor with the explosion of the so-called gig-economy.
According to a recent study by Cornell University’s Worker Institute, sponsored by the state AFL-CIO, the exponential growth in the on-demand workforce of independent contractors that’s managed by online platforms, or “apps,” is eroding long-standing legal protections for labor.
Intuit Inc, the parent company of Turbo Tax, estimates that almost 34 percent of the workforce today is in the gig economy and predicts that share to rise to 43 percent by 2020. No doubt, many of the participants in that realm also are still working a conventional job.
But for the millions of Americans who work only in the overall gig economy, there is no unemployment insurance, workers compensation coverage, wage and hour protection, family and medical leave, workplace health and safety, withholding of taxes, pension security, anti-discrimination or right to organize and collectively bargain.
“We have a class of workers who are being denied basic rights that most other workers have,” Cilento said in a statement when the report was issued on April 30. “This is a turning point in our changing economy that reeks of early 20th century working conditions of low wages and discrimination.”
“On-demand platform employment is but the latest demonstration of destabilizing changes in work, conditions, and labor markets that have developed since the 1980s,” according to the Cornell Worker Institute report commissioned by the NYS-AFL-CIO.
“Companies have systematically shifted or eliminated jobs formerly done in-house through subcontracting, reliance on third parties, contingent and temporary work contracts, and abuse of ‘independent contractor’ status.”
The Cornell analysis reports the industries most impacted by this trend are: transportation, trucking, construction, home health care, janitorial, hospitality, restaurant, household services, clerical, and retail services.
The research paper continues, “On-demand industry practice, represented by such companies as Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and TaskRabbit, is to hire and dispatch workers as “independent contractors. These workers are, however, not true ‘independent contractors’; they are not in business for themselves and cannot freely negotiate employment terms.”
“It is going to be very important for taxpayers,” Cilento warned. “These workers will be working 60 hours a week and not making even the minimum wage, which means ultimately if you have a growing percentage of the economy with workers working at these lower rates the general public — taxpayers are going to be subsidizing their earnings with public assistance because we have a growing number of people who are not making ends meet.”
As a consequence, Cilento predicts conventional brick-and-mortar businesses will increasingly be handicapped by having to live up to their legal obligations under existing labor law that protects their employees as their web-based competitors can increase their profits and increase their market share because their business model is based on evading them.
So much for social progress.
It’s like that warm and fuzzy inner glow we get from Disney’s Epcot Center where we can trace “early man” executing cave drawings through the printing of the Gutenberg Bible all the way to today’s driverless car.
It’s all very patriotic and cuts down on the odds of incubating young radicals who might threaten capital’s established order or be in too much of hurry to make things better now. The one thing you don’t want to teach them is labor history because then they will know just how bad its been and for how long.
Yeah, people died for the cause of labor rights in the fervent hope something might get better. Owners didn’t just say “oh, you don’t want to bring your 11-year-old to work with you anymore and you want Sunday off? No problem.”
The cover story for the great disappearance of unions goes something like this: “Yes, at one time back in the era of black and white movies American workers were terribly exploited but then they organized unions and several Frank Capra movies later, the workers won their struggle and we got the minimum wage and the forty-hour week, but we really don’t need unions in modern times.”
Or, so we were told.
We know just how violently exploitative slavery was as an institution but how many Americans know that by some historical estimates half to three-quarters of European immigrants that came to the colonies had some form of indenture price hanging over their head.
Capital has been kicking labor’s ass since it wore powdered wigs in this country and the data shows it hasn’t let up since, as the widening wealth and income gap demonstrates.
Scroll forward a few hundred years, the entire recorded history of the country and according to a 2018 Federal Reserve Report on the Economic Well Being of the U.S. Household in the 21st century “four in 10 adults, if faced with an unexpected expense of $400, would either not be able to cover it or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”
So that’s the great wheel of progress? More like the randomness of the wheel of fortune. At least when you were indentured there was a chance you might get free food and shelter.
In the 2020 debate for the Democratic nomination, the constant refrain we hear from the moderators of the cable debate is that the greatest danger Democrats face is the perilous prospect they will go too far left, too fast.
If anything, we have been moving too slow for too long and we can see it in the data related to the growing affordability crisis that’s been documented by the United Way across the country with its analysis of the working poor in several states.
The national non-profit takes a detailed look at the local cost of living and wages for families they define as asset limited income constrained but employed (ALICE). In California 48 percent of the state’s families are either poor or struggle week-to-week to get by. In Florida, it is 46 percent. In Ohio, 42 percent are in that ALICE cohort. In New York, 45 percent either live below poverty or are struggling on the edge over which they will plummet after one major unexpected expense.
We did not get to these numbers overnight. This is the consequence of decades of permitting corporations to grow larger and larger as the union movement shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Fifty years ago, almost a third of Americans were in a union while today it is just one in ten. Is it any wonder that since the 1970s wages have declined or stayed flat as worker productivity skyrocketed along with the cost of living?
As I have written in this space before, there are signs of a grass roots labor union revival born out of something that has been brewing for several Presidential election cycles. It is driven by data that shows this generation of young adults are on track to be the first that won’t do better than their parents economically.
For me it appears to be most evident In New York State that has a bit of a head start with one of the highest concentrations of organized labor in the country. In the next few weeks the state’s union movement is hoping to right what New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento, believes is a “decades old disgrace” with the passage this session of the Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act (S-2837/A-2750).
In the 1930s America’s farmworkers were excluded from the landmark protections extended to the rest of the nation as codified during the New Deal. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Practices Act expressly exempted them, along with domestic workers.
These landmark reforms codified the concept of overtime and a minimum wage.
“People think we all took these huge leaps forward, but these reforms were not universal,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor and labor historian at the City of New York’s Graduate Center. “It depended on your race and gender and the farmworker and domestic worker cutouts were to get southern Congressional Democrats on board who did not want to see black workers covered.”
During the eighty-plus years since, resistance to farmworkers organizing and gaining legal work place protections has remained intense with less than one percent of the workforce being able to benefit from union membership.
In New York State’s the drive to, at long last, provide farmworkers with labor rights they have been denied for decades is led by 33-year-old State Senator Jessica Ramos, who was first elected last year and chairs the State Senate Labor Committee.
“We must ensure that farmworkers are granted the rights that all other workers in our state are afforded — a day off, overtime pay, unemployment benefits and the right to collectively bargain,” she said in an email exchange.
Ramos has held hearings across the state to raise the visibility of the issue and is trying to forge a consensus. “I am talking to all stakeholders in this issue and I have toured the state talking to farmers and farmworkers alike,” she said. “Farm work isn’t like a nine-to-five office job and is greatly impacted by inclement weather. I hope to come to an agreement and pass the bill by the end of session.”
Ramos has worked for two unions and sees advancing labor’s interests as central to her agenda. “Despite having the highest union density in the country, there are too many unorganized and disorganized industries in New York,” said Ramos. “As the daughter of immigrants, one of whom is a former member of the now-defunct International Lady Garment Workers Union, I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility in bridging the gap between born and raised New Yorkers like me and immigrants like my parents.”
The New York State AFL- CIO’s Cilento believes the farmworker labor standards bill, long a state labor priority, is now closer than it has ever been to becoming law
.“Farmworkers don’t have the right to overtime pay which means a farmworker can work 60,70, 80 hours a week at the discretion of their employer for as long as the employer sees fit,” Cilento said “And because they don’t have a right to join a union, to collectively bargain. they don’t have any say on the matter.”
Yet, even as the state AFL-CIO was lobbying hoping to finally deliver for farmworkers, Cilento said he saw a bigger challenge ahead for organized labor with the explosion of the so-called gig-economy.
According to a recent study by Cornell University’s Worker Institute, sponsored by the state AFL-CIO, the exponential growth in the on-demand workforce of independent contractors that’s managed by online platforms, or “apps,” is eroding long-standing legal protections for labor.
Intuit Inc, the parent company of Turbo Tax, estimates that almost 34 percent of the workforce today is in the gig economy and predicts that share to rise to 43 percent by 2020. No doubt, many of the participants in that realm also are still working a conventional job.
But for the millions of Americans who work only in the overall gig economy, there is no unemployment insurance, workers compensation coverage, wage and hour protection, family and medical leave, workplace health and safety, withholding of taxes, pension security, anti-discrimination or right to organize and collectively bargain.
“We have a class of workers who are being denied basic rights that most other workers have,” Cilento said in a statement when the report was issued on April 30. “This is a turning point in our changing economy that reeks of early 20th century working conditions of low wages and discrimination.”
“On-demand platform employment is but the latest demonstration of destabilizing changes in work, conditions, and labor markets that have developed since the 1980s,” according to the Cornell Worker Institute report commissioned by the NYS-AFL-CIO.
“Companies have systematically shifted or eliminated jobs formerly done in-house through subcontracting, reliance on third parties, contingent and temporary work contracts, and abuse of ‘independent contractor’ status.”
The Cornell analysis reports the industries most impacted by this trend are: transportation, trucking, construction, home health care, janitorial, hospitality, restaurant, household services, clerical, and retail services.
The research paper continues, “On-demand industry practice, represented by such companies as Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and TaskRabbit, is to hire and dispatch workers as “independent contractors. These workers are, however, not true ‘independent contractors’; they are not in business for themselves and cannot freely negotiate employment terms.”
“It is going to be very important for taxpayers,” Cilento warned. “These workers will be working 60 hours a week and not making even the minimum wage, which means ultimately if you have a growing percentage of the economy with workers working at these lower rates the general public — taxpayers are going to be subsidizing their earnings with public assistance because we have a growing number of people who are not making ends meet.”
As a consequence, Cilento predicts conventional brick-and-mortar businesses will increasingly be handicapped by having to live up to their legal obligations under existing labor law that protects their employees as their web-based competitors can increase their profits and increase their market share because their business model is based on evading them.
So much for social progress.
Hospital Workers in Toledo, Ohio, Strike for Safe Patient Care
BY Roland Reed, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 15, 2019
On May 6, more than 2,000 unionized workers organized by the United Automobile Workers (UAW) marched out of Mercy Health St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio, to demand safe staffing, safe working conditions for all hospital workers and the right to bargain fixed health care rates. The striking workers include registered nurses, technical unit employees and support staff.
The workers overwhelmingly voted to go on strike with the union’s registered nurse contingent, voting 90 percent in favor on October 29, 2018, which is the same day the current contract expired. “The main reason why nurses went on strike is because of patient safety,” said Barb Mazur, a registered nurse and strike captain of UAW Local 2213 Professional Registered Nurses. Mazur is concerned about their current nurse-to-patient ratios and working long shifts that put patients in danger. “Our concern is that we’re being overworked and extended to longer hours. The major focus is patient safety. We’re standing up for our patients.”
From the picket lines, it’s evident how much support the strikers have from the patients and community at large. Cars driving by are consistently honking in support to the point where it’s difficult to even have a conversation. Support is even coming from within the hospital. “We have a lot of patients that have verbalized that they are supporting us…. One patient walked out holding a UAW sign,” Mazur told Truthout.
There has been an outpouring of labor support coming not only from Toledo, but from Ohio at large and other states as well. “We have the ONA [Ohio Nurses Association], the MNA [Michigan Nurses Association], AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], the Ironworkers, the fire department and others,” Mazur said. “People are coming to drop off water and food; and from the bottom of our hearts, we appreciate it.”
According to the Toledo Blade, the hospital planned to continue operations of the facility during the strike by bringing in workers from other Mercy Health facilities in the area. Mercy Health claims that the UAW leadership is stalling negotiations by trying to win benefits that only help selected union leaders, “We are disappointed that as we continue to work to find a solution, the interests of [a] few are being held above the interests of all.”
When it comes to ending the strike, Mazur put it plainly as to who is stalling negotiations. “Nurses want to see a contract that we can pass,” she said. “[Hospital management is] not coming forward in good faith. We need to stand up. We need to get caps on hours worked per week. That’s what we need for nurses so we can keep our patients safe.”
Susan Pratt, a registered nurse and president of Local 2213, sees this strike as a way to make sure that workers’ voices are heard when it comes to protecting their patients. Pratt wants hospital staffing that is based on what is best for the patients. One of the many issues facing workers, and especially nurses, is working long hours.
“We proposed that once nurses were considered impaired (due to exhaustion) that they had to take 24 hours off…. The hospital flat-out refused it. They said they were not willing to do it and had a lot of excuses,” Pratt told Truthout. “We just want to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Health care costs have been an issue for hospital workers as well. Pratt told Truthout that the hospital wants total control of the workers’ health care. “There is also a component with the health care that they can change it [the cost] at a whim. We’ve never had that in our agreement either.”
For Pratt, just being on the picket line itself is a struggle.
“We’re caregivers. For us to walk out, many of us struggled with that, but we have to look at the bigger picture. It’s not unique,” Pratt said. “Lots of hospitals are struggling with this, but many workers don’t have a voice, and that’s one reason I joined the UAW. I saw a decline in how we could take care of our patients and the union was a way to fight for my patients.”
Pratt also made the connection between the nurses’ strike and the wave of teacher strikes that have rocked the country. “We both feel our jobs are a calling. When our patients don’t have money for their medication, we pass around the hat and get them their medication. Teachers are the same way with their students. They’re both very important jobs, and both primarily women’s jobs. I don’t know if that’s part of the problem … we don’t value these workers the same as we would with a male-dominated profession.”
As encouraging as it is to see politicians like Senator Sanders give his support to the strike, Pratt knows that the power is in their community, and that they still have a lot of work to do. “I’m really looking forward to getting back to work and providing the care that we do…. We’re a really tight-knit team and it takes all of us to accomplish what we need to for the patients. We’re going to make change by supporting each other.”
As of May 15, the strike is still ongoing, and the union is planning a public picketing event for Saturday, May 18, for all supporters of the strike.
Those outside of Toledo interested in supporting the striking workers can sign this petition.
The workers overwhelmingly voted to go on strike with the union’s registered nurse contingent, voting 90 percent in favor on October 29, 2018, which is the same day the current contract expired. “The main reason why nurses went on strike is because of patient safety,” said Barb Mazur, a registered nurse and strike captain of UAW Local 2213 Professional Registered Nurses. Mazur is concerned about their current nurse-to-patient ratios and working long shifts that put patients in danger. “Our concern is that we’re being overworked and extended to longer hours. The major focus is patient safety. We’re standing up for our patients.”
From the picket lines, it’s evident how much support the strikers have from the patients and community at large. Cars driving by are consistently honking in support to the point where it’s difficult to even have a conversation. Support is even coming from within the hospital. “We have a lot of patients that have verbalized that they are supporting us…. One patient walked out holding a UAW sign,” Mazur told Truthout.
There has been an outpouring of labor support coming not only from Toledo, but from Ohio at large and other states as well. “We have the ONA [Ohio Nurses Association], the MNA [Michigan Nurses Association], AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees], the Ironworkers, the fire department and others,” Mazur said. “People are coming to drop off water and food; and from the bottom of our hearts, we appreciate it.”
According to the Toledo Blade, the hospital planned to continue operations of the facility during the strike by bringing in workers from other Mercy Health facilities in the area. Mercy Health claims that the UAW leadership is stalling negotiations by trying to win benefits that only help selected union leaders, “We are disappointed that as we continue to work to find a solution, the interests of [a] few are being held above the interests of all.”
When it comes to ending the strike, Mazur put it plainly as to who is stalling negotiations. “Nurses want to see a contract that we can pass,” she said. “[Hospital management is] not coming forward in good faith. We need to stand up. We need to get caps on hours worked per week. That’s what we need for nurses so we can keep our patients safe.”
Susan Pratt, a registered nurse and president of Local 2213, sees this strike as a way to make sure that workers’ voices are heard when it comes to protecting their patients. Pratt wants hospital staffing that is based on what is best for the patients. One of the many issues facing workers, and especially nurses, is working long hours.
“We proposed that once nurses were considered impaired (due to exhaustion) that they had to take 24 hours off…. The hospital flat-out refused it. They said they were not willing to do it and had a lot of excuses,” Pratt told Truthout. “We just want to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Health care costs have been an issue for hospital workers as well. Pratt told Truthout that the hospital wants total control of the workers’ health care. “There is also a component with the health care that they can change it [the cost] at a whim. We’ve never had that in our agreement either.”
For Pratt, just being on the picket line itself is a struggle.
“We’re caregivers. For us to walk out, many of us struggled with that, but we have to look at the bigger picture. It’s not unique,” Pratt said. “Lots of hospitals are struggling with this, but many workers don’t have a voice, and that’s one reason I joined the UAW. I saw a decline in how we could take care of our patients and the union was a way to fight for my patients.”
Pratt also made the connection between the nurses’ strike and the wave of teacher strikes that have rocked the country. “We both feel our jobs are a calling. When our patients don’t have money for their medication, we pass around the hat and get them their medication. Teachers are the same way with their students. They’re both very important jobs, and both primarily women’s jobs. I don’t know if that’s part of the problem … we don’t value these workers the same as we would with a male-dominated profession.”
As encouraging as it is to see politicians like Senator Sanders give his support to the strike, Pratt knows that the power is in their community, and that they still have a lot of work to do. “I’m really looking forward to getting back to work and providing the care that we do…. We’re a really tight-knit team and it takes all of us to accomplish what we need to for the patients. We’re going to make change by supporting each other.”
As of May 15, the strike is still ongoing, and the union is planning a public picketing event for Saturday, May 18, for all supporters of the strike.
Those outside of Toledo interested in supporting the striking workers can sign this petition.
GOP-LED EFFORTS TO CRUSH UNIONS HAVE A NEW TARGET: HOME HEALTH CARE WORKERS
Rachel M. Cohen - the intercept
May 16 2019, 4:00 a.m.
FIVE STATES ARE pushing back against the latest Republican-led assault to weaken unions across the country, which targets in-home caregivers who work with Medicaid beneficiaries.
On Monday, attorneys general representing California, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging a new rule, announced earlier this month, that impedes home care workers from paying union dues through their Medicaid-funded paychecks. The rule, which goes into effect in July, will impact more than half a million workers in California alone, and several hundred thousand more in 10 other states.
The case was brought against the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Alex Azar, and filed in San Francisco federal court. The plaintiffs argue that the defendants have illegally reinterpreted federal law “in service of anti-union objectives.” The new rule, they say, disrupts long-settled arrangements that allow seniors and individuals with disabilities — who work with state governments to set wages, benefits, and terms of service for their providers — to direct their own health care. More than 700,000 individuals across the five plaintiff states currently use consumer-directed Medicaid programs.
The lawsuit against the Trump administration rule, which was finalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, comes the same week as two major developments for home care workers in the United States. In Washington state, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law the nation’s first publicly funded long-term care benefit, a hard-fought victory by advocates including SEIU 775, which represents 45,000 home care workers in Washington and Montana. National advocates say they will use Washington’s policy as a model to push for in other states.
Also this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition to review a case led by a group of Minnesota home care workers who argued that a state law that made Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, their bargaining agent violated their First Amendment rights. The plaintiffs pointed to Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the 2018 case struck down public sector unions charging fees to non-dues paying workers. The same conservative legal groups that supported Janus also helped the Minnesota home care providers, though this time their efforts failed.
While the high court’s ruling marks a setback to conservatives seeking to leverage free speech laws against union power, there are still dozens of other Janus-inspired lawsuits winding their way through federal courts, with two more lawsuits filedin the last month. This week’s lawsuit against HHS is the opposite of that — a proactive effort to get the courts to defend the rights of unionized workers.
THE PLAINTIFFS ARGUE that HHS and Azar have violated the Administrative Procedures Act, the law governing how federal agencies can propose and implement regulation. Their complaint says the new rule “abruptly and without any sound rationale or conversations with affected states” overturns an Obama-era rule that confirmed the practice of taking direct deductions from home care workers’ paychecks. The Trump administration has been repeatedly accused of violating the APA, issuing new rules and mandates, and repealing old ones, often outside the bounds of established protocol.
“With this rule, the Trump administration is not only harming Medicaid skilled home care workers who have joined unions, but the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who depend on these indispensable workers,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a statement.
SEIU, which represents most home care workers, released a statement calling the rule “racist” — noting that 90 percent of home care workers are women, more than half are women of color, and a quarter are immigrants. “The administration’s attempt to silence home care workers reflects a long history in the United States of double-standard policies that deny working people of color like home care workers and domestic workers basic legal protections and rights, including protections for minimum wage and overtime pay, and the right to organize and form strong unions,” the union said. Without a union, SEIU added, independent home care workers earn a median wage of just $10.49 an hour, with no paid sick time or health care benefits.
The federal Bureau for Labor Statistics projects that demand for home care workers will increase by 41 percent between 2016 and 2026, as the baby-boom generation continues to get older. Union membership gives home care workers an incentive to stay on the job, according to a 2017 survey by the National Employment Law Project of more than 3,000 home care workers, of which one-third were union members. The researchers found that unionized respondents were more likely to expect to be a home care worker a year from now, less likely to be looking for other jobs outside of home care, more likely to receive benefits, and had higher wages on average.
The Trump administration announced last August that it was considering scrapping the Obama-era rule that affirmed home care workers could deduct union dues from their Medicaid-funded paychecks. This practice has been criticized by conservatives who argue that in-home caregivers shouldn’t be able to “skim” government funds away to union coffers and that doing so “damages the integrity” of the Medicaid program.
Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which files lawsuits in favor of banning unionized workplaces from requiring dues for bargaining representation, praisedthe Trump administration’s new rule in a statement, calling it a “long-overdue rule [that] closes the illegal loophole created by the Obama Administration that has provided union officials with legal cover to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funds into union political and lobbying activities.”
In 2014, thanks to a lawsuit backed by Mix’s group, the U.S Supreme Court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that Illinois home care workers could not be required to pay union agency fees. Mix said the Trump administration’s new rule represents “another important step forward in protecting the rights of home care worker from rapacious union officials” and pointed to the 2014 Supreme Court decision, describing it as a situation where “[National Right to Work] Foundation attorneys freed homecare workers” from making payments.
CMS Administrator Seema Verma has denied their new rule is about making it harder for workers to be in unions; she said it’s simply to ensure that any diversion of Medicaid payments is truly lawful.
Last April, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs — which is tasked with investigating “the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness” of all government agencies — wrote to Verma requesting that she look into this alleged “dues skimming” and cited rising Medicaid costs. The letter, authored by committee chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said allowing unions to take dues from home health care providers saps $200 million annually from Medicaid recipient care. Johnson asked CMS to review the practice “and determine whether changes to law or regulation are necessary to ensure Medicaid funds are provided to the program’s intended beneficiaries.”
“The effect of this final rule is the elimination of one method of getting payment from A to B,” the final rule states. “It in no way prevents healthcare workers from purchasing health insurance, enrolling in trainings, or paying dues to a union or other association.”
Critics say the Trump administration’s rationale makes no sense, pointing out that eliminating the ability to directly deduct union dues does nothing to curb Medicaid spending.
Caitlin Connolly, the director of social insurance at the National Employment Law Project, a union-backed legal advocacy group, told The Intercept the argument put forward by the Trump administration and its Republican allies is misleading because the money spent on dues is taken from workers’ wages, who get to decide how to spend the money that they earn.
“When I look at my paycheck, I get my wages and I decide, thanks to the convenience of my right as an employee, to allocate some of that money to a retirement account, some to a health savings account, and some to my union dues,” she said. ‘It’s my money, and I get to choose how to spend it. Just because the source of these workers’ wages is Medicaid dollars doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to choose how to spend it.”
And since workers are still able to take their wages and spend it on union dues, just without the convenience of direct paycheck deduction, Connolly said this shows the point is to create more hurdles for workers to jump through to exercise their union rights.
“I think there are locals working with members to see how they can handle dues payments in a way that would reduce the burden if direct deposit were restricted, and I think workers are sharing with them ideas on what would be helpful, but there’s nothing easier than saying, ‘I don’t have to think about this, I agree to this, and please take care of it,’” Connolly said.
On Monday, attorneys general representing California, Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Washington filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging a new rule, announced earlier this month, that impedes home care workers from paying union dues through their Medicaid-funded paychecks. The rule, which goes into effect in July, will impact more than half a million workers in California alone, and several hundred thousand more in 10 other states.
The case was brought against the Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Alex Azar, and filed in San Francisco federal court. The plaintiffs argue that the defendants have illegally reinterpreted federal law “in service of anti-union objectives.” The new rule, they say, disrupts long-settled arrangements that allow seniors and individuals with disabilities — who work with state governments to set wages, benefits, and terms of service for their providers — to direct their own health care. More than 700,000 individuals across the five plaintiff states currently use consumer-directed Medicaid programs.
The lawsuit against the Trump administration rule, which was finalized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, comes the same week as two major developments for home care workers in the United States. In Washington state, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed into law the nation’s first publicly funded long-term care benefit, a hard-fought victory by advocates including SEIU 775, which represents 45,000 home care workers in Washington and Montana. National advocates say they will use Washington’s policy as a model to push for in other states.
Also this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition to review a case led by a group of Minnesota home care workers who argued that a state law that made Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, their bargaining agent violated their First Amendment rights. The plaintiffs pointed to Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the 2018 case struck down public sector unions charging fees to non-dues paying workers. The same conservative legal groups that supported Janus also helped the Minnesota home care providers, though this time their efforts failed.
While the high court’s ruling marks a setback to conservatives seeking to leverage free speech laws against union power, there are still dozens of other Janus-inspired lawsuits winding their way through federal courts, with two more lawsuits filedin the last month. This week’s lawsuit against HHS is the opposite of that — a proactive effort to get the courts to defend the rights of unionized workers.
THE PLAINTIFFS ARGUE that HHS and Azar have violated the Administrative Procedures Act, the law governing how federal agencies can propose and implement regulation. Their complaint says the new rule “abruptly and without any sound rationale or conversations with affected states” overturns an Obama-era rule that confirmed the practice of taking direct deductions from home care workers’ paychecks. The Trump administration has been repeatedly accused of violating the APA, issuing new rules and mandates, and repealing old ones, often outside the bounds of established protocol.
“With this rule, the Trump administration is not only harming Medicaid skilled home care workers who have joined unions, but the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who depend on these indispensable workers,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a statement.
SEIU, which represents most home care workers, released a statement calling the rule “racist” — noting that 90 percent of home care workers are women, more than half are women of color, and a quarter are immigrants. “The administration’s attempt to silence home care workers reflects a long history in the United States of double-standard policies that deny working people of color like home care workers and domestic workers basic legal protections and rights, including protections for minimum wage and overtime pay, and the right to organize and form strong unions,” the union said. Without a union, SEIU added, independent home care workers earn a median wage of just $10.49 an hour, with no paid sick time or health care benefits.
The federal Bureau for Labor Statistics projects that demand for home care workers will increase by 41 percent between 2016 and 2026, as the baby-boom generation continues to get older. Union membership gives home care workers an incentive to stay on the job, according to a 2017 survey by the National Employment Law Project of more than 3,000 home care workers, of which one-third were union members. The researchers found that unionized respondents were more likely to expect to be a home care worker a year from now, less likely to be looking for other jobs outside of home care, more likely to receive benefits, and had higher wages on average.
The Trump administration announced last August that it was considering scrapping the Obama-era rule that affirmed home care workers could deduct union dues from their Medicaid-funded paychecks. This practice has been criticized by conservatives who argue that in-home caregivers shouldn’t be able to “skim” government funds away to union coffers and that doing so “damages the integrity” of the Medicaid program.
Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which files lawsuits in favor of banning unionized workplaces from requiring dues for bargaining representation, praisedthe Trump administration’s new rule in a statement, calling it a “long-overdue rule [that] closes the illegal loophole created by the Obama Administration that has provided union officials with legal cover to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funds into union political and lobbying activities.”
In 2014, thanks to a lawsuit backed by Mix’s group, the U.S Supreme Court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that Illinois home care workers could not be required to pay union agency fees. Mix said the Trump administration’s new rule represents “another important step forward in protecting the rights of home care worker from rapacious union officials” and pointed to the 2014 Supreme Court decision, describing it as a situation where “[National Right to Work] Foundation attorneys freed homecare workers” from making payments.
CMS Administrator Seema Verma has denied their new rule is about making it harder for workers to be in unions; she said it’s simply to ensure that any diversion of Medicaid payments is truly lawful.
Last April, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs — which is tasked with investigating “the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness” of all government agencies — wrote to Verma requesting that she look into this alleged “dues skimming” and cited rising Medicaid costs. The letter, authored by committee chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said allowing unions to take dues from home health care providers saps $200 million annually from Medicaid recipient care. Johnson asked CMS to review the practice “and determine whether changes to law or regulation are necessary to ensure Medicaid funds are provided to the program’s intended beneficiaries.”
“The effect of this final rule is the elimination of one method of getting payment from A to B,” the final rule states. “It in no way prevents healthcare workers from purchasing health insurance, enrolling in trainings, or paying dues to a union or other association.”
Critics say the Trump administration’s rationale makes no sense, pointing out that eliminating the ability to directly deduct union dues does nothing to curb Medicaid spending.
Caitlin Connolly, the director of social insurance at the National Employment Law Project, a union-backed legal advocacy group, told The Intercept the argument put forward by the Trump administration and its Republican allies is misleading because the money spent on dues is taken from workers’ wages, who get to decide how to spend the money that they earn.
“When I look at my paycheck, I get my wages and I decide, thanks to the convenience of my right as an employee, to allocate some of that money to a retirement account, some to a health savings account, and some to my union dues,” she said. ‘It’s my money, and I get to choose how to spend it. Just because the source of these workers’ wages is Medicaid dollars doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to choose how to spend it.”
And since workers are still able to take their wages and spend it on union dues, just without the convenience of direct paycheck deduction, Connolly said this shows the point is to create more hurdles for workers to jump through to exercise their union rights.
“I think there are locals working with members to see how they can handle dues payments in a way that would reduce the burden if direct deposit were restricted, and I think workers are sharing with them ideas on what would be helpful, but there’s nothing easier than saying, ‘I don’t have to think about this, I agree to this, and please take care of it,’” Connolly said.
No matter how much Uber exploits its workers, it still can’t make money
It took two days for investors to sour on Uber’s prospects. They're right to do so
KEITH A. SPENCER - salon
MAY 13, 2019 11:01PM (UTC)
Ride-sharing giant Uber Technologies Inc., went public on Friday, following a coordinated, multi-city labor action by its oft-exploited fleet of contract drivers around the world.
Now, only two business days since the much-anticipated IPO, the company’s stock has dropped from its initial public offering of $45 down to $37.25 at the end of the day today — an overall drop of 17%.
The CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, sent an email to employees to try to smooth the situation. Reporter Mike Isaac of the New York Times obtained the email, which read in part: "Remember that the Facebook and Amazon post-IPO trading was incredibly difficult for those companies. And look at how they have delivered since. Our road will be the same.”
An optimistic investor might ask: does Khosrowshahi’s analogy, between his company and Amazon or Facebook, pass muster? Not really. In fact, the outlook for Uber is pretty dismal.
The company lost 3.0 billion in 2018; it had $11.2 billion in revenue. Given the degree to which the company is able to dodge normal taxi-service costs by offloading them to their poor drivers, that fact alone is pretty damning.
And about Uber’s business model: There are myriad stories about how bad it is to be an Uber driver, so how does the company retain its contractors? First of all, not well: a 2017 report found that only 4% of Uber drivers were still working with the company after a year, meaning the company must constantly recruit.
Unlike a limousine or taxi service, Uber is a platform — the employees own almost all of the assets that an old-school limo company would likely own. Assets like cars depreciate, something that the average driver probably doesn’t account for, but which saves Uber millions of dollars. Kati Sipp, a consultant who works in labor, told me previously how depreciation is a hidden cost for drivers:
"People just don’t understand it, when they get into things like depreciation… Say you're driving your car around ... your car experiences depreciation, you're paying for car insurance, [your fare] doesn't cover all of the costs of operations that you have as an independent contractor… so then you end up making [far less] when you offset your cost against whatever the bounty is.”
Beyond this, the company obscures precisely how much its drivers make per hour through a complicated system of pay, to manipulate them into taking ever-smaller cuts of the passenger’s fare. Both Lyft and Uber do not reveal what passengers are paying to drivers, and seem to be taking increasingly large percentage cuts, as a Guardian report from last month found:
A few weeks ago, Giovanny Tarrago, who has been driving full-time for Uber in Chicago for two years, noticed as he audited his fares that price surges were showing up for riders, but not for drivers.
“They were charging prices for an airport ride that would be typical of a blizzard,” Tarrago told the Guardian. “They were charging high-demand prices for a low-demand morning.”
Demonstrating the differences shown in the Uber app for drivers compared with riders through screenshots, Tarrago said: “When Uber and Lyft do that, they pocket the difference. It’s unfair that hasn’t been communicated to passengers and a lot of drivers around the country still aren’t aware of how the pricing model works.”
An Economic Policy Institute report from 2018 found that after taking into account vehicle expenses and depreciation, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid after the fact, the average Uber driver wage was $10.87 per hour. Basic statistics knowledge suggests that many drivers would make below their local minimum wage, which varies nationally from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour in some cities in California.
In other words, these common psychological tactics — of obscuring the true wage and passing off hidden costs of maintenance and depreciation onto drivers — are intrinsic to Uber’s business model.
Incredibly, despite this unprecedented systematized exploitation of their contractors, Uber still can’t turn a profit, and subsidizes its rides to the tune of billions a year, all of that from investors — first private ones, and now the general investing public. The infusion of more cash via its IPO feels like a good way to extend a Ponzi scheme.
The company’s long-term goal, at least according to the brass, has been to get to automated vehicles that would eliminate drivers entirely, but such a goal is decades off, and may not be possible whatsoever due to the limitations of computers' ability to think and behave like humans.
Now, only two business days since the much-anticipated IPO, the company’s stock has dropped from its initial public offering of $45 down to $37.25 at the end of the day today — an overall drop of 17%.
The CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, sent an email to employees to try to smooth the situation. Reporter Mike Isaac of the New York Times obtained the email, which read in part: "Remember that the Facebook and Amazon post-IPO trading was incredibly difficult for those companies. And look at how they have delivered since. Our road will be the same.”
An optimistic investor might ask: does Khosrowshahi’s analogy, between his company and Amazon or Facebook, pass muster? Not really. In fact, the outlook for Uber is pretty dismal.
The company lost 3.0 billion in 2018; it had $11.2 billion in revenue. Given the degree to which the company is able to dodge normal taxi-service costs by offloading them to their poor drivers, that fact alone is pretty damning.
And about Uber’s business model: There are myriad stories about how bad it is to be an Uber driver, so how does the company retain its contractors? First of all, not well: a 2017 report found that only 4% of Uber drivers were still working with the company after a year, meaning the company must constantly recruit.
Unlike a limousine or taxi service, Uber is a platform — the employees own almost all of the assets that an old-school limo company would likely own. Assets like cars depreciate, something that the average driver probably doesn’t account for, but which saves Uber millions of dollars. Kati Sipp, a consultant who works in labor, told me previously how depreciation is a hidden cost for drivers:
"People just don’t understand it, when they get into things like depreciation… Say you're driving your car around ... your car experiences depreciation, you're paying for car insurance, [your fare] doesn't cover all of the costs of operations that you have as an independent contractor… so then you end up making [far less] when you offset your cost against whatever the bounty is.”
Beyond this, the company obscures precisely how much its drivers make per hour through a complicated system of pay, to manipulate them into taking ever-smaller cuts of the passenger’s fare. Both Lyft and Uber do not reveal what passengers are paying to drivers, and seem to be taking increasingly large percentage cuts, as a Guardian report from last month found:
A few weeks ago, Giovanny Tarrago, who has been driving full-time for Uber in Chicago for two years, noticed as he audited his fares that price surges were showing up for riders, but not for drivers.
“They were charging prices for an airport ride that would be typical of a blizzard,” Tarrago told the Guardian. “They were charging high-demand prices for a low-demand morning.”
Demonstrating the differences shown in the Uber app for drivers compared with riders through screenshots, Tarrago said: “When Uber and Lyft do that, they pocket the difference. It’s unfair that hasn’t been communicated to passengers and a lot of drivers around the country still aren’t aware of how the pricing model works.”
An Economic Policy Institute report from 2018 found that after taking into account vehicle expenses and depreciation, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid after the fact, the average Uber driver wage was $10.87 per hour. Basic statistics knowledge suggests that many drivers would make below their local minimum wage, which varies nationally from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour in some cities in California.
In other words, these common psychological tactics — of obscuring the true wage and passing off hidden costs of maintenance and depreciation onto drivers — are intrinsic to Uber’s business model.
Incredibly, despite this unprecedented systematized exploitation of their contractors, Uber still can’t turn a profit, and subsidizes its rides to the tune of billions a year, all of that from investors — first private ones, and now the general investing public. The infusion of more cash via its IPO feels like a good way to extend a Ponzi scheme.
The company’s long-term goal, at least according to the brass, has been to get to automated vehicles that would eliminate drivers entirely, but such a goal is decades off, and may not be possible whatsoever due to the limitations of computers' ability to think and behave like humans.
Exclusive: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs
Jeffrey Dastin - reuters
MAY 13, 2019 / 3:08 AM
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is rolling out machines to automate a job held by thousands of its workers: boxing up customer orders.
The company started adding technology to a handful of warehouses in recent years, which scans goods coming down a conveyor belt and envelopes them seconds later in boxes custom-built for each item, two people who worked on the project told Reuters.
Amazon has considered installing two machines at dozens more warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people.
That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory. Amazon would expect to recover the costs in under two years, at $1 million per machine plus operational expenses, they said.
The plan, previously unreported, shows how Amazon is pushing to reduce labor and boost profits as automation of the most common warehouse task – picking up an item – is still beyond its reach. The changes are not finalized because vetting technology before a major deployment can take a long time.
Amazon is famous for its drive to automate as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. But the company is in a precarious position as it considers replacing jobs that have won it subsidies and public goodwill.
“We are piloting this new technology with the goal of increasing safety, speeding up delivery times and adding efficiency across our network,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. “We expect the efficiency savings will be re-invested in new services for customers, where new jobs will continue to be created.”
Amazon last month downplayed its automation efforts to press visiting its Baltimore fulfillment center, saying a fully robotic future was far off. Its employee base has grown to become one of the largest in the United States, as the company opened new warehouses and raised wages to attract staff in a tight labor market.
A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles. Those have high turnover because boxing multiple orders per minute over 10 hours is taxing work. At the same time, employees that stay with the company can be trained to take up more technical roles.
The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The machines require one person to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue and a technician to fix jams on occasion.
CMC declined to comment.
Though Amazon has announced it intends to speed up shipping across its Prime loyalty program, this latest round of automation is not focused on speed. “It’s truly about efficiency and savings,” one of the people said.
Including other machines known as the “SmartPac,” which the company rolled out recently to mail items in patented envelopes, Amazon’s technology suite will be able to automate a majority of its human packers. Five rows of workers at a facility can turn into two, supplemented by two CMC machines and one SmartPac, the person said.
The company describes this as an effort to “re-purpose” workers, the person said.
It could not be learned where roles might disappear first and what incentives, if any, are tied to those specific jobs.
But the hiring deals that Amazon has with governments are often generous. For the 1,500 jobs Amazon announced last year in Alabama, for instance, the state promised the company $48.7 million over 10 years, its department of commerce said.
PICKING CHALLENGE
Amazon is not alone in testing CMC’s packing technology. JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc, according to a person familiar with its pilot.
Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations, the person said. The company declined to comment.
Interest in boxing technology sheds light on how the e-commerce behemoths are approaching one of the major problems in the logistics industry today: finding a robotic hand that can grasp diverse items without breaking them.
Amazon employs countless workers at each fulfillment center who do variations of this same task. Some stow inventory, while others pick customer orders and still others grab those orders, placing them in the right size box and taping them up.
Many venture-backed companies and university researchers are racing to automate this work. While advances in artificial intelligence are improving machines’ accuracy, there is still no guarantee that robotic hands can prevent a marmalade jar from slipping and breaking, or switch seamlessly from picking up an eraser to grabbing a vacuum cleaner.
Amazon has tested different vendors’ technology that it may one day use for picking, including from Soft Robotics, a Boston-area startup that drew inspiration from octopus tentacles to make grippers more versatile, one person familiar with Amazon’s experimentation said. Soft Robotics declined to comment on its work with Amazon but said it has handled a wide and ever-changing variety of products for multiple large retailers.
Believing that grasping technology is not ready for prime time, Amazon is automating around that problem when packing customer orders. Humans still place items on a conveyor, but machines then build boxes around them and take care of the sealing and labeling. This saves money not just by reducing labor but by reducing wasted packing materials as well.
These machines are not without flaws. CMC can only produce so many per year. They need a technician on site who can fix problems as they arise, a requirement Amazon would rather do without, the two sources said. The super-hot glue closing the boxes can pile up and halt a machine.
Still other types of automation, like the robotic grocery assembly system of Ocado Group PLC, are the focus of much industry interest.
But the boxing machines are already proving helpful to Amazon. The company has installed them in busy warehouses that are driving distance from Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, Manchester and elsewhere, the people said.
The machines have the potential to automate far more than 24 jobs per facility, one of the sources said. The company is also setting up nearly two dozen more U.S. fulfillment centers for small and non-specialty inventory, according to logistics consultancy MWPVL International, which could be ripe for the machines.
This is just a harbinger of automation to come.
“A ‘lights out’ warehouse is ultimately the goal,” one of the people said.
The company started adding technology to a handful of warehouses in recent years, which scans goods coming down a conveyor belt and envelopes them seconds later in boxes custom-built for each item, two people who worked on the project told Reuters.
Amazon has considered installing two machines at dozens more warehouses, removing at least 24 roles at each one, these people said. These facilities typically employ more than 2,000 people.
That would amount to more than 1,300 cuts across 55 U.S. fulfillment centers for standard-sized inventory. Amazon would expect to recover the costs in under two years, at $1 million per machine plus operational expenses, they said.
The plan, previously unreported, shows how Amazon is pushing to reduce labor and boost profits as automation of the most common warehouse task – picking up an item – is still beyond its reach. The changes are not finalized because vetting technology before a major deployment can take a long time.
Amazon is famous for its drive to automate as many parts of its business as possible, whether pricing goods or transporting items in its warehouses. But the company is in a precarious position as it considers replacing jobs that have won it subsidies and public goodwill.
“We are piloting this new technology with the goal of increasing safety, speeding up delivery times and adding efficiency across our network,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. “We expect the efficiency savings will be re-invested in new services for customers, where new jobs will continue to be created.”
Amazon last month downplayed its automation efforts to press visiting its Baltimore fulfillment center, saying a fully robotic future was far off. Its employee base has grown to become one of the largest in the United States, as the company opened new warehouses and raised wages to attract staff in a tight labor market.
A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles. Those have high turnover because boxing multiple orders per minute over 10 hours is taxing work. At the same time, employees that stay with the company can be trained to take up more technical roles.
The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The machines require one person to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue and a technician to fix jams on occasion.
CMC declined to comment.
Though Amazon has announced it intends to speed up shipping across its Prime loyalty program, this latest round of automation is not focused on speed. “It’s truly about efficiency and savings,” one of the people said.
Including other machines known as the “SmartPac,” which the company rolled out recently to mail items in patented envelopes, Amazon’s technology suite will be able to automate a majority of its human packers. Five rows of workers at a facility can turn into two, supplemented by two CMC machines and one SmartPac, the person said.
The company describes this as an effort to “re-purpose” workers, the person said.
It could not be learned where roles might disappear first and what incentives, if any, are tied to those specific jobs.
But the hiring deals that Amazon has with governments are often generous. For the 1,500 jobs Amazon announced last year in Alabama, for instance, the state promised the company $48.7 million over 10 years, its department of commerce said.
PICKING CHALLENGE
Amazon is not alone in testing CMC’s packing technology. JD.com Inc and Shutterfly Inc have used the machines as well, the companies said, as has Walmart Inc, according to a person familiar with its pilot.
Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. locations, the person said. The company declined to comment.
Interest in boxing technology sheds light on how the e-commerce behemoths are approaching one of the major problems in the logistics industry today: finding a robotic hand that can grasp diverse items without breaking them.
Amazon employs countless workers at each fulfillment center who do variations of this same task. Some stow inventory, while others pick customer orders and still others grab those orders, placing them in the right size box and taping them up.
Many venture-backed companies and university researchers are racing to automate this work. While advances in artificial intelligence are improving machines’ accuracy, there is still no guarantee that robotic hands can prevent a marmalade jar from slipping and breaking, or switch seamlessly from picking up an eraser to grabbing a vacuum cleaner.
Amazon has tested different vendors’ technology that it may one day use for picking, including from Soft Robotics, a Boston-area startup that drew inspiration from octopus tentacles to make grippers more versatile, one person familiar with Amazon’s experimentation said. Soft Robotics declined to comment on its work with Amazon but said it has handled a wide and ever-changing variety of products for multiple large retailers.
Believing that grasping technology is not ready for prime time, Amazon is automating around that problem when packing customer orders. Humans still place items on a conveyor, but machines then build boxes around them and take care of the sealing and labeling. This saves money not just by reducing labor but by reducing wasted packing materials as well.
These machines are not without flaws. CMC can only produce so many per year. They need a technician on site who can fix problems as they arise, a requirement Amazon would rather do without, the two sources said. The super-hot glue closing the boxes can pile up and halt a machine.
Still other types of automation, like the robotic grocery assembly system of Ocado Group PLC, are the focus of much industry interest.
But the boxing machines are already proving helpful to Amazon. The company has installed them in busy warehouses that are driving distance from Seattle, Frankfurt, Milan, Amsterdam, Manchester and elsewhere, the people said.
The machines have the potential to automate far more than 24 jobs per facility, one of the sources said. The company is also setting up nearly two dozen more U.S. fulfillment centers for small and non-specialty inventory, according to logistics consultancy MWPVL International, which could be ripe for the machines.
This is just a harbinger of automation to come.
“A ‘lights out’ warehouse is ultimately the goal,” one of the people said.
Trump Labor Officials Are Secretly Using Forced Arbitration to Get Corporations Off the Hook
By ZACHARY CLOPTON and DAVID NOLL - slate
MAY 10, 2019
With a history-making showdown over the Mueller report looming between the White House and Congress, it can be easy to forget about the Trump administration’s other attacks on the rule of law. One of the most overlooked but consequential is the administration’s attack on federal regulation. As Trump likes to boast, his administration has systematically dismantled federal regulations enacted to protect consumers, retirement savers, and the environment. At the same time, Trump and his appointees have sabotaged agencies responsible for enforcing federal regulatory programs.
Behind closed doors, Trump’s agencies are engaged in a quieter form of deregulation that is as hard to detect as it is insidious. We call it the “arbitration shell game,” and it works like this: First, a corporation pushes its employees or customers into arbitration, limiting their ability to sue. Then, federal agencies refuse to exercise their own enforcement authority because employees or customers “agreed” to arbitrate. The result is that corporations operate free of accountability, even when their actions affect thousands of people.
The game gets going when a corporation adds an arbitration clause to contracts governing its consumers and employees. Thanks to the Supreme Court, these clauses are enforceable—and dramatically restrict individuals’ ability to enforce the law. Just ask employees of Lamps Plus, a California lighting company. In 2016, a hacker posing as a company official stole the tax filings of about 1,300 workers. Last month, the Supreme Court held that the workers could not come together to seek compensation for their employer’s slipshod security practices. When it comes to enforcing their rights, victims of data breaches, wage theft, and sexual harassment are forced to go it alone in secret—which usually means not going forward at all.
Next, a federal agency treats arbitration as if it were the only way to enforce the law. Traditionally, federal agencies exercised their own authority to bring lawsuits that an individual could not file because he was required to arbitrate. For example, in a 2002 case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit seeking unpaid wages on behalf of a Waffle House cook who was fired after suffering seizures on the job. It made no difference that the cook himself would have been compelled to arbitrate his claim; the government had its own authority to sue for Waffle House employees.
But now, Trump’s agency heads are apparently declining cases like these. Last year, for example, Solicitor of Labor Kate O’Scannlain issued a memorandum to attorneys at the Department of Labor that instructed them to notify her office if they wanted to bring a case where the employee was subject to arbitration. The message is clear: An employee who has been forced to arbitrate should not expect any help from the department. Indeed, O’Scannlain has suggested that she intends to quash such suits.
Because the arbitration shell game is being played behind closed doors, it is hard to know precisely how many agencies are playing it. The Labor Department stonewalled a Freedom of Information Act request we submitted in January to determine how it had implemented O’Scannlain’s memorandum, and other agencies claimed it would be too expensive to tell us whether they are following Labor’s lead. This secrecy is particularly alarming because—in contrast to regulatory repeals—enforcement decisions are usually exempt from judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act. So while the Trump administration’s regulatory repeals have been stopped by courts, a judge could not simply force an agency to bring a case it has not filed.
Instead, the response must come from Congress. In particular, because the Senate is unlikely to support proposed federal legislation regulating arbitration, the House oversight committees must step up. Each of the agencies that can sue on behalf of people who are subject to arbitration is subject to the jurisdiction of a House oversight committee. Those committees should demand—via subpoena, if necessary—to know whether agencies have a policy of declining to bring cases on behalf of individuals subject to arbitration provisions. The committees should also demand statistics about the agency’s enforcement docket and about cases where an individual sought the agency’s assistance and the agency declined to investigate or file suit. We suspect that answers to these questions will be embarrassing and that agency heads will resist committees’ oversight demands. If so, House appropriators should respond with funding cuts targeted specifically at the agency heads. More substantively, if we cannot count on federal agencies to defend individual rights, Congress should consider other moves to facilitate private enforcement.
Agencies’ power to file suit on behalf of individuals who cannot sue for themselves is an important part of the complex system that Congress crafted over the past century to enforce federal law. Agency heads who “deregulate” by failing to exercise this authority should be held accountable to the public they serve.
Behind closed doors, Trump’s agencies are engaged in a quieter form of deregulation that is as hard to detect as it is insidious. We call it the “arbitration shell game,” and it works like this: First, a corporation pushes its employees or customers into arbitration, limiting their ability to sue. Then, federal agencies refuse to exercise their own enforcement authority because employees or customers “agreed” to arbitrate. The result is that corporations operate free of accountability, even when their actions affect thousands of people.
The game gets going when a corporation adds an arbitration clause to contracts governing its consumers and employees. Thanks to the Supreme Court, these clauses are enforceable—and dramatically restrict individuals’ ability to enforce the law. Just ask employees of Lamps Plus, a California lighting company. In 2016, a hacker posing as a company official stole the tax filings of about 1,300 workers. Last month, the Supreme Court held that the workers could not come together to seek compensation for their employer’s slipshod security practices. When it comes to enforcing their rights, victims of data breaches, wage theft, and sexual harassment are forced to go it alone in secret—which usually means not going forward at all.
Next, a federal agency treats arbitration as if it were the only way to enforce the law. Traditionally, federal agencies exercised their own authority to bring lawsuits that an individual could not file because he was required to arbitrate. For example, in a 2002 case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit seeking unpaid wages on behalf of a Waffle House cook who was fired after suffering seizures on the job. It made no difference that the cook himself would have been compelled to arbitrate his claim; the government had its own authority to sue for Waffle House employees.
But now, Trump’s agency heads are apparently declining cases like these. Last year, for example, Solicitor of Labor Kate O’Scannlain issued a memorandum to attorneys at the Department of Labor that instructed them to notify her office if they wanted to bring a case where the employee was subject to arbitration. The message is clear: An employee who has been forced to arbitrate should not expect any help from the department. Indeed, O’Scannlain has suggested that she intends to quash such suits.
Because the arbitration shell game is being played behind closed doors, it is hard to know precisely how many agencies are playing it. The Labor Department stonewalled a Freedom of Information Act request we submitted in January to determine how it had implemented O’Scannlain’s memorandum, and other agencies claimed it would be too expensive to tell us whether they are following Labor’s lead. This secrecy is particularly alarming because—in contrast to regulatory repeals—enforcement decisions are usually exempt from judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act. So while the Trump administration’s regulatory repeals have been stopped by courts, a judge could not simply force an agency to bring a case it has not filed.
Instead, the response must come from Congress. In particular, because the Senate is unlikely to support proposed federal legislation regulating arbitration, the House oversight committees must step up. Each of the agencies that can sue on behalf of people who are subject to arbitration is subject to the jurisdiction of a House oversight committee. Those committees should demand—via subpoena, if necessary—to know whether agencies have a policy of declining to bring cases on behalf of individuals subject to arbitration provisions. The committees should also demand statistics about the agency’s enforcement docket and about cases where an individual sought the agency’s assistance and the agency declined to investigate or file suit. We suspect that answers to these questions will be embarrassing and that agency heads will resist committees’ oversight demands. If so, House appropriators should respond with funding cuts targeted specifically at the agency heads. More substantively, if we cannot count on federal agencies to defend individual rights, Congress should consider other moves to facilitate private enforcement.
Agencies’ power to file suit on behalf of individuals who cannot sue for themselves is an important part of the complex system that Congress crafted over the past century to enforce federal law. Agency heads who “deregulate” by failing to exercise this authority should be held accountable to the public they serve.
Uber, Lyft drivers on global strike just before Uber's IPO
SOO YOUN - Good Morning America - yahoo.com
May 8, 2019
Uber and Lyft drivers around the world are striking on Wednesday to improve wages and working conditions just two days ahead of Uber's monster IPO that could generate $80 million to $90 million.
The hours drivers plan to strike vary by location but will span from New York to Atlanta to Tokyo.
In New York, drivers are striking from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., according to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In some cities, like Los Angeles, drivers are being urged to keep the ride-sharing apps off all day. In Atlanta, the strike is slated for noon to midnight.
In general though, workers are protesting blockbuster paydays for high-level executives while driver pay continues to get slashed. Drivers are independent contractors, not employees, so they don't receive benefits like health insurance. Meanwhile, they've said their pay keeps going down as their costs go up.
New York drivers are fresh off a recent win against the city with a new law that mandates ride-hail companies pay at least $17.22 an hour after expenses, which other cities have hailed as an example, especially in expensive housing markets like L.A. Still, drivers say it's hard to make ends meet in major markets on that wage.
In March, Lyft went public with a $24 billion IPO. Uber's likely will be almost four times that size. Despite the massive valuations, neither company has a clear path to profitability.
"These investors of Lyft are making hundreds of millions and billions in the IPO while millions of drivers are trying to make rent," Sinakhone Keodara, a Lyft driver in L.A. who was recently homeless, told ABC News at the time. "In this new economy, there cannot be innovation without labor standards."
Uber issued a statement through a spokesperson, saying: "Drivers are at the heart of our service -- we can't succeed without them -- and thousands of people come into work at Uber every day focused on how to make their experience better, on and off the road. Whether it's more consistent earnings, stronger insurance protections or fully funded four-year degrees for drivers or their families, we'll continue working to improve the experience for and with drivers."
Lyft also issued a statement, which said: "Lyft drivers' hourly earnings have increased over the last two years, and they have earned more than $10B on the Lyft platform. Over 75 percent drive less than 10 hours a week to supplement their existing jobs. On average, Lyft drivers earn over $20 per hour. We know that access to flexible, extra income makes a big difference for millions of people, and we're constantly working to improve how we can best serve our driver community."
The hours drivers plan to strike vary by location but will span from New York to Atlanta to Tokyo.
In New York, drivers are striking from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., according to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In some cities, like Los Angeles, drivers are being urged to keep the ride-sharing apps off all day. In Atlanta, the strike is slated for noon to midnight.
In general though, workers are protesting blockbuster paydays for high-level executives while driver pay continues to get slashed. Drivers are independent contractors, not employees, so they don't receive benefits like health insurance. Meanwhile, they've said their pay keeps going down as their costs go up.
New York drivers are fresh off a recent win against the city with a new law that mandates ride-hail companies pay at least $17.22 an hour after expenses, which other cities have hailed as an example, especially in expensive housing markets like L.A. Still, drivers say it's hard to make ends meet in major markets on that wage.
In March, Lyft went public with a $24 billion IPO. Uber's likely will be almost four times that size. Despite the massive valuations, neither company has a clear path to profitability.
"These investors of Lyft are making hundreds of millions and billions in the IPO while millions of drivers are trying to make rent," Sinakhone Keodara, a Lyft driver in L.A. who was recently homeless, told ABC News at the time. "In this new economy, there cannot be innovation without labor standards."
Uber issued a statement through a spokesperson, saying: "Drivers are at the heart of our service -- we can't succeed without them -- and thousands of people come into work at Uber every day focused on how to make their experience better, on and off the road. Whether it's more consistent earnings, stronger insurance protections or fully funded four-year degrees for drivers or their families, we'll continue working to improve the experience for and with drivers."
Lyft also issued a statement, which said: "Lyft drivers' hourly earnings have increased over the last two years, and they have earned more than $10B on the Lyft platform. Over 75 percent drive less than 10 hours a week to supplement their existing jobs. On average, Lyft drivers earn over $20 per hour. We know that access to flexible, extra income makes a big difference for millions of people, and we're constantly working to improve how we can best serve our driver community."
'It's because we were union members': Boeing fires workers who organized
Workers terminated by the aircraft maker in South Carolina see their dismissals as part of efforts to stifle a nascent union
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Fri 3 May 2019 02.01 EDT
Richard Mester worked for Boeing in South Carolina as a flight safety inspector for five years before being suddenly fired – along with two other employees – in November 2018 for allegedly failing to report a bird strike. However, the bad news also came shortly after the company was told Mester had been elected a union steward.
“I have 30 years’ experience as an engine guy, so I was taken back by it because I don’t miss bird strikes,” Mester told the Guardian.
An air force veteran, Mester had just bought a house and had two daughters in college when he was terminated. Mester and his colleagues have filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging there was no bird strike at all, but rather that this is an excuse to fire workers involved in unionization efforts.
“It was easy to see it was because we were union members,” said Mester. “Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”
Mester and his colleagues believe their plight is intrinsically linked to Boeing’s attempts to stifle unionization of the workforce in its important South Carolina operations – a workplace that has become an important battleground for both America’s labor movement and the aircraft giant.
Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers(IAM).
Since then, Boeing has fought to prevent unionization efforts of their workers in South Carolina. In February 2017, union organizers came up short in attempting to unionize about 3,000 Boeing workers. But organizers found success in May 2018, when over 60% of the nearly 200 Boeing flight line workers in North Charleston, South Carolina, voted to form a union, despite an aggressive anti-union campaign led by Boeing which included radio ad buys and attempts to delay and stop the election from occurring.
Boeing is formally appealing against the election results with the National Labor Relations Board.
“This is where the problems come in with US labor law. Boeing has a zillion options available to it,” said Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “All these things get a chance to get litigated and it slows down the process. While the process slows down, what happens at the plant site is they start firing people knowing in a year or two they might have to pay them some wages for firing due to union activity, but it scares people and scares them enough to think maybe they did the wrong thing to vote for the union.”
As the board reviews the appeals, the union has accused Boeing of firing workers for supporting the union and spying on workers who voted in the election.
“It’s been 11 long months since the election,” said Vinny Addeo, IAM organizing director. “They are imposing their power, strength and political allies to delay this proceeding as long as possible because they know doing this disenfranchises these workers and tries to break up any type of momentum we have going forward.”
The union’s associate general counsel, Bill Haller, added: “They want to send the message that if you support the union you’re going to get fired. They’re not being subtle about it.”
The union noted other groups of Boeing workers in South Carolina are waiting on the NLRB decision before proceeding with their own unionization efforts.
“They started writing people up for things that were the norm. They’ve targeted union supporters,” said a current Boeing employee who requested to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation. The worker explained that after the union vote Boeing increased the workload of the group of workers who voted to form a union, reduced quality control and frequently sends the workers job openings in different locations.
“I personally don’t believe Boeing knows how to treat hourly workers without a contract. We need some type of an agreement. They don’t even follow their own policies and procedures that are in writing,” added the worker in regards to why a union is needed.
As the NLRB reviews the unfair labor practice charges filed against Boeing , those fired workers who supported the union are left to struggle with unemployment.
Sixty-one-year-old Carlos Lugo, one of the two other union-supporting Boeing workers fired alongside Mester, is still looking for employment. He says he has been forced to sell some of his belongings to try to make ends meet.
“Boeing never gave us the opportunity to write a statement on what we think happened with the airplane. They’re accusing us of being irresponsible of a bird strike that they can’t prove,” said Lugo, who worked at Boeing for 10 years before his termination. “It’s been very abusive what they’ve done to us.”
The NLRB declined to comment.
A Boeing representative told the Guardian in an email: “Boeing follows a robust process to ensure termination decisions are fully evaluated and consistent with long-standing, visible and objective safety, compliance and conduct policies. In each of the cases that the IAM highlights, the individual was terminated for violating well-established, consistently applied policies without regard to union sentiment. There has been no retaliation against any individual based on that person’s feelings about a union.”
“I have 30 years’ experience as an engine guy, so I was taken back by it because I don’t miss bird strikes,” Mester told the Guardian.
An air force veteran, Mester had just bought a house and had two daughters in college when he was terminated. Mester and his colleagues have filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging there was no bird strike at all, but rather that this is an excuse to fire workers involved in unionization efforts.
“It was easy to see it was because we were union members,” said Mester. “Boeing has no qualms about squashing any possibility of a union down here. Unfortunately we were the result of that.”
Mester and his colleagues believe their plight is intrinsically linked to Boeing’s attempts to stifle unionization of the workforce in its important South Carolina operations – a workplace that has become an important battleground for both America’s labor movement and the aircraft giant.
Boeing’s mere presence in South Carolina was already viewed as a union-busting move when the company first opened an aircraft production plant there in 2011 rather than Washington state, where Boeing had unionized operations. South Carolina has the lowest union membership rate in the United States at just 2.7% of workers. The National Labor Relations Board filed a federal complaint against Boeing for the move, accusing the company of violating federal labor law, before dropping it after the company came to an agreement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers(IAM).
Since then, Boeing has fought to prevent unionization efforts of their workers in South Carolina. In February 2017, union organizers came up short in attempting to unionize about 3,000 Boeing workers. But organizers found success in May 2018, when over 60% of the nearly 200 Boeing flight line workers in North Charleston, South Carolina, voted to form a union, despite an aggressive anti-union campaign led by Boeing which included radio ad buys and attempts to delay and stop the election from occurring.
Boeing is formally appealing against the election results with the National Labor Relations Board.
“This is where the problems come in with US labor law. Boeing has a zillion options available to it,” said Lee Adler, a professor at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “All these things get a chance to get litigated and it slows down the process. While the process slows down, what happens at the plant site is they start firing people knowing in a year or two they might have to pay them some wages for firing due to union activity, but it scares people and scares them enough to think maybe they did the wrong thing to vote for the union.”
As the board reviews the appeals, the union has accused Boeing of firing workers for supporting the union and spying on workers who voted in the election.
“It’s been 11 long months since the election,” said Vinny Addeo, IAM organizing director. “They are imposing their power, strength and political allies to delay this proceeding as long as possible because they know doing this disenfranchises these workers and tries to break up any type of momentum we have going forward.”
The union’s associate general counsel, Bill Haller, added: “They want to send the message that if you support the union you’re going to get fired. They’re not being subtle about it.”
The union noted other groups of Boeing workers in South Carolina are waiting on the NLRB decision before proceeding with their own unionization efforts.
“They started writing people up for things that were the norm. They’ve targeted union supporters,” said a current Boeing employee who requested to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation. The worker explained that after the union vote Boeing increased the workload of the group of workers who voted to form a union, reduced quality control and frequently sends the workers job openings in different locations.
“I personally don’t believe Boeing knows how to treat hourly workers without a contract. We need some type of an agreement. They don’t even follow their own policies and procedures that are in writing,” added the worker in regards to why a union is needed.
As the NLRB reviews the unfair labor practice charges filed against Boeing , those fired workers who supported the union are left to struggle with unemployment.
Sixty-one-year-old Carlos Lugo, one of the two other union-supporting Boeing workers fired alongside Mester, is still looking for employment. He says he has been forced to sell some of his belongings to try to make ends meet.
“Boeing never gave us the opportunity to write a statement on what we think happened with the airplane. They’re accusing us of being irresponsible of a bird strike that they can’t prove,” said Lugo, who worked at Boeing for 10 years before his termination. “It’s been very abusive what they’ve done to us.”
The NLRB declined to comment.
A Boeing representative told the Guardian in an email: “Boeing follows a robust process to ensure termination decisions are fully evaluated and consistent with long-standing, visible and objective safety, compliance and conduct policies. In each of the cases that the IAM highlights, the individual was terminated for violating well-established, consistently applied policies without regard to union sentiment. There has been no retaliation against any individual based on that person’s feelings about a union.”
just another slave plantation!!!
Software engineers at prominent tech firm say they were fired for trying to unionize: Report
NPM Inc., whose software underlies core website infrastructure, are in hot water for ousting organizing employees
NICOLE KARLIS salon
APRIL 30, 2019 11:00PM (UTC)
Silicon Valley's recent labor pains have been largely confined to blue collar contractors in gig economy–reliant companies like Uber and Lyft. But this week, an unusual case is bubbling up in Silicon Valley that could set a precedent for software engineers across the industry.
The English technology news site The Register has been following lay-offs at NPM Inc., the company behind the ubiquitous NPM JavaScript package repository, since the beginning of April. NPM in acronym for Node Package Manager, and is well-known among computer programmers around the world who use JavaScript, a common programming language.
“NPM is the most widely-used package manager for JavaScript, the language that runs in web browsers and which over the last 10 years has become commonplace on servers, too,” Cara Esten, a senior engineer at Slack, explained to Salon. “Essentially a package manager is a tool that helps you easily integrate software other developers have written into your project.”
According to the report by The Register, three of the five people let go claim it was because they were trying to form a union. Four complaints have been filed against the company with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); three at the beginning of April, and the fourth was filed last week.
The complaints cite the following violations: "8(a)(1) Concerted Activities (Retaliation, Discharge, Discipline) and 8(a)(3) Discharge (Including Layoff and Refusal to Hire (not salting))."
These complaints are often associated with Section 7 of America's National Labor Relations Act, which protects an employee's right to bargain.
"What the charges say to me is that there was either some concerted activity to protect worker rights or a union drive was being considered or started," Wendy Musell, a partner lawyer at Stewart & Musell, told The Register.
An anonymous source told The Register that they had been told a unionization was underway. Employees involved in the unionization discussions were allegedly the ones dismissed. Documents obtained by The Register through the Freedom of Information Act also indicate that unionization was underway.
It is possible anonymity from these employees has been forced by a non-disparagement clause that was reportedly part of the severance packages.
There is a slow but steady unionization movement happening among Silicon Valley workers, both white and blue collar. In mid-March, the employees at Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, announced their plans to unionize. Those efforts are ongoing. In 2018, software engineers at the startup Lanetix announced their intent to unionize, but were promptly fired by management. The National Labor Relations Board intervened, and ultimately forced Lanetix to pay the 15 fired engineers a total of $775,000. The show of worker power at Lanetix may have paved the way for Kickstarter’s workers.
Similarly, workers across the video game industry — generally among the most overworked, underpaid workers within the tech industry — have been making steps towards unionization. Game Workers Unite, profiled by Salon last year, is building a grassroots movement to organize the ranks of video game makers.
NPM addressed the lay-offs in a statement published on Medium, but did not address the allegations around unionization. "Recently, we let go of 5 people in a company restructuring," the company said in a statement. "The way that we undertook the process, unfortunately, made the terminations more painful than they needed to be, which we deeply regret, and we are sorry."
Notably, it is not uncommon for companies to let go of or fire employees involved in unionization efforts, but claim they were let go for other reasons. Though federal labor laws make it illegal for companies to retaliate against employees who try to form a union, such cases are notoriously difficult to prove.
The English technology news site The Register has been following lay-offs at NPM Inc., the company behind the ubiquitous NPM JavaScript package repository, since the beginning of April. NPM in acronym for Node Package Manager, and is well-known among computer programmers around the world who use JavaScript, a common programming language.
“NPM is the most widely-used package manager for JavaScript, the language that runs in web browsers and which over the last 10 years has become commonplace on servers, too,” Cara Esten, a senior engineer at Slack, explained to Salon. “Essentially a package manager is a tool that helps you easily integrate software other developers have written into your project.”
According to the report by The Register, three of the five people let go claim it was because they were trying to form a union. Four complaints have been filed against the company with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); three at the beginning of April, and the fourth was filed last week.
The complaints cite the following violations: "8(a)(1) Concerted Activities (Retaliation, Discharge, Discipline) and 8(a)(3) Discharge (Including Layoff and Refusal to Hire (not salting))."
These complaints are often associated with Section 7 of America's National Labor Relations Act, which protects an employee's right to bargain.
"What the charges say to me is that there was either some concerted activity to protect worker rights or a union drive was being considered or started," Wendy Musell, a partner lawyer at Stewart & Musell, told The Register.
An anonymous source told The Register that they had been told a unionization was underway. Employees involved in the unionization discussions were allegedly the ones dismissed. Documents obtained by The Register through the Freedom of Information Act also indicate that unionization was underway.
It is possible anonymity from these employees has been forced by a non-disparagement clause that was reportedly part of the severance packages.
There is a slow but steady unionization movement happening among Silicon Valley workers, both white and blue collar. In mid-March, the employees at Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, announced their plans to unionize. Those efforts are ongoing. In 2018, software engineers at the startup Lanetix announced their intent to unionize, but were promptly fired by management. The National Labor Relations Board intervened, and ultimately forced Lanetix to pay the 15 fired engineers a total of $775,000. The show of worker power at Lanetix may have paved the way for Kickstarter’s workers.
Similarly, workers across the video game industry — generally among the most overworked, underpaid workers within the tech industry — have been making steps towards unionization. Game Workers Unite, profiled by Salon last year, is building a grassroots movement to organize the ranks of video game makers.
NPM addressed the lay-offs in a statement published on Medium, but did not address the allegations around unionization. "Recently, we let go of 5 people in a company restructuring," the company said in a statement. "The way that we undertook the process, unfortunately, made the terminations more painful than they needed to be, which we deeply regret, and we are sorry."
Notably, it is not uncommon for companies to let go of or fire employees involved in unionization efforts, but claim they were let go for other reasons. Though federal labor laws make it illegal for companies to retaliate against employees who try to form a union, such cases are notoriously difficult to prove.
Most Restaurant Workers Don’t Earn Enough to Feed Their Own Families
BY Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 29, 2019
When Venorica Tucker was in high school, she worked as a server in a restaurant owned by the Marriott Corporation in Washington, D.C. It was the mid-1960s and her wage was 66 cents an hour, plus tips.
Now 70 years old, Tucker currently serves food and bartends as a contractor at the U.S. House of Representatives, and while her wages have risen significantly over the past 50-plus years, she still often finds herself scrambling.
Her salary, she says, varies with the congressional calendar. “In this job, when there’s no work, there’s no pay. I had a really hard time during the government shutdown. Remember, it lasted more than a month and even though I was able to collect unemployment benefits, being without a job for so long meant that I fell behind on my bills. I’m still playing catch-up four months later.”
Tucker emphasizes that she works extremely hard and believes that she deserves to be compensated fairly and treated with respect, free from the economic exploitation and sexual harassment that are rampant in the industry. And she is not alone in voicing these basic demands.
According to Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit organization and worker center that supports and connects restaurant workers throughout the country, more than 13 million U.S. residents, the majority of them women of color, are employed in restaurants. In 18 states, they earn a base pay of $2.13 an hour plus tips, a sub-minimum wage that has been frozen since 1991. Twenty-six states pay a somewhat higher sub-minimum, while just seven — Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — provide the full federal minimum to those who serve our food when we dine out.
This leaves hundreds of thousands of workers in poverty; in New York City alone, a winter 2019 survey conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and the Community Service Society found that 36 percent of tipped workers employed in eateries, nail salons and car washes lived at or below the federal poverty line — $16,460 for a two-person household; $25,100 for four — and more often than not, had to rely on food stamps, soup kitchens and Medicaid.
New York is not an anomaly. The Economic Policy Institute found that in states that allow payment of a sub-minimum wage, 18.5 percent of workers are impoverished; in states where everyone earns the federal minimum, the poverty rate drops to 11.1 percent. Furthermore, the institute notes that closing the loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that allows payment of a sub-minimum wage, and upping the hourly minimum to $15 by 2024, would boost the wages of 38.1 percent of African American and 23.2 percent of white workers.
Support for the Raise the Wage Act
This is why Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is supporting the Raise the Wage Act, H.R.582, legislation to abolish the sub-minimum wage and bring tipped workers up to the federal standard. The bill was introduced by Bobby Scott (D-Virginia); a Senate companion bill, S.150, was introduced by Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is also supporting state efforts to enact what they are calling One Fair Wage laws.
Anthony Advincula, public affairs officer at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, notes that 16 states are presently considering One Fair Wage bills, but emphasizes that opposition from the National Restaurant Association — dubbed “the other NRA” — has been fierce.
“If passed, H.R.582 would stifle new job creation, impose undue harm to the nation’s small business owners, and harm those it proclaims to help,” National Restaurant Association spokeswoman Mollie O’Dell wrote in an email to Truthout.
Not surprisingly, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United disagrees. “They’ve created a fake grassroots organization, called Restaurant Workers of America, to invoke fear that restaurants will close and jobs will be eliminated,” Advincula says. “The truth is that the industry does not want to eliminate the sub-minimum wage because it will cost them. But this is a racial and gender justice issue. The majority of workers who are exploited by the sub-minimum wage are immigrants, people of color and single mothers who live in poverty despite working full-time.”
Furthermore, an in-depth investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review confirms that Restaurant Workers of America is wholly funded by restaurant owners. In addition, the investigation found that its representatives have missed few opportunities to appear with “restaurant industry trade groups and Republican politicians” since coming together in 2017.
That said, the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Workers of America have been effective in undermining One Fair Wage campaigns in New York, Michigan and Washington, D.C.
In New York, Advincula says, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has the authority to instruct the commissioner of labor to end the sub-minimum wage — something he said he intended to do. Seven hearings on this issue were held in different parts of the state between April and June 2018. “Everything was set in motion to make this change but Cuomo has not fulfilled his promise,” Advincula reports. “The issue seems stalled. We have contacted the governor again and again to say that he should listen to the majority of restaurant workers. Instead, he has listened to the Restaurant Workers of America and the National Restaurant Association. Their campaign has been appalling. It’s obscene to hear restaurant workers argue that no, they don’t need an increase in the minimum wage, that things are fine as they are. We assume that this is why Cuomo has backed off on his pledge to abolish the sub-minimum [wage].”
Diana Ramirez is the senior policy advocate at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, but, until recently, she led the Washington, D.C., chapter of the organization and coordinated last year’s ballot initiative to bring One Fair Wage to the District of Columbia. As the campaign unfolded, the D.C. chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United zeroed in on endemic, industry-wide sexual exploitation — as well as the inadequate base pay — since workers whose wages rely on tips often feel silenced when it comes to fighting back against predatory behavior. “The rate of sexual harassment for restaurant workers is the highest of any industry,” she says. “The ‘customer is always right’ mentality has made it hard for tipped workers who have to depend on the generosity of patrons.”
A broad coalition of women’s rights, labor and racial justice groups came together in 2016 in support of One Fair Wage — coalition members ranged from the D.C. chapter of the National Organization for Women, to Forward Together, the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Jews United For Justice. The goal was to put a One Fair Wage measure — called Initiative 77 — on the July 2018 ballot.
Opposition from the Restaurant Workers of America and the National Restaurant Association was immediate. “They got workers, mostly white male bartenders working in high-end establishments, to come out and yell at women of color wherever we went,” Ramirez told Truthout. “It’s a Trumpian effect: Somehow you doing better will make me worse off.”
Ignoring the Community’s Desires
Despite the pushback, the ballot initiative in Washington, D.C., passed with 56 percent of the vote, and voters in all but one neighborhood supported One Fair Wage. But the victory was short-lived. Ramirez points out that after the ballot measure passed, the restaurant association went into high gear and successfully lobbied the D.C. City Council to overturn the measure.
“The Council essentially told Black people, the majority population in D.C., that their vote did not matter,” Ramirez explains. “People were outraged and after the vote was repealed, an influx of racial justice and pro-democracy groups came to Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and said, ‘We want to work with you to protect democracy.’”
A referendum on this is now before the courts. “It can take a year, until late 2019 or early 2020,” Ramirez says, “but this is not something we’re going to drop. We’re continuing to organize for One Fair Wage. It’s the future of the restaurant industry, whether they like it or not.”
A similar fight is unfolding in Michigan. “Most Michiganders in the restaurant industry — tipped and non-tipped — earn less than $12 an hour,” Deputy Director Alicia Farris from the Michigan branch of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United begins. “We’re talking about parents and kids. Since we know that kids growing up in poverty start out at a deficit, we worked hard to get One Fair Wage on the 2018 ballot.” Farris says that Restaurant Opportunities Centers United mobilized hundreds of volunteers to collect the 253,000 signatures required by the Board of State Canvassers and despite a challenge from the National Restaurant Association, they got the go-ahead to bring the issue to Michigan’s voters.
Then something unexpected happened. On September 5, 2018, the state legislature passed One Fair Wage. “The lame duck session began the day after Election Day and ended right before Christmas,” Farris says. “It turned out that the legislature had passed [One Fair Wage] in order to gut it.” According to the Michigan chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, the lame duck session voted to raise the state’s overall minimum incrementally, not getting to $12.05 an hour until 2030. Their raise to the sub-minimum was even paltrier: They raised it by seven cents an hour, from $3.52 to $3.59, effective March 29 of this year. The original measure raised the sub-minimum from $3.52 to $12 by 2024.
An editorial in USA Today elaborates further: “Faced with ballot initiatives that would have raised the minimum wage and established sick time for all the state’s workers, Republicans instead passed both proposals last summer as a way to keep them off the ballot and make them easier to change.”
The courts are presently considering whether a 1964 opinion barring the legislature from “amend[ing] a citizen-initiated proposal in the same legislative session” will hold sway.
Meanwhile, Farris says that members of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United are continuing to speak to legislators, doing Get Out the Vote work and educating the community about the legislative process. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know what lame duck means,” she says, noting that because many restaurant workers have little time to research political policy in depth, the organizing challenge is enormous. “People get scared when someone persuasive comes along and tells them that ending the sub-minimum wage will lead to job losses,” she adds. But this is why the Michigan chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is working overtime to counter the misinformation being pushed by astroturf groups like the Restaurant Workers of America.
Workers Continue to Be Exploited
Meanwhile, the majority of tipped restaurant workers continue to face economic insecurity. Trupti Patel has been a Washington, D.C.-area server for the past nine years. “Most restaurant managers in the U.S. are white men,” Patel says. “If they feel miffed by you, or if you did not jump when they flirted, you can end up with crappy shifts or a station that does not get much traffic.” Patel believes that abolition of the sub-minimum wage will reduce this dynamic. “The income in restaurant work fluctuates; it is not stable but our bills are a constant,” she continues. “The U.S. is the only country in the world where hospitality is not considered a profession. I do not get health insurance even though I work full-time. I pay $423 a month out of pocket for it. Workers in non-tipped industries have predictable pay, retirement benefits, health insurance and paid time off. This is rarely offered in the hospitality trade.”
Now 70 years old, Tucker currently serves food and bartends as a contractor at the U.S. House of Representatives, and while her wages have risen significantly over the past 50-plus years, she still often finds herself scrambling.
Her salary, she says, varies with the congressional calendar. “In this job, when there’s no work, there’s no pay. I had a really hard time during the government shutdown. Remember, it lasted more than a month and even though I was able to collect unemployment benefits, being without a job for so long meant that I fell behind on my bills. I’m still playing catch-up four months later.”
Tucker emphasizes that she works extremely hard and believes that she deserves to be compensated fairly and treated with respect, free from the economic exploitation and sexual harassment that are rampant in the industry. And she is not alone in voicing these basic demands.
According to Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit organization and worker center that supports and connects restaurant workers throughout the country, more than 13 million U.S. residents, the majority of them women of color, are employed in restaurants. In 18 states, they earn a base pay of $2.13 an hour plus tips, a sub-minimum wage that has been frozen since 1991. Twenty-six states pay a somewhat higher sub-minimum, while just seven — Alaska, California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — provide the full federal minimum to those who serve our food when we dine out.
This leaves hundreds of thousands of workers in poverty; in New York City alone, a winter 2019 survey conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and the Community Service Society found that 36 percent of tipped workers employed in eateries, nail salons and car washes lived at or below the federal poverty line — $16,460 for a two-person household; $25,100 for four — and more often than not, had to rely on food stamps, soup kitchens and Medicaid.
New York is not an anomaly. The Economic Policy Institute found that in states that allow payment of a sub-minimum wage, 18.5 percent of workers are impoverished; in states where everyone earns the federal minimum, the poverty rate drops to 11.1 percent. Furthermore, the institute notes that closing the loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that allows payment of a sub-minimum wage, and upping the hourly minimum to $15 by 2024, would boost the wages of 38.1 percent of African American and 23.2 percent of white workers.
Support for the Raise the Wage Act
This is why Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is supporting the Raise the Wage Act, H.R.582, legislation to abolish the sub-minimum wage and bring tipped workers up to the federal standard. The bill was introduced by Bobby Scott (D-Virginia); a Senate companion bill, S.150, was introduced by Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is also supporting state efforts to enact what they are calling One Fair Wage laws.
Anthony Advincula, public affairs officer at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, notes that 16 states are presently considering One Fair Wage bills, but emphasizes that opposition from the National Restaurant Association — dubbed “the other NRA” — has been fierce.
“If passed, H.R.582 would stifle new job creation, impose undue harm to the nation’s small business owners, and harm those it proclaims to help,” National Restaurant Association spokeswoman Mollie O’Dell wrote in an email to Truthout.
Not surprisingly, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United disagrees. “They’ve created a fake grassroots organization, called Restaurant Workers of America, to invoke fear that restaurants will close and jobs will be eliminated,” Advincula says. “The truth is that the industry does not want to eliminate the sub-minimum wage because it will cost them. But this is a racial and gender justice issue. The majority of workers who are exploited by the sub-minimum wage are immigrants, people of color and single mothers who live in poverty despite working full-time.”
Furthermore, an in-depth investigation by the Columbia Journalism Review confirms that Restaurant Workers of America is wholly funded by restaurant owners. In addition, the investigation found that its representatives have missed few opportunities to appear with “restaurant industry trade groups and Republican politicians” since coming together in 2017.
That said, the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Workers of America have been effective in undermining One Fair Wage campaigns in New York, Michigan and Washington, D.C.
In New York, Advincula says, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has the authority to instruct the commissioner of labor to end the sub-minimum wage — something he said he intended to do. Seven hearings on this issue were held in different parts of the state between April and June 2018. “Everything was set in motion to make this change but Cuomo has not fulfilled his promise,” Advincula reports. “The issue seems stalled. We have contacted the governor again and again to say that he should listen to the majority of restaurant workers. Instead, he has listened to the Restaurant Workers of America and the National Restaurant Association. Their campaign has been appalling. It’s obscene to hear restaurant workers argue that no, they don’t need an increase in the minimum wage, that things are fine as they are. We assume that this is why Cuomo has backed off on his pledge to abolish the sub-minimum [wage].”
Diana Ramirez is the senior policy advocate at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, but, until recently, she led the Washington, D.C., chapter of the organization and coordinated last year’s ballot initiative to bring One Fair Wage to the District of Columbia. As the campaign unfolded, the D.C. chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United zeroed in on endemic, industry-wide sexual exploitation — as well as the inadequate base pay — since workers whose wages rely on tips often feel silenced when it comes to fighting back against predatory behavior. “The rate of sexual harassment for restaurant workers is the highest of any industry,” she says. “The ‘customer is always right’ mentality has made it hard for tipped workers who have to depend on the generosity of patrons.”
A broad coalition of women’s rights, labor and racial justice groups came together in 2016 in support of One Fair Wage — coalition members ranged from the D.C. chapter of the National Organization for Women, to Forward Together, the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Jews United For Justice. The goal was to put a One Fair Wage measure — called Initiative 77 — on the July 2018 ballot.
Opposition from the Restaurant Workers of America and the National Restaurant Association was immediate. “They got workers, mostly white male bartenders working in high-end establishments, to come out and yell at women of color wherever we went,” Ramirez told Truthout. “It’s a Trumpian effect: Somehow you doing better will make me worse off.”
Ignoring the Community’s Desires
Despite the pushback, the ballot initiative in Washington, D.C., passed with 56 percent of the vote, and voters in all but one neighborhood supported One Fair Wage. But the victory was short-lived. Ramirez points out that after the ballot measure passed, the restaurant association went into high gear and successfully lobbied the D.C. City Council to overturn the measure.
“The Council essentially told Black people, the majority population in D.C., that their vote did not matter,” Ramirez explains. “People were outraged and after the vote was repealed, an influx of racial justice and pro-democracy groups came to Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and said, ‘We want to work with you to protect democracy.’”
A referendum on this is now before the courts. “It can take a year, until late 2019 or early 2020,” Ramirez says, “but this is not something we’re going to drop. We’re continuing to organize for One Fair Wage. It’s the future of the restaurant industry, whether they like it or not.”
A similar fight is unfolding in Michigan. “Most Michiganders in the restaurant industry — tipped and non-tipped — earn less than $12 an hour,” Deputy Director Alicia Farris from the Michigan branch of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United begins. “We’re talking about parents and kids. Since we know that kids growing up in poverty start out at a deficit, we worked hard to get One Fair Wage on the 2018 ballot.” Farris says that Restaurant Opportunities Centers United mobilized hundreds of volunteers to collect the 253,000 signatures required by the Board of State Canvassers and despite a challenge from the National Restaurant Association, they got the go-ahead to bring the issue to Michigan’s voters.
Then something unexpected happened. On September 5, 2018, the state legislature passed One Fair Wage. “The lame duck session began the day after Election Day and ended right before Christmas,” Farris says. “It turned out that the legislature had passed [One Fair Wage] in order to gut it.” According to the Michigan chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, the lame duck session voted to raise the state’s overall minimum incrementally, not getting to $12.05 an hour until 2030. Their raise to the sub-minimum was even paltrier: They raised it by seven cents an hour, from $3.52 to $3.59, effective March 29 of this year. The original measure raised the sub-minimum from $3.52 to $12 by 2024.
An editorial in USA Today elaborates further: “Faced with ballot initiatives that would have raised the minimum wage and established sick time for all the state’s workers, Republicans instead passed both proposals last summer as a way to keep them off the ballot and make them easier to change.”
The courts are presently considering whether a 1964 opinion barring the legislature from “amend[ing] a citizen-initiated proposal in the same legislative session” will hold sway.
Meanwhile, Farris says that members of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United are continuing to speak to legislators, doing Get Out the Vote work and educating the community about the legislative process. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t know what lame duck means,” she says, noting that because many restaurant workers have little time to research political policy in depth, the organizing challenge is enormous. “People get scared when someone persuasive comes along and tells them that ending the sub-minimum wage will lead to job losses,” she adds. But this is why the Michigan chapter of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is working overtime to counter the misinformation being pushed by astroturf groups like the Restaurant Workers of America.
Workers Continue to Be Exploited
Meanwhile, the majority of tipped restaurant workers continue to face economic insecurity. Trupti Patel has been a Washington, D.C.-area server for the past nine years. “Most restaurant managers in the U.S. are white men,” Patel says. “If they feel miffed by you, or if you did not jump when they flirted, you can end up with crappy shifts or a station that does not get much traffic.” Patel believes that abolition of the sub-minimum wage will reduce this dynamic. “The income in restaurant work fluctuates; it is not stable but our bills are a constant,” she continues. “The U.S. is the only country in the world where hospitality is not considered a profession. I do not get health insurance even though I work full-time. I pay $423 a month out of pocket for it. Workers in non-tipped industries have predictable pay, retirement benefits, health insurance and paid time off. This is rarely offered in the hospitality trade.”
How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’
Documents show how the company tracks and terminates workers
By Colin Lecher@colinlecher - the verge.com
Apr 25, 2019, 12:06pm EDT
Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.
Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.
Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas. A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today. Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons. The numbers are even more staggering in North America as a whole. Amazon operates more than 75 fulfillment centers with more than 125,000 full-time employees, suggesting thousands lose their jobs with the company annually for failing to move packages quickly enough.
The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Critics see the system as a machine that only sees numbers, not people. “One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” Mitchell says. “They’re monitored and supervised by robots.”
The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations.
Amazon says retraining is part of the process to get workers up to standards and that it only changes rates when more than 75 percent of workers at a facility are meeting goals. The bottom 5 percent of workers are placed on a training plan, according to the company. An appeal system is also part of the termination process.
”Approximately 300 employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this timeframe,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “In general, the number of employee terminations have decreased over the last two years at this facility as well as across North America.” Amazon did not give details on the current rate of terminations.
Amazon produced the data as part of a labor dispute with a former worker at the Baltimore facility, who claimed they had been terminated for engaging in legally protected activity, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. In a letter to the board, Amazon responded that the employee had instead been fired for failing to reach productivity benchmarks — a common occurrence, the company said. To bolster its case, the company also included the list of terminations at the Baltimore facility, labeled by Amazon as BWI2. The Verge obtained the letter and related documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Amazon consistently terminates fulfillment center associates for failing to repeatedly meet the standardized productivity rates,” the company’s attorney wrote in the letter. Amazon terminated the employee, the attorney wrote, “for the same reason it has terminated hundreds of other employees without regard to any alleged protected concerted activity.” The former employee’s charge was ultimately withdrawn.
While the names on the termination list filed by the company have been redacted, it includes more than 900 entries, as well as each employee’s supervisor and the reason they were fired. All of the employees on the list were terminated either for “productivity” or a category of offense called “productivity_trend,” a longer series of inefficiency issues. Amazon said a mistake resulted in an overly broad list being filed that included other performance problems and that it is fixing the error with the board.
The letter also details Amazon’s strict standards more widely. “Associates must be detailed and efficient in processing each order,” the letter reads. To ensure that efficiency continues, the company has developed “a proprietary productivity metric.” Amazon says those goals are set objectively, and that they’re based on metrics like customer demand and location.
Workers have, at times, pushed back against the company’s productivity requirements. Last year, East African immigrant workers at a Minnesota facility organized protests against the company, saying they didn’t have sufficient break time, including for prayer.
In response, Amazon has continued to tout the benefits of working for the company, pointing to their hourly pay rates and policies like parental leave. But the documents make clear that some workers, failing to meet productivity standards, won’t reap the benefits of a job at all.
Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.
Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas. A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.
The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today. Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons. The numbers are even more staggering in North America as a whole. Amazon operates more than 75 fulfillment centers with more than 125,000 full-time employees, suggesting thousands lose their jobs with the company annually for failing to move packages quickly enough.
The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Critics see the system as a machine that only sees numbers, not people. “One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” Mitchell says. “They’re monitored and supervised by robots.”
The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations.
Amazon says retraining is part of the process to get workers up to standards and that it only changes rates when more than 75 percent of workers at a facility are meeting goals. The bottom 5 percent of workers are placed on a training plan, according to the company. An appeal system is also part of the termination process.
”Approximately 300 employees turned over in Baltimore related to productivity in this timeframe,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “In general, the number of employee terminations have decreased over the last two years at this facility as well as across North America.” Amazon did not give details on the current rate of terminations.
Amazon produced the data as part of a labor dispute with a former worker at the Baltimore facility, who claimed they had been terminated for engaging in legally protected activity, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. In a letter to the board, Amazon responded that the employee had instead been fired for failing to reach productivity benchmarks — a common occurrence, the company said. To bolster its case, the company also included the list of terminations at the Baltimore facility, labeled by Amazon as BWI2. The Verge obtained the letter and related documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“Amazon consistently terminates fulfillment center associates for failing to repeatedly meet the standardized productivity rates,” the company’s attorney wrote in the letter. Amazon terminated the employee, the attorney wrote, “for the same reason it has terminated hundreds of other employees without regard to any alleged protected concerted activity.” The former employee’s charge was ultimately withdrawn.
While the names on the termination list filed by the company have been redacted, it includes more than 900 entries, as well as each employee’s supervisor and the reason they were fired. All of the employees on the list were terminated either for “productivity” or a category of offense called “productivity_trend,” a longer series of inefficiency issues. Amazon said a mistake resulted in an overly broad list being filed that included other performance problems and that it is fixing the error with the board.
The letter also details Amazon’s strict standards more widely. “Associates must be detailed and efficient in processing each order,” the letter reads. To ensure that efficiency continues, the company has developed “a proprietary productivity metric.” Amazon says those goals are set objectively, and that they’re based on metrics like customer demand and location.
Workers have, at times, pushed back against the company’s productivity requirements. Last year, East African immigrant workers at a Minnesota facility organized protests against the company, saying they didn’t have sufficient break time, including for prayer.
In response, Amazon has continued to tout the benefits of working for the company, pointing to their hourly pay rates and policies like parental leave. But the documents make clear that some workers, failing to meet productivity standards, won’t reap the benefits of a job at all.
Black Walmart Workers Promised Raises But Were Instead Fired Over Their Criminal Records, Complaint Alleges
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
April 26, 2019
Over 100 African-American workers have filed a discrimination complaint against retail giant Walmart, saying the company denied them jobs because of their past criminal histories.
Before taking over management of a distribution center in Elwood, Ill., earlier this year, Walmart promised its nearly 600 employees raises and benefits, CBS Money Watch reported. Instead, nearly 200 Black workers found themselves without jobs because of their criminal records.
The retailer, which has nearly 5,000 stores across the U.S., claims it’s open to hiring felons. However, that didn’t seem to be the case for the hundreds of workers who lost their jobs in February despite having worked at the now-Walmart-owned facility for years.
Schneider Logistics, a third-party contractor, had been managing the warehouse until January, when Walmart decided to take on the role.
Mark Balentine, 52, said he was “absolutely excited” when he was told in writing that his pay would be increasing to $18.65 an hour from $16.35. His smile turned upside down, however, after hearing from colleagues that the company might have an issue with felons.
The news was jolting for Balentine, considering his 20-year-old conviction for cocaine possession.
“I’m a changed person, if I could roll back the clock to 1999 …” he told CBS MoneyWatch, adding: “If we don’t give people chances, we’re going to have overcrowded prisons. None of us should be out of a job or at the unemployment office.”
Balentine was set to start work at the Walmart-managed warehouse but was informed that he wouldn’t be hired after the company ran a criminal background check. On April 4, the day Walmart took over operations, the 52-year-old said four security guards escorted him off the premises.
Balentine had worked at the facility for almost three years and was suddenly unemployed.
According to Christopher Williams, a lawyer with the National legal Advocacy Network, Balentine was among several Black workers who performed their work so effectively and professionally, “that Walmart initially offered them their jobs.” He said what happened to the nearly 200 workers, all of whom are African-American, was no doubt unlawful.
“This is not only not right, we believe it is not lawful,” Williams said.
A complaint has since been filed with the Illinois Department of Human Rights and the U.S. Equal Employment Commission (EEOC), with a class-action suit expected in the future, Williams told the outlet. He noted the disproportionate impact on the warehouse’s Black workers and said that non-Black workers with criminal backgrounds were allowed to keep their jobs.
Walmart responded in a statement Wednesday saying it had restarted its application process and that the previous background check does not “bar employment.” According to ABC7, employees who lost their jobs said they were told to simply reapply.
Despite the complaint, Walmart added that most of those working at the warehouse had been kept on.
“Retaining as many existing employees as possible has always been the goal of our transition at the Elwood distribution center, and we hired hundreds of those workers,” a company spokesman said. “We understand the importance of providing second chances, and our background checks include a thoughtful and transparent review process to help ensure everyone is treated fairly.”
This isn’t the first time the popular retailer has been hit with discrimination claims. In February, 100 women filed a class-action suit against Walmart in the U.S. Southern District of Florida accusing the company of funneling female employees into minimum wage positions while male workers got starting salaries of $14 to $21 per hour for the same jobs.
Before taking over management of a distribution center in Elwood, Ill., earlier this year, Walmart promised its nearly 600 employees raises and benefits, CBS Money Watch reported. Instead, nearly 200 Black workers found themselves without jobs because of their criminal records.
The retailer, which has nearly 5,000 stores across the U.S., claims it’s open to hiring felons. However, that didn’t seem to be the case for the hundreds of workers who lost their jobs in February despite having worked at the now-Walmart-owned facility for years.
Schneider Logistics, a third-party contractor, had been managing the warehouse until January, when Walmart decided to take on the role.
Mark Balentine, 52, said he was “absolutely excited” when he was told in writing that his pay would be increasing to $18.65 an hour from $16.35. His smile turned upside down, however, after hearing from colleagues that the company might have an issue with felons.
The news was jolting for Balentine, considering his 20-year-old conviction for cocaine possession.
“I’m a changed person, if I could roll back the clock to 1999 …” he told CBS MoneyWatch, adding: “If we don’t give people chances, we’re going to have overcrowded prisons. None of us should be out of a job or at the unemployment office.”
Balentine was set to start work at the Walmart-managed warehouse but was informed that he wouldn’t be hired after the company ran a criminal background check. On April 4, the day Walmart took over operations, the 52-year-old said four security guards escorted him off the premises.
Balentine had worked at the facility for almost three years and was suddenly unemployed.
According to Christopher Williams, a lawyer with the National legal Advocacy Network, Balentine was among several Black workers who performed their work so effectively and professionally, “that Walmart initially offered them their jobs.” He said what happened to the nearly 200 workers, all of whom are African-American, was no doubt unlawful.
“This is not only not right, we believe it is not lawful,” Williams said.
A complaint has since been filed with the Illinois Department of Human Rights and the U.S. Equal Employment Commission (EEOC), with a class-action suit expected in the future, Williams told the outlet. He noted the disproportionate impact on the warehouse’s Black workers and said that non-Black workers with criminal backgrounds were allowed to keep their jobs.
Walmart responded in a statement Wednesday saying it had restarted its application process and that the previous background check does not “bar employment.” According to ABC7, employees who lost their jobs said they were told to simply reapply.
Despite the complaint, Walmart added that most of those working at the warehouse had been kept on.
“Retaining as many existing employees as possible has always been the goal of our transition at the Elwood distribution center, and we hired hundreds of those workers,” a company spokesman said. “We understand the importance of providing second chances, and our background checks include a thoughtful and transparent review process to help ensure everyone is treated fairly.”
This isn’t the first time the popular retailer has been hit with discrimination claims. In February, 100 women filed a class-action suit against Walmart in the U.S. Southern District of Florida accusing the company of funneling female employees into minimum wage positions while male workers got starting salaries of $14 to $21 per hour for the same jobs.
States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage
BY Mike Ludwig, Truthout
PUBLISHED April 23, 2019
Earlier this month, the New Orleans City Council took a big first step: It unanimously approved a resolution aimed at raising the city’s minimum wage. However, the resolution will be entirely symbolic unless Louisiana’s Republican state legislature gets out of the way. Instead of raising wages, the resolution urges legislators in Baton Rouge to change state law, which has prevented local governments from setting their own minimum wage since 1997.
Conservative state lawmakers have blocked efforts to raise the statewide minimum ever since, leaving Louisiana cities and towns stuck with the rock-bottom federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. These cities are home to some of the nation’s highest poverty rates. In 2016, more than one in four Louisiana children were living in poverty.
“It’s kind of like being in a bad relationship,” said Rep. Joyce Duplessis, a Louisiana state legislator who is cosponsoring legislation that would allow local minimum wage hikes, during a rally in New Orleans earlier this month. “You see, the state hasn’t been willing to do right by the cities.”
Preventing towns and cities from passing their own reforms and regulations is broadly known as “state preemption,” and it has swept across conservative legislatures nationwide in response to local campaigns for affordable housing, better labor standards and higher pay.
As of 2018, 28 states prevented local governments from raising the minimum wage, and 23 states had laws preventing cities from requiring employers to provide paid sick and maternity leave, according to the National League of Cities. A few states have longstanding provisions preventing local governments from raising the wage floor beyond the state minimum, but most preemption laws grew out of debates over “local control” in the past two decades.
Louisiana became the first state to pass a minimum wage preemption law in 1997. Similar laws have since passed in 24 other states, including Alabama, Ohio and North Carolina, which passed minimum wage preemption laws in 2016 as movements to raise wages spread, making their way to ballot initiatives and city councils. At the time, calls for raising the minimum wage to $15 were reaching a fever pitch, thanks in part to the Fight for $15 movement and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works closely with conservative state lawmakers, has circulated model legislation to preempt local minimum wage hikes since 2002. The National League of Cities reports that Alabama’s 2016 minimum wage preemption law “bore a striking resemblance” to ALEC’s model legislation.
“Corporate interests and reactionary lawmakers are aligned and have strategy across state lines and across the country, and if we are serious about building power to be able to improve the standard of living in our communities, we need to be as united and as strategic as their corporate greed,” said Ben Zucker, co-founder of the progressive group Step Up Louisiana, in an interview.
State preemption is a big deal in New Orleans, a liberal oasis in a red state where local leaders often find their hands tied by state preemption when attempting to address the city’s rampant inequality and a well-documented housing crisis. Housing costs have steadily risen over the past decade while wages stagnated, pushing working-class artists, cooks, musicians and other culture bearers out of the city’s historic core, according to local housing justice groups.
New Orleans has the highest poverty rate of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas and the second-highest rate of income inequality. Most New Orleans residents are renters, and 60 percent — including 72 percent of women of color — spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. This is the amount considered by the federal government to be enough of a cost-burden that food, clothes, health care and other necessities become difficult to afford. New Orleans renters are evicted from their homes at a rate twice the national average, and eviction rates are alarmingly higher in neighborhoods of color.
The New Orleans City Council recently passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance to encourage affordable housing construction, but only after Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed legislation passed by the Republican legislature that gutted a state law that allows for local inclusionary zoning. (Edwards, a socially conservative Democrat who supports some fiscally liberal policies, warned New Orleans policymakers to act fast because he would not block inclusionary zoning preemption again.)
Indeed, state preemption goes far beyond the minimum wage issue. In Louisiana and many other red states, it has a major impact on housing and labor policy, as cities are barred from establishing rent controls and requiring public contractors to meet local wage and labor standards. A number of other states preempt local regulations of the gig economy and “fair scheduling” laws that would protect workers from abusive labor practices by requiring employers to give advance notice of work-house and schedule changes, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
ALEC and conservative lawmakers claim minimum wage increases cause businesses to raise prices and hire fewer workers, but advocates for the working poor say states like Louisiana are proof that the wage floor must be raised from time to time in order to keep people out of poverty.
“If these policies worked, if these policies that prevented local democracy actually worked, then why would New Orleans have almost half of the children in our town born into poverty?” Zucker said. “If they worked, then why do Black women make 48 cents for every dollar that white men make in our state?”
A number of states are moving forward toward a statewide living wage regardless of preemption laws. Eighteen states started 2019 with higher minimum wages, either due to automatic cost-of-living increases or previously approved legislation or ballot initiatives, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Despite Republican opposition, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland enacted legislation this year that will gradually increase the state minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next five to six years. Democrats in Vermont are pushing for a $15 minimum.
In Louisiana, state lawmakers may not be keen on raising wages, but the people are. Recent state polling shows that 88 percent of Louisiana voters — including nearly three-quarters of Republicans — support a minimum wage hike to $8.50 an hour, even though Republican lawmakers have blocked efforts by Edwards and other Democrats to make the small increase for three years straight, according to The Advocate newspaper.
Louisiana residents are not alone: The majority of Americans support living wages. In January, national polling showed that 55 percent of US voters support a $15 per hour minimum wage, with another 27 percent supporting a wage increase of a lesser amount. In fact, 70 percent of GOP voters want some kind of increase in the minimum wage.
While Republican leaders on the national level have consistently pushed back against calls for a higher minimum wage, Sanders and other Democratic presidential hopefuls want to gradually phase up to $15. Trump has not taken a clear position on the minimum wage, and his opponents are expected to pounce on the issue during the presidential race.
Back in Louisiana, people from all walks of life are eager to see the pay scale increase, because wages intersect with so many other issues impacting individual communities. If state lawmakers won’t raise the minimum wage, local communities want the power to do it themselves.
“Race and gender equality is on fire in Louisiana, and one of the few tools we have to really combat that is letting local governing authorities and local communities be able to decide what’s best for them,” Zucker said.
Conservative state lawmakers have blocked efforts to raise the statewide minimum ever since, leaving Louisiana cities and towns stuck with the rock-bottom federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. These cities are home to some of the nation’s highest poverty rates. In 2016, more than one in four Louisiana children were living in poverty.
“It’s kind of like being in a bad relationship,” said Rep. Joyce Duplessis, a Louisiana state legislator who is cosponsoring legislation that would allow local minimum wage hikes, during a rally in New Orleans earlier this month. “You see, the state hasn’t been willing to do right by the cities.”
Preventing towns and cities from passing their own reforms and regulations is broadly known as “state preemption,” and it has swept across conservative legislatures nationwide in response to local campaigns for affordable housing, better labor standards and higher pay.
As of 2018, 28 states prevented local governments from raising the minimum wage, and 23 states had laws preventing cities from requiring employers to provide paid sick and maternity leave, according to the National League of Cities. A few states have longstanding provisions preventing local governments from raising the wage floor beyond the state minimum, but most preemption laws grew out of debates over “local control” in the past two decades.
Louisiana became the first state to pass a minimum wage preemption law in 1997. Similar laws have since passed in 24 other states, including Alabama, Ohio and North Carolina, which passed minimum wage preemption laws in 2016 as movements to raise wages spread, making their way to ballot initiatives and city councils. At the time, calls for raising the minimum wage to $15 were reaching a fever pitch, thanks in part to the Fight for $15 movement and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that works closely with conservative state lawmakers, has circulated model legislation to preempt local minimum wage hikes since 2002. The National League of Cities reports that Alabama’s 2016 minimum wage preemption law “bore a striking resemblance” to ALEC’s model legislation.
“Corporate interests and reactionary lawmakers are aligned and have strategy across state lines and across the country, and if we are serious about building power to be able to improve the standard of living in our communities, we need to be as united and as strategic as their corporate greed,” said Ben Zucker, co-founder of the progressive group Step Up Louisiana, in an interview.
State preemption is a big deal in New Orleans, a liberal oasis in a red state where local leaders often find their hands tied by state preemption when attempting to address the city’s rampant inequality and a well-documented housing crisis. Housing costs have steadily risen over the past decade while wages stagnated, pushing working-class artists, cooks, musicians and other culture bearers out of the city’s historic core, according to local housing justice groups.
New Orleans has the highest poverty rate of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas and the second-highest rate of income inequality. Most New Orleans residents are renters, and 60 percent — including 72 percent of women of color — spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. This is the amount considered by the federal government to be enough of a cost-burden that food, clothes, health care and other necessities become difficult to afford. New Orleans renters are evicted from their homes at a rate twice the national average, and eviction rates are alarmingly higher in neighborhoods of color.
The New Orleans City Council recently passed an inclusionary zoning ordinance to encourage affordable housing construction, but only after Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed legislation passed by the Republican legislature that gutted a state law that allows for local inclusionary zoning. (Edwards, a socially conservative Democrat who supports some fiscally liberal policies, warned New Orleans policymakers to act fast because he would not block inclusionary zoning preemption again.)
Indeed, state preemption goes far beyond the minimum wage issue. In Louisiana and many other red states, it has a major impact on housing and labor policy, as cities are barred from establishing rent controls and requiring public contractors to meet local wage and labor standards. A number of other states preempt local regulations of the gig economy and “fair scheduling” laws that would protect workers from abusive labor practices by requiring employers to give advance notice of work-house and schedule changes, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
ALEC and conservative lawmakers claim minimum wage increases cause businesses to raise prices and hire fewer workers, but advocates for the working poor say states like Louisiana are proof that the wage floor must be raised from time to time in order to keep people out of poverty.
“If these policies worked, if these policies that prevented local democracy actually worked, then why would New Orleans have almost half of the children in our town born into poverty?” Zucker said. “If they worked, then why do Black women make 48 cents for every dollar that white men make in our state?”
A number of states are moving forward toward a statewide living wage regardless of preemption laws. Eighteen states started 2019 with higher minimum wages, either due to automatic cost-of-living increases or previously approved legislation or ballot initiatives, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Despite Republican opposition, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland enacted legislation this year that will gradually increase the state minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next five to six years. Democrats in Vermont are pushing for a $15 minimum.
In Louisiana, state lawmakers may not be keen on raising wages, but the people are. Recent state polling shows that 88 percent of Louisiana voters — including nearly three-quarters of Republicans — support a minimum wage hike to $8.50 an hour, even though Republican lawmakers have blocked efforts by Edwards and other Democrats to make the small increase for three years straight, according to The Advocate newspaper.
Louisiana residents are not alone: The majority of Americans support living wages. In January, national polling showed that 55 percent of US voters support a $15 per hour minimum wage, with another 27 percent supporting a wage increase of a lesser amount. In fact, 70 percent of GOP voters want some kind of increase in the minimum wage.
While Republican leaders on the national level have consistently pushed back against calls for a higher minimum wage, Sanders and other Democratic presidential hopefuls want to gradually phase up to $15. Trump has not taken a clear position on the minimum wage, and his opponents are expected to pounce on the issue during the presidential race.
Back in Louisiana, people from all walks of life are eager to see the pay scale increase, because wages intersect with so many other issues impacting individual communities. If state lawmakers won’t raise the minimum wage, local communities want the power to do it themselves.
“Race and gender equality is on fire in Louisiana, and one of the few tools we have to really combat that is letting local governing authorities and local communities be able to decide what’s best for them,” Zucker said.
The world's largest hedge fund breaks down how the US workforce got screwed over the past 20 years
Allana Akhtar - business insider
4/17/19
- Bridgewater, the world's most successful hedge fund, released a report that states the main reason corporate profit margins have increased rapidly in the last 20 years is due to declining labor shares.
- In industries where unionization decreased, wages fell as well. Union members went from being around one-fourth of the workforce to just over 10% today.
- "We are in the midst of a populist backlash," the report states.
Corporations may have hit peak profits over the last 25 years — but workers did not see that in their wages.
Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, is run by billionaire Ray Dalio. It recently released a report on how US corporations have seen profit margins soar over the last two decades.
In what Bridgewater calls "the most pro-corporate environment in history," the last two decades have seen corporate taxes and labor bargaining power fall, as globalization and automation increased.
The biggest driving factor behind soaring profits, Bridgewater reports, is the decline in the share of profit that workers receive. The decline in unionization among US workers, and to a lesser extent the advance of technology and outsourcing of jobs, are driving worker wages down.
In companies that had union membership decline, wages fell at a greater level than sectors where union membership remained in tact. Transportation, manufacturing, and construction jobs were hit the hardest: these three industries had union membership decline by as much as 9%, while national wages grew only around 1.7% to 2.5% since 2000. Jobs in the financial sector, meanwhile, had the most growth in union membership since 2000, and saw wages increase by nearly 3%.
As a whole, union members went from being around one-fourth of the workforce to just over 10% today.
"While changes in union activity have been smaller in recent years, even small moves toward or away from unionization can be linked to changes in how much firms pay their employees," the report states.
Earlier this year, Dalio called current levels of income inequality a "national emergency," warning that these conditions will ultimately weaken the US economy and reduce the country's strength relative to other global leaders.
Solutions Dalio offered to fix income inequality include increasing taxes on the wealthy and increased coordination between the White House, the Federal Reserve, and Congress.
The call to raise taxes on the ultra-rich is becoming more mainstream. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently proposed that the marginal tax rate on income of more than $10 million be raised to 70%, bringing it back to levels last seen in the 1970s. Two Democratic presidential candidates' plans to increase taxes on the rich are polling well among Americans.
Because of this, Bridgewater warns the margin growth may not persist, due to more people recognizing that the power of big companies has come at the expense of worker pay. The firm predicts more government regulation of corporations, and says survey data suggests people feel growing animosity toward globalization and the sweeping power of companies.
"We are in the midst of a populist backlash against rising inequality and increasingly seeing a move toward more protectionism," the report states.
'We're Broke, and Amazon Is Shouting About How Amazing They Are Because of This Raise'
Hamilton Nolan- splinternews.com
4/16/19
Last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (net worth: $150 billion) boasted abouthis company’s recent decision to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. For some useful perspective on what that means for actual humans, we now bring you the thoughts of a longtime Amazon customer service employee.
This employee wrote to us last week after reading about Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders, in which America’s richest man took a jab at his competitors, challenging them to raise their own wages as well, and wrote, rather beatifically “we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Amazon—no doubt reading the political mood of the nation—raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour last October, but saved itself some money at the same time by ending its program of stock grants and incentive pay for its lowest-paid workers. Its move came after more than a decade of concerted action by the Fight For 15 movement to make the $15 wage a national issue. For Bezos, the cost of the wage increase could be written off as a PR expense. But for Amazon employees themselves, the takeaway is decidedly mixed.
The following note is from a current Amazon customer service agent (CSA):
I work in customer service on a specialty team. I’ve been here for several years. When the raise happened, they got rid of bonuses and stock grants. (For the stock grants, you were given more the longer you were with Amazon, but you have to wait for them to vest.) Sometimes you might get a small gift card as a pat on the back.
The bonuses were based on numbers. Specifically, the number of YES-es you got on the email survey after a contact. It’s hard to calculate because it was applied to everyone, but different departments do better than others depending on the complexity of the contacts they take. I know of many who relied on those bonuses to make up for income shortfall.
Our employee discount is 10%, until we’ve spent $1,000. So, it’s really only $100 per year total.
Everyone hired new gets the $15 per hour. Those of us who have been here got either an extra $2.50 per hour, or a raise to $16.50 per hour, whichever was higher.
We have no idea what our new income cap is. There has been no mention of our twice-annual merit increase of .25 per hour.
When the raise kicked in, I was earning more than $2.50 over my starting pay. I feel they should have given me the same amount over the new starting pay. They did not.
The $16.50 I now make means I can’t get food stamps anymore, but the new pay isn’t really enough to make up the difference.
My department takes difficult calls all day. We are often slammed with back-to-back contacts because Amazon is getting crazy about productivity and starting to treat reps like robots. We’re tired. We’re broke, and Amazon is shouting about how amazing they are because of this raise. It’s hard to watch.
So, no bonuses, no stocks, pitiful discount, extra workload with very little or no time between calls, a raise that really wasn’t, and no idea if we will ever be able to make more than what we do now. I don’t want to seem greedy but we get screamed at by people who really DO expect their orders in two days no matter what. We also get perverts who call because they know we have to be polite (Though, we can hang up.) Then there are the freebie abusers who call demanding compensation for their distress.
We are timed on EVERYTHING. We are way more restricted in what we do than people who work in an office.
Yes, I work from home, but I can’t pay my bills with that. It wasn’t always horrible. I really used to like my job, but the last few years things have really changed. The problem is I NEED my job.
We get 6 paid holidays per year, chances are we WILL have to work on all of them. While it means extra money in overtime, I would rather have time off with my family. I haven’t had a full holiday off in years. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken an angry call on Christmas morning.
This employee wrote to us last week after reading about Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders, in which America’s richest man took a jab at his competitors, challenging them to raise their own wages as well, and wrote, rather beatifically “we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.”
Amazon—no doubt reading the political mood of the nation—raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour last October, but saved itself some money at the same time by ending its program of stock grants and incentive pay for its lowest-paid workers. Its move came after more than a decade of concerted action by the Fight For 15 movement to make the $15 wage a national issue. For Bezos, the cost of the wage increase could be written off as a PR expense. But for Amazon employees themselves, the takeaway is decidedly mixed.
The following note is from a current Amazon customer service agent (CSA):
I work in customer service on a specialty team. I’ve been here for several years. When the raise happened, they got rid of bonuses and stock grants. (For the stock grants, you were given more the longer you were with Amazon, but you have to wait for them to vest.) Sometimes you might get a small gift card as a pat on the back.
The bonuses were based on numbers. Specifically, the number of YES-es you got on the email survey after a contact. It’s hard to calculate because it was applied to everyone, but different departments do better than others depending on the complexity of the contacts they take. I know of many who relied on those bonuses to make up for income shortfall.
Our employee discount is 10%, until we’ve spent $1,000. So, it’s really only $100 per year total.
Everyone hired new gets the $15 per hour. Those of us who have been here got either an extra $2.50 per hour, or a raise to $16.50 per hour, whichever was higher.
We have no idea what our new income cap is. There has been no mention of our twice-annual merit increase of .25 per hour.
When the raise kicked in, I was earning more than $2.50 over my starting pay. I feel they should have given me the same amount over the new starting pay. They did not.
The $16.50 I now make means I can’t get food stamps anymore, but the new pay isn’t really enough to make up the difference.
My department takes difficult calls all day. We are often slammed with back-to-back contacts because Amazon is getting crazy about productivity and starting to treat reps like robots. We’re tired. We’re broke, and Amazon is shouting about how amazing they are because of this raise. It’s hard to watch.
So, no bonuses, no stocks, pitiful discount, extra workload with very little or no time between calls, a raise that really wasn’t, and no idea if we will ever be able to make more than what we do now. I don’t want to seem greedy but we get screamed at by people who really DO expect their orders in two days no matter what. We also get perverts who call because they know we have to be polite (Though, we can hang up.) Then there are the freebie abusers who call demanding compensation for their distress.
We are timed on EVERYTHING. We are way more restricted in what we do than people who work in an office.
Yes, I work from home, but I can’t pay my bills with that. It wasn’t always horrible. I really used to like my job, but the last few years things have really changed. The problem is I NEED my job.
We get 6 paid holidays per year, chances are we WILL have to work on all of them. While it means extra money in overtime, I would rather have time off with my family. I haven’t had a full holiday off in years. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken an angry call on Christmas morning.
Stop & Shop hit by strike as 31,000 workers walk off job
*Talks break down over healthcare, wages and pensions
*Customers respect picket lines at 240 stores in New England
Sarah Betancourt in Boston
the guardian
Mon 15 Apr 2019 08.37 EDT
The Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren greets striking Stop & Shop workers while also bringing coffee and donuts on Friday in Somerville, Massachusetts. Photograph: Scott Eisen/Getty Images
More than 31,000 employees of the grocery chain Stop & Shop walked off the job across New England last week, after the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) and management reached an impasse in negotiations.
At the weekend, as the strikers attracted support from among others Senator Elizabeth Warren and former vice-president Joe Biden, the two sides restarted efforts to find a compromise over healthcare, wages and pensions.
Many stores opened on Friday with severely reduced staff and management working registers. In parking lots at the 240 stores affected, longtime customers refused to cross picket lines. At one location in Somerville, Massachusetts, a staffing agency brought in temporary workers to cover missed shifts, much to the chagrin of strikers.
In a video circulated on Facebook, Tyrone Housey, president of UFCW Local 1459 in Springfield, Massachusetts, encouraged union members to ask shoppers not to do business with the company until the strike ends.
The strikers come from all roles, from cashiers to bakers, butchers and deli employees. Their three-year contract expired on 23 February. Several local chapters of the union voted to strike. A Stop & Shop spokeswoman, Jennifer Brogan, said the company had been trying to negotiate.
“Throughout negotiations, Stop & Shop continuously has been available to bargain, every day, for nearly three months,” she said. “The company’s current offer is substantially enhanced, better for associates than most recent UFCW contract settlements, provides overall pay and benefits that are better than what most of our competitors provide, and represents improvements for our associates.”
For Paul Tritto, 59, the strike is about providing the best care for his autistic grandson. An 18-year employee, now a meat manager, Tritto drives more than 40 miles across state lines for his job, in order to support the 16-year-old and his own wife, who is retired and handicapped.
“We were actually in the process of getting him on my health insurance,” Tritto told the Guardian, adding that the proposal the company is pushing would drastically increase his monthly contributions.
“For a family plan right now,” he said, “the deductible is $2,500. With what they’re pushing, it will go up to $5,000.” He and his wife would pay more than $300 a month for coverage, he said, not factoring in additional care and adding his grandson to the mix.
Management is also axing overtime pay on holidays and Sundays, which would mean Tritto would make $20 an hour on Sundays, instead of $30.
“I’d be forced to take a part-time job,” he said. “And that takes more time away from my grandson Seth and wife, who can’t drive.”
The latest proposal from Stop & Shop includes pay increases for associates and an increase of $2 to $4 on health insurance premiums. The pay increase is 50 cents an hour. According to the union, it would not offset higher healthcare costs.
The UFCW national spokeswoman, Erikka Knuti, told the Guardian the average full-time employee would pay $900 in weekly health premiums over three years. Part-timers would pay $600.
Monday is day five of a strike workers think could be successful. Kristen Johnson, a 34-year-old deli manager at a store near McGrath Highway in Massachusetts, said the location usually had about $100,000 in sales on an average Saturday.
“They’ll be lucky if they make $10,000,” she said, describing customers who have joined strikers, delivered pizza and shared coffee. Despite the cuts proposed by the company, Johnson said she was not considering a move.
“We love what we do,” she said, “or else we wouldn’t be here. We love our customers. They’re like our second family. I’m in it for the long haul.”
Johnson said strikers “loved it” when Warren, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, joined them on the picket line on Friday and urged her audience to not cross it.
“This is a company that made $2bn in profits, that then got a fancy tax break in Washington from the Republicans and now wants to squeeze our workers right here in Massachusetts,” she said.
Last year, Stop & Shop’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, reported profits of more than $2bn.
Other unions have been supporting the Stop & Shop workers. The Teamsters Council 10, for example, is cutting off supplies like produce and perishables and stopping trash pick-up.
At the weekend, as the strikers attracted support from among others Senator Elizabeth Warren and former vice-president Joe Biden, the two sides restarted efforts to find a compromise over healthcare, wages and pensions.
Many stores opened on Friday with severely reduced staff and management working registers. In parking lots at the 240 stores affected, longtime customers refused to cross picket lines. At one location in Somerville, Massachusetts, a staffing agency brought in temporary workers to cover missed shifts, much to the chagrin of strikers.
In a video circulated on Facebook, Tyrone Housey, president of UFCW Local 1459 in Springfield, Massachusetts, encouraged union members to ask shoppers not to do business with the company until the strike ends.
The strikers come from all roles, from cashiers to bakers, butchers and deli employees. Their three-year contract expired on 23 February. Several local chapters of the union voted to strike. A Stop & Shop spokeswoman, Jennifer Brogan, said the company had been trying to negotiate.
“Throughout negotiations, Stop & Shop continuously has been available to bargain, every day, for nearly three months,” she said. “The company’s current offer is substantially enhanced, better for associates than most recent UFCW contract settlements, provides overall pay and benefits that are better than what most of our competitors provide, and represents improvements for our associates.”
For Paul Tritto, 59, the strike is about providing the best care for his autistic grandson. An 18-year employee, now a meat manager, Tritto drives more than 40 miles across state lines for his job, in order to support the 16-year-old and his own wife, who is retired and handicapped.
“We were actually in the process of getting him on my health insurance,” Tritto told the Guardian, adding that the proposal the company is pushing would drastically increase his monthly contributions.
“For a family plan right now,” he said, “the deductible is $2,500. With what they’re pushing, it will go up to $5,000.” He and his wife would pay more than $300 a month for coverage, he said, not factoring in additional care and adding his grandson to the mix.
Management is also axing overtime pay on holidays and Sundays, which would mean Tritto would make $20 an hour on Sundays, instead of $30.
“I’d be forced to take a part-time job,” he said. “And that takes more time away from my grandson Seth and wife, who can’t drive.”
The latest proposal from Stop & Shop includes pay increases for associates and an increase of $2 to $4 on health insurance premiums. The pay increase is 50 cents an hour. According to the union, it would not offset higher healthcare costs.
The UFCW national spokeswoman, Erikka Knuti, told the Guardian the average full-time employee would pay $900 in weekly health premiums over three years. Part-timers would pay $600.
Monday is day five of a strike workers think could be successful. Kristen Johnson, a 34-year-old deli manager at a store near McGrath Highway in Massachusetts, said the location usually had about $100,000 in sales on an average Saturday.
“They’ll be lucky if they make $10,000,” she said, describing customers who have joined strikers, delivered pizza and shared coffee. Despite the cuts proposed by the company, Johnson said she was not considering a move.
“We love what we do,” she said, “or else we wouldn’t be here. We love our customers. They’re like our second family. I’m in it for the long haul.”
Johnson said strikers “loved it” when Warren, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, joined them on the picket line on Friday and urged her audience to not cross it.
“This is a company that made $2bn in profits, that then got a fancy tax break in Washington from the Republicans and now wants to squeeze our workers right here in Massachusetts,” she said.
Last year, Stop & Shop’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, reported profits of more than $2bn.
Other unions have been supporting the Stop & Shop workers. The Teamsters Council 10, for example, is cutting off supplies like produce and perishables and stopping trash pick-up.
CIRCA 1870: A CARTOON SATIRISING THE SWEATSHOPS OF THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY. ORIGINAL ARTIST: BY JOHN LEECH FROM PUNCH MAGAZINE. (PHOTO BY RISCHGITZ/GETTY IMAGES)
US union seeks $100m in largest wage theft case involving federal contractor
Labor department is reviewing several complaints against General Dynamics, which operates call centers across the Us
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Thu 4 Apr 2019 03.00 EDT
An American union is seeking to win more than $100m in back wages from a private call center firm in a move that, if successful, would win the largest wage theft case involving federal contractors in history.
The Department of Labor is currently reviewing several complaints filed by the Communications Workers of America against the federal contractor General Dynamics, a company that operated several call centers across the US under federal contracts.
The CWA estimates thousands of current and former workers at the company stand to receive back pay dating from 2013 – and the case has energized a move to unionize the firm’s workforce. Wage theft is defined as not paying workers the compensation they deserve through things like unpaid overtime or mis-classifying workers.
General Dynamics was acquired in November 2018 by Virginia-based federal contractor Maximus in a $400m deal. Employees argue the working conditions under Maximus haven’t changed since the acquisition, and are pushing to form a union to improve wages, benefits and the work environment.
“Absolutely nothing has changed but the name,” said Railonnie Brooks, a trainer at a Maximus call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi that focuses on providing customer service for medicare recipients and the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
She has worked at the call center since it opened in October 2013, from when General Dynamics operated it through the acquisition by Maximus. About 2,000 workers are employed at the call center.
“We are not paid what we’re worth,” added Brooks, who noted base employees at the call center make just $10.35 an hour.
Things are not much better further up the management chain, workers say. Tiandra Robinson has also worked at the Maximus call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as an instructor since it opened under General Dynamics in 2013. “Right off the bat, things started to go downhill. My position was reclassified and I ended up making $16.83 an hour and that is the wage I have remained at since 2013,” said Robinson.
She referred to the work conditions at her call center as “deplorable” and cited examples of bed bug infestations in her instruction classrooms.
At Maximus’s call center in Bogalusa, Louisiana, workers who focus on responding to queries about government healthcare services, explained their work environment and restrooms are not kept clean or properly stocked and maintained.
Sylvia Walker has worked at the Bogalusa call center since 2013, and has been reprimanded by management for distributing union flyers in the parking lot.
“I want to be able to organize, not be criticized, not be antagonized or made to feel like someone is watching me. As long as I do my job, in the parking lot I should be able to say whatever I want about the union,” said Walker. “I believe if I give you my best on the job, and I come every day to give my best, you can compensate me with a decent wage. I should not have to go without basic necessities.”
On 20 March 2019, workers attended Maximus’ shareholder meeting in Reston, Virginia, to voice their concerns over how call center workers are treated and to push the company to allow workers to organize a union without intimidation and interference.
“The deck is really stacked against workers because employers have fairly free rein to conduct an anti-union campaign that can be very intimidating for workers and that’s what we’ve seen at General Dynamics and Maximus,” said Alex Van Schaick, an attorney at the Communications Workers of America.
The basis of the complaints revolve around how workers are classified, with the CWA arguing the call center workers are misclassified in lower-paying job titles, given the responsibilities and complexities their jobs entail. Under the law, minimum prevailing wages are set for federal contractors based on location and job duties.
An October 2018 report published by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University found properly classifying Maximus call center workers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, would inject $9.7m annually in the local community through wage increases, and help create nearly 200 jobs over the next four years.
“Call center workers need fairly reclassified jobs, as well as a real freedom to form unions and negotiate higher pay,” said Dr Patrick Dixon, research analyst at the Kalmanovitz Initiative who authored the report. “Our research shows that these steps would raise area families out of poverty and tackle historical racial and gender pay inequities.”
The Department of Labor declined to comment on the wage theft complaints still in litigation.
A spokesperson for Maximus told the Guardian in an email: “We comply with all wage rates and employee classifications as established by the [Department of Labor]. We are proud of the fact that we provide employees with fair treatment, personal dignity and respect, good working conditions, competitive wages and an excellent benefits package, in addition to opportunities for career advancement.”
The Department of Labor is currently reviewing several complaints filed by the Communications Workers of America against the federal contractor General Dynamics, a company that operated several call centers across the US under federal contracts.
The CWA estimates thousands of current and former workers at the company stand to receive back pay dating from 2013 – and the case has energized a move to unionize the firm’s workforce. Wage theft is defined as not paying workers the compensation they deserve through things like unpaid overtime or mis-classifying workers.
General Dynamics was acquired in November 2018 by Virginia-based federal contractor Maximus in a $400m deal. Employees argue the working conditions under Maximus haven’t changed since the acquisition, and are pushing to form a union to improve wages, benefits and the work environment.
“Absolutely nothing has changed but the name,” said Railonnie Brooks, a trainer at a Maximus call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi that focuses on providing customer service for medicare recipients and the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
She has worked at the call center since it opened in October 2013, from when General Dynamics operated it through the acquisition by Maximus. About 2,000 workers are employed at the call center.
“We are not paid what we’re worth,” added Brooks, who noted base employees at the call center make just $10.35 an hour.
Things are not much better further up the management chain, workers say. Tiandra Robinson has also worked at the Maximus call center in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as an instructor since it opened under General Dynamics in 2013. “Right off the bat, things started to go downhill. My position was reclassified and I ended up making $16.83 an hour and that is the wage I have remained at since 2013,” said Robinson.
She referred to the work conditions at her call center as “deplorable” and cited examples of bed bug infestations in her instruction classrooms.
At Maximus’s call center in Bogalusa, Louisiana, workers who focus on responding to queries about government healthcare services, explained their work environment and restrooms are not kept clean or properly stocked and maintained.
Sylvia Walker has worked at the Bogalusa call center since 2013, and has been reprimanded by management for distributing union flyers in the parking lot.
“I want to be able to organize, not be criticized, not be antagonized or made to feel like someone is watching me. As long as I do my job, in the parking lot I should be able to say whatever I want about the union,” said Walker. “I believe if I give you my best on the job, and I come every day to give my best, you can compensate me with a decent wage. I should not have to go without basic necessities.”
On 20 March 2019, workers attended Maximus’ shareholder meeting in Reston, Virginia, to voice their concerns over how call center workers are treated and to push the company to allow workers to organize a union without intimidation and interference.
“The deck is really stacked against workers because employers have fairly free rein to conduct an anti-union campaign that can be very intimidating for workers and that’s what we’ve seen at General Dynamics and Maximus,” said Alex Van Schaick, an attorney at the Communications Workers of America.
The basis of the complaints revolve around how workers are classified, with the CWA arguing the call center workers are misclassified in lower-paying job titles, given the responsibilities and complexities their jobs entail. Under the law, minimum prevailing wages are set for federal contractors based on location and job duties.
An October 2018 report published by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University found properly classifying Maximus call center workers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, would inject $9.7m annually in the local community through wage increases, and help create nearly 200 jobs over the next four years.
“Call center workers need fairly reclassified jobs, as well as a real freedom to form unions and negotiate higher pay,” said Dr Patrick Dixon, research analyst at the Kalmanovitz Initiative who authored the report. “Our research shows that these steps would raise area families out of poverty and tackle historical racial and gender pay inequities.”
The Department of Labor declined to comment on the wage theft complaints still in litigation.
A spokesperson for Maximus told the Guardian in an email: “We comply with all wage rates and employee classifications as established by the [Department of Labor]. We are proud of the fact that we provide employees with fair treatment, personal dignity and respect, good working conditions, competitive wages and an excellent benefits package, in addition to opportunities for career advancement.”
Harley Davidson workers in Wisconsin reject new labor contract
by Rajesh Kumar Singh - Reuters - raw story
02 APR 2019 AT 15:43 ET
Harley-Davidson Inc’s workers in Milwaukee and Tomahawk, Wisconsin, have rejected the motorcycle maker’s proposal for a five-year contract, their union said on Tuesday, citing non-financial issues such as temporary workers and job security.
The current contract was set to expire on April 1. But Harley and the United Steelworkers (USW) union, which represents more than 1,000 hourly employees at the two facilities, said they had agreed to extend the contract through April 14.
The union is pressing the Milwaukee-based company to address issues related to temporary workers, job security, scheduling, and seniority and temporary workers rights.
A USW official told Reuters the union wants to protect full-time workers from layoffs. While it is asking for a roadmap that would allow temporary workers to become full time workers, it is opposed to the company using temporary workers to pull work away from full-time employees.
Harley did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the non-financial issues.
In a statement earlier, the company said it was disappointed with the union’s decision to reject a “competitive” offer. The company, however, said production would continue as usual at all of its facilities.
Under the proposed agreement, Harley’s employees would have received a 14 percent wage increase during the contract period as well as a $2,250 signing bonus.
The proposal also included no changes to healthcare and significant pension enhancements for current employees, along with a retirement incentive for those eligible to retire, Harley said.
The average wage for current, regular full-time employees under the first year of the agreement was proposed to be over $25 an hour in Tomahawk and over $33 per hour in the Milwaukee area.
The statement did not quantify the financial impact of the proposal for a company that has been struggling to revive demand in the United States, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of total bike sales.
Adding to its troubles, it is estimated that a tariff war waged by U.S. President Donald Trump will cost the company between $100 million and $120 million in 2019 and contribute to a 6-percentage-point drop in operating margins in the quarter that just ended.
To avoid fallout from the tariff war, Harley is spending $15 million to expand a facility in Thailand to serve European markets.
A decision to shift production out of the United States for European markets was announced last summer after the EU slapped tariffs on U.S. imports in response to Trump’s duties on steel and aluminum imports from the trading bloc.
Trump had blasted Harley’s decision and publicly backed a boycott of the company.
The current contract was set to expire on April 1. But Harley and the United Steelworkers (USW) union, which represents more than 1,000 hourly employees at the two facilities, said they had agreed to extend the contract through April 14.
The union is pressing the Milwaukee-based company to address issues related to temporary workers, job security, scheduling, and seniority and temporary workers rights.
A USW official told Reuters the union wants to protect full-time workers from layoffs. While it is asking for a roadmap that would allow temporary workers to become full time workers, it is opposed to the company using temporary workers to pull work away from full-time employees.
Harley did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the non-financial issues.
In a statement earlier, the company said it was disappointed with the union’s decision to reject a “competitive” offer. The company, however, said production would continue as usual at all of its facilities.
Under the proposed agreement, Harley’s employees would have received a 14 percent wage increase during the contract period as well as a $2,250 signing bonus.
The proposal also included no changes to healthcare and significant pension enhancements for current employees, along with a retirement incentive for those eligible to retire, Harley said.
The average wage for current, regular full-time employees under the first year of the agreement was proposed to be over $25 an hour in Tomahawk and over $33 per hour in the Milwaukee area.
The statement did not quantify the financial impact of the proposal for a company that has been struggling to revive demand in the United States, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of total bike sales.
Adding to its troubles, it is estimated that a tariff war waged by U.S. President Donald Trump will cost the company between $100 million and $120 million in 2019 and contribute to a 6-percentage-point drop in operating margins in the quarter that just ended.
To avoid fallout from the tariff war, Harley is spending $15 million to expand a facility in Thailand to serve European markets.
A decision to shift production out of the United States for European markets was announced last summer after the EU slapped tariffs on U.S. imports in response to Trump’s duties on steel and aluminum imports from the trading bloc.
Trump had blasted Harley’s decision and publicly backed a boycott of the company.
funnies
