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Slavery 21st Century
You thought it was over, think again
apr 24, 2018
Slavery did not end it was merely outsourced,
reconfigured, and made politically correct
headlines and issues
*AT&T's union says company has been slashing jobs since 'tax cuts promise,' ready to strike(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Columbia grad students protest university’s efforts to block unionization
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Immigrants allegedly forced to work in detention centers for $1 a day
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How the American economy conspires to keep wages down
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Pay gap worsened for women under 40 over last two years, US study finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Massive Minimum Wage Study Finds Significant Gains for Low-Income Workers and Few Downsides(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UNIONS SQUEEZE COMPANIES TO DIVULGE PLANS FOR TAX BILL WINDFALL
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PUBLIC WORKERS WORRIED THAT TENNESSEE’S BILLIONAIRE GOVERNOR IS TAKING ANOTHER RUN AT THEM(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘At least you make more than the intern’: Asian woman sues Intel over pay
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fairer schedules are good for workers—and can boost profits, new study shows
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A Sick New Game from the Executive Suite
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Jim Hightower: Corporations Use This Cheap Trick to Avoid Paying Employees a Living Wage
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Minor League Baseball Players Make Poverty-Level Wages. Congress Wants to Keep It That Way.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Inside IBM’s Purge of Thousands of Workers Who Have One Thing in Common
(excerpt below)
funnies(at the end)
From Daily Kos: Tell me again about how the gender wage gap is because women leave the workforce to stay home with the kids, or whatever the excuse du jour is:
Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience. While young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88, or $2.99 less than men. This gap of $2.99 per hour is particularly striking as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4 percent) than young men (14.9 percent). This difference would translate to an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers.
And the gap has widened since 2000. Read More
Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience. While young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88, or $2.99 less than men. This gap of $2.99 per hour is particularly striking as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4 percent) than young men (14.9 percent). This difference would translate to an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers.
And the gap has widened since 2000. Read More
AT&T's union says company has been slashing jobs since 'tax cuts promise,' ready to strike
Walter Einenkel
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday April 24, 2018 · 3:00 PM PDT
Remember how AT&T stood on top of a mountain to tell everybody how they were investing their big tax breaks back into building better infrastructure, raising workers’ wages, and creating more jobs? Yeah, I remember too. It was such a glorious day for America. Sure most of us knew that AT&T’s track record for telling the truth was about as good as our current president’s track record for telling the truth—but who doesn’t love good-sounding news! U S A! Of course it turned out that the big bonuses AT&T was touting were the result of AT&T workers’ union negotiating those bumps in wages weeks before the Republican Party gave the richest in our country a welfare check.
In December, AT&T issued $1,000 bonuses to more than 200,000 employees after the tax reform bill's passage. The company also promised to increase investment in the U.S. and, the union charges, implied hiring increases.
However, the union says over the past seven years, AT&T has laid off 16,000 call center workers nationwide, while closing 44 call centers, according to a CWA report out today — an early copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY. Many of those jobs have been outsourced to call centers in countries including Canada, Colombia and El Salvador, the union says, and it continued that trend in December.
This comes after the workers’ union sued AT&T in January for “massive layoffs.” AT&T’s rebuttal is that they’ve been hiring tens of thousands of people during that time. But the union charges that the jobs cuts that are occurring unfairly hurt long-time employees, in favor of outsourced and contracted labor. "The outsourcing has created a sense of insecurity for folks," said Linda Hinton, CWA's AT&T Midwest vice president.
"(AT&T CEO) Randall Stephenson has said on several occasions he was committed to raising wages and creating good-paying jobs," she said. "We are trying to hold his feet to the fire on this. This is what you said and this is what we expect."
The union’s members have authorized a strike if negotiations with the company, since the current contract ended on April 14, does not bear fruit.
In December, AT&T issued $1,000 bonuses to more than 200,000 employees after the tax reform bill's passage. The company also promised to increase investment in the U.S. and, the union charges, implied hiring increases.
However, the union says over the past seven years, AT&T has laid off 16,000 call center workers nationwide, while closing 44 call centers, according to a CWA report out today — an early copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY. Many of those jobs have been outsourced to call centers in countries including Canada, Colombia and El Salvador, the union says, and it continued that trend in December.
This comes after the workers’ union sued AT&T in January for “massive layoffs.” AT&T’s rebuttal is that they’ve been hiring tens of thousands of people during that time. But the union charges that the jobs cuts that are occurring unfairly hurt long-time employees, in favor of outsourced and contracted labor. "The outsourcing has created a sense of insecurity for folks," said Linda Hinton, CWA's AT&T Midwest vice president.
"(AT&T CEO) Randall Stephenson has said on several occasions he was committed to raising wages and creating good-paying jobs," she said. "We are trying to hold his feet to the fire on this. This is what you said and this is what we expect."
The union’s members have authorized a strike if negotiations with the company, since the current contract ended on April 14, does not bear fruit.
university was built with slave labor, why stop now???
Columbia grad students protest university’s efforts to block unionization
Graduate teaching assistants have taken on heavier workloads, but their pay rarely rises to the level of a living wage.
ELHAM KHATAMI - think progress
APR 24, 2018, 1:42 PM
HUNDREDS OF COLUMBIA STUDENTS PROTEST THE UNIVERSITY'S EFFORTS TO BLOCK UNIONIZATION. (CREDIT: SCREENSHOT/TWITTER, @JORGEMLG)
More than a year after graduate students at Columbia University voted to unionize with the United Automobile Workers, hundreds of students participated in a walkout Tuesday to protest the university’s refusal to bargain with them.
The students plan to stage a week-long strike during what is the university’s most hectic time, when students and professors are preparing for finals and the help of graduate teaching assistants, fellows, and research assistants is critical.
They claim that the university has “repeatedly ignored” the majority support among graduate students for the Graduate Workers of Columbia University-United Automobile Workers (GWC-UAW). This, despite the fact that efforts to unionize have been ongoing for more than three years.
The conflict between the university and its students regarding unionization is rooted in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not graduate students are university employees — students argue that they are, and the university contends that they’re not.
The distinction is not merely an issue of semantics, but one of rights, better wages, and improved working conditions. According to a January 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute, graduate teaching assistants have taken on heavier workloads, have more responsibility when it comes to teaching and grading, and assume much of the research that ends up winning the universities grants and prestige.
“And yet the pay they receive rarely rises to the level of a living wage,” the report stated.
The EPI report found that between 2005 and 2015, the rise in graduate assistant and non-tenure-track faculty jobs surpassed that of tenured and tenure-track jobs, with the former currently making up approximately 73 percent of the academic workforce.
“The simple explanation for this increasing reliance on graduate and non-tenure-track faculty is that they are far less costly to employ,” the report reads.
In a statement last week, Columbia University provost John H. Coatsworth said “we believe it would not serve the best interests of our academic mission—or of students themselves—for our student teaching and research assistants to engage with the University as employees rather than students.”
Coatsworth noted that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has “repeatedly reversed itself on the status of teaching and research assistants over the past 15 years,” and called for a judicial review of the “still-unsettled question.” The most recent decision came in 2016, when the NLRB ruled that student teaching and research assistants at private universities are employees with the right to form a union. That ruling is expected to be reversed again under the current Trump administration.
Other universities across the country, including Harvard University and the University of Chicago, have also recently taken steps toward unionization. Harvard graduate students voted to unionize with UAW last week.
“This growing momentum makes clear that Columbia’s efforts to block our democratic rights here on our campus cannot hold back the rising tide of academic workers seeking to improve our conditions and make our universities more just and inclusive for all,” a statement posted on the GWC website on Monday reads. “Columbia administration needs to get on the right of history and negotiate with our union.”
The students plan to stage a week-long strike during what is the university’s most hectic time, when students and professors are preparing for finals and the help of graduate teaching assistants, fellows, and research assistants is critical.
They claim that the university has “repeatedly ignored” the majority support among graduate students for the Graduate Workers of Columbia University-United Automobile Workers (GWC-UAW). This, despite the fact that efforts to unionize have been ongoing for more than three years.
The conflict between the university and its students regarding unionization is rooted in a fundamental disagreement about whether or not graduate students are university employees — students argue that they are, and the university contends that they’re not.
The distinction is not merely an issue of semantics, but one of rights, better wages, and improved working conditions. According to a January 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute, graduate teaching assistants have taken on heavier workloads, have more responsibility when it comes to teaching and grading, and assume much of the research that ends up winning the universities grants and prestige.
“And yet the pay they receive rarely rises to the level of a living wage,” the report stated.
The EPI report found that between 2005 and 2015, the rise in graduate assistant and non-tenure-track faculty jobs surpassed that of tenured and tenure-track jobs, with the former currently making up approximately 73 percent of the academic workforce.
“The simple explanation for this increasing reliance on graduate and non-tenure-track faculty is that they are far less costly to employ,” the report reads.
In a statement last week, Columbia University provost John H. Coatsworth said “we believe it would not serve the best interests of our academic mission—or of students themselves—for our student teaching and research assistants to engage with the University as employees rather than students.”
Coatsworth noted that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has “repeatedly reversed itself on the status of teaching and research assistants over the past 15 years,” and called for a judicial review of the “still-unsettled question.” The most recent decision came in 2016, when the NLRB ruled that student teaching and research assistants at private universities are employees with the right to form a union. That ruling is expected to be reversed again under the current Trump administration.
Other universities across the country, including Harvard University and the University of Chicago, have also recently taken steps toward unionization. Harvard graduate students voted to unionize with UAW last week.
“This growing momentum makes clear that Columbia’s efforts to block our democratic rights here on our campus cannot hold back the rising tide of academic workers seeking to improve our conditions and make our universities more just and inclusive for all,” a statement posted on the GWC website on Monday reads. “Columbia administration needs to get on the right of history and negotiate with our union.”
Immigrants allegedly forced to work in detention centers for $1 a day
"Under these circumstances, no labor is voluntary – it is forced."
ESTHER YU HSI LEE - think progress
APR 17, 2018, 11:32 AM
Detainees held at a privately-operated immigration detention center in Georgia are forced to work at the facility for pitiful pay and are threatened with serious harm if they refuse to “volunteer” to work, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday against the private prison operator CoreCivic.
According to the lawsuit filed on behalf of current and formerly detained immigrants, the CoreCivic-operated Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin solicits “volunteers,” or immigrants detainees, to “mop, sweep, and wax floors; scrub toilets and showers; wash dishes; do laundry, clean medical facilities; and cook and prepare food and beverages” for the nearly 2,000-detainee population. Detainees are then paid between $1 and $4 per day and occasionally slightly more for double shifts. The lawsuit states that immigrant detainees reportedly do not have a choice to refuse because the facility has a “policy of threatening detained immigrants until they comply.”
“CoreCivic then threatens detained immigrants who refuse to work with serious harm, including the deprivation of privacy and safety in open living quarters, referral for criminal prosecution, and, ultimately, the sensory and psychological deprivation of their humanity resulting from solitary confinement,” the lawsuit charged. “Under these circumstances, no labor is voluntary – it is forced.”
The class action plaintiffs include two current and one former kitchen workers who work as part of the “Voluntary Work Program” at Stewart where they are usually paid between $1 and $4 per day and can be paid as much as $8 per day when they work more than 12 hours a day.
The lawsuit — which was filed by Project South, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Law Office of R. Andrew Free, and Burns Charest LLP — was intended to end the operator’s “forced labor scheme and remedy the unjust enrichment resulting from CoreCivic’s illegal labor practices.”
“The prison corporation CoreCivic is exploiting the labor of detained immigrants to enrich itself–last year its revenues were nearly $1.8 billion. It must be stopped,” Azadeh N. Shahshahani, the Legal & Advocacy Director at the Atlanta-based advocacy group Project South, told ThinkProgress in an email Tuesday.
The Stewart Detention Center has an Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) to detain immigrants on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Advocates have long argued that immigration violations are civil violations and many immigrants do not have criminal histories. But immigrant detainees are often held in “prison-like” conditions and under “punitive circumstances inappropriate for immigration detention’s noncriminal purposes” at detention centers like Stewart across the country.
Despite the poor conditions, the immigration detention system has expanded at a rapid clip over the past two decades from 5,532 detention beds in 1994 to over 41,000 beds. At the same time, CoreCivic and other private prison operators like the GEO Group have become major beneficiaries of immigration enforcement, spending millions of dollars to lobby lawmakers and get more contracts to detain immigrants. Currently, more than 60 percent of all ICE immigration detention beds are operated by these private prison operators, the advocacy group Grassroots Leadership previously found, with nine out of the ten largest ICE detention centers owned by for-profit prison operators.
Private prison operators have continued to expand their reach into immigration detention at dizzying speed. Under the Trump administration, private prison operators have seen their revenue growth on an upward trajectory, with ICE looking to build detention facilities in Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and Salt Lake City areas. During an earnings call in February, GEO Group officials touted the development of a 1,000-bed ICE processing center in Houston under a “new 10-year contract” among other proposals accepted by the federal immigration agency. And earlier this year, a leaked memo revealed the Trump administration ordered transferring more inmates from government-run facilities to privately-owned facilities.
Yet even as private prison operators like CoreCivic and GEO Group expand, advocates have argued that facility conditions have not improved in kind. At least 14 detainees in custody have “passed away” after President Donald Trump took office in November 2016. Just at the Stewart Detention Center earlier this year, a Cuban immigrant slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness after he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He was the third immigrant to die at a Georgia-based immigration detention center in less than a year, Shahshahani told ThinkProgress in January.
Last week at another privately-operated facility in Texas, Gourgen Mirimanian, an Armenian immigrant who had been in the country since 1994, died at a Texas hospital after he entered ICE custody at the Prairieland Detention Center (PDC) in February. PDC staff found him unresponsive in his bunk before he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. According to the ICE agency, he was the fourth immigrant detainee to die in the 2018 fiscal year.
According to the lawsuit filed on behalf of current and formerly detained immigrants, the CoreCivic-operated Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin solicits “volunteers,” or immigrants detainees, to “mop, sweep, and wax floors; scrub toilets and showers; wash dishes; do laundry, clean medical facilities; and cook and prepare food and beverages” for the nearly 2,000-detainee population. Detainees are then paid between $1 and $4 per day and occasionally slightly more for double shifts. The lawsuit states that immigrant detainees reportedly do not have a choice to refuse because the facility has a “policy of threatening detained immigrants until they comply.”
“CoreCivic then threatens detained immigrants who refuse to work with serious harm, including the deprivation of privacy and safety in open living quarters, referral for criminal prosecution, and, ultimately, the sensory and psychological deprivation of their humanity resulting from solitary confinement,” the lawsuit charged. “Under these circumstances, no labor is voluntary – it is forced.”
The class action plaintiffs include two current and one former kitchen workers who work as part of the “Voluntary Work Program” at Stewart where they are usually paid between $1 and $4 per day and can be paid as much as $8 per day when they work more than 12 hours a day.
The lawsuit — which was filed by Project South, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Law Office of R. Andrew Free, and Burns Charest LLP — was intended to end the operator’s “forced labor scheme and remedy the unjust enrichment resulting from CoreCivic’s illegal labor practices.”
“The prison corporation CoreCivic is exploiting the labor of detained immigrants to enrich itself–last year its revenues were nearly $1.8 billion. It must be stopped,” Azadeh N. Shahshahani, the Legal & Advocacy Director at the Atlanta-based advocacy group Project South, told ThinkProgress in an email Tuesday.
The Stewart Detention Center has an Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) to detain immigrants on behalf of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Advocates have long argued that immigration violations are civil violations and many immigrants do not have criminal histories. But immigrant detainees are often held in “prison-like” conditions and under “punitive circumstances inappropriate for immigration detention’s noncriminal purposes” at detention centers like Stewart across the country.
Despite the poor conditions, the immigration detention system has expanded at a rapid clip over the past two decades from 5,532 detention beds in 1994 to over 41,000 beds. At the same time, CoreCivic and other private prison operators like the GEO Group have become major beneficiaries of immigration enforcement, spending millions of dollars to lobby lawmakers and get more contracts to detain immigrants. Currently, more than 60 percent of all ICE immigration detention beds are operated by these private prison operators, the advocacy group Grassroots Leadership previously found, with nine out of the ten largest ICE detention centers owned by for-profit prison operators.
Private prison operators have continued to expand their reach into immigration detention at dizzying speed. Under the Trump administration, private prison operators have seen their revenue growth on an upward trajectory, with ICE looking to build detention facilities in Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and Salt Lake City areas. During an earnings call in February, GEO Group officials touted the development of a 1,000-bed ICE processing center in Houston under a “new 10-year contract” among other proposals accepted by the federal immigration agency. And earlier this year, a leaked memo revealed the Trump administration ordered transferring more inmates from government-run facilities to privately-owned facilities.
Yet even as private prison operators like CoreCivic and GEO Group expand, advocates have argued that facility conditions have not improved in kind. At least 14 detainees in custody have “passed away” after President Donald Trump took office in November 2016. Just at the Stewart Detention Center earlier this year, a Cuban immigrant slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness after he was diagnosed with pneumonia. He was the third immigrant to die at a Georgia-based immigration detention center in less than a year, Shahshahani told ThinkProgress in January.
Last week at another privately-operated facility in Texas, Gourgen Mirimanian, an Armenian immigrant who had been in the country since 1994, died at a Texas hospital after he entered ICE custody at the Prairieland Detention Center (PDC) in February. PDC staff found him unresponsive in his bunk before he was transported to the hospital where he was pronounced dead. According to the ICE agency, he was the fourth immigrant detainee to die in the 2018 fiscal year.
Undercover author finds Amazon warehouse workers in UK 'peed in bottles' over fears of being punished for taking a break
Shona Ghosh - business insider
4/16/18
- An undercover author told The Sun that workers at an Amazon warehouse in the UK "peed in bottles" because they were scared walking to a bathroom would cause them to miss targets.
- The author, James Bloodworth, found that staff members feared being disciplined for "idle time."
- A separate survey of Amazon workers released Monday found that some workers who reported feeling sick — even through pregnancy — said they were penalized for not turning up or taking breaks.
- Amazon said it didn't recognize the allegations as an accurate portrayal of its warehouse working conditions.
- The company disputed the survey findings and said it didn't time toilet breaks.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos may be the world's richest person, with a net worth of about $112 billion (£78 billion), but at least some of those working on his warehouse floors are apparently so desperate to keep their jobs that they don't even take time to use a restroom.
The author James Bloodworth went undercover at an Amazon warehouse in Staffordshire, UK, for a book on low wages in Britain. He found that the warehouse's fulfillment workers, who run around Amazon's massive warehouses gathering products for delivery, had a "toilet bottle" system in place because the bathrooms were too sparse to get to quickly.
"For those of us who worked on the top floor, the closest toilets were down four flights of stairs,"Bloodworth told The Sun. "People just peed in bottles because they lived in fear of being disciplined over 'idle time' and losing their jobs just because they needed the loo."
Amazon is known to track how fast its warehouse workers can pick and package items from its shelves, imposing strictly timed breaks and targets. It issues warning points for those who don't meet its goals or who take extended breaks.
A separate survey found almost three-quarters of UK fulfillment-center staff members were afraid of using the toilet because of time concerns. A report released Monday with the survey's findings said 241 Amazon warehouse employees in England were interviewed.
The survey anonymously quoted one person as saying targets had "increased dramatically" and "I do not drink water because I do not have time to go to the toilet."
Another said: "The target grows every year. I do not have two more legs yet to make the 100% to pick, where you actually need to run and go to the toilet just during the break. Packing 120 products per hour is terribly heavy.
"You have to pack two products per minute. You do not have time to drink water because you go to the toilet after every evening sends messages to the scanner with the target and tells you to hurry."
The survey, compiled by the worker campaign platform Organise, also found that respondents said they felt considerably more anxious after joining Amazon.
Workers say they have been punished for being sick
Another employee said she was ill while pregnant and was still given a warning.
And yet another said: "I turned up for my shift even though I felt like s---, managed 2 hours then I just could not do anymore. Told my supervisor and was signed off sick, I had a gastric bug (sickness and diarrhoea, very bad) saw my doc. Got a sick note with an explanation, but still got a strike."
Amazon disputed the allegations. The company said in a statement to Business Insider:
"Amazon provides a safe and positive workplace for thousands of people across the UK with competitive pay and benefits from day one. We have not been provided with confirmation that the people who completed the survey worked at Amazon and we don't recognize these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings.
"We have a focus on ensuring we provide a great environment for all our employees and last month Amazon was named by LinkedIn as the 7th most sought after place to work in the UK and ranked first place in the US. Amazon also offers public tours of its fulfillment centres so customers can see first-hand what happens after they click 'buy' on Amazon."
Amazon said it didn't time workers' toilet breaks and set its performance targets based on previous worker performance. The company said it provided coaching to help people improve and used "proper discretion" when it came to sick leave and absences from work.
The company also said it provided on-site occupational health and physiotherapy support as well as legal, financial, and workplace guidance.
opinion
How the American economy conspires to keep wages down
Gabriel Winant - the guardian
Fri 13 Apr 2018 06.00 EDT
When unemployment goes down, wages are supposed to go up. That’s just supply and demand. Quite puzzlingly, though, this mechanism seems not to be working today. Unemployment stands at a modest 4%, but paychecks aren’t growing. Although today’s is the best-educated workforce in history, employers just insist that workers need more training.
In other words, they’re gaslighting us. Meanwhile, over decades, employers have built and maintained a massive collective political apparatus to hold down wages. To call it a conspiracy would be only slight embellishment.
The symptoms of the problem are not hard to miss. In February, for example, the American economy posted its biggest one-month jobs gain in a couple years, but wage growth stayed stalled out. For months, economists and financial journalists have been puzzling over the question, as Bloomberg put it, of “why the economy grows but your paycheck doesn’t”.
Economists will tell you that wages generally increase with productivity – that you’re paid in line with the value of what you do. This was credible from the end of the second world war to the 1970s, when productivity and hourly wages rose almost perfectly in sync. But according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, from the early 1970s to 2016 productivity went up 73.7%, and wages only 12.3%.
Similarly, there used to be a positive relationship between stock prices and wage increases. But some initial signs of wage growth in February sent the market spiraling over inflation fears – until it became clear that the reported wage gains were all concentrated among top earners. Then everyone calmed down and stopped selling.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve just announced that it’s taking the next step in its plan to raise interest rates. This will suppress wages to prevent inflation, although inflation is minuscule and wages aren’t showing signs of life.
Another apparent culprit is what’s called “monopsony”. Monopoly occurs when sellers are so concentrated that they don’t really have to compete. Monopsony is when the buyers – in this case, employers – are concentrated.
A recent paper from the Roosevelt Institute found that the average level of concentration in labor markets is 45% higher than the threshold for “highly concentrated” markets used by antitrust regulators. If the government went after employer monopsony the way it does other kinds of markets, regulators might have their hands quite full.
What’s worse, as Alan Krueger and Eric Posner pointed out in the New York Times recently, one in five workers with a high school degree or less is subject to a non-compete clause – a tool for employers to push wages down by forbidding workers from getting jobs with their competitors.
Many major franchises also forbid their franchisees from hiring workers away from each other. So a McDonald’s on this corner isn’t allowed to hire away workers from the McDonald’s on the other corner by offering 25 cents more. (Such rules were a classic tool of white landlords in the Jim Crow South to keep down the pay of black sharecroppers.)
And even employers that don’t have such a commanding position can still hire workers through contractors who do. Temp agencies, for example, can function like bottlenecks, forcing workers into monopsonistic labor market conditions on behalf of smaller, less powerful employers.
We tend to think of employment as a market interaction: supply and demand meet to set a price, and that’s the wage you get paid. But work is much more than this. When you buy bread, there’s no other connection between you and the baker. You take your loaf and go home. But when you sell labor in the labor market, you’re entering into an ongoing power relationship. In return for your wages, you’re supposed to submit – not once but every day. It’s not just economic. Work is intrinsically political.
Typically, we enter into economic relationships by ourselves. But political relationships quickly become collective. As we’ve seen, employers have a vast collective apparatus at their disposal: the stock market, the Fed, antitrust and employment law, just to name a few.
But, defiance can travel and become collective too. For some years, for example, unions have had success winning raises for low-wage workers politically, rather than at the bargaining table – through direct ballot initiatives, by putting pressure on Democratic politicians, and by getting new laws passed. (If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with overall income growth, it would be three times higher.)
Workers have taken heroic risks to make a point – in the fast-food industry in particular, where employer retaliation is a given. And cities and states across the country have responded by passing minimum wage hikes.
Today, the supreme court is weighing the question of the collective political power of workers. In the Janus v AFSCME case, an anti-union corporate group is seeking to take away the power of public sector unions to collect money from all workers whom they represent.
The anti-union side argues that such fees violate workers’ free speech rights by compelling them to pay for representation that’s of an essentially political nature. As Justice Anthony Kennedy argued, public sector unions will always advocate “for massive government, for increasing bonded indebtedness, for increasing taxes”. Kennedy’s point is that these aren’t just economic goals; such workplace bargaining affects public policy.
Somewhat wanly, the state of Illinois (defending the fees) argued that if unions don’t have the right to collect this money, the workplace will become unstable and conflictual. It didn’t seem like a credible threat. Then along came the West Virginia teachers’ strike and the chain reaction it ignited. The improbable outbreak, endurance, and triumph of the teachers’ strike in that state has inspired underpaid educators in Kentucky, Arizona and Oklahoma to take action for themselves.
All these are states where teachers and underpaid and fed up, and where the formal power of their unions is quite limited. But in West Virginia, the teachers figured out how to win a long-delayed raise anyway: realizing they were irreplaceable, they shut down the schools for almost two weeks, and secured a 5% pay bump – not just for themselves, but for the state’s whole public sector.
In West Virginia, the legislature had to pass a law, and the governor had to sign it, to give the teachers their raise. Oklahoma has now done the same, and passed its first tax increase in decades to fund the raise. These workers, in other words, are not just engaging in bargaining: their strikes are political in nature, and they are shaping public policy.
The political power typically enjoyed by employers is generally experienced by workers as fear: fear of harassment, favoritism and wage theft, fear of joining a union or speaking out, fear of the consequences of injury or sickness, fear of the risks of asking for a raise, and beneath these, the fundamental workplace fear – of losing your job.
The current of fear running through the workplace is one of the best ways to tell there’s something more than a market transaction happening there. But fear can go both ways. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, the irreplaceable teachers terrified Republican officials. With unemployment down, more of us are becoming irreplaceable every day. There’s leverage for workers there, but you have to be willing to scare your boss to use it.
In other words, they’re gaslighting us. Meanwhile, over decades, employers have built and maintained a massive collective political apparatus to hold down wages. To call it a conspiracy would be only slight embellishment.
The symptoms of the problem are not hard to miss. In February, for example, the American economy posted its biggest one-month jobs gain in a couple years, but wage growth stayed stalled out. For months, economists and financial journalists have been puzzling over the question, as Bloomberg put it, of “why the economy grows but your paycheck doesn’t”.
Economists will tell you that wages generally increase with productivity – that you’re paid in line with the value of what you do. This was credible from the end of the second world war to the 1970s, when productivity and hourly wages rose almost perfectly in sync. But according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, from the early 1970s to 2016 productivity went up 73.7%, and wages only 12.3%.
Similarly, there used to be a positive relationship between stock prices and wage increases. But some initial signs of wage growth in February sent the market spiraling over inflation fears – until it became clear that the reported wage gains were all concentrated among top earners. Then everyone calmed down and stopped selling.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve just announced that it’s taking the next step in its plan to raise interest rates. This will suppress wages to prevent inflation, although inflation is minuscule and wages aren’t showing signs of life.
Another apparent culprit is what’s called “monopsony”. Monopoly occurs when sellers are so concentrated that they don’t really have to compete. Monopsony is when the buyers – in this case, employers – are concentrated.
A recent paper from the Roosevelt Institute found that the average level of concentration in labor markets is 45% higher than the threshold for “highly concentrated” markets used by antitrust regulators. If the government went after employer monopsony the way it does other kinds of markets, regulators might have their hands quite full.
What’s worse, as Alan Krueger and Eric Posner pointed out in the New York Times recently, one in five workers with a high school degree or less is subject to a non-compete clause – a tool for employers to push wages down by forbidding workers from getting jobs with their competitors.
Many major franchises also forbid their franchisees from hiring workers away from each other. So a McDonald’s on this corner isn’t allowed to hire away workers from the McDonald’s on the other corner by offering 25 cents more. (Such rules were a classic tool of white landlords in the Jim Crow South to keep down the pay of black sharecroppers.)
And even employers that don’t have such a commanding position can still hire workers through contractors who do. Temp agencies, for example, can function like bottlenecks, forcing workers into monopsonistic labor market conditions on behalf of smaller, less powerful employers.
We tend to think of employment as a market interaction: supply and demand meet to set a price, and that’s the wage you get paid. But work is much more than this. When you buy bread, there’s no other connection between you and the baker. You take your loaf and go home. But when you sell labor in the labor market, you’re entering into an ongoing power relationship. In return for your wages, you’re supposed to submit – not once but every day. It’s not just economic. Work is intrinsically political.
Typically, we enter into economic relationships by ourselves. But political relationships quickly become collective. As we’ve seen, employers have a vast collective apparatus at their disposal: the stock market, the Fed, antitrust and employment law, just to name a few.
But, defiance can travel and become collective too. For some years, for example, unions have had success winning raises for low-wage workers politically, rather than at the bargaining table – through direct ballot initiatives, by putting pressure on Democratic politicians, and by getting new laws passed. (If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with overall income growth, it would be three times higher.)
Workers have taken heroic risks to make a point – in the fast-food industry in particular, where employer retaliation is a given. And cities and states across the country have responded by passing minimum wage hikes.
Today, the supreme court is weighing the question of the collective political power of workers. In the Janus v AFSCME case, an anti-union corporate group is seeking to take away the power of public sector unions to collect money from all workers whom they represent.
The anti-union side argues that such fees violate workers’ free speech rights by compelling them to pay for representation that’s of an essentially political nature. As Justice Anthony Kennedy argued, public sector unions will always advocate “for massive government, for increasing bonded indebtedness, for increasing taxes”. Kennedy’s point is that these aren’t just economic goals; such workplace bargaining affects public policy.
Somewhat wanly, the state of Illinois (defending the fees) argued that if unions don’t have the right to collect this money, the workplace will become unstable and conflictual. It didn’t seem like a credible threat. Then along came the West Virginia teachers’ strike and the chain reaction it ignited. The improbable outbreak, endurance, and triumph of the teachers’ strike in that state has inspired underpaid educators in Kentucky, Arizona and Oklahoma to take action for themselves.
All these are states where teachers and underpaid and fed up, and where the formal power of their unions is quite limited. But in West Virginia, the teachers figured out how to win a long-delayed raise anyway: realizing they were irreplaceable, they shut down the schools for almost two weeks, and secured a 5% pay bump – not just for themselves, but for the state’s whole public sector.
In West Virginia, the legislature had to pass a law, and the governor had to sign it, to give the teachers their raise. Oklahoma has now done the same, and passed its first tax increase in decades to fund the raise. These workers, in other words, are not just engaging in bargaining: their strikes are political in nature, and they are shaping public policy.
The political power typically enjoyed by employers is generally experienced by workers as fear: fear of harassment, favoritism and wage theft, fear of joining a union or speaking out, fear of the consequences of injury or sickness, fear of the risks of asking for a raise, and beneath these, the fundamental workplace fear – of losing your job.
The current of fear running through the workplace is one of the best ways to tell there’s something more than a market transaction happening there. But fear can go both ways. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, the irreplaceable teachers terrified Republican officials. With unemployment down, more of us are becoming irreplaceable every day. There’s leverage for workers there, but you have to be willing to scare your boss to use it.
Pay gap worsened for women under 40 over last two years, US study finds
Despite attention to the issue, American women earned 79 cents for every $1 a man earned in 2017, compared with 81 cents in 2015
Jessica Glenzain New York
the guardian
Tue 10 Apr 2018 08.00 EDT
The pay gap worsened for American women younger than 40 between 2015 and 2017, despite widespread attention to the issue, according to a study.
The workforce analytics company Visier said American women earned 79 cents for every $1 a man earned in 2017, compared with 81 cents in 2015.
“Employers are not making collective progress towards achieving gender pay equity,” the Visier said, in a report published on Equal Pay Day.
Visier used anonymized company data for the last three years to examine pay and performance for more than 1.5 million American workers across 60 companies. Visier said the companies represent a wide array of industries.
At the same time that the gender wage gap increased, Visier found women were more likely to outperform their male colleagues in performance ratings. In 2017, women were 21% more likely to be rated as a top performer, compared with 12% more likely in 2015.
Visier said one of the most likely causes of the gender pay disparity is the number of women in management. In 2017, 18% of men held management positions, compared with 12% of women.
“Given managers on average earn two times the salaries of non-managers, this gap contributes significantly to the overall gender wage gap,” the report said.
The report recommended companies examines their female headcount, hiring practices, performance ratings and promotion practices to help close the gap.
Since the 1960s, the pay gap has narrowed in the US, but progress in the last couple of decades has slowed.
All UK companies with more than 250 employees had to report details of the gap between the median hourly rate paid to male and female staff by midnight on Wednesday last week.
The workforce analytics company Visier said American women earned 79 cents for every $1 a man earned in 2017, compared with 81 cents in 2015.
“Employers are not making collective progress towards achieving gender pay equity,” the Visier said, in a report published on Equal Pay Day.
Visier used anonymized company data for the last three years to examine pay and performance for more than 1.5 million American workers across 60 companies. Visier said the companies represent a wide array of industries.
At the same time that the gender wage gap increased, Visier found women were more likely to outperform their male colleagues in performance ratings. In 2017, women were 21% more likely to be rated as a top performer, compared with 12% more likely in 2015.
Visier said one of the most likely causes of the gender pay disparity is the number of women in management. In 2017, 18% of men held management positions, compared with 12% of women.
“Given managers on average earn two times the salaries of non-managers, this gap contributes significantly to the overall gender wage gap,” the report said.
The report recommended companies examines their female headcount, hiring practices, performance ratings and promotion practices to help close the gap.
Since the 1960s, the pay gap has narrowed in the US, but progress in the last couple of decades has slowed.
All UK companies with more than 250 employees had to report details of the gap between the median hourly rate paid to male and female staff by midnight on Wednesday last week.
Massive Minimum Wage Study Finds Significant Gains for Low-Income Workers and Few Downsides
This research builds on previous studies that have chipped away at opposition to the policy.
By Cody Fenwick / AlterNet
April 5, 2018, 4:12 PM GMT
A new study on the minimum wage confirms previous research that found the policy raises wages for low-income workers without reducing total employment. The paper may even finally start to convince conservative critics of the minimum wage to reconsider their views.
Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen was one of the first to write about the study. As a libertarian, he's long been critical of policies like the minimum wage, and the new study hasn't made him a believer. But he does acknowledge that the new research is "thorough and detailed." He writes:
"...[O]n the pro-minimum wage side, you should consider that those immediately affected by the wage hike do seem better off, and their higher income in the meantime may itself bring some efficiency-enhancing gains."
The study is indeed impressive. Census researchers Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis used data from the bureau's Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which surveys more than 75,000 households. The authors then link this data with administrative filings from the Social Security Administration on wages and track the changes between 1991 and 2013. The study stands out for covering such a large number of people over such an extended people.
"[R]aising the minimum wage increases earnings growth at the bottom of the distribution, and those effects persist and indeed grow in magnitude over several years," the authors write. At the same time, there's little indication that other people lose their jobs as a result of the minimum wage — the outcome conservatives always warn about.
The authors go on to note that "a large increase in minimum wages would blunt the worst of the income losses during the Great Recession," though it would not have completely reversed the crisis's effects.
While this research supports the case for more aggressive minimum wage policies, it also speaks to major distortions in the economy. As columnist Noah Smith points out, these findings, combined with others, indicate that workers are particularly vulnerable in the present economy.
This means an increased minimum wage is almost certainly not enough. Workers will need a range of new protections, like labor union protections and a greater ability to sue their employers, to dampen the power that businesses wield over them.
Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen was one of the first to write about the study. As a libertarian, he's long been critical of policies like the minimum wage, and the new study hasn't made him a believer. But he does acknowledge that the new research is "thorough and detailed." He writes:
"...[O]n the pro-minimum wage side, you should consider that those immediately affected by the wage hike do seem better off, and their higher income in the meantime may itself bring some efficiency-enhancing gains."
The study is indeed impressive. Census researchers Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis used data from the bureau's Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which surveys more than 75,000 households. The authors then link this data with administrative filings from the Social Security Administration on wages and track the changes between 1991 and 2013. The study stands out for covering such a large number of people over such an extended people.
"[R]aising the minimum wage increases earnings growth at the bottom of the distribution, and those effects persist and indeed grow in magnitude over several years," the authors write. At the same time, there's little indication that other people lose their jobs as a result of the minimum wage — the outcome conservatives always warn about.
The authors go on to note that "a large increase in minimum wages would blunt the worst of the income losses during the Great Recession," though it would not have completely reversed the crisis's effects.
While this research supports the case for more aggressive minimum wage policies, it also speaks to major distortions in the economy. As columnist Noah Smith points out, these findings, combined with others, indicate that workers are particularly vulnerable in the present economy.
This means an increased minimum wage is almost certainly not enough. Workers will need a range of new protections, like labor union protections and a greater ability to sue their employers, to dampen the power that businesses wield over them.
Unions Squeeze Companies to Divulge Plans for Tax Bill Windfall
Josh Eidelson Bloomberg
April 4, 2018
Unions are pressing companies they bargain with to disclose details of what they’re doing with savings from the Trump tax cuts, the latest move by organized labor to pressure corporations to pass along their windfall from the overhaul.
Four unions have recently filed formal information requests with 11 companies, including American Airlines Group Inc., AT&T Inc., and PepsiCo Inc. subsidiary Frito-Lay, requesting disclosure of the firms’ plans for the extra cash freed up by the tax cuts. The labor groups say failure to comply could lead to the filing of complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces the federal labor law requiring companies to provide unions that represent their employees with information germane to collective bargaining.
“President Trump and the Republican Congress promised that billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways would ultimately raise wages and brings jobs back from overseas, but a union contract is the only way to get that promise in writing,”
Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton said in a statement. “Working people deserve to know how their employers plan to spend their tax savings so they can bargain for a fair share of the windfall and ensure that corporations do more to bring jobs home and improve pay and benefits.”
Along with CWA, which is currently in negotiations with American Airlines subsidiaries Piedmont Airlines and Envoy Air, and with AT&T, the unions sending the requests are the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers and the Teamsters. The companies they’re targeting include long-term care providers, for-profit health corporations, and XPO Logistics.
The requests seek disclosure of what each company’s estimated gains from the tax revamp will be, how much they will spend on stock buybacks, how much capital investment they intend to make in the U.S. and abroad, and how many U.S. jobs they plan to create or bring back from other countries.
Request Rebuffed
American Airlines, AT&T, and PepsiCo. didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. One of the recent requests has already been rebuffed. In a letter to CWA last month, Randall White, AT&T’s Midwest labor relations vice president, wrote, “Because of the stated purpose for your inquiries, your requests are not relevant to the bargaining relationship between the company and the CWA.” White also told the union that it was seeking “irrelevant, immaterial” information.
Since passing their tax overhaul in December, Republicans have cited bonuses granted to employees at companies including Walmart Inc. and AT&T as evidence of the bill’s broad benefits. “With 3.5 million Americans receiving bonuses or other benefits from their employers as a result of TAX CUTS, 2018 is off to a great start!” President Donald Trump tweeted on Feb. 2.
Democrats have countered that the legislation was skewed in favor of the wealthy, and any boosts to working class paychecks are “crumbs” compared to the billions in handouts to big corporations.
The unions’ announcement of their push for corporate disclosure comes four weeks after Teamsters members at a Toyota Motor Corp. parts distribution center in Torrance, California, voted to authorize a strike, rejecting a contract offer they said was far too stingy in light of the company’s recent earnings boost from the tax bill.
“We heard President Trump say that workers would be getting a pay raise with the tax breaks, so when Toyota got a $2.7 billion windfall, we expected to finally be able to catch up with the high cost of living in our communities,” employee Daniel Valenzuela said in a statement released by the union.
The workers, who service Toyota repair shops from southern California to Salt Lake City, voted March 24 to reject a subsequent offer from the company, which they said included raises of 1.2 percent a year. On March 27, the local union’s secretary-treasurer sent a letter to Toyota dealers warning that “the workers are on their way to your dealership in the very near future to handbill your customers with the media present to document the event.”
“We greatly value represented team members at our Los Angeles Parts Distribution Center and have offered them a contract that not only delivers considerable improvements over their current, industry-leading wage and benefits package, but also greatly exceeds comparable local wages and benefits,” Toyota spokesman Eric Booth said in an emailed statement. At a briefing last month in Tokyo, Toyota Senior Managing Officer Masayoshi Shirayanagi said that the legislation added about 290 billion yen to the company’s bottom line.
Disney Unions
The tax bill has also become a flashpoint in negotiations between Walt Disney Co. and a coalition of unions representing theme park workers in California and Florida, which filed Labor Board complaints last month accusing the company of discriminating against union members who are currently in contract talks. By announcing special $1,000 tax-cut bonuses for employees but holding them “hostage” from those in negotiations, the company violated labor law, union leaders alleged.
In a statement last month, Disney said that for union members, the bonus would be part of overall contract negotiations. “We presented fair and compelling offers to unions on both coasts, and we hope they will reach timely agreements with us on behalf of their members,” the company said.
The Disney unions’ allegation should be pursued by the NLRB, said William Gould, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who was chairman of the labor agency under President Bill Clinton. “The employer is allowed to engage in hard, tough -- uncompromising at times -- bargaining,” he said. “What’s impermissible is to say that you only get the bonus if you agree to waive everything that’s on the bargaining table -- that makes the bargaining table useless.”
Four unions have recently filed formal information requests with 11 companies, including American Airlines Group Inc., AT&T Inc., and PepsiCo Inc. subsidiary Frito-Lay, requesting disclosure of the firms’ plans for the extra cash freed up by the tax cuts. The labor groups say failure to comply could lead to the filing of complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces the federal labor law requiring companies to provide unions that represent their employees with information germane to collective bargaining.
“President Trump and the Republican Congress promised that billions of dollars in corporate tax giveaways would ultimately raise wages and brings jobs back from overseas, but a union contract is the only way to get that promise in writing,”
Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton said in a statement. “Working people deserve to know how their employers plan to spend their tax savings so they can bargain for a fair share of the windfall and ensure that corporations do more to bring jobs home and improve pay and benefits.”
Along with CWA, which is currently in negotiations with American Airlines subsidiaries Piedmont Airlines and Envoy Air, and with AT&T, the unions sending the requests are the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers and the Teamsters. The companies they’re targeting include long-term care providers, for-profit health corporations, and XPO Logistics.
The requests seek disclosure of what each company’s estimated gains from the tax revamp will be, how much they will spend on stock buybacks, how much capital investment they intend to make in the U.S. and abroad, and how many U.S. jobs they plan to create or bring back from other countries.
Request Rebuffed
American Airlines, AT&T, and PepsiCo. didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. One of the recent requests has already been rebuffed. In a letter to CWA last month, Randall White, AT&T’s Midwest labor relations vice president, wrote, “Because of the stated purpose for your inquiries, your requests are not relevant to the bargaining relationship between the company and the CWA.” White also told the union that it was seeking “irrelevant, immaterial” information.
Since passing their tax overhaul in December, Republicans have cited bonuses granted to employees at companies including Walmart Inc. and AT&T as evidence of the bill’s broad benefits. “With 3.5 million Americans receiving bonuses or other benefits from their employers as a result of TAX CUTS, 2018 is off to a great start!” President Donald Trump tweeted on Feb. 2.
Democrats have countered that the legislation was skewed in favor of the wealthy, and any boosts to working class paychecks are “crumbs” compared to the billions in handouts to big corporations.
The unions’ announcement of their push for corporate disclosure comes four weeks after Teamsters members at a Toyota Motor Corp. parts distribution center in Torrance, California, voted to authorize a strike, rejecting a contract offer they said was far too stingy in light of the company’s recent earnings boost from the tax bill.
“We heard President Trump say that workers would be getting a pay raise with the tax breaks, so when Toyota got a $2.7 billion windfall, we expected to finally be able to catch up with the high cost of living in our communities,” employee Daniel Valenzuela said in a statement released by the union.
The workers, who service Toyota repair shops from southern California to Salt Lake City, voted March 24 to reject a subsequent offer from the company, which they said included raises of 1.2 percent a year. On March 27, the local union’s secretary-treasurer sent a letter to Toyota dealers warning that “the workers are on their way to your dealership in the very near future to handbill your customers with the media present to document the event.”
“We greatly value represented team members at our Los Angeles Parts Distribution Center and have offered them a contract that not only delivers considerable improvements over their current, industry-leading wage and benefits package, but also greatly exceeds comparable local wages and benefits,” Toyota spokesman Eric Booth said in an emailed statement. At a briefing last month in Tokyo, Toyota Senior Managing Officer Masayoshi Shirayanagi said that the legislation added about 290 billion yen to the company’s bottom line.
Disney Unions
The tax bill has also become a flashpoint in negotiations between Walt Disney Co. and a coalition of unions representing theme park workers in California and Florida, which filed Labor Board complaints last month accusing the company of discriminating against union members who are currently in contract talks. By announcing special $1,000 tax-cut bonuses for employees but holding them “hostage” from those in negotiations, the company violated labor law, union leaders alleged.
In a statement last month, Disney said that for union members, the bonus would be part of overall contract negotiations. “We presented fair and compelling offers to unions on both coasts, and we hope they will reach timely agreements with us on behalf of their members,” the company said.
The Disney unions’ allegation should be pursued by the NLRB, said William Gould, a professor emeritus at Stanford University who was chairman of the labor agency under President Bill Clinton. “The employer is allowed to engage in hard, tough -- uncompromising at times -- bargaining,” he said. “What’s impermissible is to say that you only get the bonus if you agree to waive everything that’s on the bargaining table -- that makes the bargaining table useless.”
they elected him and now they are screwed!!!
PUBLIC WORKERS WORRIED THAT TENNESSEE’S BILLIONAIRE GOVERNOR IS TAKING ANOTHER RUN AT THEM
David Dayen - the intercept
April 4 2018, 9:35 a.m.
LAST YEAR, TENNESSEE’S governor attempted a frontal assault on the unionized workers that staff the state’s facilities and management jobs at public buildings, two-thirds of which are state-run colleges. Gov. Bill Haslam, the richest U.S. elected official not named Donald Trump, signed a contract with a facilities management firm to privatize those jobs. But a prodigious campaign by the campus employee union and student activists led to nearly the entire University of Tennessee system publicly opting outof the contract.
For a union that is legally prohibited from collective bargaining, going up against a stacked deck of conservative lawmakers and powerful corporations and coming out with a win was a spectacular feat. But Haslam appears to have found a work-around.
The Tennessee legislature is on the verge of passing a bill to overhaul the University of Tennessee’s entire board of trustees, allowing Haslam to hand-pick the replacements. That board could pressure campuses to opt back into the privatization contract at any time over the next four years.
“We think it’s a pretty big threat,” said Thomas Walker of United Campus Workers, the lead union for facilities employees at Tennessee colleges. “This allows Haslam to create a board of political and business allies. He’s trying to make a crony board.”
The bill, called the UT Focus Act, mirrors a successful 2016 effort to change out all members of the board of regents for six state universities outside the UT system. By the end, Haslam will have personally appointed every member of the public college and university governing bodies in Tennessee, all of whom can opt into the privatization contract his administration negotiated.
Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., or JLL, the world’s largest facilities management firm, signed the $330 million, five-year, sole-source contract in April 2017, covering custodial services, groundskeeping, and repair and maintenance work at all government buildings. Under a concept called “vested outsourcing,” JLL actually co-wrote the terms of the contract with the state government. It also has advised the state on facilities management at state buildings, precisely the activity JLL intends to take over. The Office of Customer Focused Government — not a parody name — inked the deal with JLL.
Under the plan, state workers were not guaranteed to be re-hired, could be transferred up to 50 miles away from their existing employment locations, and were subject to additional background checks and screenings that UCW took to be a pretext to weed out workers. Because of outcry from labor and student leaders, which led even many conservative lawmakers to question the effort, the affected locations were given the option of outsourcing jobs to JLL. Only one campus in the UT system did: Austin Peay State University, which had already outsourced its custodial services and merely transferred those positions into the JLL contract.
Haslam, who expressed disappointment with the UT system opting out, subsequently announced the UT Focus Act in February. In the name of having the UT board of trustees “operate more efficiently and effectively,” the bill would reduce its membership from 27 to 11, with Haslam’s office appointing every member to staggered terms. Tennessee’s General Assembly would have to confirm the members.
Initially, the UT Focus Act was introduced as a “caption” bill, with no actual language. The blanks got filled in last month, giving the opposition little time to organize. Under the bill, staff, faculty, students, regions, and individual campuses do not have guaranteed representation on the board, contrary to current law. It even allows four people from out of state to sit on the board. Later amendments allowed for some alumni representation, and the bill also creates advisory boards for UT campuses, although those boards don’t have as much power, as the trustees don’t have to legally follow the advisors’ recommendations.
Haslam has said publicly that the bill has “zero, zero, zero” to do with privatization. Critics disagree. “It became clear that this is a tremendous backdoor to outsourcing,” said UCW’s Thomas Walker. The way the JLL contract was structured, campuses and other public buildings could opt in at any time over the life of the contract, piece by piece.
While university chancellors ultimately make the decision to opt in, their effective bosses are the board of trustees, who have numerous methods of persuasion to work their will on the universities they oversee. They could hold up budget approvals, or deny faculty hires and new facility construction unless universities agree to outsource. The board of trustees serves as “the ultimate deciders of what goes on at campuses,” Walker added, charging that they could intervene internally and force the UT system to privatize.
Haslam spokesperson Jennifer Donnals did not address outsourcing, writing in an email that “the bill’s purpose is to make the board more effective in its leadership of the University of Tennessee system.”
The bill sailed through the Tennessee Senate but faced significant bipartisan opposition last week in the House, a rarity in the legislature. David Hawk, the Republican Haslam ally who carried the bill, said he would never intentionally damage the UT system because his daughter was headed to UT-Knoxville in the fall. After just ninety minutes of debate, the UT Focus Act needed 50 votes to advance; it received 51.
Both chambers passed slightly different versions, but it was widely expected that work would wrap up on the bill this week. In fact, during the House debate, one lawmaker noted that Haslam told him who the new trustee nominees were. Those names have not been released. Appointment hearings were initially scheduled before the bill was even passed, though they have been postponed. “The board nominations will be announced when they are scheduled to be considered by the General Assembly,” said Haslam spokesperson Jennifer Donnals. “We anticipate that will happen soon, after the legislation is signed into law.”
Nominees would require legislative approval, offering another opportunity to mobilize. However, lawmakers may opt to put all 11 nominees on the consent calendar for an up-or-down vote without much deliberation. “The vote in the House was so divisive, we think there may be a way that nominees are scrutinized,” Walker said.
For a union that is legally prohibited from collective bargaining, going up against a stacked deck of conservative lawmakers and powerful corporations and coming out with a win was a spectacular feat. But Haslam appears to have found a work-around.
The Tennessee legislature is on the verge of passing a bill to overhaul the University of Tennessee’s entire board of trustees, allowing Haslam to hand-pick the replacements. That board could pressure campuses to opt back into the privatization contract at any time over the next four years.
“We think it’s a pretty big threat,” said Thomas Walker of United Campus Workers, the lead union for facilities employees at Tennessee colleges. “This allows Haslam to create a board of political and business allies. He’s trying to make a crony board.”
The bill, called the UT Focus Act, mirrors a successful 2016 effort to change out all members of the board of regents for six state universities outside the UT system. By the end, Haslam will have personally appointed every member of the public college and university governing bodies in Tennessee, all of whom can opt into the privatization contract his administration negotiated.
Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., or JLL, the world’s largest facilities management firm, signed the $330 million, five-year, sole-source contract in April 2017, covering custodial services, groundskeeping, and repair and maintenance work at all government buildings. Under a concept called “vested outsourcing,” JLL actually co-wrote the terms of the contract with the state government. It also has advised the state on facilities management at state buildings, precisely the activity JLL intends to take over. The Office of Customer Focused Government — not a parody name — inked the deal with JLL.
Under the plan, state workers were not guaranteed to be re-hired, could be transferred up to 50 miles away from their existing employment locations, and were subject to additional background checks and screenings that UCW took to be a pretext to weed out workers. Because of outcry from labor and student leaders, which led even many conservative lawmakers to question the effort, the affected locations were given the option of outsourcing jobs to JLL. Only one campus in the UT system did: Austin Peay State University, which had already outsourced its custodial services and merely transferred those positions into the JLL contract.
Haslam, who expressed disappointment with the UT system opting out, subsequently announced the UT Focus Act in February. In the name of having the UT board of trustees “operate more efficiently and effectively,” the bill would reduce its membership from 27 to 11, with Haslam’s office appointing every member to staggered terms. Tennessee’s General Assembly would have to confirm the members.
Initially, the UT Focus Act was introduced as a “caption” bill, with no actual language. The blanks got filled in last month, giving the opposition little time to organize. Under the bill, staff, faculty, students, regions, and individual campuses do not have guaranteed representation on the board, contrary to current law. It even allows four people from out of state to sit on the board. Later amendments allowed for some alumni representation, and the bill also creates advisory boards for UT campuses, although those boards don’t have as much power, as the trustees don’t have to legally follow the advisors’ recommendations.
Haslam has said publicly that the bill has “zero, zero, zero” to do with privatization. Critics disagree. “It became clear that this is a tremendous backdoor to outsourcing,” said UCW’s Thomas Walker. The way the JLL contract was structured, campuses and other public buildings could opt in at any time over the life of the contract, piece by piece.
While university chancellors ultimately make the decision to opt in, their effective bosses are the board of trustees, who have numerous methods of persuasion to work their will on the universities they oversee. They could hold up budget approvals, or deny faculty hires and new facility construction unless universities agree to outsource. The board of trustees serves as “the ultimate deciders of what goes on at campuses,” Walker added, charging that they could intervene internally and force the UT system to privatize.
Haslam spokesperson Jennifer Donnals did not address outsourcing, writing in an email that “the bill’s purpose is to make the board more effective in its leadership of the University of Tennessee system.”
The bill sailed through the Tennessee Senate but faced significant bipartisan opposition last week in the House, a rarity in the legislature. David Hawk, the Republican Haslam ally who carried the bill, said he would never intentionally damage the UT system because his daughter was headed to UT-Knoxville in the fall. After just ninety minutes of debate, the UT Focus Act needed 50 votes to advance; it received 51.
Both chambers passed slightly different versions, but it was widely expected that work would wrap up on the bill this week. In fact, during the House debate, one lawmaker noted that Haslam told him who the new trustee nominees were. Those names have not been released. Appointment hearings were initially scheduled before the bill was even passed, though they have been postponed. “The board nominations will be announced when they are scheduled to be considered by the General Assembly,” said Haslam spokesperson Jennifer Donnals. “We anticipate that will happen soon, after the legislation is signed into law.”
Nominees would require legislative approval, offering another opportunity to mobilize. However, lawmakers may opt to put all 11 nominees on the consent calendar for an up-or-down vote without much deliberation. “The vote in the House was so divisive, we think there may be a way that nominees are scrutinized,” Walker said.
‘At least you make more than the intern’: Asian woman sues Intel over pay
San Jose Mercury News - raw story
03 APR 2018 AT 18:03 ET
SAN FRANCISCO — When Cristina Wong, after a dozen years and three promotions at Intel, discovered her male peers were making considerably more money than she was, she asked her manager if she was the least-paid member of the firm's Sales Marketing Group, she said in a new lawsuit against the iconic Santa Clara semiconductor maker.
"He responded that she was at least making more than the intern," the suit said.
Her manager then confirmed that her "pay disparity was significant," Wong, an Asian woman, alleged in the suit filed Friday in San Francisco federal court.
But though her superior reportedly agreed she wasn't being paid equitably, Intel terminated her less than three months later, Wong claimed.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wong said in the suit that after talking to her manager she was directed to address the issue via the company's online employee-concerns hotline. Hotline staff promised to investigate, the suit said.
"Wong was told that Intel was aware of her pay disparity," according to the suit.
"Wong was informed that she was being paid at least $40,000 less than the minimum compensation for her grade level, and that her peers were being paid at least $50,000 more than her."
No action was taken to correct the purported disparity, and her complaint about discrimination was a primary reason Intel fired her, the suit said.
"After raising the issue of her pay disparity, on October 12, 2017, Ms. Wong was informed that her last day at Intel would be December 31, 2017," the suit said.
Wong is seeking unspecified damages.
Her legal action follows that of four women suing Google and seeking class-action status over alleged gender discrimination in pay. Google denies it pays women less than men.
"He responded that she was at least making more than the intern," the suit said.
Her manager then confirmed that her "pay disparity was significant," Wong, an Asian woman, alleged in the suit filed Friday in San Francisco federal court.
But though her superior reportedly agreed she wasn't being paid equitably, Intel terminated her less than three months later, Wong claimed.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wong said in the suit that after talking to her manager she was directed to address the issue via the company's online employee-concerns hotline. Hotline staff promised to investigate, the suit said.
"Wong was told that Intel was aware of her pay disparity," according to the suit.
"Wong was informed that she was being paid at least $40,000 less than the minimum compensation for her grade level, and that her peers were being paid at least $50,000 more than her."
No action was taken to correct the purported disparity, and her complaint about discrimination was a primary reason Intel fired her, the suit said.
"After raising the issue of her pay disparity, on October 12, 2017, Ms. Wong was informed that her last day at Intel would be December 31, 2017," the suit said.
Wong is seeking unspecified damages.
Her legal action follows that of four women suing Google and seeking class-action status over alleged gender discrimination in pay. Google denies it pays women less than men.
rocket science 101!!!
Fairer schedules are good for workers—and can boost profits, new study shows
Laura Clawson
Daily Kos Staff
Saturday March 31, 2018 · 8:00 AM PDT
Giving retail workers regular, predictable schedules so they’ll know when and how much they’re working is great for workers—and, according to a new study of 28 Gap stores in the San Francisco and Chicago areas, it’s good for profits, too. Noam Scheiber reports:
The study randomly assigned about two-thirds of the stores to a so-called treatment group, in which managers were encouraged to provide workers with more consistent start and stop times from day to day, and more consistent schedules from week to week. Many managers were also authorized to slightly increase the total number of payroll hours that they could allocate to their workers. Scheduling at the remaining one-third of the stores continued largely as usual.
The result: The change in average sales during the experiment was 7 percent higher at the stores subject to the new policies than at the stores in the control group.
“They were not operating in the stability sweet spot,” said Joan Williams of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, one of the study’s authors. “We basically held up a mirror to capitalism’s self-image of efficiency and showed the misaligned incentives that are disserving both workers and the company.”
This happened without workers’ schedules even being changed all that much—managers were encouraged, not required, to make changes and as a result schedules were made only slightly more consistent. More significant change would have to come from the top, since special promotions and other requirements from corporate management can have big impacts on staffing requirements. But while this is just one small study, you’d think it would be something retail companies would want to look into.
And by the way, dear corporate overlords: increasing your profits shouldn’t be the only reason to stop abusing your workers.
The study randomly assigned about two-thirds of the stores to a so-called treatment group, in which managers were encouraged to provide workers with more consistent start and stop times from day to day, and more consistent schedules from week to week. Many managers were also authorized to slightly increase the total number of payroll hours that they could allocate to their workers. Scheduling at the remaining one-third of the stores continued largely as usual.
The result: The change in average sales during the experiment was 7 percent higher at the stores subject to the new policies than at the stores in the control group.
“They were not operating in the stability sweet spot,” said Joan Williams of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, one of the study’s authors. “We basically held up a mirror to capitalism’s self-image of efficiency and showed the misaligned incentives that are disserving both workers and the company.”
This happened without workers’ schedules even being changed all that much—managers were encouraged, not required, to make changes and as a result schedules were made only slightly more consistent. More significant change would have to come from the top, since special promotions and other requirements from corporate management can have big impacts on staffing requirements. But while this is just one small study, you’d think it would be something retail companies would want to look into.
And by the way, dear corporate overlords: increasing your profits shouldn’t be the only reason to stop abusing your workers.
A Sick New Game from the Executive Suite
by Jim Hightower - the smirking chimp
March 29, 2018 - 6:04am
Today’s corporate captains like to think of themselves not as mere businesspeople, but as geniuses of modern innovation.
But innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society’s most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers, and embezzlers — thieves.
Sure enough, too much innovation coming out of corporate suites these days amounts to shameless schemes to dupe and rip-off rank-and-file workers.
The latest one is a hustle called “gamification.” It’s an attempt by such giants as T-Mobil and Walt Disney to give game-like, “psychological” prizes to employees — rather than giving pay raises or cash bonuses. As the honchos of United Airlines learned, however, not everyone bites the corporate bait.
United recently announced a new fun game for employees. Rather than giving standard bonus payments this year, the bosses were creating a dazzling sweepstakes lottery, with big prizes like luxury cars and $100,000 in cash up for grabs.
But the sizzle quickly fizzled as United’s 90,000 workers realized that more than 99 percent of them would get zero.
United had hoped the game would create “excitement” among the rank-and-file, but instead it created resentment. Workers, naturally preferring bonus cash to bogus corporate excitement, rebelled with such fury that United is now reconsidering the switch.
That case aside, however, the corporate push to replace real pay with cheap “psychic income” (such as bosses handing out good-work badges or doling out tickets for a sporting event) is on the rise. Major corporations are even hiring “chief behavioral officers” to analyze reams of personal data on employees to devise non-cash ways to motivate them.
What we have here is the deterioration of executive ethics to the point that openly gaming and cheating America’s workaday majority is considered fair play.
But innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society’s most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers, and embezzlers — thieves.
Sure enough, too much innovation coming out of corporate suites these days amounts to shameless schemes to dupe and rip-off rank-and-file workers.
The latest one is a hustle called “gamification.” It’s an attempt by such giants as T-Mobil and Walt Disney to give game-like, “psychological” prizes to employees — rather than giving pay raises or cash bonuses. As the honchos of United Airlines learned, however, not everyone bites the corporate bait.
United recently announced a new fun game for employees. Rather than giving standard bonus payments this year, the bosses were creating a dazzling sweepstakes lottery, with big prizes like luxury cars and $100,000 in cash up for grabs.
But the sizzle quickly fizzled as United’s 90,000 workers realized that more than 99 percent of them would get zero.
United had hoped the game would create “excitement” among the rank-and-file, but instead it created resentment. Workers, naturally preferring bonus cash to bogus corporate excitement, rebelled with such fury that United is now reconsidering the switch.
That case aside, however, the corporate push to replace real pay with cheap “psychic income” (such as bosses handing out good-work badges or doling out tickets for a sporting event) is on the rise. Major corporations are even hiring “chief behavioral officers” to analyze reams of personal data on employees to devise non-cash ways to motivate them.
What we have here is the deterioration of executive ethics to the point that openly gaming and cheating America’s workaday majority is considered fair play.
'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom
Chris Hedges - truthdig
3/26/18
A 65-year-old New York City cab driver from Queens, Nicanor Ochisor, hanged himself in his garage March 16, saying in a note he left behind that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft had made it impossible for him to make a living. It was the fourth suicide by a cab driver in New York in the last four months, including one Feb. 5 in which livery driver Douglas Schifter, 61, killed himself with a shotgun outside City Hall.
“Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.
Schifter and Ochisor were two of the millions of victims of the new economy. Corporate capitalism is establishing a neofeudal serfdom in numerous occupations, a condition in which there are no labor laws, no minimum wage, no benefits, no job security and no regulations. Desperate and impoverished workers, forced to endure 16-hour days, are viciously pitted against each other. Uber drivers make about $13.25 an hour. In cities like Detroit this falls to $8.77. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber and one of the founders, has a net worth of $4.8 billion. Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million.
The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane labor conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. When workers at General Motors carried out a 44-day sit-down strike in 1936, many were living in shacks that lacked heating and indoor plumbing; they could be laid off for weeks without compensation, had no medical or retirement benefits and often were fired without explanation. When they turned 40 their employment could be terminated. The average wage was about $900 a year at a time when the government determined that a family of four needed a minimum of $1,600 to live above the poverty line.
The managers at General Motors relentlessly persecuted union organizers. The company spent $839,000 on detective work in 1934 to spy on union organizers and infiltrate union meetings. GM employed the white terrorist group the Black Legion—the police chief of Detroit was suspected of being a member—to threaten and physically assault labor activists and assassinate union leaders including George Marchuk and John Bielak, both shot to death.
The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists. There are some 13,000 licensed cabs in New York City and 40,000 livery or town cars. The drivers should, as farmers did in 2015 with tractors in Paris, shut down the center of the city. And drivers in other cities should do the same. This is the only language our corporate masters understand.
The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obscene wealth. Consumed by greed, rendered numb to human suffering by a life of hedonism and extravagance, devoid of empathy, incapable of self-criticism or self-sacrifice, surrounded by sycophants and leeches who cater to their wishes, appetites and demands, able to use their wealth to ignore the law and destroy critics and opponents, they are among the most repugnant of the human species. Don’t be fooled by the elites’ skillful public relations campaigns—we are watching Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $64.1 billion, mount a massive propaganda effort against charges that he and Facebook are focused on exploiting and selling our personal information—or by the fawning news celebrities on corporate media who act as courtiers and apologists for the oligarchs. These people are the enemy.
Ochisor, a Romanian immigrant, owned a New York City taxi medallion. (Medallions were once coveted by cab drivers because having them allowed the drivers to own their own cabs or lease the cabs to other drivers.) Ochisor drove the night shift, lasting 10 to 12 hours. His wife drove the day shift. But after Uber and Lyft flooded the city with cars and underpaid drivers about three years ago, the couple could barely meet expenses. Ochisor’s home was about to go into foreclosure. His medallion, once worth $1.1 million, had plummeted in value to $180,000. The dramatic drop in the value of the medallion, which he had hoped to lease for $3,000 a month or sell to finance his retirement, wiped out his economic security. He faced financial ruin and poverty. And he was not alone.
The corporate architects of the new economy have no intention of halting the assault. They intend to turn everyone into temp workers trapped in demeaning, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs without job security or benefits, a reality they plaster over by inventing hip terms like “the gig economy.”
John McDonagh began driving a New York City cab 40 years ago. He, like most drivers, worked out of garages owned and operated by businesses. He was paid a percentage of what he earned each night.
“You could make a living [then],” he told me. “But everyone shared the burden. The garage shared it. The driver shared it. If you had a good night, the garage made money. If you had a bad night, you split it. That’s not the case anymore. Right now we’re leasing [cabs at the garages].”
Leasing requires a driver to pay $120 a day for the car and $30 for the gas. The drivers begin a shift $150 in debt. Because of Uber, Lyft and other smartphone ride apps, drivers’ incomes have been cut by half in many cases. Cab drivers can finish their 12-hour shifts owing the garages money. Drivers are facing bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. Some are homeless.
“The TLC [New York City Transportation and Limousine Commission] wanted to limit yellow cab drivers to 12 hours a day,” he said, referring to the distinctive yellow cabs that have medallions and can pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. “There was a protest. Yellow cab drivers were protesting that they have to work a 16-hour day in order to make a living. It’s cut everything. Everybody’s fighting for that extra fare. You would be at a light with two or three other yellow cabs. You saw someone up the street with luggage you would run the lights to get to them.
Because that might be an airport job. You’re risking your own life, risking getting tickets, you’re doing things you would never have done before.”
“We don’t have any health care,” he said. “Sitting for those 12 to 16 hours a day, you are getting diabetes. There’s no blood circulation. You’re putting on weight. And then there’s that added stress you’re not making any money.”
Uber and Lyft in 2016 had 370 active lobbyists in 44 states, “dwarfing some of the largest business and technology companies,” according to the National Employment Law Project. “Together, Uber and Lyft lobbyists outnumbered Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” The two companies, like many lobbying firms, also hire former government regulators. The former head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, is now on the board of Uber. The companies have used their money and their lobbyists, most of whom are members of the Democratic Party, to free themselves from the regulations and oversight imposed on the taxi industry. The companies using ride-hail apps have flooded New York City with about 100,000 unregulated cars in the past two years.
“The yellow cab has to be a certain vehicle,” said McDonagh. “It’s a Nissan. [Nissan won the bid to supply the city’s cabs.] Every yellow cab has to charge a certain price. When that drop goes down, that’s regulated by the city. They added on all these extra taxes, for the MTA and for the wheelchair [half of all yellow cabs are required to be wheelchair-accessible by 2020], a rush-hour tax. Uber comes in. No regulations at all. They could pick whatever type of car they want. Whatever color of car. They could change prices when it’s slow. They can lower the prices. When it’s busy they can do price surging. It can be two or three times. Whereas the yellow cab is just plowing along at the same rate at the same time. Going to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan is $52. No matter what the traffic is like, no matter how many hours it takes you to get there. Uber will jack up its prices two or three times. You might have to pay $100 to get to Kennedy Airport. While the yellow cab industry is almost regulated to death, Uber is coming in with new technology, figuring out different ways how [it is] going to make money. … It’s finished, with the yellow cabs.”
Life for Uber and Lyft drivers is as difficult. Uber and Lyft use bonuses to lure drivers into the business. Once the bonuses are gone, these drivers sink to the same economic desperation as those driving yellow cabs.
“Uber is leasing cars,” McDonagh said. “They have car dealerships that will sell. They advertise as, ‘Listen, you can have bad credit. Come down to Uber. We’ll get you the money or loan to buy this car.’ And what they do is they’ll take the money directly out of what you’re making that day to pay for the loan. They can’t lose. And if you go under, they’ll sell the car back to the dealership and then redo it for the next immigrant driver. There’s a whole scam going on.”
“As a yellow cab driver, you don’t see the world vision,” he said. “But there’s that famous term ‘the race to the bottom.’ You’re working more and more hours for less and less wages. This is the new gig economy. Someone will use an Uber to go to an Airbnb and get on his phone to order something from Amazon to eat in his house. All those shops are now gone. From cashiers to cab drivers. I feel like I’m a blacksmith or a typesetter at a newspaper business trying to explain to you what the yellow cab industry used to be. We’re becoming obsolete.”
“Guys are sleeping in the cab,” McDonagh said. “They’ll go out to Kennedy at 2 or 3 in the morning. They pull into the lot and go to sleep to catch [passengers off] the first flight that’s coming in from California a couple of hours later. You have guys who won’t go home for a couple of days. They’ll just stay out on the street. They roam the street to try to make money. It’s dangerous for the passenger. The amount of accidents will be going up because drivers are drowsy.”
McDonagh said Uber and Lyft cars must be regulated. All cars should have meters to guarantee an adequate income for drivers. And drivers should have health care and benefits. None of this will happen, he warned, as long as we live under a system of government where our political elites are dependent on campaign contributions from corporations and those who should be regulating the industry look to these corporations for future employment.
“We have to limit the amount of cabs, particularly here in New York City,” McDonagh said. “If we did it in the yellow cab industry for 50 years, why can’t we do it with Uber? They’re adding 100 cars a week through the streets of New York. This is insane. When you call an Uber, the biggest complaint people have now is, ‘The car is here too quick.’ They’re there within two or three minutes. I can’t even get dressed. … They’re rolling empty throughout the city, waiting for that hit.”
“Horses in Central Park are regulated,” he pointed out. “There’s 150 of them. They make a great living there, the guys on the horse and buggies. Say Uber comes in and says, ‘We want to bring in Uber horses. And we want to add 100,000.’ And let’s see how the market will handle it. We know what’s going to happen. No one will make money. They’re all around Central Park. And now no one can go anywhere because there are now 100,000 horses in Central Park. It would be considered madness to do that. They wouldn’t do it. Yet when it comes to the yellow cab industry, for 50 years all we could have was 13,000 cabs, and then within a year or two we’re going to add 100,000. Let’s see how the market works on that! We know how the market works.”
“They [the horses] work less hours [than cab drivers],” he said. “They don’t work in hot and cold temperatures. If you believe in reincarnation, you should come back as a horse in Central Park. And they all live on the West Side of Manhattan. We live in basements in Brooklyn and Queens. We haven’t upped our status in life, that’s for sure.”
“Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.
Schifter and Ochisor were two of the millions of victims of the new economy. Corporate capitalism is establishing a neofeudal serfdom in numerous occupations, a condition in which there are no labor laws, no minimum wage, no benefits, no job security and no regulations. Desperate and impoverished workers, forced to endure 16-hour days, are viciously pitted against each other. Uber drivers make about $13.25 an hour. In cities like Detroit this falls to $8.77. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber and one of the founders, has a net worth of $4.8 billion. Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million.
The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane labor conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. When workers at General Motors carried out a 44-day sit-down strike in 1936, many were living in shacks that lacked heating and indoor plumbing; they could be laid off for weeks without compensation, had no medical or retirement benefits and often were fired without explanation. When they turned 40 their employment could be terminated. The average wage was about $900 a year at a time when the government determined that a family of four needed a minimum of $1,600 to live above the poverty line.
The managers at General Motors relentlessly persecuted union organizers. The company spent $839,000 on detective work in 1934 to spy on union organizers and infiltrate union meetings. GM employed the white terrorist group the Black Legion—the police chief of Detroit was suspected of being a member—to threaten and physically assault labor activists and assassinate union leaders including George Marchuk and John Bielak, both shot to death.
The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists. There are some 13,000 licensed cabs in New York City and 40,000 livery or town cars. The drivers should, as farmers did in 2015 with tractors in Paris, shut down the center of the city. And drivers in other cities should do the same. This is the only language our corporate masters understand.
The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obscene wealth. Consumed by greed, rendered numb to human suffering by a life of hedonism and extravagance, devoid of empathy, incapable of self-criticism or self-sacrifice, surrounded by sycophants and leeches who cater to their wishes, appetites and demands, able to use their wealth to ignore the law and destroy critics and opponents, they are among the most repugnant of the human species. Don’t be fooled by the elites’ skillful public relations campaigns—we are watching Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $64.1 billion, mount a massive propaganda effort against charges that he and Facebook are focused on exploiting and selling our personal information—or by the fawning news celebrities on corporate media who act as courtiers and apologists for the oligarchs. These people are the enemy.
Ochisor, a Romanian immigrant, owned a New York City taxi medallion. (Medallions were once coveted by cab drivers because having them allowed the drivers to own their own cabs or lease the cabs to other drivers.) Ochisor drove the night shift, lasting 10 to 12 hours. His wife drove the day shift. But after Uber and Lyft flooded the city with cars and underpaid drivers about three years ago, the couple could barely meet expenses. Ochisor’s home was about to go into foreclosure. His medallion, once worth $1.1 million, had plummeted in value to $180,000. The dramatic drop in the value of the medallion, which he had hoped to lease for $3,000 a month or sell to finance his retirement, wiped out his economic security. He faced financial ruin and poverty. And he was not alone.
The corporate architects of the new economy have no intention of halting the assault. They intend to turn everyone into temp workers trapped in demeaning, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs without job security or benefits, a reality they plaster over by inventing hip terms like “the gig economy.”
John McDonagh began driving a New York City cab 40 years ago. He, like most drivers, worked out of garages owned and operated by businesses. He was paid a percentage of what he earned each night.
“You could make a living [then],” he told me. “But everyone shared the burden. The garage shared it. The driver shared it. If you had a good night, the garage made money. If you had a bad night, you split it. That’s not the case anymore. Right now we’re leasing [cabs at the garages].”
Leasing requires a driver to pay $120 a day for the car and $30 for the gas. The drivers begin a shift $150 in debt. Because of Uber, Lyft and other smartphone ride apps, drivers’ incomes have been cut by half in many cases. Cab drivers can finish their 12-hour shifts owing the garages money. Drivers are facing bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. Some are homeless.
“The TLC [New York City Transportation and Limousine Commission] wanted to limit yellow cab drivers to 12 hours a day,” he said, referring to the distinctive yellow cabs that have medallions and can pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. “There was a protest. Yellow cab drivers were protesting that they have to work a 16-hour day in order to make a living. It’s cut everything. Everybody’s fighting for that extra fare. You would be at a light with two or three other yellow cabs. You saw someone up the street with luggage you would run the lights to get to them.
Because that might be an airport job. You’re risking your own life, risking getting tickets, you’re doing things you would never have done before.”
“We don’t have any health care,” he said. “Sitting for those 12 to 16 hours a day, you are getting diabetes. There’s no blood circulation. You’re putting on weight. And then there’s that added stress you’re not making any money.”
Uber and Lyft in 2016 had 370 active lobbyists in 44 states, “dwarfing some of the largest business and technology companies,” according to the National Employment Law Project. “Together, Uber and Lyft lobbyists outnumbered Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” The two companies, like many lobbying firms, also hire former government regulators. The former head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, is now on the board of Uber. The companies have used their money and their lobbyists, most of whom are members of the Democratic Party, to free themselves from the regulations and oversight imposed on the taxi industry. The companies using ride-hail apps have flooded New York City with about 100,000 unregulated cars in the past two years.
“The yellow cab has to be a certain vehicle,” said McDonagh. “It’s a Nissan. [Nissan won the bid to supply the city’s cabs.] Every yellow cab has to charge a certain price. When that drop goes down, that’s regulated by the city. They added on all these extra taxes, for the MTA and for the wheelchair [half of all yellow cabs are required to be wheelchair-accessible by 2020], a rush-hour tax. Uber comes in. No regulations at all. They could pick whatever type of car they want. Whatever color of car. They could change prices when it’s slow. They can lower the prices. When it’s busy they can do price surging. It can be two or three times. Whereas the yellow cab is just plowing along at the same rate at the same time. Going to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan is $52. No matter what the traffic is like, no matter how many hours it takes you to get there. Uber will jack up its prices two or three times. You might have to pay $100 to get to Kennedy Airport. While the yellow cab industry is almost regulated to death, Uber is coming in with new technology, figuring out different ways how [it is] going to make money. … It’s finished, with the yellow cabs.”
Life for Uber and Lyft drivers is as difficult. Uber and Lyft use bonuses to lure drivers into the business. Once the bonuses are gone, these drivers sink to the same economic desperation as those driving yellow cabs.
“Uber is leasing cars,” McDonagh said. “They have car dealerships that will sell. They advertise as, ‘Listen, you can have bad credit. Come down to Uber. We’ll get you the money or loan to buy this car.’ And what they do is they’ll take the money directly out of what you’re making that day to pay for the loan. They can’t lose. And if you go under, they’ll sell the car back to the dealership and then redo it for the next immigrant driver. There’s a whole scam going on.”
“As a yellow cab driver, you don’t see the world vision,” he said. “But there’s that famous term ‘the race to the bottom.’ You’re working more and more hours for less and less wages. This is the new gig economy. Someone will use an Uber to go to an Airbnb and get on his phone to order something from Amazon to eat in his house. All those shops are now gone. From cashiers to cab drivers. I feel like I’m a blacksmith or a typesetter at a newspaper business trying to explain to you what the yellow cab industry used to be. We’re becoming obsolete.”
“Guys are sleeping in the cab,” McDonagh said. “They’ll go out to Kennedy at 2 or 3 in the morning. They pull into the lot and go to sleep to catch [passengers off] the first flight that’s coming in from California a couple of hours later. You have guys who won’t go home for a couple of days. They’ll just stay out on the street. They roam the street to try to make money. It’s dangerous for the passenger. The amount of accidents will be going up because drivers are drowsy.”
McDonagh said Uber and Lyft cars must be regulated. All cars should have meters to guarantee an adequate income for drivers. And drivers should have health care and benefits. None of this will happen, he warned, as long as we live under a system of government where our political elites are dependent on campaign contributions from corporations and those who should be regulating the industry look to these corporations for future employment.
“We have to limit the amount of cabs, particularly here in New York City,” McDonagh said. “If we did it in the yellow cab industry for 50 years, why can’t we do it with Uber? They’re adding 100 cars a week through the streets of New York. This is insane. When you call an Uber, the biggest complaint people have now is, ‘The car is here too quick.’ They’re there within two or three minutes. I can’t even get dressed. … They’re rolling empty throughout the city, waiting for that hit.”
“Horses in Central Park are regulated,” he pointed out. “There’s 150 of them. They make a great living there, the guys on the horse and buggies. Say Uber comes in and says, ‘We want to bring in Uber horses. And we want to add 100,000.’ And let’s see how the market will handle it. We know what’s going to happen. No one will make money. They’re all around Central Park. And now no one can go anywhere because there are now 100,000 horses in Central Park. It would be considered madness to do that. They wouldn’t do it. Yet when it comes to the yellow cab industry, for 50 years all we could have was 13,000 cabs, and then within a year or two we’re going to add 100,000. Let’s see how the market works on that! We know how the market works.”
“They [the horses] work less hours [than cab drivers],” he said. “They don’t work in hot and cold temperatures. If you believe in reincarnation, you should come back as a horse in Central Park. And they all live on the West Side of Manhattan. We live in basements in Brooklyn and Queens. We haven’t upped our status in life, that’s for sure.”
Jim Hightower: Corporations Use This Cheap Trick to Avoid Paying Employees a Living Wage
They'd rather have workers compete for concert tickets and gift certificates.
By Jim Hightower / AlterNet
March 22, 2018, 6:52 AM GMT
Today's captains of corporate capitalism like to think of themselves not as mere businesspeople, but as modern society's genius "innovators."
Sounds positive... until you ask the key question: Innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society's most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers and embezzlers. Sure enough, an inordinate amount of the innovation comes out of corporate suites these days, amounting to shameless schemes to dupe and rip off rank and file workers.
The latest of these is a hustle called "gamification," an attempt by such giants as T-Mobile and Walt Disney to give game-like, "psychological" prizes to employees rather than giving pay raises or cash bonuses. As the honchos of United Airlines learned, however, not everyone bites the corporate bait.
United recently announced a new fun game for employees -- rather than giving standard bonus payments this year, bosses were creating a dazzling sweepstakes lottery, with prizes such as luxury cars and $100,000 in cash. But the sizzle quickly fizzled as United's 90,000 workers realized that more than 99 percent of them would get nothing from this big prize scam, which actually would let top executives and big shareholders pocket the bulk of bonus money that was owed to employees. United had hoped the game would create "excitement" among the rank and file, but instead it created resentment. Workers, naturally preferring bonus cash to bogus corporate excitement, rebelled with such fury that United is now reconsidering the switch.
That case aside, however, the push from corporate headquarters to replace real pay with cheap "psychic income" (ranging from good-work badges and thank-you notes from bosses to doling out tickets for a sporting event) is on the rise. Major corporations are even hiring "chief behavioral officers" to analyze reams of personal data on employees to devise non-cash ways to motivate them.
Workplace exploitation is at least as old as the industrial revolution. But rather than using whips and chains to make the assembly lines move ever-faster, today's corporate exploiters use technology, devious work schedules, and lobbyists to extract more work from employees -- for less pay.
Walmart, for example, has tried to grease its pledge to provide next-day delivery for online customers by having its low-wage workforce use their own time and vehicles to drop off packages as they go home after work. Likewise, McDonald's has imposed a complicated, high-tech ordering and curbside pick-up service that requires existing workers to handle more tasks, with no hike in pay. There's a technical term for such unpaid work requirements: Stealing.
Especially victimized by corporate thieves, however, are about 4.3 million Americans who make up our "tipped workforce." Mostly employed as waitstaff in restaurants -- from big chains like IHOP to the most exclusive dining establishments -- these workers fall under a grossly unjust category of labor law that allows their employers to pay a miserly minimum wage as low as $2.13 an hour! The rationale is that customers will make-up for this sub-poverty pay by leaving generous tips -- a convenient corporate lie refuted by the fact that 12.8 percent of America's tipped workers live in poverty.
Luckily, Trump has intervened to help. Lucky for restaurant owners, that is. Bowing to demands by restaurant industry lobbyists, Trump's labor department has proposed a new rule allowing employers that pay the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to seize workers tips and use them for any purpose -- including fattening their own profits. Paying $2.13 an hour already amounts to a massive wage theft, but now the thievery is to be humongously compounded... and legalized!
Even the most notorious robbers in history would be too ashamed to pull a job this wicked. What we have here is the deterioration of executive ethics to the point that openly gaming and cheating America's workaday majority is considered fair game by the avaricious corporate elites. As America is learning, to its horror, the combination of unbridled corporate greed and abandonment of common ethics in TrumpLandia is turning wickedness into gold.
Sounds positive... until you ask the key question: Innovation for what purpose? After all, some of society's most inventive minds are flimflammers, Ponzi-schemers, gamers and embezzlers. Sure enough, an inordinate amount of the innovation comes out of corporate suites these days, amounting to shameless schemes to dupe and rip off rank and file workers.
The latest of these is a hustle called "gamification," an attempt by such giants as T-Mobile and Walt Disney to give game-like, "psychological" prizes to employees rather than giving pay raises or cash bonuses. As the honchos of United Airlines learned, however, not everyone bites the corporate bait.
United recently announced a new fun game for employees -- rather than giving standard bonus payments this year, bosses were creating a dazzling sweepstakes lottery, with prizes such as luxury cars and $100,000 in cash. But the sizzle quickly fizzled as United's 90,000 workers realized that more than 99 percent of them would get nothing from this big prize scam, which actually would let top executives and big shareholders pocket the bulk of bonus money that was owed to employees. United had hoped the game would create "excitement" among the rank and file, but instead it created resentment. Workers, naturally preferring bonus cash to bogus corporate excitement, rebelled with such fury that United is now reconsidering the switch.
That case aside, however, the push from corporate headquarters to replace real pay with cheap "psychic income" (ranging from good-work badges and thank-you notes from bosses to doling out tickets for a sporting event) is on the rise. Major corporations are even hiring "chief behavioral officers" to analyze reams of personal data on employees to devise non-cash ways to motivate them.
Workplace exploitation is at least as old as the industrial revolution. But rather than using whips and chains to make the assembly lines move ever-faster, today's corporate exploiters use technology, devious work schedules, and lobbyists to extract more work from employees -- for less pay.
Walmart, for example, has tried to grease its pledge to provide next-day delivery for online customers by having its low-wage workforce use their own time and vehicles to drop off packages as they go home after work. Likewise, McDonald's has imposed a complicated, high-tech ordering and curbside pick-up service that requires existing workers to handle more tasks, with no hike in pay. There's a technical term for such unpaid work requirements: Stealing.
Especially victimized by corporate thieves, however, are about 4.3 million Americans who make up our "tipped workforce." Mostly employed as waitstaff in restaurants -- from big chains like IHOP to the most exclusive dining establishments -- these workers fall under a grossly unjust category of labor law that allows their employers to pay a miserly minimum wage as low as $2.13 an hour! The rationale is that customers will make-up for this sub-poverty pay by leaving generous tips -- a convenient corporate lie refuted by the fact that 12.8 percent of America's tipped workers live in poverty.
Luckily, Trump has intervened to help. Lucky for restaurant owners, that is. Bowing to demands by restaurant industry lobbyists, Trump's labor department has proposed a new rule allowing employers that pay the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to seize workers tips and use them for any purpose -- including fattening their own profits. Paying $2.13 an hour already amounts to a massive wage theft, but now the thievery is to be humongously compounded... and legalized!
Even the most notorious robbers in history would be too ashamed to pull a job this wicked. What we have here is the deterioration of executive ethics to the point that openly gaming and cheating America's workaday majority is considered fair game by the avaricious corporate elites. As America is learning, to its horror, the combination of unbridled corporate greed and abandonment of common ethics in TrumpLandia is turning wickedness into gold.
Minor League Baseball Players Make Poverty-Level Wages. Congress Wants to Keep It That Way.
These athletes don’t make overtime pay or have union protections.
EDWIN RIOS -mother jones
MAR. 22, 2018 5:48 PM
Tucked away on page 1,967 of the $1.3 trillion omnibus bill making its way through Congress in an effort to avoid a government shutdown, between child welfare protections legislation and a bill to combat abuse of youth athletes, is a provision that would exempt minor league baseball players from federal labor law.
Congress slipped the provision into the omnibus bill late Wednesday thanks to a yearslong lobbying effort by Major League Baseball. The bill, known as the Save America’s Pastime Act, doesn’t really save anything. Instead, it means Major League Baseball, which reportedly brought in $10 billion in revenue in 2017, can confine their minor league players’ salaries to below minimum wage without the benefit of overtime pay.
The MLB’s pay structure has been the subject of several federal lawsuits, including one filed in 2014 on behalf of minor league baseball players that alleges that minor league players are illegally underpaid and don’t receive overtime pay. Unlike their major league counterparts, minor league players are not unionized.
A similar effort to the Save America’s Pastime Act was made in 2016 when Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) and Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) introduced the act to the House to create the exemption. After a flurry of backlash, Bustos, whose father was MLB’s first lobbyist, withdrew her support for the measure. Minor League Baseball president Pat O’Connor told the Washington Post earlier this week that the lawsuit threatened to upend the business model for minor league baseball clubs. Major League Baseball clubs pay the wages for minor league players, who are considered seasonal workers, and the league argues that if players started receiving minimum wages, minor league clubs would have to chip in.
While the major leagues may seem prosperous, low pay in the minors has been an issue for decades. Under the bill, minor league players could make a minimum of $1,160 a month, and clubs would only pay for the 40-hour weeks worked during the season. Players entering the minor leagues currently bring in as little as $1,100 a month, well below the federal minimum wage. That’s paltry compared to the minimum salary—$92,000 per month—in the major leagues. Since 1976, the minimum salary for major leaguers has skyrocketed by more than 2,500 percent. In the minors, it’s risen only 70 percent. As Mother Jones previously reported, the man behind the 2014 lawsuit, attorney Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league baseball player himself, saw an opening into challenging Major League Baseball’s traditional pay structure by homing in on the league’s compliance with federal wage and overtime law.
Figuring out a way around MLB’s antitrust exemption was the first order of business. The exemption, in place since 1922, shields teams from allegations of monopolistic business practices, such as colluding to suppress minor leaguers’ wages. But it doesn’t protect MLB from federal wage and overtime laws, which is why Broshuis’ case focuses on unpaid and extra work, from seven-day-a-week schedules to mandatory offseason workouts. McCann thinks the suit, one of a surge of sports-related cases targeting everything from concussions to college athlete unionization, signals big changes not seen since the free-agency lawsuits of the 1960s and ’70s. However, if Senne gets past MLB’s initial motion to dismiss, it will likely take years to litigate, particularly if it expands into a class-action suit.
The case is currently wrapped in federal appeals court. But if Congress approves the omnibus bill with the exemption, the stakes in court could get even higher. “This is about billionaire owners using their clout to try to pass something that isn’t going through the normal procedures of legislature and that is only going to make thousands of minor leaguers suffer even more,” Broshuis told the Washington Post earlier this week. “We’re just talking about basic minimum wage laws here—the same laws that McDonald’s has to comply with, the same laws that Walmart has to comply with.”
Congress slipped the provision into the omnibus bill late Wednesday thanks to a yearslong lobbying effort by Major League Baseball. The bill, known as the Save America’s Pastime Act, doesn’t really save anything. Instead, it means Major League Baseball, which reportedly brought in $10 billion in revenue in 2017, can confine their minor league players’ salaries to below minimum wage without the benefit of overtime pay.
The MLB’s pay structure has been the subject of several federal lawsuits, including one filed in 2014 on behalf of minor league baseball players that alleges that minor league players are illegally underpaid and don’t receive overtime pay. Unlike their major league counterparts, minor league players are not unionized.
A similar effort to the Save America’s Pastime Act was made in 2016 when Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) and Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) introduced the act to the House to create the exemption. After a flurry of backlash, Bustos, whose father was MLB’s first lobbyist, withdrew her support for the measure. Minor League Baseball president Pat O’Connor told the Washington Post earlier this week that the lawsuit threatened to upend the business model for minor league baseball clubs. Major League Baseball clubs pay the wages for minor league players, who are considered seasonal workers, and the league argues that if players started receiving minimum wages, minor league clubs would have to chip in.
While the major leagues may seem prosperous, low pay in the minors has been an issue for decades. Under the bill, minor league players could make a minimum of $1,160 a month, and clubs would only pay for the 40-hour weeks worked during the season. Players entering the minor leagues currently bring in as little as $1,100 a month, well below the federal minimum wage. That’s paltry compared to the minimum salary—$92,000 per month—in the major leagues. Since 1976, the minimum salary for major leaguers has skyrocketed by more than 2,500 percent. In the minors, it’s risen only 70 percent. As Mother Jones previously reported, the man behind the 2014 lawsuit, attorney Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league baseball player himself, saw an opening into challenging Major League Baseball’s traditional pay structure by homing in on the league’s compliance with federal wage and overtime law.
Figuring out a way around MLB’s antitrust exemption was the first order of business. The exemption, in place since 1922, shields teams from allegations of monopolistic business practices, such as colluding to suppress minor leaguers’ wages. But it doesn’t protect MLB from federal wage and overtime laws, which is why Broshuis’ case focuses on unpaid and extra work, from seven-day-a-week schedules to mandatory offseason workouts. McCann thinks the suit, one of a surge of sports-related cases targeting everything from concussions to college athlete unionization, signals big changes not seen since the free-agency lawsuits of the 1960s and ’70s. However, if Senne gets past MLB’s initial motion to dismiss, it will likely take years to litigate, particularly if it expands into a class-action suit.
The case is currently wrapped in federal appeals court. But if Congress approves the omnibus bill with the exemption, the stakes in court could get even higher. “This is about billionaire owners using their clout to try to pass something that isn’t going through the normal procedures of legislature and that is only going to make thousands of minor leaguers suffer even more,” Broshuis told the Washington Post earlier this week. “We’re just talking about basic minimum wage laws here—the same laws that McDonald’s has to comply with, the same laws that Walmart has to comply with.”
Inside IBM’s Purge of Thousands of Workers Who Have One Thing in Common
“Age discrimination is an open secret like sexual harassment was.”
PETER GOSSELIN AND ARIANA TOBIN - mother jones/pro publica
MAR. 22, 2018 6:00 AM
For nearly a half century, IBM came as close as any company to bearing the torch for the American Dream.
As the world’s dominant technology firm, payrolls at International Business Machines Corp. swelled to nearly a quarter-million US white-collar workers in the 1980s. Its profits helped underwrite a broad agenda of racial equality, equal pay for women and an unbeatable offer of great wages and something close to lifetime employment, all in return for unswerving loyalty.
But when high tech suddenly started shifting and companies went global, IBM faced the changing landscape with a distinction most of its fiercest competitors didn’t have: a large number of experienced and aging US employees.
The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” It slashed IBM’s US workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its total US job cuts during those years. (Read more about how ProPublica got the story here.)
In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked US laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees.
Among ProPublica‘s findings, IBM:
ProPublica provided the company with a 10-page summary of its findings and the evidence on which they were based. IBM spokesman Edward Barbini said that to respond the company needed to see copies of all documents cited in the story, a request ProPublica could not fulfill without breaking faith with its sources.
Instead, ProPublica provided IBM with detailed descriptions of the paperwork. Barbini declined to address the documents or answer specific questions about the firm’s policies and practices, and instead issued the following statement:
“We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law. Our ability to do this is why we are the only tech company that has not only survived but thrived for more than 100 years.”
With nearly 400,000 people worldwide, and tens of thousands still in the US, IBM remains a corporate giant. How it handles the shift from its veteran baby-boom workforce to younger generations will likely influence what other employers do. And the way it treats its experienced workers will eventually affect younger IBM employees as they too age.
Fifty years ago, Congress made it illegal with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to treat older workers differently than younger ones with only a few exceptions, such as jobs that require special physical qualifications. And for years, judges and policymakers treated the law as essentially on a par with prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and other categories.
In recent decades, however, the courts have responded to corporate pleas for greater leeway to meet global competition and satisfy investor demands for rising profits by expanding the exceptions and shrinking the protections against age bias.
“Age discrimination is an open secret like sexual harassment was until recently,” said Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the independent federal agency that administers the nation’s workplace anti-discrimination laws.
“Everybody knows it’s happening, but often these cases are difficult to prove” because courts have weakened the law, Lipnic said. “The fact remains it’s an unfair and illegal way to treat people that can be economically devastating.”
Many companies have sought to take advantage of the court rulings. But the story of IBM’s downsizing provides an unusually detailed portrait of how a major American corporation systematically identified employees to coax or force out of work in their 40s, 50s and 60s, a time when many are still productive and need a paycheck, but face huge hurdles finding anything like comparable jobs.
The dislocation caused by IBM’s cuts has been especially great because until recently the company encouraged its employees to think of themselves as “IBMers” and many operated under the assumption that they had career-long employment.
When the axe suddenly fell, IBM provided almost no information about why an employee was cut or who else was departing, leaving people to piece together what had happened through websites, listservs and Facebook groups such as “Watching IBM” or “Geographically Undesirable IBM Marketers,” as well as informal support groups.
Marjorie Madfis, at the time 57, was a New York-based digital marketing strategist and 17-year IBM employee when she and six other members of her nine-person team—all women in their 40s and 50s—were laid off in July 2013. The two who remained were younger men.
Since her specialty was one that IBM had said it was expanding, she asked for a written explanation of why she was let go. The company declined to provide it.
“They got rid of a group of highly skilled, highly effective, highly respected women, including me, for a reason nobody knows,” Madfis said in an interview. “The only explanation is our age.” (read more)
As the world’s dominant technology firm, payrolls at International Business Machines Corp. swelled to nearly a quarter-million US white-collar workers in the 1980s. Its profits helped underwrite a broad agenda of racial equality, equal pay for women and an unbeatable offer of great wages and something close to lifetime employment, all in return for unswerving loyalty.
But when high tech suddenly started shifting and companies went global, IBM faced the changing landscape with a distinction most of its fiercest competitors didn’t have: a large number of experienced and aging US employees.
The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would “correct seniority mix.” It slashed IBM’s US workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over, about 60 percent of its total US job cuts during those years. (Read more about how ProPublica got the story here.)
In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked US laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees.
Among ProPublica‘s findings, IBM:
- Denied older workers information the law says they need in order to decide whether they’ve been victims of age bias, and required them to sign away the right to go to court or join with others to seek redress.
- Targeted people for layoffs and firings with techniques that tilted against older workers, even when the company rated them high performers. In some instances, the money saved from the departures went toward hiring young replacements.
- Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.
- Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.
- Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits.
ProPublica provided the company with a 10-page summary of its findings and the evidence on which they were based. IBM spokesman Edward Barbini said that to respond the company needed to see copies of all documents cited in the story, a request ProPublica could not fulfill without breaking faith with its sources.
Instead, ProPublica provided IBM with detailed descriptions of the paperwork. Barbini declined to address the documents or answer specific questions about the firm’s policies and practices, and instead issued the following statement:
“We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law. Our ability to do this is why we are the only tech company that has not only survived but thrived for more than 100 years.”
With nearly 400,000 people worldwide, and tens of thousands still in the US, IBM remains a corporate giant. How it handles the shift from its veteran baby-boom workforce to younger generations will likely influence what other employers do. And the way it treats its experienced workers will eventually affect younger IBM employees as they too age.
Fifty years ago, Congress made it illegal with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to treat older workers differently than younger ones with only a few exceptions, such as jobs that require special physical qualifications. And for years, judges and policymakers treated the law as essentially on a par with prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and other categories.
In recent decades, however, the courts have responded to corporate pleas for greater leeway to meet global competition and satisfy investor demands for rising profits by expanding the exceptions and shrinking the protections against age bias.
“Age discrimination is an open secret like sexual harassment was until recently,” said Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the independent federal agency that administers the nation’s workplace anti-discrimination laws.
“Everybody knows it’s happening, but often these cases are difficult to prove” because courts have weakened the law, Lipnic said. “The fact remains it’s an unfair and illegal way to treat people that can be economically devastating.”
Many companies have sought to take advantage of the court rulings. But the story of IBM’s downsizing provides an unusually detailed portrait of how a major American corporation systematically identified employees to coax or force out of work in their 40s, 50s and 60s, a time when many are still productive and need a paycheck, but face huge hurdles finding anything like comparable jobs.
The dislocation caused by IBM’s cuts has been especially great because until recently the company encouraged its employees to think of themselves as “IBMers” and many operated under the assumption that they had career-long employment.
When the axe suddenly fell, IBM provided almost no information about why an employee was cut or who else was departing, leaving people to piece together what had happened through websites, listservs and Facebook groups such as “Watching IBM” or “Geographically Undesirable IBM Marketers,” as well as informal support groups.
Marjorie Madfis, at the time 57, was a New York-based digital marketing strategist and 17-year IBM employee when she and six other members of her nine-person team—all women in their 40s and 50s—were laid off in July 2013. The two who remained were younger men.
Since her specialty was one that IBM had said it was expanding, she asked for a written explanation of why she was let go. The company declined to provide it.
“They got rid of a group of highly skilled, highly effective, highly respected women, including me, for a reason nobody knows,” Madfis said in an interview. “The only explanation is our age.” (read more)
funnies
