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Slavery 21st Century
You thought it was over, think again
february 15, 2019
Slavery did not end it was merely outsourced,
reconfigured, and made politically correct
The Global Slavery Index
published on Thursday by Walk Free Foundation, describes modern slavery as a complex and often hidden crime that crosses borders, sectors and jurisdictions. The US number, the study estimates, is almost one hundredth of the estimated 40.3 million global total number of people it defines as being enslaved.
headlines and issues
*Fired for no reason? US fast-food workers in fresh assault on unfair dismissals
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'How do they expect to run without us?' Tesla accused of axing key staff to cut costs
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*California hotel workers ‘on the brink’ of joining wave of strikes
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*GOP LAWMAKER WHO EMPLOYS HUNDREDS OF MINORS LOOKS TO ABOLISH ALL STATE CHILD LABOR LAWS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Students File Lawsuit Accusing Brown University of Labor Violations
(excerpt below)
*'It's union busting 101': documents reveal Verizon's attacks on organized labor
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US apparel firm cuts off Chinese factory in internment camp
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: Google's 'two-tier' workforce training document
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US airport workers struggle to make ends meet as industry profits soar
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Workers Are Fighting Retail Robber Barons – and Winning
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Dangerous, Low-Paid World of Nail Salons
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*New York labor leaders: Amazon has 'record of routinely mistreating workers'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Revealed: Restricting breaks keeps poultry industry workers living in fear
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*US retail workers face long hours, poor pay and 'anxiety through the roof' on Black Friday
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Our new column from inside Amazon: 'They treat us as disposable'
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CALIFORNIA IS USING INMATE LABOR TO FIGHT ITS DEADLY WILDFIRES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*House Democrats plan to grill Labor Department officials about tip and child labor policies
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Meet the Janitors Taking On Big Pharma to Win a Livable Wage
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Chicago Creates New Office of Labor Standards to Combat Wage Theft
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
Fired for no reason? US fast-food workers in fresh assault on unfair dismissals
New York bill that could apply in other states would give workers stronger protections if they’ve been fired unjustly
Steven Greenhouse in New York
the guardian
Fri 15 Feb 2019 06.00 EST
Fast-food restaurants in New York City may soon have to adhere to a law that prohibits firing an employee without just cause. Photograph: Mike Groll/AP
It’s easy to get fired in fast food. According to a recent report, one fast-food worker said she was fired because her nails were too long; another because she said she didn’t smile enough. That might be about to change.
In a first-in-the-nation effort, a city council member in New York moved on Wednesday to make the city’s 60,000 fast-food jobs a lot less precarious – introducing legislation that would prohibit fast-food restaurants from terminating employees except for “just cause”.
“Workers have told me they’ve been fired for no reason at all,” said Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat who introduced the measure. “Should employers have the right to fire people for any reason, including the most trivial reasons? Most people would say that’s not a right people should have.”
Lander’s bill is a direct assault on the system of at-will employment that pervades most of the United States. That system lets employers fire workers for any reason; for instance, they dislike a worker’s eyelashes or shoes but not for prohibited reasons, like discriminating by race or religion.
A successful push to change the rules in New York could have significant effects for other states.
Lander voiced confidence that the city council would enact his proposal, which gives three choices to workers who feel they have been fired unjustly: sue in court, seek arbitration or complain to the city’s department of consumer affairs.
Business groups were quick to assert that New York – where the Fight for $15 campaign for a higher minimum wage began – was once again unduly hamstringing business. “If you’re going to say to somebody, any time you want to fire someone, it’s going to be subject to litigation, that’s a big burden, especially if you’re a franchisee,” said Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Economic Policies Institute, a business-backed research group.
The National Restaurant Association hinted at a lawsuit saying this “burdensome and discriminatory legislation” would hurt the industry. It added that such a measure, by overturning at-will employment, would be contrary to New York’s labor laws.
One of the state’s most powerful unions, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union – which represents tens of thousands of janitors and doormen and championed the Fight for $15 early on – vigorously backs Lander’s “just cause” legislation.
“This is trying to address one of the biggest problems in the fast-food industry: many terminations and significant turnover,” said Hector Figueroa, Local 32BJ’s president. “We’re trying to make these good jobs. For these workers, arbitrary terminations are all too common.”
Bryonna Oliver, who was fired last month, said the legislation is badly needed. Oliver, 23, said she had worked at a McDonalds in downtown Brooklyn for two and a half years, but her manager suddenly fired her last month for not reporting to work the previous day.
Oliver insisted she was never scheduled to work that day, but her protests were to no avail. “I was very upset,” she said. “Fast-food workers should not be terminated unfairly. They should only be fired for a good reason.”
On Wednesday, four progressive groups, including the National Employment Law Project and the Center for Popular Democracy, released a research report that provided intellectual ammunition for the just-cause bill. Researchers surveyed 539 New York fast-food workers and found that 65% of the 192 who had ever been terminated from a job reported that they had, in at least one instance, not been given any reason for being fired.
Tsedeye Gebreselassie, the chairwoman of the board of Fast Food Justice, a worker advocacy group, said, “Basically, employers have broad leeway to fire workers for no reason at all, and that wreaks havoc on workers, especially low-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck.”
Princess Wright, a 22-year-old McDonald’s worker in Brooklyn, said her boss fired her for missing work after he had initially agreed she could miss her shift to help her landlord with a babysitting crisis. Wright, a student at Mercy College, said that after four days of missing work, she managed to persuade her boss to rehire her, but those missed days and a delay in receiving her paycheck caused her to fall behind in paying her rent.
“The reason I was fired was wrong,” Wright said. “This law would make my position much stronger if I’m in a situation like that.”
Adrienne Adams, a councilmember from Queens, introduced a companion bill to Lander’s – hers would require fast-food restaurants to follow seniority when they lay off people for economic reasons, such as a decline in sales. Her bill aims to prevent restaurants from doing layoffs out of seniority order as a pretext to get rid of employees for whom they don’t have just cause to terminate.
“Just-cause legislation is a necessary step to bring accountability to fast-food giants and security to their employees,” Adams said.
Lander said another advantage of the legislation is that fast-food workers would feel emboldened to speak out about pay and workplace problems once they have “just cause” protections.
Jeff Hanscom, the International Franchise Association’s vice-president for state government relations, criticized the legislation, saying its sponsors “take pride that New York City is in the forefront of doing something nobody else has done. We don’t know what impact this will have. We don’t think there will be a positive impact when government dictates conditions in any sector.”
Hanscom voiced resentment that the city council has repeatedly passed legislation that applies only to what he called the “quick service restaurant” industry.
Hanscom complained: “They seem to have a knack for targeting only one sector of the economy.”
Lander responded: “If the primary complaint that fast-food employers have is that this law should cover more employers, I’d be glad to consider it.”
In a first-in-the-nation effort, a city council member in New York moved on Wednesday to make the city’s 60,000 fast-food jobs a lot less precarious – introducing legislation that would prohibit fast-food restaurants from terminating employees except for “just cause”.
“Workers have told me they’ve been fired for no reason at all,” said Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat who introduced the measure. “Should employers have the right to fire people for any reason, including the most trivial reasons? Most people would say that’s not a right people should have.”
Lander’s bill is a direct assault on the system of at-will employment that pervades most of the United States. That system lets employers fire workers for any reason; for instance, they dislike a worker’s eyelashes or shoes but not for prohibited reasons, like discriminating by race or religion.
A successful push to change the rules in New York could have significant effects for other states.
Lander voiced confidence that the city council would enact his proposal, which gives three choices to workers who feel they have been fired unjustly: sue in court, seek arbitration or complain to the city’s department of consumer affairs.
Business groups were quick to assert that New York – where the Fight for $15 campaign for a higher minimum wage began – was once again unduly hamstringing business. “If you’re going to say to somebody, any time you want to fire someone, it’s going to be subject to litigation, that’s a big burden, especially if you’re a franchisee,” said Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Economic Policies Institute, a business-backed research group.
The National Restaurant Association hinted at a lawsuit saying this “burdensome and discriminatory legislation” would hurt the industry. It added that such a measure, by overturning at-will employment, would be contrary to New York’s labor laws.
One of the state’s most powerful unions, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union – which represents tens of thousands of janitors and doormen and championed the Fight for $15 early on – vigorously backs Lander’s “just cause” legislation.
“This is trying to address one of the biggest problems in the fast-food industry: many terminations and significant turnover,” said Hector Figueroa, Local 32BJ’s president. “We’re trying to make these good jobs. For these workers, arbitrary terminations are all too common.”
Bryonna Oliver, who was fired last month, said the legislation is badly needed. Oliver, 23, said she had worked at a McDonalds in downtown Brooklyn for two and a half years, but her manager suddenly fired her last month for not reporting to work the previous day.
Oliver insisted she was never scheduled to work that day, but her protests were to no avail. “I was very upset,” she said. “Fast-food workers should not be terminated unfairly. They should only be fired for a good reason.”
On Wednesday, four progressive groups, including the National Employment Law Project and the Center for Popular Democracy, released a research report that provided intellectual ammunition for the just-cause bill. Researchers surveyed 539 New York fast-food workers and found that 65% of the 192 who had ever been terminated from a job reported that they had, in at least one instance, not been given any reason for being fired.
Tsedeye Gebreselassie, the chairwoman of the board of Fast Food Justice, a worker advocacy group, said, “Basically, employers have broad leeway to fire workers for no reason at all, and that wreaks havoc on workers, especially low-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck.”
Princess Wright, a 22-year-old McDonald’s worker in Brooklyn, said her boss fired her for missing work after he had initially agreed she could miss her shift to help her landlord with a babysitting crisis. Wright, a student at Mercy College, said that after four days of missing work, she managed to persuade her boss to rehire her, but those missed days and a delay in receiving her paycheck caused her to fall behind in paying her rent.
“The reason I was fired was wrong,” Wright said. “This law would make my position much stronger if I’m in a situation like that.”
Adrienne Adams, a councilmember from Queens, introduced a companion bill to Lander’s – hers would require fast-food restaurants to follow seniority when they lay off people for economic reasons, such as a decline in sales. Her bill aims to prevent restaurants from doing layoffs out of seniority order as a pretext to get rid of employees for whom they don’t have just cause to terminate.
“Just-cause legislation is a necessary step to bring accountability to fast-food giants and security to their employees,” Adams said.
Lander said another advantage of the legislation is that fast-food workers would feel emboldened to speak out about pay and workplace problems once they have “just cause” protections.
Jeff Hanscom, the International Franchise Association’s vice-president for state government relations, criticized the legislation, saying its sponsors “take pride that New York City is in the forefront of doing something nobody else has done. We don’t know what impact this will have. We don’t think there will be a positive impact when government dictates conditions in any sector.”
Hanscom voiced resentment that the city council has repeatedly passed legislation that applies only to what he called the “quick service restaurant” industry.
Hanscom complained: “They seem to have a knack for targeting only one sector of the economy.”
Lander responded: “If the primary complaint that fast-food employers have is that this law should cover more employers, I’d be glad to consider it.”
profit vs. quality, guess which losses!!!
'How do they expect to run without us?' Tesla accused of axing key staff to cut costs
Electric car firm slashed 7% of workforce this month and ex-employees say more experienced staff were targeted
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Wed 30 Jan 2019 03.00 EST
Alan Ochoa worked at Tesla’s Fremont plant in California for four years. He was laid off recently along with his entire department in quality control, many of whom were also long-time employees. “I have no idea how they expect to run without us,” said Ochoa.
The electric car company releases its latest financial results on Wednesday and analysts are not expecting good news. On 18 January, founder Elon Musk sent out a mass email to employees announcing 7% of the company’s workforce were being laid off, in addition to cuts to temporary and contracted employees, and warning of a “very difficult” road ahead.
Ochoa predicts Tesla’s “difficult road” will not be helped by laying off experienced staff.
He said: “My last repair on Friday was finding a rear fascia was missing a screw so if you pulled on it, it would pop out. I grabbed a drill, the screw, got down on my knees and made the repair myself. No one would have known about it unless they tugged on the edges of the rear fascia like I had made it a habit to do.
“But I know once the car starts driving it would become unseated due to the wind pulling it out.”
An internal document provided to laid-off employees explained those who were dismissed were selected “by evaluating the criticality of each position, identifying duplicate roles, and by assessing the specific skills and abilities of each individual in the company”.
Workers past and present believe Tesla is trying to cut costs by getting rid of more expensive, and experienced, staff. The company disputes this.
Tesla has a one through five pay ranking system for employees. Five represents the most senior.
Anthony Lamendola worked at the Lathrop facility, also in California, for nearly seven years before being laid off.
Lamendola, who was also level five, said: “They let all the people go who have been there level rive or more, all level fours and threes, only kept one, two, some threes. I’ve never been late, never called in, never been wrote up in over six years. I’m just am in shock for them to do this and keep temps and new hires.”
A current Tesla employee at Lathrop who requested anonymity for fear of losing their job, noted temporary employees and recent hires were kept on, while many long-time employees were laid off as part of the cuts. “This was a move I was expecting due to the high price of raw metal from our president’s tariff war with China,” the worker said. “Tesla Lathrop has a large amount of people that wanted to go union.”
Back at the Fremont plant, a current employee who has worked for over four years at the plant was transferred to work on car seats as part of restructuring. He noted many transferred employees took hourly pay cuts, and a few walked off the job as a result.
“It seems like they tried to get rid of the older, more experienced guys making more money than the entry level. I personally see and feel this is aimed at the higher-waged employees,” the employee said. “They replaced me with a $19 an hour worker. I make $26 an hour.” He was told his transfer would be a lateral move and wouldn’t include a pay cut, but he’s still wary that his pay will be reduced from changing departments.
“I loved Tesla at one point. But four and a half years of living what I lived through, I don’t feel the love, what a good, dedicated employee should feel from a company.”
Another employee at the Fremont plant noted that dozens of newly hired workers started training the week after the mass layoff, and that there was also an elimination of overtime. “You get in trouble with one minute of overtime, which is counter-productive because you have people wrapping up earlier than they normally would so they don’t risk going over,’ the worker said.
A Tesla spokesperson said: “We are continuing to hire for essential positions.” The company denied senior and high-waged employees were targeted in the layoff.
Tesla said: “Regarding the number of impacted employees, here’s what we said in our blogpost: as a result of the above, we unfortunately have no choice but to reduce full-time employee headcount by approximately 7% (we grew by 30% last year, which is more than we can support) and retain only the most critical temps and contractors.”
The cuts have been severe. A third employee at the Fremont plant explained his department was cut in half, with the employees who survived this round of layoffs forced to do even more work.
“We’re going to have to take over their positions,” the employee said. “We have to do our job, plus the contractor job. Usually we have to work for two people, now, we’re going to have to work for three people.”
Tesla has suffered quality control setbacks in the past and workers fear those issues may be worsened by the cuts. Ochoa explained he was making several dozen repairs a day on quality control, depending on what line he was on.
He said: “I fear the quality will be greatly diminished. Not all of my repairs were easy to see but would have a lasting effect.”
The electric car company releases its latest financial results on Wednesday and analysts are not expecting good news. On 18 January, founder Elon Musk sent out a mass email to employees announcing 7% of the company’s workforce were being laid off, in addition to cuts to temporary and contracted employees, and warning of a “very difficult” road ahead.
Ochoa predicts Tesla’s “difficult road” will not be helped by laying off experienced staff.
He said: “My last repair on Friday was finding a rear fascia was missing a screw so if you pulled on it, it would pop out. I grabbed a drill, the screw, got down on my knees and made the repair myself. No one would have known about it unless they tugged on the edges of the rear fascia like I had made it a habit to do.
“But I know once the car starts driving it would become unseated due to the wind pulling it out.”
An internal document provided to laid-off employees explained those who were dismissed were selected “by evaluating the criticality of each position, identifying duplicate roles, and by assessing the specific skills and abilities of each individual in the company”.
Workers past and present believe Tesla is trying to cut costs by getting rid of more expensive, and experienced, staff. The company disputes this.
Tesla has a one through five pay ranking system for employees. Five represents the most senior.
Anthony Lamendola worked at the Lathrop facility, also in California, for nearly seven years before being laid off.
Lamendola, who was also level five, said: “They let all the people go who have been there level rive or more, all level fours and threes, only kept one, two, some threes. I’ve never been late, never called in, never been wrote up in over six years. I’m just am in shock for them to do this and keep temps and new hires.”
A current Tesla employee at Lathrop who requested anonymity for fear of losing their job, noted temporary employees and recent hires were kept on, while many long-time employees were laid off as part of the cuts. “This was a move I was expecting due to the high price of raw metal from our president’s tariff war with China,” the worker said. “Tesla Lathrop has a large amount of people that wanted to go union.”
Back at the Fremont plant, a current employee who has worked for over four years at the plant was transferred to work on car seats as part of restructuring. He noted many transferred employees took hourly pay cuts, and a few walked off the job as a result.
“It seems like they tried to get rid of the older, more experienced guys making more money than the entry level. I personally see and feel this is aimed at the higher-waged employees,” the employee said. “They replaced me with a $19 an hour worker. I make $26 an hour.” He was told his transfer would be a lateral move and wouldn’t include a pay cut, but he’s still wary that his pay will be reduced from changing departments.
“I loved Tesla at one point. But four and a half years of living what I lived through, I don’t feel the love, what a good, dedicated employee should feel from a company.”
Another employee at the Fremont plant noted that dozens of newly hired workers started training the week after the mass layoff, and that there was also an elimination of overtime. “You get in trouble with one minute of overtime, which is counter-productive because you have people wrapping up earlier than they normally would so they don’t risk going over,’ the worker said.
A Tesla spokesperson said: “We are continuing to hire for essential positions.” The company denied senior and high-waged employees were targeted in the layoff.
Tesla said: “Regarding the number of impacted employees, here’s what we said in our blogpost: as a result of the above, we unfortunately have no choice but to reduce full-time employee headcount by approximately 7% (we grew by 30% last year, which is more than we can support) and retain only the most critical temps and contractors.”
The cuts have been severe. A third employee at the Fremont plant explained his department was cut in half, with the employees who survived this round of layoffs forced to do even more work.
“We’re going to have to take over their positions,” the employee said. “We have to do our job, plus the contractor job. Usually we have to work for two people, now, we’re going to have to work for three people.”
Tesla has suffered quality control setbacks in the past and workers fear those issues may be worsened by the cuts. Ochoa explained he was making several dozen repairs a day on quality control, depending on what line he was on.
He said: “I fear the quality will be greatly diminished. Not all of my repairs were easy to see but would have a lasting effect.”
California hotel workers ‘on the brink’ of joining wave of strikes
Nearly 1,000 workers at Anaheim’s Sheraton Park and Hilton poised to walk off the job following protests across the US in 2018
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Tue 29 Jan 2019 06.00 EST
After 18 years working a housekeeper at the Sheraton Park resort in Anaheim, California, Celia Hernandez still struggles to make ends meet.
“I live three blocks from Disneyland. I live in a two-bedroom apartment. I pay $1,875 a month in rent. My 23-year-old son is forced to live in the living room on the couch because we can’t afford a bigger place because the cost of living is so high,” Hernandez said. “It’s a struggle for someone like me to put food on the table for my family.”
But Hernandez is now taking action. She is one of nearly 1,000 hotel workers at the Sheraton Park resort and Hilton hotel in Anaheim who are on the verge of walking off the job, continuing a wave of hotel strikes that occurred at the end of 2018 across the US.
In September 2018, 6,000 union members went on strike against 26 hotels in Chicago. Nearly 8,000 Marriott hotel workers went on strike in eight US cities for nine weeks in October 2018, the largest hotel strike in US history. Hotel workers in the Los Angeles area were poised to join the wave of hotel strikes after union members at 24 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange county voted to authorize a strike in December 2018.
Though several Los Angeles hotels later reached contract deals to avoid a strike, the Sheraton Park resort and Hilton are holding out in negotiations, demanding concessions. Unite Here Local 11, which represents about 1,000 workers at both hotels, said workers are “now on the brink of walking off the job”.
Among concerns from hotel workers are the small wage increases being offered by the hotels in contract negotiations, as well as risks due to reduce health coverage.
“If they raise the price of the medical insurance, people won’t be able to afford it any more,” Hernandez said. “A week ago I had a biopsy on one of my breasts. If I didn’t have affordable health insurance, I can’t imagine how much money I would have paid out of pocket for that.”
Lorena Osegueda has worked at the Sheraton Park resort as a hostess for 12 years and struggles on her current wages and with the cost of health insurance. “A mother of three with the income I’m getting, I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s very hard for me to pay for the insurance as it is,” said Osegueda. “We’re living in a two-bedroom apartment for $1,600 plus bills on top, let alone other things that come up – food, and other things.”
The hotels have stood firm to demand concessions from the union. Unite Here Local 11’s organizing director in Orange county, Austin Lynch, noted cooks and stewards are being asked to work four-hour shifts, after they have historically relied on eight-hour shifts. They plan on opening a non-union restaurant in the hotel lobby to compete with the unionized restaurant operated by the hotel, and remain one of the few unionized hotels to refuse to offer their employees a pension. The Hilton is also pushing to enact a program to incentivize guests to reject room cleaning, which would result in layoffs or a reduction in hours for current housekeepers, as well as an increase their workload.
“Both hotels are offering very little money, not enough for the workers to take a significant step forward in their wages or pension. Right now the cost of living is surging and the hotels have been doing fabulously, they don’t deny that,” said Lynch. “Workers can’t get small wage increases or no improvement in their pension at a time when hotels are surging and the cost of living is surging.”
The union has also accused both hotels of utilizing anti-union tactics, including managers intimidating and interrogating workers and distributing false information about the union negotiations.
In a letter sent from the Sheraton Park resort to Unite Here Local 11, the hotel’s general manager wrote: “Union representatives continue to unnecessarily agitate the associates, causing some associates to leave work in tears, and negatively impact the guests who financially support the Hotel and provide our associates with work opportunities.”
Marriott referred comment to the hospitality management company that operates the Sheraton Park hotel, Interstate Hotels & Resorts.
A spokesperson for the hotel told the Guardian in an email: “We are currently in the midst of negotiations with the labor union that represents some of our employees. However, our collective bargaining agreement expired on 30 November 2018. While we continue to negotiate in good faith with the union to achieve a new agreement, we support our associates’ right to decide whether to participate in activities protected by federal labor laws.”
A spokesperson for Hilton hotels said in an email: “If the union decides to call a strike, we have contingency plans in place to ensure operations run as smoothly as possible and that we continue to offer the same service and amenities that we are proud to provide our guest and clients every day.”
“I live three blocks from Disneyland. I live in a two-bedroom apartment. I pay $1,875 a month in rent. My 23-year-old son is forced to live in the living room on the couch because we can’t afford a bigger place because the cost of living is so high,” Hernandez said. “It’s a struggle for someone like me to put food on the table for my family.”
But Hernandez is now taking action. She is one of nearly 1,000 hotel workers at the Sheraton Park resort and Hilton hotel in Anaheim who are on the verge of walking off the job, continuing a wave of hotel strikes that occurred at the end of 2018 across the US.
In September 2018, 6,000 union members went on strike against 26 hotels in Chicago. Nearly 8,000 Marriott hotel workers went on strike in eight US cities for nine weeks in October 2018, the largest hotel strike in US history. Hotel workers in the Los Angeles area were poised to join the wave of hotel strikes after union members at 24 hotels in Los Angeles and Orange county voted to authorize a strike in December 2018.
Though several Los Angeles hotels later reached contract deals to avoid a strike, the Sheraton Park resort and Hilton are holding out in negotiations, demanding concessions. Unite Here Local 11, which represents about 1,000 workers at both hotels, said workers are “now on the brink of walking off the job”.
Among concerns from hotel workers are the small wage increases being offered by the hotels in contract negotiations, as well as risks due to reduce health coverage.
“If they raise the price of the medical insurance, people won’t be able to afford it any more,” Hernandez said. “A week ago I had a biopsy on one of my breasts. If I didn’t have affordable health insurance, I can’t imagine how much money I would have paid out of pocket for that.”
Lorena Osegueda has worked at the Sheraton Park resort as a hostess for 12 years and struggles on her current wages and with the cost of health insurance. “A mother of three with the income I’m getting, I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s very hard for me to pay for the insurance as it is,” said Osegueda. “We’re living in a two-bedroom apartment for $1,600 plus bills on top, let alone other things that come up – food, and other things.”
The hotels have stood firm to demand concessions from the union. Unite Here Local 11’s organizing director in Orange county, Austin Lynch, noted cooks and stewards are being asked to work four-hour shifts, after they have historically relied on eight-hour shifts. They plan on opening a non-union restaurant in the hotel lobby to compete with the unionized restaurant operated by the hotel, and remain one of the few unionized hotels to refuse to offer their employees a pension. The Hilton is also pushing to enact a program to incentivize guests to reject room cleaning, which would result in layoffs or a reduction in hours for current housekeepers, as well as an increase their workload.
“Both hotels are offering very little money, not enough for the workers to take a significant step forward in their wages or pension. Right now the cost of living is surging and the hotels have been doing fabulously, they don’t deny that,” said Lynch. “Workers can’t get small wage increases or no improvement in their pension at a time when hotels are surging and the cost of living is surging.”
The union has also accused both hotels of utilizing anti-union tactics, including managers intimidating and interrogating workers and distributing false information about the union negotiations.
In a letter sent from the Sheraton Park resort to Unite Here Local 11, the hotel’s general manager wrote: “Union representatives continue to unnecessarily agitate the associates, causing some associates to leave work in tears, and negatively impact the guests who financially support the Hotel and provide our associates with work opportunities.”
Marriott referred comment to the hospitality management company that operates the Sheraton Park hotel, Interstate Hotels & Resorts.
A spokesperson for the hotel told the Guardian in an email: “We are currently in the midst of negotiations with the labor union that represents some of our employees. However, our collective bargaining agreement expired on 30 November 2018. While we continue to negotiate in good faith with the union to achieve a new agreement, we support our associates’ right to decide whether to participate in activities protected by federal labor laws.”
A spokesperson for Hilton hotels said in an email: “If the union decides to call a strike, we have contingency plans in place to ensure operations run as smoothly as possible and that we continue to offer the same service and amenities that we are proud to provide our guest and clients every day.”
GOP lawmaker who employs hundreds of minors looks to abolish all state child labor laws
Brad Reed -raw story
28 JAN 2019 AT 08:09 ET
A Republican state senator in Indiana whose business employs hundreds of minors is making a major push to scrap his state’s child labor laws.
The Indy Star reports that Indiana state Sen. Chip Perfect has filed a bill that would get rid of work permit requirements for underage employees, while also removing restrictions on the hours underage teenagers can work.
Perfect, who is the CEO of the Perfect North Slopes ski resort, estimates that his business employs between 300 to 400 minors.
The Indy Star writes that, to drum up support for his bill, Perfect had his human resources director testify “in favor of the bill during a committee hearing last week, raising questions about whether his involvement in the legislation is a conflict of interest.”
However, Perfect is insisting that he is not conflicted in proposing the law, even though it would allow him to hire more minors and give them longer hours.
“It wouldn’t affect me directly, because as I testified today, we have invested an incredible amount of money and we are currently adhering to the laws,” Perfect said. “This is really more about small businesses who cannot afford the resources to adhere to these antiquated laws.”
Federal child labor laws offer strong protections for young workers under the age of 16, but treatment of workers aged between 16 and 17 is left up to state legislators.
The Indy Star reports that Indiana state Sen. Chip Perfect has filed a bill that would get rid of work permit requirements for underage employees, while also removing restrictions on the hours underage teenagers can work.
Perfect, who is the CEO of the Perfect North Slopes ski resort, estimates that his business employs between 300 to 400 minors.
The Indy Star writes that, to drum up support for his bill, Perfect had his human resources director testify “in favor of the bill during a committee hearing last week, raising questions about whether his involvement in the legislation is a conflict of interest.”
However, Perfect is insisting that he is not conflicted in proposing the law, even though it would allow him to hire more minors and give them longer hours.
“It wouldn’t affect me directly, because as I testified today, we have invested an incredible amount of money and we are currently adhering to the laws,” Perfect said. “This is really more about small businesses who cannot afford the resources to adhere to these antiquated laws.”
Federal child labor laws offer strong protections for young workers under the age of 16, but treatment of workers aged between 16 and 17 is left up to state legislators.
Students File Lawsuit Accusing Brown University of Labor Violations
BY
Ella Fassler, Truthout
PUBLISHED
January 25, 2019
On January 24, 2019, several current and former Brown University Dining Services student-workers hit the Ivy League school with a unique lawsuit alleging that Brown has been violating federal labor laws for years.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a federal labor law passed in 1938, and Brown’s own policy dictate that employers must compensate workers when they are “engaged to wait” during “on-call” shifts. Employees meet this criterion when their on-call restrictions are such that they are not able to use their time effectively for personal affairs. Brown student dining managers and supervisors say that they are expected to be on campus, follow dress code, and be able to immediately respond via phone and in person during their on-call shifts.
Max Kozlov, a junior majoring in cognitive neuroscience at Brown and former Brown University Dining Services supervisor and manager told Truthout, “Depending on the unit, supervisors and managers in the blue room, carts and cashier’s units take on-call shifts of 10-30 hours per week, in addition to working 15-40 hours per week, in addition to being full time students. But, in reality, we were really effectively on-call 24/7 because of the restrictions and demands of the job.” Another plaintiff, Ben Bosis, picked his class schedule, in part, based off on-call shifts.
The crux of the legal complaint against Brown, Kozlov said, is that the university’s on-call policy goes back “indefinitely” and “to our knowledge, no one has ever been compensated adequately [by Brown] for being on call.” If this lawsuit is successful, sixty former and current Brown student dining supervisors and managers may be eligible for retroactive payment.
Federal and state “on-call” lawsuits have been filed in the past, with mixed outcomes. In January 2018, Pier 1 Imports settled for $3.5 millionfollowing allegations that the company violated California wage laws by requiring employees to be on call for shifts without compensation. Pacific Sun, The Gao and Tilly’s have been sued for similar allegations. Some FLSA on-call lawsuits have failed, typically when employees could still pursue their own interests to some degree while on call.
The FLSA lawsuit against Brown, uniquely led by students, could trailblaze the path forward for similar actions against other universities across the country. The case could implicate non-student workers as well by swinging the pendulum of the debate one way or the other; the courts have far from settled issues regarding on-call compensation.
---
A History of Labor Exploitation
Ivy League universities — typically managed by wealthy elites — may project a progressive image, yet oftentimes fail to surpass the status quo when it comes to labor issues.
For Brown, this has been true throughout its history. For example, an investigation commissioned by Brown University itself reported that Brown’s oldest building — University Hall — was financed through a public subscription campaign, whereby white men “donated” enslaved people to construct the building. Wood materials were donated by Lopez and Rivera, a large firm that traded enslaved individuals, previously based in Newport, Rhode Island.
The four Brown brothers, after whom the university was named, participated in the trade. During one particularly horrific capture funded by the Browns in the 1760s, 108 of 196 enslaved Africans — including children — perished on the ship The Sally during sail from Africa to the West Indies. One woman hanged herself between the decks. Others drowned themselves following a failed insurrectionary escape attempt.
Although the 13th Amendment halted slavery and involuntary servitude for those not convicted of a crime, some universities maintain labor contracts with prisons that generally pay prisoners pennies an hour. In 2015, Columbia University was the first university to divest from private prison companies following a student campaign titled Columbia Prison Divest. Although Brown students have similarly protested, there’s no evidence that Brown University — or any other Ivy League school — has followed suit.
Within the past few decades, most labor disputes at Brown have revolved around wage labor and unions. The Brown University administration singlehandedly altered the labor landscape on campuses across the entire country in 2004, when it argued to a Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a quasi-judicial body which rules on labor-related cases, that graduate students, research assistants, and proctors have a primarily educational, not an economic, relationship to the university and, thus, shouldn’t be allowed to unionize or collectively bargain as employees. The Board ultimately agreed with Brown, and reversed a previous ruling, NYU (2000), that granted graduate teaching assistants the right to unionize.
However, two years ago, the Graduate Workers of Columbia filed a petition seeking to represent a unit of graduate and undergraduate teaching and research assistants, and the Board finally overturned the decision made under Brown. This decision was made despite a brief filed by Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University and Yale University which urged against the recognition of graduate students as employees.
This relatively new development is, in part, why we’ve seen an explosion of student union activity.
On November 1, 2018, Brown graduate students voted 576 to 394 in favor of unionizing; however, since the students were well-aware that filing through the NLRB could trigger another rule reversal, they filed the union through a private entity, AAA. Universities must approve of the union when students file privately, which provides schools with much more leverage over union negotiations and they can cancel the labor agreement at any time.
Brown graduate student fears were well-founded: earlier this month, on December 7, 2018, Grinnell College administrators instigated another round of NLRB ping pong when it filed an appeal of the Columbia decision in response to the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW) NLRB petition to expand its union. UGSDW was forced to withdraw their petition in early December 2018, citing the “flimsy possibility of a fair ruling” before a Trump NLRB. Because of private university administrators’ unwillingness to support student unions, the future of publicly administered unionization on campus looks bleak until a new labor board is appointed.
Labor Disputes on Campus Are Radicalizing Youth
Even if the lawsuit against Brown isn’t successful in a legal sense, the student-led initiative may inspire other students and workers to develop tactics that challenge their poor working conditions. “Students have a lot of sway at universities, and this is a power that students can and should use to their advantage to stand up to injustice,” Kozlov said. In some cases, it might make the most sense to sue a university that is blatantly breaking the law, as Brown student managers have done. In other cases, demonstrations and direct action would be more impactful, as with the Student Labor Alliance’s fight against hot working conditions at the refectory.
Labor disputes at universities, especially if they are organized in solidarity with non-student workers, can be a vital entry point into radical organizing against powerful institutions.
A display of solidarity this past May between academic student workers, non-student cafeteria staff, student advisers and their supporters at The New School, based in New York City, shut the cafeteria down for 10 days in response to the university’s attempt to have cafeteria staff re-apply for their jobs under cryptic terms. Many suspected that the university was attempting to bust the cafeteria staff union, in order to replace unionized workers with cheaper student-workers.
Collaboration among a wide variety of anarchist, communist and pro-union groups proved to be efficacious: “Militancy, magnitude, and legitimacy were exchanged, bolstering otherwise timid, small, or dismissable individual campaigns,” Pacific Standard Mag reported. In the end, UNITE HERE Local 100 declared a victory for the cafeteria staff, with all staff members retaining their jobs under their original contract.
When universities try to prevent students from unionizing, they are not only being avaricious (Brown’s endowment is $3.8 billion), they are also robbing students of empowering experiences. Meanwhile, despite publishing a report in order to make reparations for its historical relationship to slavery, Brown has seemingly resisted student activists’ calls for the school to divest from private prisons, raising questions about whether the university actually wishes to abolish the current racist social order. As one of the world’s most powerful, elite institutions, which oftentimes fails to pay its student-workers an adequate wage or compensate them for on-call hours, Brown is implicitly teaching students that this is how workers ought to be treated. And anyone who’s ever forgotten the details of a course from college knows that some of life’s most powerful lessons are taught outside of a classroom.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), a federal labor law passed in 1938, and Brown’s own policy dictate that employers must compensate workers when they are “engaged to wait” during “on-call” shifts. Employees meet this criterion when their on-call restrictions are such that they are not able to use their time effectively for personal affairs. Brown student dining managers and supervisors say that they are expected to be on campus, follow dress code, and be able to immediately respond via phone and in person during their on-call shifts.
Max Kozlov, a junior majoring in cognitive neuroscience at Brown and former Brown University Dining Services supervisor and manager told Truthout, “Depending on the unit, supervisors and managers in the blue room, carts and cashier’s units take on-call shifts of 10-30 hours per week, in addition to working 15-40 hours per week, in addition to being full time students. But, in reality, we were really effectively on-call 24/7 because of the restrictions and demands of the job.” Another plaintiff, Ben Bosis, picked his class schedule, in part, based off on-call shifts.
The crux of the legal complaint against Brown, Kozlov said, is that the university’s on-call policy goes back “indefinitely” and “to our knowledge, no one has ever been compensated adequately [by Brown] for being on call.” If this lawsuit is successful, sixty former and current Brown student dining supervisors and managers may be eligible for retroactive payment.
Federal and state “on-call” lawsuits have been filed in the past, with mixed outcomes. In January 2018, Pier 1 Imports settled for $3.5 millionfollowing allegations that the company violated California wage laws by requiring employees to be on call for shifts without compensation. Pacific Sun, The Gao and Tilly’s have been sued for similar allegations. Some FLSA on-call lawsuits have failed, typically when employees could still pursue their own interests to some degree while on call.
The FLSA lawsuit against Brown, uniquely led by students, could trailblaze the path forward for similar actions against other universities across the country. The case could implicate non-student workers as well by swinging the pendulum of the debate one way or the other; the courts have far from settled issues regarding on-call compensation.
---
A History of Labor Exploitation
Ivy League universities — typically managed by wealthy elites — may project a progressive image, yet oftentimes fail to surpass the status quo when it comes to labor issues.
For Brown, this has been true throughout its history. For example, an investigation commissioned by Brown University itself reported that Brown’s oldest building — University Hall — was financed through a public subscription campaign, whereby white men “donated” enslaved people to construct the building. Wood materials were donated by Lopez and Rivera, a large firm that traded enslaved individuals, previously based in Newport, Rhode Island.
The four Brown brothers, after whom the university was named, participated in the trade. During one particularly horrific capture funded by the Browns in the 1760s, 108 of 196 enslaved Africans — including children — perished on the ship The Sally during sail from Africa to the West Indies. One woman hanged herself between the decks. Others drowned themselves following a failed insurrectionary escape attempt.
Although the 13th Amendment halted slavery and involuntary servitude for those not convicted of a crime, some universities maintain labor contracts with prisons that generally pay prisoners pennies an hour. In 2015, Columbia University was the first university to divest from private prison companies following a student campaign titled Columbia Prison Divest. Although Brown students have similarly protested, there’s no evidence that Brown University — or any other Ivy League school — has followed suit.
Within the past few decades, most labor disputes at Brown have revolved around wage labor and unions. The Brown University administration singlehandedly altered the labor landscape on campuses across the entire country in 2004, when it argued to a Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a quasi-judicial body which rules on labor-related cases, that graduate students, research assistants, and proctors have a primarily educational, not an economic, relationship to the university and, thus, shouldn’t be allowed to unionize or collectively bargain as employees. The Board ultimately agreed with Brown, and reversed a previous ruling, NYU (2000), that granted graduate teaching assistants the right to unionize.
However, two years ago, the Graduate Workers of Columbia filed a petition seeking to represent a unit of graduate and undergraduate teaching and research assistants, and the Board finally overturned the decision made under Brown. This decision was made despite a brief filed by Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University and Yale University which urged against the recognition of graduate students as employees.
This relatively new development is, in part, why we’ve seen an explosion of student union activity.
On November 1, 2018, Brown graduate students voted 576 to 394 in favor of unionizing; however, since the students were well-aware that filing through the NLRB could trigger another rule reversal, they filed the union through a private entity, AAA. Universities must approve of the union when students file privately, which provides schools with much more leverage over union negotiations and they can cancel the labor agreement at any time.
Brown graduate student fears were well-founded: earlier this month, on December 7, 2018, Grinnell College administrators instigated another round of NLRB ping pong when it filed an appeal of the Columbia decision in response to the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW) NLRB petition to expand its union. UGSDW was forced to withdraw their petition in early December 2018, citing the “flimsy possibility of a fair ruling” before a Trump NLRB. Because of private university administrators’ unwillingness to support student unions, the future of publicly administered unionization on campus looks bleak until a new labor board is appointed.
Labor Disputes on Campus Are Radicalizing Youth
Even if the lawsuit against Brown isn’t successful in a legal sense, the student-led initiative may inspire other students and workers to develop tactics that challenge their poor working conditions. “Students have a lot of sway at universities, and this is a power that students can and should use to their advantage to stand up to injustice,” Kozlov said. In some cases, it might make the most sense to sue a university that is blatantly breaking the law, as Brown student managers have done. In other cases, demonstrations and direct action would be more impactful, as with the Student Labor Alliance’s fight against hot working conditions at the refectory.
Labor disputes at universities, especially if they are organized in solidarity with non-student workers, can be a vital entry point into radical organizing against powerful institutions.
A display of solidarity this past May between academic student workers, non-student cafeteria staff, student advisers and their supporters at The New School, based in New York City, shut the cafeteria down for 10 days in response to the university’s attempt to have cafeteria staff re-apply for their jobs under cryptic terms. Many suspected that the university was attempting to bust the cafeteria staff union, in order to replace unionized workers with cheaper student-workers.
Collaboration among a wide variety of anarchist, communist and pro-union groups proved to be efficacious: “Militancy, magnitude, and legitimacy were exchanged, bolstering otherwise timid, small, or dismissable individual campaigns,” Pacific Standard Mag reported. In the end, UNITE HERE Local 100 declared a victory for the cafeteria staff, with all staff members retaining their jobs under their original contract.
When universities try to prevent students from unionizing, they are not only being avaricious (Brown’s endowment is $3.8 billion), they are also robbing students of empowering experiences. Meanwhile, despite publishing a report in order to make reparations for its historical relationship to slavery, Brown has seemingly resisted student activists’ calls for the school to divest from private prisons, raising questions about whether the university actually wishes to abolish the current racist social order. As one of the world’s most powerful, elite institutions, which oftentimes fails to pay its student-workers an adequate wage or compensate them for on-call hours, Brown is implicitly teaching students that this is how workers ought to be treated. And anyone who’s ever forgotten the details of a course from college knows that some of life’s most powerful lessons are taught outside of a classroom.
'It's union busting 101': documents reveal Verizon's attacks on organized labor
The US’s largest wireless provider encourages staff to use anti-union rhetoric and disparages previous unionization efforts
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Wed 16 Jan 2019 06.00 EST
Unions offer “empty promises and unrealistic expectations” and don’t act with “integrity”, according to internal documents circulated by Verizon’s human resources department and obtained by the Guardian.
In documents given to managers and employees the US’s largest wireless provider encourages its own staff to use anti-union rhetoric and disparages previous unionization efforts within the company.
Several pages focus on the six Verizon retail stores in Brooklyn that voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in 2014, the first Verizon stores to unionize. The union battles at these stores are used to frame unions as a danger to Verizon and its workers.
“The employees in Brooklyn were highly influenced into voting for the CWA,” the documents allege. “They were swayed by a good sales pitch through empty promises and unrealistic expectations. Unfortunately, the union does not have to sell with integrity, and it was our Brooklyn employees who paid the price.”
“Before you sign anything or even click ‘submit’ online, think hard about joining a union and remember the story of your Brooklyn workers,” the document continues.
Verizon pushed for a union decertification vote in their Brooklyn stores, which workers voted against doing in August 2018.
In a ‘Questions you may have’ section, Verizon offers further input against unions. The answers claim “the best way to secure jobs is to provide excellent products, services, and customer service,” rather than join a labor union.
Verizon also criticized a 2016 strike of workers at their Brooklyn retail stores and nearly 40,000 other unionized employees who work as network technicians and customer service reps, citing its impact on “working conditions for our employees and experience for our customers”.
The documents further explain Verizon’s anti-union position. “We don’t believe unions are necessary at Verizon Wireless or that you or your coworkers will be well served by electing a union as your collective voice.” Verizon argues the only difference between unions and non-union represented employees are the dues union members pay. Verizon defines a union as “an organization whose income comes from taking a portion of the wages from the employees it represents”.
Verizon added: “Instead of treating employees as individuals, the company has to negotiate with the union on behalf of all employees collectively.” The documents claim union representation has declined because state and federal labor laws protect workers for free.
The internal Verizon website, marked “for Verizon Wireless management only, not for distribution to non-supervisory employees”, offers leadership training on how to react to any employees who mention or discuss unionizing.
The prompts resemble those offered to Amazon employees in a HR training video leaked in September 2018.
The website includes union awareness refreshers and responses to any perceived CWA organizing and union activity, including responses to union flyers on call center closures and offshoring.
Verizon has run into trouble for previous attempts to ward off union activity. In December 2018, Verizon finalized a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board after the CWA filed a unfair labor practice charge in response to a Verizon employee in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who experienced interrogation and surveillance by Verizon for engaging in union activity.
“When I noticed the change in structure at Verizon, that made me want to start unionizing and organizing two years ago when I took a different position to work at headquarters,” said LaTasha French, a Verizon employee for 18 years at the Verizon headquarters in Irving, Texas.
She claimed Verizon has sent union busters to harass her, give her misinformation and offer false promises, like the possibility to work from home. French added the way Verizon human resources had handled complaints of harassment she had made, which included a supervisor joyriding in the wheelchair the company provided for her, had also contributed to her involvement in union efforts.
“I’m not afraid to go up against them because I know I do my job. I know I’m there and available,” French said. “But what I won’t stand for is you’re making billions of dollars on our head and you treat us as modern day slaves and uneducated. You’re trying to consolidate other departments and you’re not giving the people who take these additional duties any more pay.”
In July 2018, a Verizon retail store in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, successfully voted to unionize. Verizon’s union busting tactics stopped an effort to hold an election to unionize in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, around the same time.
“We ended up pulling the petition,” said Darryl Givens, a Verizon employee at the Wilkes-Barre store. “If we lost, we had to wait a year. It was initially five to four. Two people didn’t want to be involved at all.”
He explained Verizon sent executives to the store in response to union activity. “The first thing they do is come and say how awful the union will be for us and if we go union, they can’t do anything special for you. They would come out and, not directly, say ‘unions, sometimes their stores sometimes get closed,’ trying to entice us in anyway to vote no,” Givens said. “They would call us in, do forced meetings with us, and go over how awful unions are. Every few days we’d get rotated back in.”
According to Tim Dubnau, an organizing coordinator for the CWA, this is the modus operandi of Verizon in response to any perceived union activity.
“They distort the truth about unions, they imply union workers make less, they distort the truth about dues and strikes. That’s the union busting 101 when you walk into the door,” said Dubnau. “They have a jump team ready at a moments notice to have a forced captive audience meeting to warn about the dangers of unions.”
Verizon did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In documents given to managers and employees the US’s largest wireless provider encourages its own staff to use anti-union rhetoric and disparages previous unionization efforts within the company.
Several pages focus on the six Verizon retail stores in Brooklyn that voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in 2014, the first Verizon stores to unionize. The union battles at these stores are used to frame unions as a danger to Verizon and its workers.
“The employees in Brooklyn were highly influenced into voting for the CWA,” the documents allege. “They were swayed by a good sales pitch through empty promises and unrealistic expectations. Unfortunately, the union does not have to sell with integrity, and it was our Brooklyn employees who paid the price.”
“Before you sign anything or even click ‘submit’ online, think hard about joining a union and remember the story of your Brooklyn workers,” the document continues.
Verizon pushed for a union decertification vote in their Brooklyn stores, which workers voted against doing in August 2018.
In a ‘Questions you may have’ section, Verizon offers further input against unions. The answers claim “the best way to secure jobs is to provide excellent products, services, and customer service,” rather than join a labor union.
Verizon also criticized a 2016 strike of workers at their Brooklyn retail stores and nearly 40,000 other unionized employees who work as network technicians and customer service reps, citing its impact on “working conditions for our employees and experience for our customers”.
The documents further explain Verizon’s anti-union position. “We don’t believe unions are necessary at Verizon Wireless or that you or your coworkers will be well served by electing a union as your collective voice.” Verizon argues the only difference between unions and non-union represented employees are the dues union members pay. Verizon defines a union as “an organization whose income comes from taking a portion of the wages from the employees it represents”.
Verizon added: “Instead of treating employees as individuals, the company has to negotiate with the union on behalf of all employees collectively.” The documents claim union representation has declined because state and federal labor laws protect workers for free.
The internal Verizon website, marked “for Verizon Wireless management only, not for distribution to non-supervisory employees”, offers leadership training on how to react to any employees who mention or discuss unionizing.
The prompts resemble those offered to Amazon employees in a HR training video leaked in September 2018.
The website includes union awareness refreshers and responses to any perceived CWA organizing and union activity, including responses to union flyers on call center closures and offshoring.
Verizon has run into trouble for previous attempts to ward off union activity. In December 2018, Verizon finalized a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board after the CWA filed a unfair labor practice charge in response to a Verizon employee in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who experienced interrogation and surveillance by Verizon for engaging in union activity.
“When I noticed the change in structure at Verizon, that made me want to start unionizing and organizing two years ago when I took a different position to work at headquarters,” said LaTasha French, a Verizon employee for 18 years at the Verizon headquarters in Irving, Texas.
She claimed Verizon has sent union busters to harass her, give her misinformation and offer false promises, like the possibility to work from home. French added the way Verizon human resources had handled complaints of harassment she had made, which included a supervisor joyriding in the wheelchair the company provided for her, had also contributed to her involvement in union efforts.
“I’m not afraid to go up against them because I know I do my job. I know I’m there and available,” French said. “But what I won’t stand for is you’re making billions of dollars on our head and you treat us as modern day slaves and uneducated. You’re trying to consolidate other departments and you’re not giving the people who take these additional duties any more pay.”
In July 2018, a Verizon retail store in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, successfully voted to unionize. Verizon’s union busting tactics stopped an effort to hold an election to unionize in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, around the same time.
“We ended up pulling the petition,” said Darryl Givens, a Verizon employee at the Wilkes-Barre store. “If we lost, we had to wait a year. It was initially five to four. Two people didn’t want to be involved at all.”
He explained Verizon sent executives to the store in response to union activity. “The first thing they do is come and say how awful the union will be for us and if we go union, they can’t do anything special for you. They would come out and, not directly, say ‘unions, sometimes their stores sometimes get closed,’ trying to entice us in anyway to vote no,” Givens said. “They would call us in, do forced meetings with us, and go over how awful unions are. Every few days we’d get rotated back in.”
According to Tim Dubnau, an organizing coordinator for the CWA, this is the modus operandi of Verizon in response to any perceived union activity.
“They distort the truth about unions, they imply union workers make less, they distort the truth about dues and strikes. That’s the union busting 101 when you walk into the door,” said Dubnau. “They have a jump team ready at a moments notice to have a forced captive audience meeting to warn about the dangers of unions.”
Verizon did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
US apparel firm cuts off Chinese factory in internment camp
Martha Mendoza and Yanan Wang, Associated Press - chron
Updated 4:10 am CST, Thursday, January 10, 2019
Photo: Anonymous, AP
A U.S. supplier of t-shirts and other team apparel to college bookstores cut its ties Wednesday with a Chinese company that drew workers from an internment camp holding targeted members of ethnic minority groups.
In recent years, authorities in the far west Chinese region of Xinjiang have detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs in heavily-secured facilities where detainees say they are ordered to renounce their language and religion while pledging loyalty to the China's ruling Communist Party.
Last month an Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government had also started forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. The investigation tracked recent shipments from one such factory, the privately-owned Hetian Taida Apparel, located inside an internment camp, to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina.
In a statement posted to its website, Badger said Wednesday it will no longer do business with Hetian Taida, nor import any goods from the same region "given the controversy around doing business" there.
"Furthermore, we will not ship any product sourced from Hetian Taida currently in our possession," the company said, adding that the supplier accounted for about 1 percent of Badger's total annual sales.
Repeated calls to Hetian Taida's chairman, Wu Hongbo, rang unanswered Wednesday. In a previous conversation with the AP, Wu said while Hetian Taida was located in the same compound as one camp that the government calls a "vocational skills education and training center," Hetian Taida was not involved in the camp's activities.
However, Wu said his company employed 20 to 30 "trainees" from the center as part of the region's efforts to alleviate poverty.
Asked about the case, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Thursday that while the ministry doesn't generally comment on individual business decisions, Badger appeared to have been acting on "misinformation."
The vocational training centers in Xinjiang are "totally different from so-called forced labor," Lu said, referring further questions on the camps to statements made by the regional government, which maintains that the centers help poor Uighurs gain employable skills.
"It's a tragedy for that business," Lu said.
Universities stocking Badger clothing began pulling items from their shelves and websites after the report appeared in December.
Hetian Taida was certified as complying with good business practices by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, which sent an auditor to a different Hetian Taida facility, not the one inside the internment camp. That factory "is not engaged in the use of forced labor," WRAP and Badger concluded. But Badger added that "historical documentation provided by Hetian Taida regarding their prior facility was insufficient to conclude with certainty" that it had met Badger's sourcing standards.
WRAP spokesman Seth Lennon confirmed to AP that the facility they investigated is not the same place AP wrote about.
"Our model centers around factories approaching us requesting to be audited," Lennon wrote in an email. "We do not seek out any factories whatsoever to audit unsolicited."
The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions across the U.S. to ensure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, conducted its own investigation and found additional evidence confirming the factory supplying Badger was inside an internment camp.
WRC executive director Scott Nova said Wednesday's announcement reinforces that finding.
"There is nothing in Badger's statement, or WRAP's, that calls into question the conclusion that Hetian Taida used detainee labor while producing for Badger," he said.
Any item that is the product of forced labor is illegal and subject to seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which said in December it was reviewing the reports. A CBP spokesperson had an automatic message Wednesday that they were unable to respond to emails or telephone calls due to the government shutdown.
In recent years, authorities in the far west Chinese region of Xinjiang have detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs and Kazakhs in heavily-secured facilities where detainees say they are ordered to renounce their language and religion while pledging loyalty to the China's ruling Communist Party.
Last month an Associated Press investigation found the Chinese government had also started forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. The investigation tracked recent shipments from one such factory, the privately-owned Hetian Taida Apparel, located inside an internment camp, to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina.
In a statement posted to its website, Badger said Wednesday it will no longer do business with Hetian Taida, nor import any goods from the same region "given the controversy around doing business" there.
"Furthermore, we will not ship any product sourced from Hetian Taida currently in our possession," the company said, adding that the supplier accounted for about 1 percent of Badger's total annual sales.
Repeated calls to Hetian Taida's chairman, Wu Hongbo, rang unanswered Wednesday. In a previous conversation with the AP, Wu said while Hetian Taida was located in the same compound as one camp that the government calls a "vocational skills education and training center," Hetian Taida was not involved in the camp's activities.
However, Wu said his company employed 20 to 30 "trainees" from the center as part of the region's efforts to alleviate poverty.
Asked about the case, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Thursday that while the ministry doesn't generally comment on individual business decisions, Badger appeared to have been acting on "misinformation."
The vocational training centers in Xinjiang are "totally different from so-called forced labor," Lu said, referring further questions on the camps to statements made by the regional government, which maintains that the centers help poor Uighurs gain employable skills.
"It's a tragedy for that business," Lu said.
Universities stocking Badger clothing began pulling items from their shelves and websites after the report appeared in December.
Hetian Taida was certified as complying with good business practices by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, which sent an auditor to a different Hetian Taida facility, not the one inside the internment camp. That factory "is not engaged in the use of forced labor," WRAP and Badger concluded. But Badger added that "historical documentation provided by Hetian Taida regarding their prior facility was insufficient to conclude with certainty" that it had met Badger's sourcing standards.
WRAP spokesman Seth Lennon confirmed to AP that the facility they investigated is not the same place AP wrote about.
"Our model centers around factories approaching us requesting to be audited," Lennon wrote in an email. "We do not seek out any factories whatsoever to audit unsolicited."
The Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), which has agreements with many educational institutions across the U.S. to ensure the products they sell on campus are ethically manufactured, conducted its own investigation and found additional evidence confirming the factory supplying Badger was inside an internment camp.
WRC executive director Scott Nova said Wednesday's announcement reinforces that finding.
"There is nothing in Badger's statement, or WRAP's, that calls into question the conclusion that Hetian Taida used detainee labor while producing for Badger," he said.
Any item that is the product of forced labor is illegal and subject to seizure by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which said in December it was reviewing the reports. A CBP spokesperson had an automatic message Wednesday that they were unable to respond to emails or telephone calls due to the government shutdown.
'We are not robots': Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize
Workers announced launch of union push in response to working conditions as company says it does not recognize allegations
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Tue 1 Jan 2019 07.00 EST
As Amazon’s workforce has more than doubled over the past three years, workers at Amazon fulfillment center warehouses in the United States have started organizing and pushing toward forming a union to fight back against the company’s treatment of its workers.
Amazon’s global workforce reached more than 613,000 employees worldwide according to its latest quarterly earnings report, not including the 100,000 temporary employees the company hired for the holiday season.
Just a few months after Amazon opened its first New York-based fulfillment center in Staten Island, workers announced on 12 December the launch of a union push with help from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
“Amazon is a very big company. They need to have a union put in place,” said an Amazon worker who requested to remain anonymous. The worker has been with the company for two years and was transferred to Staten Island when it opened in October 2018. “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”
Other employees cited working conditions as one of the prevailing factors for wanting to form a union. “I support the effort. They have to be more supportive toward their employees,” said another Amazon employee in Staten Island. “Right now, at that fulfillment center, if an employee is a picker, they want that person to pick up 400 items per hour, picking each item every seven seconds.”
They noted that to keep up with that hourly rate, workers cannot take bathroom breaks or they risk Tot (time off task points) that could be used to justify job termination.
In a statement during the announcement of the union push, picker Rashad Long claimed workers are overworked, pressured with frivolous disciplinary actions and security lines at the exit cut into breaks and extended work shifts, unpaid.
“We are not robots. We are human beings. We cannot come into work after only four hours of sleep and be expected to be fully energized and ready to work. That’s impossible,” said Long. “I feel like all the company cares about is getting their products out to the customers as quickly humanly as possible, no matter what that means for us workers in the end.”
Amazon said in a statement: “To claim Staten Island workers want a union is not a fair representation of the vast majority of the employees at this site.”
In Minnesota, workers at several Amazon facilities were the first to force management to the bargaining table over the past few months after workers held protests in the summer.
“The end of September and October, we had private meetings with Amazon management,” said Nimo Omar, an organizer and founder of the Awood Center, an east African worker-led organization in the Minneapolis area. “We met with Amazon management, and we had workers from across five different warehouses in that meeting talking about working conditions at Amazon, from warehouse workers to truck drivers who deliver packages to some of the leads in these warehouses as well.”
Workers held a rally outside the Shakopee fulfillment center on 14 December to continue to pressure Amazon to improve conditions for workers.
“If you get injured, they don’t treat you well, they don’t care,” said 24-year-old Hibaq Mohamed, who has worked at the Shakopee facility for over two years. She said every two to three months, Amazon increases hourly productivity rates workers must meet to keep their jobs. “During summertime, we don’t get enough AC, in the winter we don’t get enough heat. We want to change the imbalance at Amazon.”
Hafsa Hassan, 21, who has worked at the fulfillment center since July 2017, claimed managers create a hostile work environment that prevents workers from seeking proper medical treatment, taking bathroom breaks, or reporting safety issues.
“A lot of workers aren’t comfortable going to managers and that has a lot to do with rate. There’s an obsession with rate,” said Hassan. “The rate people have to make every single hour, every hour it’s mentioned, and if a person isn’t doing well, the managers will pick on them. Sometimes you can hear it from different departments.”
Amazon said it “did not recognize” these allegations. “We work hard every day to ensure all of our employees are treated fairly and with dignity and respect,” the company said.
Amazon fulfillment centers aren’t the only part of Amazon where workers started organizing efforts in 2018. The online retail giant bought Whole Foodsin August 2017 for $13.7bn. A little over a year later, workers launched Whole Worker, a unionizing effort in response to changes made by Amazon since the acquisition. Shortly after the group announced its founding, an employee leaked an Amazon training video where managers were taught how to discourage labor organizing efforts.
In a 9 December email sent out by Whole Worker leaders to thousands of Whole Foods employees, the group announced solidarity with other organizing efforts across Amazon, including co-hosting a rally in Queens against the HQ2 project. “While we pursue our long-term goals, we are looking for other ways to collectively use our voices regarding unfair and potentially illegal compensation practices,” said the email. “We at Whole Worker believe that all Whole Foods and Amazon team members deserve a say in our workplaces and that coming together to negotiate a contract as a formal union is the only way to ensure that our voices are truly heard.”
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian: “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution. We firmly believe this direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce.
“We provide a $15 minimum wage for all US hourly employees, opportunities for career growth, industry-leading benefits, and hands-on training using emerging technology. Associates are the heart and soul of our operations, and in fact, they are also our number one recruiter for new hires by regularly encouraging friends and family to apply for roles. We encourage anyone to compare our pay, benefits and workplace to other major employers across the country.”
Amazon’s global workforce reached more than 613,000 employees worldwide according to its latest quarterly earnings report, not including the 100,000 temporary employees the company hired for the holiday season.
Just a few months after Amazon opened its first New York-based fulfillment center in Staten Island, workers announced on 12 December the launch of a union push with help from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
“Amazon is a very big company. They need to have a union put in place,” said an Amazon worker who requested to remain anonymous. The worker has been with the company for two years and was transferred to Staten Island when it opened in October 2018. “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”
Other employees cited working conditions as one of the prevailing factors for wanting to form a union. “I support the effort. They have to be more supportive toward their employees,” said another Amazon employee in Staten Island. “Right now, at that fulfillment center, if an employee is a picker, they want that person to pick up 400 items per hour, picking each item every seven seconds.”
They noted that to keep up with that hourly rate, workers cannot take bathroom breaks or they risk Tot (time off task points) that could be used to justify job termination.
In a statement during the announcement of the union push, picker Rashad Long claimed workers are overworked, pressured with frivolous disciplinary actions and security lines at the exit cut into breaks and extended work shifts, unpaid.
“We are not robots. We are human beings. We cannot come into work after only four hours of sleep and be expected to be fully energized and ready to work. That’s impossible,” said Long. “I feel like all the company cares about is getting their products out to the customers as quickly humanly as possible, no matter what that means for us workers in the end.”
Amazon said in a statement: “To claim Staten Island workers want a union is not a fair representation of the vast majority of the employees at this site.”
In Minnesota, workers at several Amazon facilities were the first to force management to the bargaining table over the past few months after workers held protests in the summer.
“The end of September and October, we had private meetings with Amazon management,” said Nimo Omar, an organizer and founder of the Awood Center, an east African worker-led organization in the Minneapolis area. “We met with Amazon management, and we had workers from across five different warehouses in that meeting talking about working conditions at Amazon, from warehouse workers to truck drivers who deliver packages to some of the leads in these warehouses as well.”
Workers held a rally outside the Shakopee fulfillment center on 14 December to continue to pressure Amazon to improve conditions for workers.
“If you get injured, they don’t treat you well, they don’t care,” said 24-year-old Hibaq Mohamed, who has worked at the Shakopee facility for over two years. She said every two to three months, Amazon increases hourly productivity rates workers must meet to keep their jobs. “During summertime, we don’t get enough AC, in the winter we don’t get enough heat. We want to change the imbalance at Amazon.”
Hafsa Hassan, 21, who has worked at the fulfillment center since July 2017, claimed managers create a hostile work environment that prevents workers from seeking proper medical treatment, taking bathroom breaks, or reporting safety issues.
“A lot of workers aren’t comfortable going to managers and that has a lot to do with rate. There’s an obsession with rate,” said Hassan. “The rate people have to make every single hour, every hour it’s mentioned, and if a person isn’t doing well, the managers will pick on them. Sometimes you can hear it from different departments.”
Amazon said it “did not recognize” these allegations. “We work hard every day to ensure all of our employees are treated fairly and with dignity and respect,” the company said.
Amazon fulfillment centers aren’t the only part of Amazon where workers started organizing efforts in 2018. The online retail giant bought Whole Foodsin August 2017 for $13.7bn. A little over a year later, workers launched Whole Worker, a unionizing effort in response to changes made by Amazon since the acquisition. Shortly after the group announced its founding, an employee leaked an Amazon training video where managers were taught how to discourage labor organizing efforts.
In a 9 December email sent out by Whole Worker leaders to thousands of Whole Foods employees, the group announced solidarity with other organizing efforts across Amazon, including co-hosting a rally in Queens against the HQ2 project. “While we pursue our long-term goals, we are looking for other ways to collectively use our voices regarding unfair and potentially illegal compensation practices,” said the email. “We at Whole Worker believe that all Whole Foods and Amazon team members deserve a say in our workplaces and that coming together to negotiate a contract as a formal union is the only way to ensure that our voices are truly heard.”
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson told the Guardian: “Amazon maintains an open-door policy that encourages employees to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management team for discussion and resolution. We firmly believe this direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce.
“We provide a $15 minimum wage for all US hourly employees, opportunities for career growth, industry-leading benefits, and hands-on training using emerging technology. Associates are the heart and soul of our operations, and in fact, they are also our number one recruiter for new hires by regularly encouraging friends and family to apply for roles. We encourage anyone to compare our pay, benefits and workplace to other major employers across the country.”
Revealed: Google's 'two-tier' workforce training document
Exclusive: internal document shows how Google employees are trained to treat temps, vendors and contractors
Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
the guardian
Wed 12 Dec 2018 01.00 EST
Google staff are instructed not to reward certain workers with perks like T-shirts, invite them to all-hands meetings, or allow them to engage in professional development training, an internal training document seen by the Guardian reveals.
The guide instructs Google employees on the ins and outs of interacting with its tens of thousands of temps, vendors and contractors – a class of worker known at Google as TVCs.
“Working with TVCs and Googlers is different,” the training documentation, titled the The ABCs of TVCs, explains. “Our policies exist because TVC working arrangements can carry significant risks.”
The risks Google appears to be most concerned about include standard insider threats, like leaks of proprietary information, but also – and especially – the risk of being found to be a joint employer, a legal designation which could be exceedingly costly for Google in terms of benefits.
Google’s treatment of TVCs has come under increased scrutiny by the company’s full-time employees (FTEs) amid a nascent labor movement at the company, which has seen workers speak out about both their own working conditions and the morality of the work they perform.
American companies have long turned to temps and subcontractors to plug holes and perform specialized tasks, but Google achieved a dubious distinction this year when Bloomberg reported that in early 2018, the company did not directly employ a majority of its own workforce.
According to a current employee with access to the figures, of approximately 170,000 people around the world who now work at Google, 50.05% are FTEs. The rest, 49.95%, are TVCs.
The two-tier system has complicated labor activism at Google. After 20,000 workers joined a global walkout on 1 November, the company quickly gave in to one of the protesters’ demands by ending forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment – but only for FTEs.
On 5 December, the walkout organizers published an anonymous open letteraddressed to Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, from “TVCs at Google”. The letter detailed some of the material concerns that TVCs face due to Google’s differential treatment, including lower wages and “minimal benefits”.
But beyond financial inequality, the letter focused on disparate access to information. “Google routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives,” the letter states. “When the tragic shooting occurred at YouTube in April of this year, the company sent real-time security updates to full-time employees only, leaving TVCs defenseless in the line of fire. TVCs were then excluded from a town hall discussion the following day.”
Red badges v white badges
Matt was on his way to a “whole team” meeting for a project he was working on when he noticed that one of his co-workers, a test engineer, was still at his desk. “You should come,” Matt, a Google software engineer, recalls saying, only to be told that the meeting was not actually for the whole team: temps, vendors and contractors were not allowed.
“The guy sits with us,” Matt told the Guardian of his co-worker. (Matt asked not to be identified by his real name because he is not authorized to speak to the media.) “Like literally next to my desk. He’s got better knowledge than me about parts of the project, to be honest … It changes the dynamic a lot.”
While excluding his co-worker from an important meeting bothered Matt, leaving the TVC out in the cold was the proper procedure, according to The ABCs of TVCs. “When we share strategic or proprietary information with TVCs through meetings or communications, it can create both co-employment and information security risks for Alphabet,” the document states.
The training instructs Google employees not to invite TVCs to all-hands meetings, team offsites, or the company’s weekly “TGIF” meeting, where employees vote on questions to post to top executives. Indeed, according to two current employees, the company often employs security guards to stand outside all-hands meetings, admitting those whose employee badges are white (FTEs) and keeping TVCs, whose badges are red, outside. The security guards themselves are subcontracted and wear red badges.
The training document includes a number of other common scenarios that Google employees might encounter when working with TVCs. One slide asks whether “Gary” should reward his vendor team with Google T-shirts after they complete a major task.
“Gary should not reward them with shirts,” the document explains, because “swag, bonuses, and other gifts are considered taxable income to the individual”. Instead, Gary is advised to send a thank-you email or write a positive comment on G+, the social network used internally at Google.
Another scenario involves a Googler noticing that a TVC has listed Google as their employer on LinkedIn, illustrated with a LinkedIn profile of “Tom Temp” claiming to be a “Staffing Coordinator – Google”.
“Since TVCs are not Alphabet employees, they may not represent themselves as such on resumes or external sites (e.g. social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc),” the document states. Googlers are encouraged to either “address it with the temp directly”, report the TVC via an anonymous form, or report the TVC to their direct employer.
Other rules address paying for expenses (“their travel should not, under any circumstances, be paid for using a Gcard”), dealing with medical issues, and handling the ambitions of a TVC who wants to take professional development courses (“training beyond what they need to do their jobs is considered an employee benefit … they may not enroll in or attend soft skill or professional development trainings”).
‘It’s all about saving money’(greed)
Throughout the training document, the “risk” that TVCs pose to Google is raised numerous times. The document names three types of risks: deviation from the “code of conduct”, such as concerns about harassment or discrimination; risks to security and privacy; and the risk of “co-employment”.
It is this third type of risk that earns the most attention in the document. “Co-employment is a relationship between two or more employers in which each has actual or potential legal rights and duties with respect to the same employee,” the document explains. “If found to be a joint employer of a TVC by an agency or court, then Alphabet could be liable for employer obligations, as well as acts and omissions leading to employment related legal claims.”
The legal designation of employees is a frequent issue in Silicon Valley, where the multibillion-dollar valuations of startups like Uber and Lyft rely on classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.
But while Uber and Lyft have thus far been able to maintain a legal distinction between the software engineers in their corporate headquarters and the armies of drivers working in their own vehicles, there is a major precedent for a tech giant getting in trouble over the TVCs in its own offices.
Microsoft spent much of the 1990s embroiled in a dispute over its expansive use of “permatemps” who often performed similar work to Microsoft employees, but without the access to employment benefits or stock options. In 2000, Microsoft agreed to pay a $97m settlement over a massive class-action lawsuit brought by permatemps.
That settlement was estimated to cover an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 individuals, far fewer than the number of TVCs currently on Google’s books.
To Matt, this is the real reason that he was tasked with learning The ABCs of TVCs. “It’s all about saving money,” he said. “If someone sues them, they want to point at all this fake shit and say, ‘Hey look, there’s such a big difference, see?’
“We are legally in the clear to treat people like garbage.”
The guide instructs Google employees on the ins and outs of interacting with its tens of thousands of temps, vendors and contractors – a class of worker known at Google as TVCs.
“Working with TVCs and Googlers is different,” the training documentation, titled the The ABCs of TVCs, explains. “Our policies exist because TVC working arrangements can carry significant risks.”
The risks Google appears to be most concerned about include standard insider threats, like leaks of proprietary information, but also – and especially – the risk of being found to be a joint employer, a legal designation which could be exceedingly costly for Google in terms of benefits.
Google’s treatment of TVCs has come under increased scrutiny by the company’s full-time employees (FTEs) amid a nascent labor movement at the company, which has seen workers speak out about both their own working conditions and the morality of the work they perform.
American companies have long turned to temps and subcontractors to plug holes and perform specialized tasks, but Google achieved a dubious distinction this year when Bloomberg reported that in early 2018, the company did not directly employ a majority of its own workforce.
According to a current employee with access to the figures, of approximately 170,000 people around the world who now work at Google, 50.05% are FTEs. The rest, 49.95%, are TVCs.
The two-tier system has complicated labor activism at Google. After 20,000 workers joined a global walkout on 1 November, the company quickly gave in to one of the protesters’ demands by ending forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment – but only for FTEs.
On 5 December, the walkout organizers published an anonymous open letteraddressed to Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, from “TVCs at Google”. The letter detailed some of the material concerns that TVCs face due to Google’s differential treatment, including lower wages and “minimal benefits”.
But beyond financial inequality, the letter focused on disparate access to information. “Google routinely denies TVCs access to information that is relevant to our jobs and our lives,” the letter states. “When the tragic shooting occurred at YouTube in April of this year, the company sent real-time security updates to full-time employees only, leaving TVCs defenseless in the line of fire. TVCs were then excluded from a town hall discussion the following day.”
Red badges v white badges
Matt was on his way to a “whole team” meeting for a project he was working on when he noticed that one of his co-workers, a test engineer, was still at his desk. “You should come,” Matt, a Google software engineer, recalls saying, only to be told that the meeting was not actually for the whole team: temps, vendors and contractors were not allowed.
“The guy sits with us,” Matt told the Guardian of his co-worker. (Matt asked not to be identified by his real name because he is not authorized to speak to the media.) “Like literally next to my desk. He’s got better knowledge than me about parts of the project, to be honest … It changes the dynamic a lot.”
While excluding his co-worker from an important meeting bothered Matt, leaving the TVC out in the cold was the proper procedure, according to The ABCs of TVCs. “When we share strategic or proprietary information with TVCs through meetings or communications, it can create both co-employment and information security risks for Alphabet,” the document states.
The training instructs Google employees not to invite TVCs to all-hands meetings, team offsites, or the company’s weekly “TGIF” meeting, where employees vote on questions to post to top executives. Indeed, according to two current employees, the company often employs security guards to stand outside all-hands meetings, admitting those whose employee badges are white (FTEs) and keeping TVCs, whose badges are red, outside. The security guards themselves are subcontracted and wear red badges.
The training document includes a number of other common scenarios that Google employees might encounter when working with TVCs. One slide asks whether “Gary” should reward his vendor team with Google T-shirts after they complete a major task.
“Gary should not reward them with shirts,” the document explains, because “swag, bonuses, and other gifts are considered taxable income to the individual”. Instead, Gary is advised to send a thank-you email or write a positive comment on G+, the social network used internally at Google.
Another scenario involves a Googler noticing that a TVC has listed Google as their employer on LinkedIn, illustrated with a LinkedIn profile of “Tom Temp” claiming to be a “Staffing Coordinator – Google”.
“Since TVCs are not Alphabet employees, they may not represent themselves as such on resumes or external sites (e.g. social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc),” the document states. Googlers are encouraged to either “address it with the temp directly”, report the TVC via an anonymous form, or report the TVC to their direct employer.
Other rules address paying for expenses (“their travel should not, under any circumstances, be paid for using a Gcard”), dealing with medical issues, and handling the ambitions of a TVC who wants to take professional development courses (“training beyond what they need to do their jobs is considered an employee benefit … they may not enroll in or attend soft skill or professional development trainings”).
‘It’s all about saving money’(greed)
Throughout the training document, the “risk” that TVCs pose to Google is raised numerous times. The document names three types of risks: deviation from the “code of conduct”, such as concerns about harassment or discrimination; risks to security and privacy; and the risk of “co-employment”.
It is this third type of risk that earns the most attention in the document. “Co-employment is a relationship between two or more employers in which each has actual or potential legal rights and duties with respect to the same employee,” the document explains. “If found to be a joint employer of a TVC by an agency or court, then Alphabet could be liable for employer obligations, as well as acts and omissions leading to employment related legal claims.”
The legal designation of employees is a frequent issue in Silicon Valley, where the multibillion-dollar valuations of startups like Uber and Lyft rely on classifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees.
But while Uber and Lyft have thus far been able to maintain a legal distinction between the software engineers in their corporate headquarters and the armies of drivers working in their own vehicles, there is a major precedent for a tech giant getting in trouble over the TVCs in its own offices.
Microsoft spent much of the 1990s embroiled in a dispute over its expansive use of “permatemps” who often performed similar work to Microsoft employees, but without the access to employment benefits or stock options. In 2000, Microsoft agreed to pay a $97m settlement over a massive class-action lawsuit brought by permatemps.
That settlement was estimated to cover an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 individuals, far fewer than the number of TVCs currently on Google’s books.
To Matt, this is the real reason that he was tasked with learning The ABCs of TVCs. “It’s all about saving money,” he said. “If someone sues them, they want to point at all this fake shit and say, ‘Hey look, there’s such a big difference, see?’
“We are legally in the clear to treat people like garbage.”
US airport workers struggle to make ends meet as industry profits soar
Airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017 but some tips-dependent workers at major hubs are making less than minimum wage
Michael Sainato
the guardian
Fri 7 Dec 2018 06.00 EST
Carlos Batista has worked at Orlando international airport for 12 years as a wheelchair attendant, a job where he often doesn’t make the federally required minimum hourly wage due to being classified as a tipped worker. Instead, the independent contractor he works for pays him $5.23 an hour, and attendants are not allowed to solicit passengers for tips.
“A lot of people don’t know we live off tips, so we get thank yous, and the average wheelchair assist from counter to gate takes 45 minutes to an hour,” Batista said. “We’re the face of the airport. We take care of mothers and family members who need assistance with wheelchairs and bags.”
Due to his low wages, Batista can only afford to rent a room from his uncle. He said high baggage fees now meant air travelers carry less luggage, resulting in fewer tips while his wages have remained stagnant.
Batista’s problems – and those of thousands of workers like him – are symptomatic of the air travel industry. As the airlines and airport companies seek to boost profits, they have increasingly relied on low-cost air carriers and contractors that drive down wages, eliminate benefits and infringe workers’ rights, according to a recent report by Airport Workers United.
The report noted airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017, a fourfold increase since 2013. Nearly half those profits are made by US-based airlines. The International Air Transport Association predicted in 2018 expenditures on air travel would grow by more than $70bn.
The airport industry is also booming from an increase in airline passengers. In 2016, global airport revenues were over $160bn, with 39.4% generated from sources such as retail concessions and parking. In 2018, US airports experienced a record number of air travelers for the summer and Thanksgiving holiday.
But those profits do not trickle down to the workers that generate them. In the United States, airports have cuts jobs and outsourced them to contractors despite increases in the number of travelers. An October 2013 study conducted by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley found that between 2002 to 2012, outsourced baggage handler jobs increased from 25% to 84%, while wages during that period for baggage handlers dropped by more than 45%.
Another example is 67-year-old Aleida Diaz who started working at Orlando international airport this summer as a wheelchair attendant when she decided to stay in Florida after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, where she worked as an English teacher.
“Sometimes you don’t even make the minimum wage with the tips,” Diaz said. She too makes $5.23 an hour plus tips. “It’s very hard because I have to eat, pay my rent, my electric bills, and I’m barely making ends meet.” Her son is going to be deployed to Afghanistan on 2 January, but the independent contractor who she works for did not allow her to take time off to spend with him due to the busy holiday season.
In 2003, customer service agent Janice Woods’s employer at Miami international airport switched to an independent contractor. She makes around $15 an hour, but her hours and benefits were drastically cut. “They cut hours to make us part-time,” Woods said. She has worked at the airport for 19 years. “They used to offer vacation, sick days, health, dental, vision and flight benefits.”
The contractor eliminated benefits, and her healthcare plan now has a hefty deductible. Woods added, “I was sick last year and the beginning of this year. If it wasn’t for my family to come up and pay my bills … I wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet.”
Klassie Shepard, an airplane cabin cleaner working for an independent contractor at San Francisco international airport, has also struggled even though San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“In 2017, working full-time at SFO, I was homeless. I would sleep at the airport on the blue chairs in the terminals with a blanket over me,” Shepard said. “I wasn’t making enough to be able to afford rent by myself.”
In November 2018, Shepard was fired. Her employer said she walked off the job but Shepard explained she felt dizzy, tried to call a supervisor who didn’t answer and then flagged down a police officer who called an ambulance and took her to hospital. Shepherd, with help from the Service Employees International Union, is working to get her job back.
A spokesperson for San Francisco international airport said: “Our records show medical personnel being dispatched to an airport service company break room around that date and time, but we do not have any additional detail on the circumstances.”
Low wages and poor benefits in the airport industry have contributed to thousands of airport workers relying on government assistance. A June 2017 report published by the Economic Roundtable found that more than 116,000 US airport workers receive food stamps, more than 23,000 received cash welfare benefits, and over 194,000 out of roughly 664,000 airport workers in the United States rely on Medicaid.
Mark Souder, who has worked maintenance at Baltimore-Washington international airport for eight years, used government assistance to help pay for his prescription drug medicine when a new independent contractor, Menzies Aviation, took over and changed his health insurance plan. Under the new plan, specialty medication was not covered, leaving Souder, who is HIV positive, to figure out how to pay for his pills.
“It was covered for seven years, then Menzies took over,” Souder said. The Maryland Aids Drug Assistance Program eventually agreed to cover his medication costs for a year, but Souder is unsure what is going to happen when that ends on 31 December. He could face crippling costs or a lack of vital medicines.
Orlando international airport did not respond to requests for comment. Miami international airport and Menzies Aviation also did not respond to a request for comment.
“A lot of people don’t know we live off tips, so we get thank yous, and the average wheelchair assist from counter to gate takes 45 minutes to an hour,” Batista said. “We’re the face of the airport. We take care of mothers and family members who need assistance with wheelchairs and bags.”
Due to his low wages, Batista can only afford to rent a room from his uncle. He said high baggage fees now meant air travelers carry less luggage, resulting in fewer tips while his wages have remained stagnant.
Batista’s problems – and those of thousands of workers like him – are symptomatic of the air travel industry. As the airlines and airport companies seek to boost profits, they have increasingly relied on low-cost air carriers and contractors that drive down wages, eliminate benefits and infringe workers’ rights, according to a recent report by Airport Workers United.
The report noted airlines made $38bn in profits during 2017, a fourfold increase since 2013. Nearly half those profits are made by US-based airlines. The International Air Transport Association predicted in 2018 expenditures on air travel would grow by more than $70bn.
The airport industry is also booming from an increase in airline passengers. In 2016, global airport revenues were over $160bn, with 39.4% generated from sources such as retail concessions and parking. In 2018, US airports experienced a record number of air travelers for the summer and Thanksgiving holiday.
But those profits do not trickle down to the workers that generate them. In the United States, airports have cuts jobs and outsourced them to contractors despite increases in the number of travelers. An October 2013 study conducted by the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley found that between 2002 to 2012, outsourced baggage handler jobs increased from 25% to 84%, while wages during that period for baggage handlers dropped by more than 45%.
Another example is 67-year-old Aleida Diaz who started working at Orlando international airport this summer as a wheelchair attendant when she decided to stay in Florida after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, where she worked as an English teacher.
“Sometimes you don’t even make the minimum wage with the tips,” Diaz said. She too makes $5.23 an hour plus tips. “It’s very hard because I have to eat, pay my rent, my electric bills, and I’m barely making ends meet.” Her son is going to be deployed to Afghanistan on 2 January, but the independent contractor who she works for did not allow her to take time off to spend with him due to the busy holiday season.
In 2003, customer service agent Janice Woods’s employer at Miami international airport switched to an independent contractor. She makes around $15 an hour, but her hours and benefits were drastically cut. “They cut hours to make us part-time,” Woods said. She has worked at the airport for 19 years. “They used to offer vacation, sick days, health, dental, vision and flight benefits.”
The contractor eliminated benefits, and her healthcare plan now has a hefty deductible. Woods added, “I was sick last year and the beginning of this year. If it wasn’t for my family to come up and pay my bills … I wouldn’t have been able to make ends meet.”
Klassie Shepard, an airplane cabin cleaner working for an independent contractor at San Francisco international airport, has also struggled even though San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.
“In 2017, working full-time at SFO, I was homeless. I would sleep at the airport on the blue chairs in the terminals with a blanket over me,” Shepard said. “I wasn’t making enough to be able to afford rent by myself.”
In November 2018, Shepard was fired. Her employer said she walked off the job but Shepard explained she felt dizzy, tried to call a supervisor who didn’t answer and then flagged down a police officer who called an ambulance and took her to hospital. Shepherd, with help from the Service Employees International Union, is working to get her job back.
A spokesperson for San Francisco international airport said: “Our records show medical personnel being dispatched to an airport service company break room around that date and time, but we do not have any additional detail on the circumstances.”
Low wages and poor benefits in the airport industry have contributed to thousands of airport workers relying on government assistance. A June 2017 report published by the Economic Roundtable found that more than 116,000 US airport workers receive food stamps, more than 23,000 received cash welfare benefits, and over 194,000 out of roughly 664,000 airport workers in the United States rely on Medicaid.
Mark Souder, who has worked maintenance at Baltimore-Washington international airport for eight years, used government assistance to help pay for his prescription drug medicine when a new independent contractor, Menzies Aviation, took over and changed his health insurance plan. Under the new plan, specialty medication was not covered, leaving Souder, who is HIV positive, to figure out how to pay for his pills.
“It was covered for seven years, then Menzies took over,” Souder said. The Maryland Aids Drug Assistance Program eventually agreed to cover his medication costs for a year, but Souder is unsure what is going to happen when that ends on 31 December. He could face crippling costs or a lack of vital medicines.
Orlando international airport did not respond to requests for comment. Miami international airport and Menzies Aviation also did not respond to a request for comment.
Workers Are Fighting Retail Robber Barons – and Winning
BY
Mike Ludwig, Truthout
PUBLISHED
December 6, 2018
A small group of Walmart workers recently publicly confronted Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress who is probably the world’s richest woman. Earlier this year, Walmart increased the starting wage for store associates to $11 an hour, but competitors Amazon and Target agreed to $15, which is still not enough to make ends meet in many parts of the United States. Would Walmart follow their lead?
Walton attempted to deflect the question, saying, “That’s not my job.” The workers pressed Walton for an answer, pointing to Walmart CEO Greg Foran, who recently thanked the Walton family for their role in past pay increases during a recent meeting with investors in October. That sent a flustered Walton into a hasty retreat.
Foran also told investors that, in some areas of the country, $11 is still “the right amount to pay” a starting Walmart associate. Organization United for Respect (OUR), a nonprofit group that advocates for better wages and conditions at Walmart, used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to take Foran to task.
In every state in the country, a Walmart associate working full time (which Walmart defines as 34 hours per week) at $11 does not make enough money to cover the basic costs of living for an individual, not to mention a family, according to the group’s analysis. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
“There are two major trends in retail: Corporations are squeezing people harder every day, and people are fighting back within that context to make some real gains happen,” said OUR co-director Andrea Dehlendorf, in an interview.
Last week, Walmart workers confronted Alice Walton again, this time with a demonstration demanding better pay held outside her Manhattan penthouse. They also paid a visit to the penthouse of Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart’s ecommerce arm. He reportedly bought his penthouse in Manhattan for $44 million.
Madeline Chambers, who works 32 hours a week at Walmart in North Carolina and lives on the brink of homelessness with her two children, was one the activists involved.
“Last year, four of the Walton family members made $12.7 billion in a single day,” Chambers said in a statement after the protests. “It would take a Walmart associate like me more than 650,000 years working full time to make that much.
Retail’s Race to the Bottom
The retail sector is experiencing “disruption,” to use the corporate buzzword. Companies with household names like Sears and Toys ‘R Us are going under as Wall Street hedge funds cash in on their debt. Retail behemoths Walmart and Amazon are duking it out over the emerging ecommerce market, where websites and robots are supposed to be changing the way we shop. Well, that’s the view from executive suite, at least.
Things look much different from the floors of sprawling superstores and vast fulfillment warehouses full of merchandise, where tens of thousands of people are working under the grueling conditions of the holiday rush to fuel mega-fortunes enjoyed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Waltons of the world. Thousands of families are struggling to make ends meet now that Toys ‘R Us is out of business, and Sears and Kmart are closing stores across the country.
With the rise of online shopping and automation, big retailers appear to be in a race to the bottom. Conditions in retail warehouses and shipping centers are infamous, particularly during the holiday season, when temporary laborers are hired to meet an explosion in consumer demand. In the high-tech “centers” run by Amazon, wearable surveillance technology is used to ensure every Amazon Prime package is delivered on time.
Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, said safety has always been a problem in the high-pressure warehouse environment, but now the risks are psychological as well as physical. Workers lose sleep because they feel like Amazon is “always watching,” and they can’t “turn it off when they go home.”
“People are getting hurt because they are moving too quickly,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center (WWRC), in an interview. “In some cases, it’s a traditional manager yelling at you, in others cases it’s Amazon surveillance technology whispering in your ear, saying ‘go faster.'”
In the face of corporate expansion, activists from the retail sector are winning notable victories. About 33,000 workers lost their jobs as Toys ‘R Us went out of business last year, and $75 million in severance pay was lost in bankruptcy. By then, the company had been taken over by Wall Street lenders and hedge funds.
Former Toys ‘R Us workers, many of them mothers who spent years with the company, organized with a group called Rise Up Retail to pressure investors that liquidated the company to deliver $20 million in financial assistance. The campaign has inspired former Sears employees to launch a similar effort aimed at Wall Street.
Carrie Gleason, a policy director at Rise Up Retail, said Wall Street’s role in liquidating Sears and Toys ‘R Us reveals that robotic automation and online shopping at Amazon and Jet.com are not the only factors contributing to “disruption” in the retail sector that has pushed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs.
“We are seeing all these iconic American companies go under from crushing debt that they can’t pay back [to Wall Street],” Gleason said, in an interview. “These are man-made disasters that could have been avoided.”
Retail Protests Spread
Walmart is not the only major retailer facing protests now that the holiday shopping season is underway. Workers and activists are taking on the retail robber barons, creating a disruption of their own.
Across Europe, where many Amazon employees are unionized, Amazon workers marked Black Friday with a wave of strikes to protest conditions at shipping and sorting warehouses known as “fulfillment centers.” On “Cyber Monday,” the online shopping version of Black Friday, activists held protests across New York City against Amazon’s plans to build a major corporate headquarters in Queens, thanks in part to lucrative tax subsidies.
A broad coalition opposed the Amazon deal in New York, including housing rights groups concerned about gentrification and those opposed to subsidizing a wealthy company at taxpayer expense. Unions and labor groups said flatly that a company with Amazon’s labor standards does not deserve tax breaks — or to do business in New York City to begin with — citing a “disturbing pattern” of injuries and deaths in Amazon warehouses.
“We shouldn’t be paying for them to pay workers less; they should not even be able to open,” said Chelsea Connor, the communications director for the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), in an interview.
The same goes for Walmart, which is absent from the five boroughs, largely due to community opposition and concerns over pay scale and labor standards. However, the company recently gained a foothold in New York with a warehouse in the Bronx for Jet.com, the Walmart ecommerce business founded by Lore.
Unions at Amazon and Walmart?
Whole Foods, the brick-and-mortar prize of the Amazon empire, heard rumblings of unionization in September, when groups of employees backed by the RWDSU circulated a letter urging fellow workers to consider unionization in the face of job cuts resulting from Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of the grocery chain.
Like Walmart, Amazon is known for swiftly crushing labor organizing efforts. Within weeks, a 45-minute training video distributed by Amazon among team leaders was leaked to the media. The video urged would be union-busters to be wary of “spies” and keep an ear out for fellow workers using “union words” like “living wage.” “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either,” the video states, adding that unions are “not in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates.”
Amazon was already under fire for poor working conditions and paying so little that considerable numbers of employees rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food assistance to survive, essentially forcing taxpayers to subsidize Bezos’s massive fortune. Soon, the company announced a base wage increase to $15 an hour — but simultaneously cut stock awards and other incentives that were popular among many workers.
It’s not hard to imagine that, after working long hours in a fulfillment center or attempting to survive on an $11 hourly wage, retail employees are left with little time and energy to advocate for their rights, much less organize collectively and form a union. Unions have made few inroads at retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart, which spare no expense in fighting off labor organizers, according to Chelsea Connor, the communications director at RWDSU.
“It’s institutional insofar that these are major corporations that have a lot of money to spend on union-busting lawyers,” Connor said, adding that retail employees of brands like Zara and Guitar Center are members of RWDSU. “Amazon and Walmart have a lot more money to spend than Guitar Center even, though that is a multimillion-dollar corporation.”
In the absence of unions, groups like OUR, Rise Up Retail and WWRC work to fill the gaps, providing resources and support through training programs and even an app that allows workers to pool answers to questions about company policy and workplace rights. Such “worker centers” may receive some union backing, but they do not collectively bargain with employers like unions do. Instead, they help workers navigate company policies and advocate for better conditions with activist campaigns.
“Our model is to be an organization that supports people and builds community, so that people are able to improve their jobs and connect with each other, and then work collectively to advocate for change in the sector,” Dehlendorf said.
Connor said Sears, Kmart and Toys ‘R Us are going under because they failed to invest in their employees and the stores they work at. Cashiers and customer service representatives were not treated with the same respect as those working for other retailers, no matter how hard they worked. Stores became dull and disorganized. The quality of the customer’s shopping experience plunged, driving business toward ecommerce and away from traditional shopping centers.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Connor said.
Employees at the massive warehouses that fuel online shopping for Amazon and Walmart do not interact with paying customers, so their employers have fewer incentives to invest in keeping them happy and healthy, according to Connor. Still, union organizing remains a huge challenge. Both companies are behemoths with large facilities spread out in rural areas. Part-time and seasonal employment is very common. Workers are spread out across the country, and many don’t stick around long enough to organize in the first place.
“Amazon is so big, it’s going to take big, coordinated efforts, sort of like Fight for $15 and things like that,” Connor said. “Amazon and Walmart think they can fix things by raising the minimum wage to $15, but $15 is not enough. We can do better.”
Unions are making progress in retail. The RWDSU has had success organizing younger retail workers at brands such as Zara and Guitar Center, which still run much of their business out of brick-and-mortar stores rather than online.
Millennials working retail are showing a significant and growinginterest, with the young employees of H&M clothing stores in New York City recently organizing with the RWDSU, along with retail workers for medical marijuana companies and Babeland, a popular sex toy store.
Across every industry and sector last year, the biggest gains in union membership were among workers under the age of 35, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This makes sense. Millennials are much lessfinancially well off than previous generations. Meanwhile, the Trump era has seen a new spirit of protest and activism.
Connor said the labor movement is getting younger every day, and if it can keep up with the times, then the momentum can spread deeper into the retail sector.
“I do think that the era of ‘unions are cool again’ is coming,” Connor said.
Walton attempted to deflect the question, saying, “That’s not my job.” The workers pressed Walton for an answer, pointing to Walmart CEO Greg Foran, who recently thanked the Walton family for their role in past pay increases during a recent meeting with investors in October. That sent a flustered Walton into a hasty retreat.
Foran also told investors that, in some areas of the country, $11 is still “the right amount to pay” a starting Walmart associate. Organization United for Respect (OUR), a nonprofit group that advocates for better wages and conditions at Walmart, used MIT’s Living Wage Calculator to take Foran to task.
In every state in the country, a Walmart associate working full time (which Walmart defines as 34 hours per week) at $11 does not make enough money to cover the basic costs of living for an individual, not to mention a family, according to the group’s analysis. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.
“There are two major trends in retail: Corporations are squeezing people harder every day, and people are fighting back within that context to make some real gains happen,” said OUR co-director Andrea Dehlendorf, in an interview.
Last week, Walmart workers confronted Alice Walton again, this time with a demonstration demanding better pay held outside her Manhattan penthouse. They also paid a visit to the penthouse of Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart’s ecommerce arm. He reportedly bought his penthouse in Manhattan for $44 million.
Madeline Chambers, who works 32 hours a week at Walmart in North Carolina and lives on the brink of homelessness with her two children, was one the activists involved.
“Last year, four of the Walton family members made $12.7 billion in a single day,” Chambers said in a statement after the protests. “It would take a Walmart associate like me more than 650,000 years working full time to make that much.
Retail’s Race to the Bottom
The retail sector is experiencing “disruption,” to use the corporate buzzword. Companies with household names like Sears and Toys ‘R Us are going under as Wall Street hedge funds cash in on their debt. Retail behemoths Walmart and Amazon are duking it out over the emerging ecommerce market, where websites and robots are supposed to be changing the way we shop. Well, that’s the view from executive suite, at least.
Things look much different from the floors of sprawling superstores and vast fulfillment warehouses full of merchandise, where tens of thousands of people are working under the grueling conditions of the holiday rush to fuel mega-fortunes enjoyed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the Waltons of the world. Thousands of families are struggling to make ends meet now that Toys ‘R Us is out of business, and Sears and Kmart are closing stores across the country.
With the rise of online shopping and automation, big retailers appear to be in a race to the bottom. Conditions in retail warehouses and shipping centers are infamous, particularly during the holiday season, when temporary laborers are hired to meet an explosion in consumer demand. In the high-tech “centers” run by Amazon, wearable surveillance technology is used to ensure every Amazon Prime package is delivered on time.
Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, said safety has always been a problem in the high-pressure warehouse environment, but now the risks are psychological as well as physical. Workers lose sleep because they feel like Amazon is “always watching,” and they can’t “turn it off when they go home.”
“People are getting hurt because they are moving too quickly,” said Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center (WWRC), in an interview. “In some cases, it’s a traditional manager yelling at you, in others cases it’s Amazon surveillance technology whispering in your ear, saying ‘go faster.'”
In the face of corporate expansion, activists from the retail sector are winning notable victories. About 33,000 workers lost their jobs as Toys ‘R Us went out of business last year, and $75 million in severance pay was lost in bankruptcy. By then, the company had been taken over by Wall Street lenders and hedge funds.
Former Toys ‘R Us workers, many of them mothers who spent years with the company, organized with a group called Rise Up Retail to pressure investors that liquidated the company to deliver $20 million in financial assistance. The campaign has inspired former Sears employees to launch a similar effort aimed at Wall Street.
Carrie Gleason, a policy director at Rise Up Retail, said Wall Street’s role in liquidating Sears and Toys ‘R Us reveals that robotic automation and online shopping at Amazon and Jet.com are not the only factors contributing to “disruption” in the retail sector that has pushed tens of thousands of people out of their jobs.
“We are seeing all these iconic American companies go under from crushing debt that they can’t pay back [to Wall Street],” Gleason said, in an interview. “These are man-made disasters that could have been avoided.”
Retail Protests Spread
Walmart is not the only major retailer facing protests now that the holiday shopping season is underway. Workers and activists are taking on the retail robber barons, creating a disruption of their own.
Across Europe, where many Amazon employees are unionized, Amazon workers marked Black Friday with a wave of strikes to protest conditions at shipping and sorting warehouses known as “fulfillment centers.” On “Cyber Monday,” the online shopping version of Black Friday, activists held protests across New York City against Amazon’s plans to build a major corporate headquarters in Queens, thanks in part to lucrative tax subsidies.
A broad coalition opposed the Amazon deal in New York, including housing rights groups concerned about gentrification and those opposed to subsidizing a wealthy company at taxpayer expense. Unions and labor groups said flatly that a company with Amazon’s labor standards does not deserve tax breaks — or to do business in New York City to begin with — citing a “disturbing pattern” of injuries and deaths in Amazon warehouses.
“We shouldn’t be paying for them to pay workers less; they should not even be able to open,” said Chelsea Connor, the communications director for the New York-based Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), in an interview.
The same goes for Walmart, which is absent from the five boroughs, largely due to community opposition and concerns over pay scale and labor standards. However, the company recently gained a foothold in New York with a warehouse in the Bronx for Jet.com, the Walmart ecommerce business founded by Lore.
Unions at Amazon and Walmart?
Whole Foods, the brick-and-mortar prize of the Amazon empire, heard rumblings of unionization in September, when groups of employees backed by the RWDSU circulated a letter urging fellow workers to consider unionization in the face of job cuts resulting from Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of the grocery chain.
Like Walmart, Amazon is known for swiftly crushing labor organizing efforts. Within weeks, a 45-minute training video distributed by Amazon among team leaders was leaked to the media. The video urged would be union-busters to be wary of “spies” and keep an ear out for fellow workers using “union words” like “living wage.” “We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either,” the video states, adding that unions are “not in the best interest of our customers, our shareholders, or most importantly, our associates.”
Amazon was already under fire for poor working conditions and paying so little that considerable numbers of employees rely on public benefits like Medicaid and food assistance to survive, essentially forcing taxpayers to subsidize Bezos’s massive fortune. Soon, the company announced a base wage increase to $15 an hour — but simultaneously cut stock awards and other incentives that were popular among many workers.
It’s not hard to imagine that, after working long hours in a fulfillment center or attempting to survive on an $11 hourly wage, retail employees are left with little time and energy to advocate for their rights, much less organize collectively and form a union. Unions have made few inroads at retail behemoths like Amazon and Walmart, which spare no expense in fighting off labor organizers, according to Chelsea Connor, the communications director at RWDSU.
“It’s institutional insofar that these are major corporations that have a lot of money to spend on union-busting lawyers,” Connor said, adding that retail employees of brands like Zara and Guitar Center are members of RWDSU. “Amazon and Walmart have a lot more money to spend than Guitar Center even, though that is a multimillion-dollar corporation.”
In the absence of unions, groups like OUR, Rise Up Retail and WWRC work to fill the gaps, providing resources and support through training programs and even an app that allows workers to pool answers to questions about company policy and workplace rights. Such “worker centers” may receive some union backing, but they do not collectively bargain with employers like unions do. Instead, they help workers navigate company policies and advocate for better conditions with activist campaigns.
“Our model is to be an organization that supports people and builds community, so that people are able to improve their jobs and connect with each other, and then work collectively to advocate for change in the sector,” Dehlendorf said.
Connor said Sears, Kmart and Toys ‘R Us are going under because they failed to invest in their employees and the stores they work at. Cashiers and customer service representatives were not treated with the same respect as those working for other retailers, no matter how hard they worked. Stores became dull and disorganized. The quality of the customer’s shopping experience plunged, driving business toward ecommerce and away from traditional shopping centers.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” Connor said.
Employees at the massive warehouses that fuel online shopping for Amazon and Walmart do not interact with paying customers, so their employers have fewer incentives to invest in keeping them happy and healthy, according to Connor. Still, union organizing remains a huge challenge. Both companies are behemoths with large facilities spread out in rural areas. Part-time and seasonal employment is very common. Workers are spread out across the country, and many don’t stick around long enough to organize in the first place.
“Amazon is so big, it’s going to take big, coordinated efforts, sort of like Fight for $15 and things like that,” Connor said. “Amazon and Walmart think they can fix things by raising the minimum wage to $15, but $15 is not enough. We can do better.”
Unions are making progress in retail. The RWDSU has had success organizing younger retail workers at brands such as Zara and Guitar Center, which still run much of their business out of brick-and-mortar stores rather than online.
Millennials working retail are showing a significant and growinginterest, with the young employees of H&M clothing stores in New York City recently organizing with the RWDSU, along with retail workers for medical marijuana companies and Babeland, a popular sex toy store.
Across every industry and sector last year, the biggest gains in union membership were among workers under the age of 35, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This makes sense. Millennials are much lessfinancially well off than previous generations. Meanwhile, the Trump era has seen a new spirit of protest and activism.
Connor said the labor movement is getting younger every day, and if it can keep up with the times, then the momentum can spread deeper into the retail sector.
“I do think that the era of ‘unions are cool again’ is coming,” Connor said.
CIRCA 1870: A CARTOON SATIRISING THE SWEATSHOPS OF THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY. ORIGINAL ARTIST: BY JOHN LEECH FROM PUNCH MAGAZINE. (PHOTO BY RISCHGITZ/GETTY IMAGES)
The Dangerous, Low-Paid World of Nail Salons
BY
Bryce Covert, Truthout
PUBLISHED
November 29, 2018
Whether nail salon employees get good pay, time off and fair treatment at work currently varies widely depending on the salon they work for.
Sarah, a Vietnamese Californian (who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid negative consequences at work), got into the nail salon industry six years ago so she could help ease her family’s financial problems. She was having trouble finding a job with her psychology degree, all while trying to support two children alongside her husband. So, she took a job as a manicurist as a “fast way of finding money,” she said.
In her current salon in West Hollywood, she makes a bit over minimum wage plus tips. “It gives me a chance to put food on my table and pay the bills,” she said. But it can get tough for her family to get by. “Sometimes we have to take out … a little loan here and there,” she said. “But pretty much, we’re surviving.”
Her current job also gives her some leniency in taking breaks and sick days when she needs them. Others haven’t been so generous. Past salons she worked in didn’t always pay her minimum wage or offer her sick days. Once, Sarah says, her daughter had an emergency doctor’s appointment and her boss said to her, “I know you have things to take care of, but we really need you today.”
So, she faced a dilemma. “I had a choice: either it’s my daughter or it’s my job,” Sarah said. She was luckily able to call her husband and have him take her. “Thank god my husband had time to take care of the girls.”
Even her current job comes with problems nail salon workers commonly face. In the hot summer season, when demand spikes, she may work intense and long hours. As the weather cools, those hours drop off, and now she’s working an average of about 30 a week. She just became an Uber driver to supplement her income.
The US government counted 126,300 nail salon workers across the country as of 2017, but that is almost certainly an undercount. In California and New York alone, there were 137,338 certified manicurists, according to a report released November 27 by the UCLA Labor Center on the nail salon industry across the country.
One thing is clear: it’s a booming industry. Total revenue for nail salons was $4.4 billion in 2015, 15 percent higher than the year before it. It’s forecast to reach $5.7 billion by 2020. Employment in the industry is also expected to grow 13 percent over the next decade.
And yet, the boom times often don’t filter down to the workers themselves. Nearly four out of five nail salon employees earn what amounts to two-thirds of median wages for full-time US workers. That’s a much higher share than the 33 percent rate for all industries in the country. Full-time nail salon employees earn less than half of what workers make in other industries on average: $9.06 an hour versus all others’ $20.18. “These findings are not unexpected; because the price of manicures and pedicures is so low, those providing the services are bound to earn low wages,” the report notes.
“A mani/pedi can be as low as $20,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which organizes nail salon workers and fights for workplace change by partnering with owners and pushing for new policies. “Think about how low that is. You wonder how much is the worker actually getting paid.”
Worse, many may not get the pay that they’re owed. Thirty percent are self-employed, including independent contractors, which is three times higher than the national average. Some may actually be independent, renting space in salons to serve their own clients, but “there are concerns that many manicurists are purposely misclassified to avoid labor laws and protections,” the report notes. Employers can shirk wage and hour obligations by classifying workers as independent contractors even if they should be labeled regular employees. Without employee status, salon workers “are being denied … paid sick leave, breaks, having their lunch break, workers comp,” Fu said. “Those are important benefits … that they deserve.”
Benefits are generally scarce. Nationally, 62 percent of workers get health insurance through work, but just 42 percent of nail salon workers do, according to the report. Over a quarter instead get coverage through public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
In New York City, for example, a survey of Nepali workers in nail salons found they were being paid as little as $30 a day while working nine to 12 hours a day. Few got overtime and many couldn’t take breaks unless the flow of customers was slow. Over a quarter couldn’t take sick days, and those who did take them didn’t get paid. In California, 61 percent of Vietnamese salon employees reported making less than minimum wage and 89 percent were not paid overtime.
Despite the low pay and infrequent benefits, these jobs are not side hustles for the women who hold them. The vast majority of people in the industry are like Sarah: The typical worker is a foreign-born woman between the ages of 25 and 44, and she works full time, year-round. Workers’ wages don’t just support themselves, but others: nearly two-thirds have at least one child, while a third are heads of their households.
“As with any worker, a big part of what they’re trying to do is really provide for their children, provide for their families and make sure that they have a roof over their heads,” Fu said.
Many workers take pride in what they do, seeing it as an art. But they’re not paid on par with that quality of work. “We want this industry to treat workers with dignity and treat them with respect and … provide them with the wages where they can really flourish and succeed,” Fu said.
Then there are the health dangers. Sarah tries to take breaks when she can so she doesn’t get exposed to the fumes of the chemicals she works with for too long. She washes her hands frequently and uses gloves when they’re available. But she doesn’t always know what she’s being exposed to. “It’s a lot of things we come in contact with,” she said. “We need to be more aware of what we’re working with.”
Most commonly, nail salon employees are exposed to the “toxic trio”: toluene, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate, all of which are common in nail polish. Disinfectants like alcohol can also cause skin disease and infections. Workers take these chemicals in through inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption while they scrub feet and paint nails.
Chemical exposure often leads to health issues. Exposure to these chemicals may be associated with allergies, eye and skin irritation, eczema and reproductive problems. In some surveys of salon workers, more than 60 percent report suffering skin conditions. Another survey found that people who work with acrylic nails are more likely to have health problems, such as irritation, allergies, pain, coughing, nausea, difficulty breathing and miscarriage. A study in California found that rates of lung cancer were elevated among manicurists, while another in Canada found that workers who regularly applied nail polish had a tenfold greater risk of contracting lupus than other workers.
There’s also the regular wear and tear on the body of such physical work: sitting in uncomfortable postures for long periods of time often leaves workers with strain and fatigue, and many report hand, neck, lower back, shoulder and wrist pain.
Yet regulation of these chemicals or of workplace practices is scarce, and many workers fear speaking out. There are “a lot of barriers, including language barriers, cultural barriers, fear of retaliation,” Fu said, as well as “mistrust of the government.” Given that immigrants dominate the workforce, those with uncertain status may fear going public.
But policy makers are taking notice. One success story was the passage of a bill in California this year that requires chemicals used by salon workers to come with the same ingredient labels that consumer cosmetic products have. Another bill passed by the state in 2016 required salons to post signs in workers’ languages about their rights. “It’s like a first step — just because there’s a sign up doesn’t mean the salon is going to make the changes,” Fu pointed out. The state also has a Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Program, created by a bill passed in 2016, which certifies and promotes salons that commit to safe practices.
New York passed its own reforms after The New York Times published an in-depth investigation into the industry. These reforms included new state regulations for safety and labor standards and its own New York Healthy Salons Coalition to recognize businesses that follow best practices. As part of that coalition, a worker center named Adhikaar has helped train more than 1,000 workers about their health and rights.
But more needs to be done. “There are a lot of cultural shifts that need to happen that will take time,” Fu said. To get there, it will require “a really comprehensive approach through partnerships with government agencies, through continual outreach and education to the community—not just to workers, but also to employers.”
Sarah, a Vietnamese Californian (who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid negative consequences at work), got into the nail salon industry six years ago so she could help ease her family’s financial problems. She was having trouble finding a job with her psychology degree, all while trying to support two children alongside her husband. So, she took a job as a manicurist as a “fast way of finding money,” she said.
In her current salon in West Hollywood, she makes a bit over minimum wage plus tips. “It gives me a chance to put food on my table and pay the bills,” she said. But it can get tough for her family to get by. “Sometimes we have to take out … a little loan here and there,” she said. “But pretty much, we’re surviving.”
Her current job also gives her some leniency in taking breaks and sick days when she needs them. Others haven’t been so generous. Past salons she worked in didn’t always pay her minimum wage or offer her sick days. Once, Sarah says, her daughter had an emergency doctor’s appointment and her boss said to her, “I know you have things to take care of, but we really need you today.”
So, she faced a dilemma. “I had a choice: either it’s my daughter or it’s my job,” Sarah said. She was luckily able to call her husband and have him take her. “Thank god my husband had time to take care of the girls.”
Even her current job comes with problems nail salon workers commonly face. In the hot summer season, when demand spikes, she may work intense and long hours. As the weather cools, those hours drop off, and now she’s working an average of about 30 a week. She just became an Uber driver to supplement her income.
The US government counted 126,300 nail salon workers across the country as of 2017, but that is almost certainly an undercount. In California and New York alone, there were 137,338 certified manicurists, according to a report released November 27 by the UCLA Labor Center on the nail salon industry across the country.
One thing is clear: it’s a booming industry. Total revenue for nail salons was $4.4 billion in 2015, 15 percent higher than the year before it. It’s forecast to reach $5.7 billion by 2020. Employment in the industry is also expected to grow 13 percent over the next decade.
And yet, the boom times often don’t filter down to the workers themselves. Nearly four out of five nail salon employees earn what amounts to two-thirds of median wages for full-time US workers. That’s a much higher share than the 33 percent rate for all industries in the country. Full-time nail salon employees earn less than half of what workers make in other industries on average: $9.06 an hour versus all others’ $20.18. “These findings are not unexpected; because the price of manicures and pedicures is so low, those providing the services are bound to earn low wages,” the report notes.
“A mani/pedi can be as low as $20,” said Lisa Fu, director of the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, which organizes nail salon workers and fights for workplace change by partnering with owners and pushing for new policies. “Think about how low that is. You wonder how much is the worker actually getting paid.”
Worse, many may not get the pay that they’re owed. Thirty percent are self-employed, including independent contractors, which is three times higher than the national average. Some may actually be independent, renting space in salons to serve their own clients, but “there are concerns that many manicurists are purposely misclassified to avoid labor laws and protections,” the report notes. Employers can shirk wage and hour obligations by classifying workers as independent contractors even if they should be labeled regular employees. Without employee status, salon workers “are being denied … paid sick leave, breaks, having their lunch break, workers comp,” Fu said. “Those are important benefits … that they deserve.”
Benefits are generally scarce. Nationally, 62 percent of workers get health insurance through work, but just 42 percent of nail salon workers do, according to the report. Over a quarter instead get coverage through public programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
In New York City, for example, a survey of Nepali workers in nail salons found they were being paid as little as $30 a day while working nine to 12 hours a day. Few got overtime and many couldn’t take breaks unless the flow of customers was slow. Over a quarter couldn’t take sick days, and those who did take them didn’t get paid. In California, 61 percent of Vietnamese salon employees reported making less than minimum wage and 89 percent were not paid overtime.
Despite the low pay and infrequent benefits, these jobs are not side hustles for the women who hold them. The vast majority of people in the industry are like Sarah: The typical worker is a foreign-born woman between the ages of 25 and 44, and she works full time, year-round. Workers’ wages don’t just support themselves, but others: nearly two-thirds have at least one child, while a third are heads of their households.
“As with any worker, a big part of what they’re trying to do is really provide for their children, provide for their families and make sure that they have a roof over their heads,” Fu said.
Many workers take pride in what they do, seeing it as an art. But they’re not paid on par with that quality of work. “We want this industry to treat workers with dignity and treat them with respect and … provide them with the wages where they can really flourish and succeed,” Fu said.
Then there are the health dangers. Sarah tries to take breaks when she can so she doesn’t get exposed to the fumes of the chemicals she works with for too long. She washes her hands frequently and uses gloves when they’re available. But she doesn’t always know what she’s being exposed to. “It’s a lot of things we come in contact with,” she said. “We need to be more aware of what we’re working with.”
Most commonly, nail salon employees are exposed to the “toxic trio”: toluene, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate, all of which are common in nail polish. Disinfectants like alcohol can also cause skin disease and infections. Workers take these chemicals in through inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption while they scrub feet and paint nails.
Chemical exposure often leads to health issues. Exposure to these chemicals may be associated with allergies, eye and skin irritation, eczema and reproductive problems. In some surveys of salon workers, more than 60 percent report suffering skin conditions. Another survey found that people who work with acrylic nails are more likely to have health problems, such as irritation, allergies, pain, coughing, nausea, difficulty breathing and miscarriage. A study in California found that rates of lung cancer were elevated among manicurists, while another in Canada found that workers who regularly applied nail polish had a tenfold greater risk of contracting lupus than other workers.
There’s also the regular wear and tear on the body of such physical work: sitting in uncomfortable postures for long periods of time often leaves workers with strain and fatigue, and many report hand, neck, lower back, shoulder and wrist pain.
Yet regulation of these chemicals or of workplace practices is scarce, and many workers fear speaking out. There are “a lot of barriers, including language barriers, cultural barriers, fear of retaliation,” Fu said, as well as “mistrust of the government.” Given that immigrants dominate the workforce, those with uncertain status may fear going public.
But policy makers are taking notice. One success story was the passage of a bill in California this year that requires chemicals used by salon workers to come with the same ingredient labels that consumer cosmetic products have. Another bill passed by the state in 2016 required salons to post signs in workers’ languages about their rights. “It’s like a first step — just because there’s a sign up doesn’t mean the salon is going to make the changes,” Fu pointed out. The state also has a Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Program, created by a bill passed in 2016, which certifies and promotes salons that commit to safe practices.
New York passed its own reforms after The New York Times published an in-depth investigation into the industry. These reforms included new state regulations for safety and labor standards and its own New York Healthy Salons Coalition to recognize businesses that follow best practices. As part of that coalition, a worker center named Adhikaar has helped train more than 1,000 workers about their health and rights.
But more needs to be done. “There are a lot of cultural shifts that need to happen that will take time,” Fu said. To get there, it will require “a really comprehensive approach through partnerships with government agencies, through continual outreach and education to the community—not just to workers, but also to employers.”
New York labor leaders: Amazon has 'record of routinely mistreating workers'
As Amazon looks to come to town, labor leaders tore into the company’s record on worker treatment in a new report
Erin Durkin in New York
the guardian
Wed 28 Nov 2018 15.22 EST
As Amazon looks to come to town, New York labor leaders tore into the company’s record on worker treatment in a new report issued on Wednesday.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and city lawmakers said Amazon’s record of grueling conditions for warehouse workers and opposition to union organizing should make the tech giant unwelcome in the city.
The company plans to open a massive new office in Long Island City, Queens – splitting its planned second headquarters between there and Arlington, Virginia. The plan, backed by the mayor and governor, has sparked a backlash and protests in the city.
“Amazon has a record of routinely mistreating and exploiting its workers at all levels, whether they are employed in its corporate offices or in its warehouses,” said the RWDSU president, Stuart Appelbaum. “Amazon has operated as an anti-worker, union-busting company across the United States and across Europe.”
At least nine workers have died at Amazon facilities since 2013, the union’s report says.
It cites reports that there were so many calls for medical help at a Pennsylvania warehouse during a heatwave that the company had ambulances stationed outside, and accusations, denied by Amazon, that UK workers were urinating in bottles because they were too afraid to take a bathroom break.
The company has also consistently fought efforts to unionize, releasing a training video to teach managers to find “warning signs” of union organizing and hiring a law firm that specializes in opposing unionization, the union notes, citing published reports.
On Black Friday, there were demonstrations outside Amazon warehouses in the UK and strikes in Germany, Italy and Spain.
Jonathan Westin, head of New York Communities for Change, which organizes low-wage workers, said with more shoppers skipping brick-and-mortar stores to buy online, warehouse jobs like the ones offered by Amazon represent the future of retail work.
“Warehouses are the new retail jobs,” he said. “It is the future of where jobs are going in this country and we need to hold them accountable.”
Amazon’s New York move does not require approval from lawmakers, since the state is using a legal maneuver to avoid the typical zoning vote.
But state senator Michael Gianaris threatened lawsuits if financial incentives for Amazon are not put through the state budget process. “The law is the law, and if they try and bypass required procedures there will be lawsuits. So this is far from a done deal,” he said.
The company is set to receive about $2.8bn in tax breaks and cash subsidies from the state and city.
Not all city unions are fighting the Amazon project. The influential building workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU, has hailed the project, saying it will bring “thousands of good union jobs that will build, maintain and secure this complex”.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about Amazon’s hostility to unions, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he believes the city’s union-friendly attitudes will rub off on the company.
“I am very happy that Amazon will benefit from being in an environment that’s pro-union and we’ll start to see why this union town works so well,” he said at a press conference this month. “We’re always going to be supportive of the union movement.”
But state senator-elect Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district is set to house an Amazon fulfillment center, said the company should be pressed to commit to a card check neutrality agreement, meaning they would not oppose any effort to organize a union.
“No union, no Amazon,” she said.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and city lawmakers said Amazon’s record of grueling conditions for warehouse workers and opposition to union organizing should make the tech giant unwelcome in the city.
The company plans to open a massive new office in Long Island City, Queens – splitting its planned second headquarters between there and Arlington, Virginia. The plan, backed by the mayor and governor, has sparked a backlash and protests in the city.
“Amazon has a record of routinely mistreating and exploiting its workers at all levels, whether they are employed in its corporate offices or in its warehouses,” said the RWDSU president, Stuart Appelbaum. “Amazon has operated as an anti-worker, union-busting company across the United States and across Europe.”
At least nine workers have died at Amazon facilities since 2013, the union’s report says.
It cites reports that there were so many calls for medical help at a Pennsylvania warehouse during a heatwave that the company had ambulances stationed outside, and accusations, denied by Amazon, that UK workers were urinating in bottles because they were too afraid to take a bathroom break.
The company has also consistently fought efforts to unionize, releasing a training video to teach managers to find “warning signs” of union organizing and hiring a law firm that specializes in opposing unionization, the union notes, citing published reports.
On Black Friday, there were demonstrations outside Amazon warehouses in the UK and strikes in Germany, Italy and Spain.
Jonathan Westin, head of New York Communities for Change, which organizes low-wage workers, said with more shoppers skipping brick-and-mortar stores to buy online, warehouse jobs like the ones offered by Amazon represent the future of retail work.
“Warehouses are the new retail jobs,” he said. “It is the future of where jobs are going in this country and we need to hold them accountable.”
Amazon’s New York move does not require approval from lawmakers, since the state is using a legal maneuver to avoid the typical zoning vote.
But state senator Michael Gianaris threatened lawsuits if financial incentives for Amazon are not put through the state budget process. “The law is the law, and if they try and bypass required procedures there will be lawsuits. So this is far from a done deal,” he said.
The company is set to receive about $2.8bn in tax breaks and cash subsidies from the state and city.
Not all city unions are fighting the Amazon project. The influential building workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU, has hailed the project, saying it will bring “thousands of good union jobs that will build, maintain and secure this complex”.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked about Amazon’s hostility to unions, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he believes the city’s union-friendly attitudes will rub off on the company.
“I am very happy that Amazon will benefit from being in an environment that’s pro-union and we’ll start to see why this union town works so well,” he said at a press conference this month. “We’re always going to be supportive of the union movement.”
But state senator-elect Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district is set to house an Amazon fulfillment center, said the company should be pressed to commit to a card check neutrality agreement, meaning they would not oppose any effort to organize a union.
“No union, no Amazon,” she said.
Revealed: Restricting breaks keeps poultry industry workers living in fear
At Sanderson Farms in Texas, workers report being reprimanded for bathroom breaks and increasing pressure to increase productivity
Milli Legrain in Bryan, Texas
the guardian
Mon 26 Nov 2018 06.00 EST
"The not using the restroom thing was really the last straw for me,” said Vivian Valadez, 36, after working for less than three months for Sanderson Farms, the third largest poultry provider in the United States.
With only two scheduled breaks per eight-hour shift, Valadez explained how a handful of workers in her area had invented “their own little restroom schedule” to relieve themselves outside official break time. They took it in turns to stand in for each other, while “trying to hurry up” to limit the effect on the rest of the poultry line.
One day Valadez got reprimanded by a supervisor on her way back from the bathroom. Even though she claims her own manager “was never really around”, the supervisor told Vivian she had to “wait until he came back around” to ask for his permission.
In an interview with the Guardian, a former Sanderson Farms supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous, described how she and her peers were encouraged to ignore worker requests for bathroom breaks.
“A superintendent would sometimes tell us to leave the area when workers were likely to go to the restroom. That way they couldn’t ask us for permission to go,” she said. “So at times we would remove ourselves from the area,” said the employee.
Valadez left the processing plant in Bryan, Texas in 2016. But workers today say conditions haven’t improved. Two years later, she still remembers the incident that led to her resignation. “Nobody is going to tell me when I can and can’t go to the restroom. So I didn’t go back after that,” she said.
As a former worker and a US citizen who is not the family breadwinner, Valadez was more willing than others to speak publicly about her experience. Poultry processing mainly attracts unskilled immigrant workers, African Americans, single mothers or even felons who are more vulnerable and fear employer retaliation.
The poultry industry “has created a culture to keep people living in fear,” said Brandon Hopkins of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) who represents workers at Sanderson Farms as well as other poultry giants including JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride.
In his 10 years as a union representative in Texas and Louisiana, he says he has “had employees go to the bathroom on themselves because they are so scared of getting in trouble that they don’t leave the line”.
The bathroom access problem is industry-wide but Sanderson Farms executives emphatically deny it affects their employees. “That would be a violation of our policies,” said Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer and spokesman for the company. “Any supervisor who was found to have done that would be terminated immediately,” he added.
But current employees claim that any restroom request outside the authorized 12-minute break and 30-minute unpaid lunch break is at the supervisor’s discretion.
“I tried not to drink water because I knew my supervisor wasn’t going to let me go. Not even if I was peeing on myself,” said one worker who had worked at Sanderson Farms.
A former supervisor claimed pressure from her own managers to turn out more chicken was immense. “I say I’m a supervisor but I’m really just doing what I’m told,” she said. “And I get into trouble if I don’t.”
Having started off as a worker herself, she experienced firsthand the humiliation of having a bathroom request denied. “The workers complain a lot and I understand. Sometimes they have to wait 30 or 40 minutes and they won’t let them use the restroom.”
“Sometimes they make you wait so long that you don’t want to go any longer,” she added.
That is not the only problem. The plant employs 1,400 workers and restrooms are located far from workstations. “If I run, I can get there in three minutes,” said one employee. “But if I go at a regular pace it takes me four or five.”
“I know because I’ve timed myself,” she said.
“So the 12-minute break is really only eight,” added another.
Cockrell did concede that the issue of bathroom breaks had been brought to his attention. “That allegation has been raised from time to time, particularly by labor unions during negotiations. But we categorically deny that. It would be a violation not only of our policies and OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards] but of basic human dignity,” he said.
The UFCW’s Brandon Hopkins disagreed: “Sanderson Farms’ answer is that any time anybody wants to use the bathroom, they can. We both know that is not true.”
Conditions across the poultry industry are notorious for high turnover rates. Others argue that employees should be grateful for the job. “With no skills they are making $12.50 an hour,” said Brodrick Ross, a workforce specialist at the state-run Texas Workforce Commission, that acts as a first point of contact for low-skilled workers looking for employment.
According to documents seen by the Guardian, the entry-level wage – which includes a competitive benefits package – is $12.20 per hour and rises to $13.55 after a year on the job. Workers say it’s the highest-paying job in the area.
OSHA inspected the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan in June and again in September after a complaint was filed by the Centro de Derechos Laborales, a local group that advocates for Hispanic worker rights. The government body has six months to investigate.
One employee from Mexico noticed that conditions improve drastically during OSHA visits. “Today was unusual,” she said. “They gave us three breaks instead of two.”
“We stopped work at 4.30pm and they gave us a break at 3.15pm. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that OSHA came.”
A former supervisor also noticed that working conditions were significantly better whenever there was an inspection. “They put less chicken on the line. Everything looks slower and people look more relaxed, ” she said.
OSHA issued its first citation against a company for violating a worker’s rightto use the restroom in 1997. For Debbie Berkowitz a lifelong workers’ advocate, currently at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington, DC, this was a watershed moment. But for many poultry workers across the United States, over 20 years later, the issue is still unresolved.
OSHA standards state that employees should be able to use the restroom whenever they need to – within reason.
“If they are on the line, and they need to go to the bathroom, they shouldn’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes or so,” said Berkowitz.
Labor laws also make clear that lack of bathroom access is a health risk. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that cause them to urinate more often are particularly vulnerable.
Pedro Guerrero, a worker with diabetes who left the Sanderson Farms plant in 2012 after hanging chickens on the line for two years remembers the time his manager confronted him for going to the bathroom. “My supervisor asked me where I was going,” Guerrero recalls. “Can’t you wait until the break?” he said. “Do you want me to do it in my pants?” replied Guerrero, pulling on his pants zipper.
The 60-year-old worker from the Mexican state of Jalisco who became a US citizen over 20 years ago, harbors bitter memories over the discrimination he suffered at the plant. He claims that US-born workers would regularly go to the restroom “to text or fool around”, while he was verbally harassed by his manager.
Experts say restricted bathroom access disproportionately affects women due to urinary tract infections, menstruation and pregnancy. Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed complaints against Case Farms in North Carolina and Fieldale Farms in Georgia alleging sexual discrimination for restricted bathroom access for two female poultry plant workers.
At Sanderson Farms, a current employee showed me a doctor’s note asking her supervisor to let her use the restroom as needed. “We would ask permission to use the restroom. They would ask us to wait. And then sometimes they would forget,” she said.
An Oxfam report from 2015 and a Government Accountability Office studyfrom 2017 confirm that lack of bathroom access runs across the poultry industry.
Labor experts link the issue to a push for increased productivity and increased line speeds following a rise in consumer demand for chicken in the 80s and 90s.
More specifically they say the issue is symptomatic of the industry’s high turnover rate. “It’s about staffing. They don’t have enough staff to replace a worker who needs to go to the bathroom,” said Berkowitz.
Employees complain of the line speed interfering with their ability to take breaks. One worker, who resigned this summer and now works at a local bank, tearfully recalled how, as a newly arrived untrained worker at Sanderson Farms, she was put under intolerable pressure by her supervisor to “pack 60 chicken drumsticks per minute”. She was later told by another supervisor that “the requirement was 45”.
In a recent move, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it was allowing poultry processing plants that meet certain criteria to increase their line speed even further.
The overall line speed at Sanderson Farms in Bryan, Texas, is a well-kept secret. But union representatives think the plant already runs “one of the faster lines in the industry”.
“It’s hard,” says Vivian Valadez, thinking of her former colleagues. “It’s hard for them. I’m not there any more.”
With only two scheduled breaks per eight-hour shift, Valadez explained how a handful of workers in her area had invented “their own little restroom schedule” to relieve themselves outside official break time. They took it in turns to stand in for each other, while “trying to hurry up” to limit the effect on the rest of the poultry line.
One day Valadez got reprimanded by a supervisor on her way back from the bathroom. Even though she claims her own manager “was never really around”, the supervisor told Vivian she had to “wait until he came back around” to ask for his permission.
In an interview with the Guardian, a former Sanderson Farms supervisor, who asked to remain anonymous, described how she and her peers were encouraged to ignore worker requests for bathroom breaks.
“A superintendent would sometimes tell us to leave the area when workers were likely to go to the restroom. That way they couldn’t ask us for permission to go,” she said. “So at times we would remove ourselves from the area,” said the employee.
Valadez left the processing plant in Bryan, Texas in 2016. But workers today say conditions haven’t improved. Two years later, she still remembers the incident that led to her resignation. “Nobody is going to tell me when I can and can’t go to the restroom. So I didn’t go back after that,” she said.
As a former worker and a US citizen who is not the family breadwinner, Valadez was more willing than others to speak publicly about her experience. Poultry processing mainly attracts unskilled immigrant workers, African Americans, single mothers or even felons who are more vulnerable and fear employer retaliation.
The poultry industry “has created a culture to keep people living in fear,” said Brandon Hopkins of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) who represents workers at Sanderson Farms as well as other poultry giants including JBS and Pilgrim’s Pride.
In his 10 years as a union representative in Texas and Louisiana, he says he has “had employees go to the bathroom on themselves because they are so scared of getting in trouble that they don’t leave the line”.
The bathroom access problem is industry-wide but Sanderson Farms executives emphatically deny it affects their employees. “That would be a violation of our policies,” said Mike Cockrell, chief financial officer and spokesman for the company. “Any supervisor who was found to have done that would be terminated immediately,” he added.
But current employees claim that any restroom request outside the authorized 12-minute break and 30-minute unpaid lunch break is at the supervisor’s discretion.
“I tried not to drink water because I knew my supervisor wasn’t going to let me go. Not even if I was peeing on myself,” said one worker who had worked at Sanderson Farms.
A former supervisor claimed pressure from her own managers to turn out more chicken was immense. “I say I’m a supervisor but I’m really just doing what I’m told,” she said. “And I get into trouble if I don’t.”
Having started off as a worker herself, she experienced firsthand the humiliation of having a bathroom request denied. “The workers complain a lot and I understand. Sometimes they have to wait 30 or 40 minutes and they won’t let them use the restroom.”
“Sometimes they make you wait so long that you don’t want to go any longer,” she added.
That is not the only problem. The plant employs 1,400 workers and restrooms are located far from workstations. “If I run, I can get there in three minutes,” said one employee. “But if I go at a regular pace it takes me four or five.”
“I know because I’ve timed myself,” she said.
“So the 12-minute break is really only eight,” added another.
Cockrell did concede that the issue of bathroom breaks had been brought to his attention. “That allegation has been raised from time to time, particularly by labor unions during negotiations. But we categorically deny that. It would be a violation not only of our policies and OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards] but of basic human dignity,” he said.
The UFCW’s Brandon Hopkins disagreed: “Sanderson Farms’ answer is that any time anybody wants to use the bathroom, they can. We both know that is not true.”
Conditions across the poultry industry are notorious for high turnover rates. Others argue that employees should be grateful for the job. “With no skills they are making $12.50 an hour,” said Brodrick Ross, a workforce specialist at the state-run Texas Workforce Commission, that acts as a first point of contact for low-skilled workers looking for employment.
According to documents seen by the Guardian, the entry-level wage – which includes a competitive benefits package – is $12.20 per hour and rises to $13.55 after a year on the job. Workers say it’s the highest-paying job in the area.
OSHA inspected the Sanderson Farms plant in Bryan in June and again in September after a complaint was filed by the Centro de Derechos Laborales, a local group that advocates for Hispanic worker rights. The government body has six months to investigate.
One employee from Mexico noticed that conditions improve drastically during OSHA visits. “Today was unusual,” she said. “They gave us three breaks instead of two.”
“We stopped work at 4.30pm and they gave us a break at 3.15pm. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that OSHA came.”
A former supervisor also noticed that working conditions were significantly better whenever there was an inspection. “They put less chicken on the line. Everything looks slower and people look more relaxed, ” she said.
OSHA issued its first citation against a company for violating a worker’s rightto use the restroom in 1997. For Debbie Berkowitz a lifelong workers’ advocate, currently at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington, DC, this was a watershed moment. But for many poultry workers across the United States, over 20 years later, the issue is still unresolved.
OSHA standards state that employees should be able to use the restroom whenever they need to – within reason.
“If they are on the line, and they need to go to the bathroom, they shouldn’t have to wait longer than 15 minutes or so,” said Berkowitz.
Labor laws also make clear that lack of bathroom access is a health risk. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that cause them to urinate more often are particularly vulnerable.
Pedro Guerrero, a worker with diabetes who left the Sanderson Farms plant in 2012 after hanging chickens on the line for two years remembers the time his manager confronted him for going to the bathroom. “My supervisor asked me where I was going,” Guerrero recalls. “Can’t you wait until the break?” he said. “Do you want me to do it in my pants?” replied Guerrero, pulling on his pants zipper.
The 60-year-old worker from the Mexican state of Jalisco who became a US citizen over 20 years ago, harbors bitter memories over the discrimination he suffered at the plant. He claims that US-born workers would regularly go to the restroom “to text or fool around”, while he was verbally harassed by his manager.
Experts say restricted bathroom access disproportionately affects women due to urinary tract infections, menstruation and pregnancy. Earlier this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed complaints against Case Farms in North Carolina and Fieldale Farms in Georgia alleging sexual discrimination for restricted bathroom access for two female poultry plant workers.
At Sanderson Farms, a current employee showed me a doctor’s note asking her supervisor to let her use the restroom as needed. “We would ask permission to use the restroom. They would ask us to wait. And then sometimes they would forget,” she said.
An Oxfam report from 2015 and a Government Accountability Office studyfrom 2017 confirm that lack of bathroom access runs across the poultry industry.
Labor experts link the issue to a push for increased productivity and increased line speeds following a rise in consumer demand for chicken in the 80s and 90s.
More specifically they say the issue is symptomatic of the industry’s high turnover rate. “It’s about staffing. They don’t have enough staff to replace a worker who needs to go to the bathroom,” said Berkowitz.
Employees complain of the line speed interfering with their ability to take breaks. One worker, who resigned this summer and now works at a local bank, tearfully recalled how, as a newly arrived untrained worker at Sanderson Farms, she was put under intolerable pressure by her supervisor to “pack 60 chicken drumsticks per minute”. She was later told by another supervisor that “the requirement was 45”.
In a recent move, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it was allowing poultry processing plants that meet certain criteria to increase their line speed even further.
The overall line speed at Sanderson Farms in Bryan, Texas, is a well-kept secret. But union representatives think the plant already runs “one of the faster lines in the industry”.
“It’s hard,” says Vivian Valadez, thinking of her former colleagues. “It’s hard for them. I’m not there any more.”
US retail workers face long hours, poor pay and 'anxiety through the roof' on Black Friday
Workers face increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without extra compensation during holidays
Michael Sainato in Albany
the guardian
Fri 23 Nov 2018 01.00 EST
Nicholas Oates started working at an Amazon fulfillment center in Kansas City, Missouri, in August last year, a few months before Amazon’s ‘peak season’ began in late November, when Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales kick off holiday shopping.
That year, 45% of all US online transactions on Thanksgiving Day and 54.9% of all online transactions on Black Friday were made through Amazon. On Cyber Monday, Amazon sold over 64m items , making up a significant portion of the record $6.59bn in total sales for the day. Amazon noted it was their biggest sales day in company history.
This year, Amazon expanded their Black Friday sale to “Black Friday Deals Week”, encompassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and offering different sales on a daily basis.
To help meet such demand during this year’s peak season, Oates, 25, said he was already working 60 hours a week.
Oates explained that as the work volume increases, Amazon workers are not allowed to use personal time and vacation time use is discouraged.
Amazon announced earlier this year a plan to hire 100,000 temporary employees for the 2018 holiday season, though that number has decreased from previous years. The reduction has been attributed to automation and an increased reliance on robots in Amazon fulfillment centers.
Oates says the robots on the warehouse floor often wind up knocking items to the ground, slowing down the work assembly and making it more difficult for workers to keep up picking items.
“It’s a depressing work culture because I’ve seen countless people get chewed up and spit out at this job. One of the biggest, depressing realizations is after I survived peak season, I couldn’t recognize my department anymore. So many people were gone.”
Oates is currently homeless, living out of his car in the Amazon fulfillment center parking lot while working full-time. Oates said he’s struggling with depression. “My quality of sleep has been horrible, I’ve only been getting four to five hours of sleep a night tops,” he said.
Shannon Allen, another Amazon employee who has worked at a fulfillment center in Haslet, Texas, since May 2017, said Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales include many more large items and appliances, which make it more difficult for Amazon workers to keep up with the pace demanded by management.
“When people order the larger items, it makes it a little more strenuous on everybody because mass quantities of larger items are not something that we normally deal with every day,” Allen said.
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said the company’s “number one priority is to ensure a positive and safe working environment”.
“In recent years, thousands of seasonal associates have gone on to join Amazon on a longer-term basis after the holiday season” the statement said.
The National Retail Federation projects overall holiday season sales to increase by 4.1% in 2018. Increasingly, these sales are shifting toward online retail over brick and mortar retail; in 2017, online sales on Black Friday saw an 18% increase from the previous year, while the number of people who shopped in brick and mortar retail stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday decreased by 4% .
Though Black Friday shopping is trending toward online retail, millions of Americans will still shop in person at brick and mortar retail stores, where workers face substantial increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without any additional compensation.
“You don’t get to enjoy Thanksgiving because of Black Friday right after,” said Ludmiala Blanco, an employee for 25 years at a CVS in Los Angeles, California.
“People are very demanding, we have huge lines, and we are understaffed for most of the time people rush in.”
She noted only full-time employees receive time and a half extra compensation for working holidays like Thanksgiving Day but isn’t offered at all on Black Friday.
“It’s really stressful. It’s chaos everywhere. Having to keep up with the pace management expects you to work at, dealing with the mess and the customers, my anxiety is through the roof,” said Noemi Castro, a three-year employee at K-Mart in Los Angeles, California, who is working the morning shift on Black Friday this year.
The director of labor education research at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, Kate Bronfenbrenner, explained these trends are persistent throughout the retail industry.
“There is a very human, personal cost,” Bronfenbrenner said. She noted in the 1980s many places did not open on holidays and were closed on Sundays. “We have moved to a world where the biggest shopping days of the year are on holidays.”
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has made efforts to compete with Amazon on Cyber Monday while hosting Black Friday sales at their retail stores across the country.
Walmart does not offer holiday pay or additional compensation to workers on days like Black Friday.
Walmart has faced increasing pressure from workers to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. In the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Stop Walmart Act introduced last week to push Walmart to raise their wages, Walmart workers are planning protest events outside of the Walmart billionaire heiress Alice Walton’s New York City Penthouse and Walmart.com headquarters in San Bruno, California, on Cyber Monday.
Kristi Branstetter, a Walmart employee for more than seven years at a store outside of Kansas City, Missouri said: “Retail workers are giving up their time, time with their family to serve customers and we are not making money for ourselves, but making money for the executives and the Waltons who are sitting at home.”
That year, 45% of all US online transactions on Thanksgiving Day and 54.9% of all online transactions on Black Friday were made through Amazon. On Cyber Monday, Amazon sold over 64m items , making up a significant portion of the record $6.59bn in total sales for the day. Amazon noted it was their biggest sales day in company history.
This year, Amazon expanded their Black Friday sale to “Black Friday Deals Week”, encompassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and offering different sales on a daily basis.
To help meet such demand during this year’s peak season, Oates, 25, said he was already working 60 hours a week.
Oates explained that as the work volume increases, Amazon workers are not allowed to use personal time and vacation time use is discouraged.
Amazon announced earlier this year a plan to hire 100,000 temporary employees for the 2018 holiday season, though that number has decreased from previous years. The reduction has been attributed to automation and an increased reliance on robots in Amazon fulfillment centers.
Oates says the robots on the warehouse floor often wind up knocking items to the ground, slowing down the work assembly and making it more difficult for workers to keep up picking items.
“It’s a depressing work culture because I’ve seen countless people get chewed up and spit out at this job. One of the biggest, depressing realizations is after I survived peak season, I couldn’t recognize my department anymore. So many people were gone.”
Oates is currently homeless, living out of his car in the Amazon fulfillment center parking lot while working full-time. Oates said he’s struggling with depression. “My quality of sleep has been horrible, I’ve only been getting four to five hours of sleep a night tops,” he said.
Shannon Allen, another Amazon employee who has worked at a fulfillment center in Haslet, Texas, since May 2017, said Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales include many more large items and appliances, which make it more difficult for Amazon workers to keep up with the pace demanded by management.
“When people order the larger items, it makes it a little more strenuous on everybody because mass quantities of larger items are not something that we normally deal with every day,” Allen said.
In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said the company’s “number one priority is to ensure a positive and safe working environment”.
“In recent years, thousands of seasonal associates have gone on to join Amazon on a longer-term basis after the holiday season” the statement said.
The National Retail Federation projects overall holiday season sales to increase by 4.1% in 2018. Increasingly, these sales are shifting toward online retail over brick and mortar retail; in 2017, online sales on Black Friday saw an 18% increase from the previous year, while the number of people who shopped in brick and mortar retail stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday decreased by 4% .
Though Black Friday shopping is trending toward online retail, millions of Americans will still shop in person at brick and mortar retail stores, where workers face substantial increases in work volume and demanding schedules, often without any additional compensation.
“You don’t get to enjoy Thanksgiving because of Black Friday right after,” said Ludmiala Blanco, an employee for 25 years at a CVS in Los Angeles, California.
“People are very demanding, we have huge lines, and we are understaffed for most of the time people rush in.”
She noted only full-time employees receive time and a half extra compensation for working holidays like Thanksgiving Day but isn’t offered at all on Black Friday.
“It’s really stressful. It’s chaos everywhere. Having to keep up with the pace management expects you to work at, dealing with the mess and the customers, my anxiety is through the roof,” said Noemi Castro, a three-year employee at K-Mart in Los Angeles, California, who is working the morning shift on Black Friday this year.
The director of labor education research at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, Kate Bronfenbrenner, explained these trends are persistent throughout the retail industry.
“There is a very human, personal cost,” Bronfenbrenner said. She noted in the 1980s many places did not open on holidays and were closed on Sundays. “We have moved to a world where the biggest shopping days of the year are on holidays.”
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has made efforts to compete with Amazon on Cyber Monday while hosting Black Friday sales at their retail stores across the country.
Walmart does not offer holiday pay or additional compensation to workers on days like Black Friday.
Walmart has faced increasing pressure from workers to raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. In the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Stop Walmart Act introduced last week to push Walmart to raise their wages, Walmart workers are planning protest events outside of the Walmart billionaire heiress Alice Walton’s New York City Penthouse and Walmart.com headquarters in San Bruno, California, on Cyber Monday.
Kristi Branstetter, a Walmart employee for more than seven years at a store outside of Kansas City, Missouri said: “Retail workers are giving up their time, time with their family to serve customers and we are not making money for ourselves, but making money for the executives and the Waltons who are sitting at home.”
Our new column from inside Amazon: 'They treat us as disposable'
In The Amazon Diaries, our anonymous insider takes us behind the scenes at an Amazon fulfillment center where workers are ‘an extension of the machine’
Anonymous
the guardian
Wed 21 Nov 2018 03.01 EST
Welcome Amazonians. It is always Day 1. Are you ready to make a difference?
It was my first day as a seasonal Amazon worker, hired just prior to peak season. Our site operations manager was like many Amazon managers: an ex-military white male, in his late 40s and wearing straight-fit jeans and a T-shirt with “Amazon Military” emblazoned on the front. He drew a line alongside an inverted pyramid, writing “least important” on the bottom and “most important” higher up, with the word “customer” scrawled along the very top.
“Where do you think Jeff Bezos sees himself on this chart?”
Silence. He points to the bottom of the pyramid.
“Jeff sees himself as the least important person in the company. What this company cares about is the customer promise, and putting our customers first.
“Where do you think our associates are?”
Silence.
“Here! Jeff sees you at the very top! You, the associates, are the closest to the customers. It is up to you, every day, to uphold our customer promise. As front line associates, you are the most important part of this company!”
As I headed to our training session wearing my new orange associate work-vest and wearing my white badge designating me as a “seasonal” employee, I was approached by a co-worker in a fancy, blue and green-lined “Ambassador” vest and a blue badge that signified he has been “converted” to a non-seasonal Amazon worker.
“Did they give you the pyramid crap?”
I nodded.
“That’s a load of shit.” We laughed, but I wasn’t quite sure I understood.
“Welcome to Amazon,” he said.
The inverted pyramid has stuck with me as an Amazon fulfillment associate. In some ways it’s on point. It’s important to take a step back and realize what an Amazon fulfillment center really is. Prior to Amazon, the sale of stuff largely took place through physical stores. Enter a store and there can be dozens of employees, stocking shelves, managing the check-out counter, controlling inventory. The pace and rhythm of the day, at least compared to fulfillment centers, can be relatively relaxed.
At Amazon, by contrast, we are not retail workers. We are factory workers.
A single fulfillment center can contain 1,500-2,000 full-time workers, stowing, picking, packing, unloading, sorting, palletizing and delivering hundreds of thousands of items every day. Centers are filled with the whirl, grind, and moan of conveyor belts, the incessant drone of a forest of Kivabots moving shelves.
We work hard, and diligently, to make Amazon run. While our collective efforts produce astounding results, we are supervised ever more intensively. Through the use of digital trackers and indicators, our workday is managed down to the second, with each task timed based on a “rate” set by managers who push us ever faster. Work is often organized to keep workers from talking or even taking breaks, with this time considered “off-task”. Like factory workers on the assembly line, we are essentially extensions of the machine.
When you recognize that we are what keeps Amazon going, and the most important part of the business, putting us at the top of the pyramid is right. Workers – whether the engineers or the hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees – are the backbone of the business and the source of astounding wealth. Without us there is no Amazon Prime, no advertising revenue, no streaming video, no HQ2.
However, the pyramid analogy is also fitting because at the time this place feels like a pyramid scheme. After a few months at the company, it becomes clear to most of us that management doesn’t regard us a crucial contributors to its success. In reality, they treat us like disposable parts.
It doesn’t take long before you’ve see blown backs, boxes falling on people’s heads, carpal tunnel in your coworkers’ wrists, and balky knees that never get better. You’ve seen workers compensation claims repeatedly denied and efforts to address safety issues given low priority. You’ve seen sexism, racism, and ageism in a promotion culture tainted with favoritism. You’ve seen write-ups unfairly distributed and used to manipulate workers. You’ve seen an emotionally toxic culture, where the stress of meeting productivity targets leads managers to treat workers like things, to be pushed harder and faster without regard for the emotional or personal cost. You’ve arrived home exhausted, too worn out to spend time with your kids or friends. And you’ve noticed that the wealth we produce is being accumulated by our boss – the modern world’s richest man – while our wages barely keep us afloat. Amazon’s much-touted new minimum wage of $15 is not enough to propel hundreds of thousands of us into the middle class.
Those of us as at the bottom of the pyramid put our bodies and lives on the line, but those at the top of the pyramid are hung out to dry.
The closer you are to doing the actual work of making this company run, the more your self-respect is attacked.
Every other week, this column will seek to understand the complexity of life inside Amazon, and explore the effects Amazon has on our lives and on our broader community. Throughout, I want to remain consistent on one thing: Amazon workers deserve respect. As the people who make this company run, we are unique. And only if we are united will we be able to transform our company and our communities into the ones we want.
It was my first day as a seasonal Amazon worker, hired just prior to peak season. Our site operations manager was like many Amazon managers: an ex-military white male, in his late 40s and wearing straight-fit jeans and a T-shirt with “Amazon Military” emblazoned on the front. He drew a line alongside an inverted pyramid, writing “least important” on the bottom and “most important” higher up, with the word “customer” scrawled along the very top.
“Where do you think Jeff Bezos sees himself on this chart?”
Silence. He points to the bottom of the pyramid.
“Jeff sees himself as the least important person in the company. What this company cares about is the customer promise, and putting our customers first.
“Where do you think our associates are?”
Silence.
“Here! Jeff sees you at the very top! You, the associates, are the closest to the customers. It is up to you, every day, to uphold our customer promise. As front line associates, you are the most important part of this company!”
As I headed to our training session wearing my new orange associate work-vest and wearing my white badge designating me as a “seasonal” employee, I was approached by a co-worker in a fancy, blue and green-lined “Ambassador” vest and a blue badge that signified he has been “converted” to a non-seasonal Amazon worker.
“Did they give you the pyramid crap?”
I nodded.
“That’s a load of shit.” We laughed, but I wasn’t quite sure I understood.
“Welcome to Amazon,” he said.
The inverted pyramid has stuck with me as an Amazon fulfillment associate. In some ways it’s on point. It’s important to take a step back and realize what an Amazon fulfillment center really is. Prior to Amazon, the sale of stuff largely took place through physical stores. Enter a store and there can be dozens of employees, stocking shelves, managing the check-out counter, controlling inventory. The pace and rhythm of the day, at least compared to fulfillment centers, can be relatively relaxed.
At Amazon, by contrast, we are not retail workers. We are factory workers.
A single fulfillment center can contain 1,500-2,000 full-time workers, stowing, picking, packing, unloading, sorting, palletizing and delivering hundreds of thousands of items every day. Centers are filled with the whirl, grind, and moan of conveyor belts, the incessant drone of a forest of Kivabots moving shelves.
We work hard, and diligently, to make Amazon run. While our collective efforts produce astounding results, we are supervised ever more intensively. Through the use of digital trackers and indicators, our workday is managed down to the second, with each task timed based on a “rate” set by managers who push us ever faster. Work is often organized to keep workers from talking or even taking breaks, with this time considered “off-task”. Like factory workers on the assembly line, we are essentially extensions of the machine.
When you recognize that we are what keeps Amazon going, and the most important part of the business, putting us at the top of the pyramid is right. Workers – whether the engineers or the hundreds of thousands of warehouse employees – are the backbone of the business and the source of astounding wealth. Without us there is no Amazon Prime, no advertising revenue, no streaming video, no HQ2.
However, the pyramid analogy is also fitting because at the time this place feels like a pyramid scheme. After a few months at the company, it becomes clear to most of us that management doesn’t regard us a crucial contributors to its success. In reality, they treat us like disposable parts.
It doesn’t take long before you’ve see blown backs, boxes falling on people’s heads, carpal tunnel in your coworkers’ wrists, and balky knees that never get better. You’ve seen workers compensation claims repeatedly denied and efforts to address safety issues given low priority. You’ve seen sexism, racism, and ageism in a promotion culture tainted with favoritism. You’ve seen write-ups unfairly distributed and used to manipulate workers. You’ve seen an emotionally toxic culture, where the stress of meeting productivity targets leads managers to treat workers like things, to be pushed harder and faster without regard for the emotional or personal cost. You’ve arrived home exhausted, too worn out to spend time with your kids or friends. And you’ve noticed that the wealth we produce is being accumulated by our boss – the modern world’s richest man – while our wages barely keep us afloat. Amazon’s much-touted new minimum wage of $15 is not enough to propel hundreds of thousands of us into the middle class.
Those of us as at the bottom of the pyramid put our bodies and lives on the line, but those at the top of the pyramid are hung out to dry.
The closer you are to doing the actual work of making this company run, the more your self-respect is attacked.
Every other week, this column will seek to understand the complexity of life inside Amazon, and explore the effects Amazon has on our lives and on our broader community. Throughout, I want to remain consistent on one thing: Amazon workers deserve respect. As the people who make this company run, we are unique. And only if we are united will we be able to transform our company and our communities into the ones we want.
California is using inmate labor to fight its deadly wildfires
The inmates are paid just $1 an hour.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
NOV 11, 2018, 9:36 AM
As wildfires rage across California and the death toll rises, hundreds of inmates in California prisons are risking their lives to be paid just $1 an hour to help fight the flames.
In Northern California, the Camp Fire erupted on November 8 in the hills north of Sacramento and became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday night, it had taken 23 lives. At the same time, the Woolsey Fire is raging in Southern California and has killed two people.
California has a long history of using prison labor to fight wildfires, and this year is no different. At least 200 inmate firefighters from 16 different crews are among the thousands of people fighting the Camp Fire, according to local reporters.
Incarcerated individuals have been brought from six different conservation camps and are being paid far below the salary of non-incarcerated firefighters to help control the dangerous flames.
Inmate firefighters are also helping to fight the Southern California fires, according to reports which say that three tried to escape but were caught.
California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was not immediately available for comment, but the department has highlighted its role in fighting wildfires in the past. In July, the department tweeted that “inmate firefighters serve a vital role” in fighting the state’s wildfires.
“Today, more than 2,000 volunteer inmate firefighters, including 58 youth offenders, are battling wildfire flames throughout CA,” the department wrote.
According to WBUR, inmates make up nearly 40 percent of California’s firefighters, saving the state $100 million per year.
The state’s practice of using inmate firefighters dates back to World War II, when the firefighter workforce across California was depleted because of the war.
According to local reporters, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has said it has “authority to operate 39 conservation camps statewide and 196 fire crews year round due to the cooperative efforts with the CDCR and the Division of Juvenile Justice.”
Across California, 29 counties operate 44 conservation camps for adult inmates, one for juvenile offenders, and three adult offender camps that house females. According to reports, the camps can house up to 4,522 adult inmates and 80 juveniles. A majority of the camps are managed by both the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Participation in the camps is voluntary, and minimum-custody inmates have to earn the right to work at the camps by having a nonviolent record. The inmates are trained by California officials and are paid, on average, $2 a day. That pay jumps up to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires.
By comparison, inmates in California typically earn between eight cents and 95 cents an hour.
Some inmates have said that fighting fires is a coveted job and allows incarcerated individuals to challenge themselves while spending time in nature. But the New York Times reported in August 2017 that the state’s roughly 250 female-inmate firefighters risk their lives for the volunteer position. The Times details the story of a 22-year-old inmate who was killed while fighting a fire less than two months before her three-year sentence was set to end.
For that type of grueling and dangerous work, many female inmates said the pay is insufficient.
‘‘The pay is ridiculous,’’ 35-year-old La’Sonya Edwards told The Times during a break from clearing a fire road. ‘‘There are some days we are worn down to the core. And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do.’’
The article noted that “Edwards makes about $500 a year in camp, plus whatever she earns while on the fire line, which might add up to a few hundred dollars in a month; the pay for a full-time civilian firefighter starts at about $40,000.”
The job isn’t just dangerous for female inmates. In April, a male inmate firefighter in Northern California collapsed and died during a training hike during his first day on the job.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told WBUR that inmate firefighters are a “uniquely vulnerable part of the workforce.”
“When prisoners do volunteer to work it’s especially important that we make absolutely sure that they’re making a free and uncoerced and truly voluntary choice,” he said. “And that’s especially important when the work they’re doing is very dangerous, like fighting wildfires.”
In Northern California, the Camp Fire erupted on November 8 in the hills north of Sacramento and became the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday night, it had taken 23 lives. At the same time, the Woolsey Fire is raging in Southern California and has killed two people.
California has a long history of using prison labor to fight wildfires, and this year is no different. At least 200 inmate firefighters from 16 different crews are among the thousands of people fighting the Camp Fire, according to local reporters.
Incarcerated individuals have been brought from six different conservation camps and are being paid far below the salary of non-incarcerated firefighters to help control the dangerous flames.
Inmate firefighters are also helping to fight the Southern California fires, according to reports which say that three tried to escape but were caught.
California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was not immediately available for comment, but the department has highlighted its role in fighting wildfires in the past. In July, the department tweeted that “inmate firefighters serve a vital role” in fighting the state’s wildfires.
“Today, more than 2,000 volunteer inmate firefighters, including 58 youth offenders, are battling wildfire flames throughout CA,” the department wrote.
According to WBUR, inmates make up nearly 40 percent of California’s firefighters, saving the state $100 million per year.
The state’s practice of using inmate firefighters dates back to World War II, when the firefighter workforce across California was depleted because of the war.
According to local reporters, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has said it has “authority to operate 39 conservation camps statewide and 196 fire crews year round due to the cooperative efforts with the CDCR and the Division of Juvenile Justice.”
Across California, 29 counties operate 44 conservation camps for adult inmates, one for juvenile offenders, and three adult offender camps that house females. According to reports, the camps can house up to 4,522 adult inmates and 80 juveniles. A majority of the camps are managed by both the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Participation in the camps is voluntary, and minimum-custody inmates have to earn the right to work at the camps by having a nonviolent record. The inmates are trained by California officials and are paid, on average, $2 a day. That pay jumps up to $1 an hour when they are actively fighting fires.
By comparison, inmates in California typically earn between eight cents and 95 cents an hour.
Some inmates have said that fighting fires is a coveted job and allows incarcerated individuals to challenge themselves while spending time in nature. But the New York Times reported in August 2017 that the state’s roughly 250 female-inmate firefighters risk their lives for the volunteer position. The Times details the story of a 22-year-old inmate who was killed while fighting a fire less than two months before her three-year sentence was set to end.
For that type of grueling and dangerous work, many female inmates said the pay is insufficient.
‘‘The pay is ridiculous,’’ 35-year-old La’Sonya Edwards told The Times during a break from clearing a fire road. ‘‘There are some days we are worn down to the core. And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do.’’
The article noted that “Edwards makes about $500 a year in camp, plus whatever she earns while on the fire line, which might add up to a few hundred dollars in a month; the pay for a full-time civilian firefighter starts at about $40,000.”
The job isn’t just dangerous for female inmates. In April, a male inmate firefighter in Northern California collapsed and died during a training hike during his first day on the job.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told WBUR that inmate firefighters are a “uniquely vulnerable part of the workforce.”
“When prisoners do volunteer to work it’s especially important that we make absolutely sure that they’re making a free and uncoerced and truly voluntary choice,” he said. “And that’s especially important when the work they’re doing is very dangerous, like fighting wildfires.”
funnies
