Hold the Fed Accountable: Opposing View
USA Today - March 17, 2015, by Mark Weisbrot - Should the Federal Reserve raise interest rates in order to create more unemployment and keep wages from rising? If the question were asked that way...
USA Today - March 17, 2015, by Mark Weisbrot - Should the Federal Reserve raise interest rates in order to create more unemployment and keep wages from rising? If the question were asked that way, the vast majority of Americans would say, "No!"
It is not posed in this manner, even though economists — including Fed economists — and many journalists who write for the business press know that this is exactly what the Fed will be doing when it raises interest rates.
Of course, the justification is that we "need" to do this in order to keep inflation from rising to harmful levels. But the Consumer Price Index is actually down slightly for the year ending in January; in other words, inflation is in negative territory. Why should anyone want to increase unemployment just to keep inflation down?
OUR VIEW: Why it's good news if Fed loses 'patience'
When the Fed increases unemployment, it increases it twice as much for African Americans as for everyone else. And higher unemployment also reduces wage growth much more for African-American workers and lower-wage workers. Across the board, more unemployment translates very directly into more income inequality.
This is no time to be increasing unemployment and inequality, and pushing down wages. Median household income in the U.S. is still down about 3% since the recession ended in mid-2009. For the vast majority of the workforce, wages have stagnated or declined since 1979. Meanwhile, in the first three years of the current economic recovery, the top 1% of Americans received 91% of all income gains.
Fortunately, for probably the first time in the Fed's century of existence, there is a grass-roots movement to hold America's central bank accountable to the voters, citizens and working people of this country. A coalition led by the Center for Popular Democracy is "Fed Up" and trying to make sure that the Fed doesn't cut off wage growth before it even gets rolling.
If America is to shed the title of "Land of Inequality," this is how it is going to happen: by more people becoming aware of how the Fed's monetary policy affects them and demanding that it change.
Source
Lingo still a barrier to relief
Times Union – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Immigrant advocacy groups say it remains difficult to get access to government services in languages other than English — nearly two years after...
Times Union – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Immigrant advocacy groups say it remains difficult to get access to government services in languages other than English — nearly two years after Gov. Andrew Cuomo decreed that written and oral interpretation would be available the state’s six most-spoken foreign languages.
Cuomo signed an executive order that took effect last October mandating state officials to offer language assistance for speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, French Creole, Russian and Chinese. But the order’s scope was necessarily limited to state agencies, even though state-funded services like food stamps, driver’s licenses and unemployment benefits are administered by New York City or other counties.
The groups — including Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities at the University at Albany — visited government offices and surveyed people with limited English proficiency to develop a measure of compliance. In a report released earlier this week, they found that less than half the people who needed language assistance were able to receive it.
According to Nisha Agarwal, deputy director of the Center for Popular Democracy, the survey found 63 percent of citizens using state-operated facilities that are explicitly covered by the order were not successful in their quest to gain language assistance.
“The governor’s team has been very engaged on implementation, and we’re sympathetic to the challenges of getting an entire state apparatus to change,” said Agarwal. “That said, the results are by no means satisfactory, and we were quite disappointed that the state took the position that county-run agencies for state services were not within the ambit of the order. We feel it’s a pretty big gap.”
The Cuomo administration responded by saying that all covered state agencies are in compliance with this executive order
“This report paints an inaccurate picture of reality by relying on visits to county-run agencies that by law fall outside the executive order,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi. “Everyone should have the same access to their government, and we encourage counties to follow the state’s lead.”
Source
Meet The ‘Rapists’ Who Built Donald Trump’s Empire
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to ...
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to clothing lines, hotels,resorts, golf courses, a winery, and apartment buildings. And for a man who has unapologetically characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and has said that infectious diseases are spilling across the border, Trump has decided to work in industries where it’s impossible to avoid the Latino immigrants he is maligning.
A 2010 Current Population Survey found that more than 200,00 foreign-born workers work in the hospitality industry, nearly 1.2 million foreign-born workers hold construction occupations, and another 1.3 million foreign-born workers are employed in the food service industry. The data doesn’t break down the figures by nationality and legal status, though a Southern Poverty Law Center survey found that Latino immigrants are most often employed in construction, factory work, cleaning, and restaurant work.
A 2011 National Council of La Raza study corroborated those results, finding that nearly one in five employees in the accommodation industry is Latino. The group is also overrepresented in “nearly all the major service jobs in the accommodation industry,” the NCLR study stated.
For Trump, that overrepresentation of Latino laborers could very well mean that at least some of his workers are from the country that he’s made inflammatory remarks about. And if he took a stroll through some of the properties that he owns long after business hours are over, he might encounter many of these “good people“:
Construction workers
As the Washington Post reported this week, Trump relies on both undocumented and legal immigrants on the construction site of his hotel in Washington, D.C. Trump has also put undocumented immigrants on the payroll in the past. In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump was embroiled in a 15-year lawsuit for allegedly cheating 200 undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe benefits during the demolition of the building that preceded Trump Tower, the New York Times reported in 1998.
Trump doesn’t think it’s “crass” to tell people that he’s “really rich,” (he has a net worth anywhere between $4.1 billion and $8.7 billion), but his wealth isn’t solely from his own doing. He likely had help — as he currently does in D.C. — from immigrants like Ramon Alvarez, a window worker, who told the Washington Post, “Do you think that when we’re hanging out there from the eighth floor that we’re raping or selling drugs? We’re risking our lives and our health. A lot of the chemicals we deal with are toxic.”
A 2013 Center for Popular Democracy report found that the majority of construction site accident victims in New York State are Latinos and/or immigrant workers. Only 34 percent of all construction workers in New York state are Latino and/or an immigrant, but they comprise 60 percent of all OSHA-investigated “fall from an elevation fatalities” in the state. A 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that 17 percent of construction workers were undocumented.
Some of these workers are subject to wage theft. Fernando, an undocumented construction worker and painter, told ThinkProgress in March that he joined an union because “the contractor refused to pay me and they helped me get my money back.” He was also serious injured twice on the job, once in Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike.
Golf course maintenance workers
About 180,000 maintenance workers keep the nation’s 15,619 golf courses green and pristine across the country. As a four-part Golf Digest series documented, immigrants do most of the maintenance work on golf courses. “We get up early and try to stay out of the way,” one golf course worker told Golf Digest. “We don’t know anything about the players, and they don’t know anything about us.”
Most of the time, American workers just aren’t “willing to do those jobs,” Chava McKeel, the associate director of government relations for the GCSAA said.
“The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) estimates that two-thirds of the maintenance workforce is Latino, with the largest presence in California, Texas and Florida (85 percent), followed by the Northwest (50 percent) and the Midwest/Mideast (10 to 20 percent),” Golf Digest reported. A 2008 Cornell study backs up the findings, noting that superintendents responding to their survey indicated that “72 percent of their workforce at the peak of the season was Hispanic.”
The Trump organization owns seven golf courses throughout the country. The PGA of America saidon Tuesday that the Grand Slam of Golf tournament won’t be played at the Los Angeles golf club.
Restaurant workers
The 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that about one in ten workers in the restaurant industry is an immigrant. Of those, about 20 percent of restaurant cooks and 30 percent of dishwashers are undocumented, Seattle’s KUOW reported.
Latinos are “disproportionately likely to be dishwashers, dining room attendants, or cooks, also relatively low-paid occupations,” an Economic Policy Institute report stated last year. The study also found that “one in six restaurant workers, or 16.7 percent, live below the official poverty line” while “more than two in five restaurant workers, or 43.1 percent, live below twice the poverty line.”
Restaurateur and TV star Anthony Bourdain told the Houston Press in 2007, “It is undeniable…I know very few chefs who’ve even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job.”
Though Trump is mainly in the hotel business, his establishments have restaurants, like the Trump Grill located in the atrium of the Trump Tower and The Terrace at Trump Chicago. However, his recent comments are threatening to derail plans for a new restaurant at the planned Trump International Hotel in D.C. At least 2,510 people have already signed a petition asking Chef Jose Andres to back out of working at the restaurant.
Hotel workers
According to the 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 36,700 Latinos working in the building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations, such as janitors, maids and housekeepers, pest control workers, and grounds maintenance staff. There are also an additional25,100 hotel, motel, and resort desk clerks who identify as Latino.
A 2009 study of workers across 50 U.S. hotels found that Latino women are twice as likely to be injured as white house keepers and 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men. The New York Times reported that housekeepers have a high injury rate since they have to do repetitive tasks, lift heavy mattresses, and work quickly to clean rooms.
“I have worked as a housekeeper for about 13 years. I work in pain constantly. My body aches all over, but most of all my back from bending and lifting throughout the day,” one housekeeper who worked at a Hyatt hotel said, according to a Work Safe report.
Unlike Trump, some conservative hoteliers have recognized the necessity of immigrant workers. J.W. Bill Marriott, then CEO and now Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board of Marriott International, has called for immigration reform several times in 2007, 2010, and again in 2012.
Source: ThinkProgress
Report: Charter schools have lost $30 million since 1997
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was in a federal courtroom as part of his ongoing criminal...
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was in a federal courtroom as part of his ongoing criminal case, a new report cited him as an example of $30 million in fraud and financial mismanagement among Pennsylvania charter schools since 1997.
The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was done by three organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United.
It piggybacks on a national report on charter schools in May by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education that claimed more than $136 million has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse by charter schools.
The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Schools issued a statement saying allegations of fraud must be investigated.
“However,” the statement continued, “the report draws sweeping conclusions about the entire charter sector based on only 11 cited incidents in the course of almost 20 years, while ignoring numerous alleged and actual fraud and fiscal mismanagement in the districts over the same time period, which dwarf the charter school allegations in terms of alleged misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
To stem the loss of tax dollars by charter schools, the three nonprofit organizations make several recommendations, including annual fraud risk assessments, trained forensic auditors doing reviews, charter school authorizers doing comprehensive reviews every three years instead of every five years, and charter schools posting findings of internal assessments.
City and county controllers should also be authorized to perform fraud risk assessments and fraud audits on charter schools, the groups recommended.
They also suggested that the state attorney general’s office review all charter schools in Pennsylvania, that the Legislature pass a law to protect and encourage charter school whistle-blowers, and that the state declare a moratorium on new charter schools until reforms are implemented.
Trombetta, who faces 11 federal charges, including mail fraud and filing false tax returns, is cited as one example in the report. On Tuesday, he was in court trying to get recordings tossed in the case, in which he is accused of using various offshoots of PA Cyber to siphon away millions of taxpayer dollars.
The coalition said the report’s recommendations should be applied to traditional school districts as well as charter schools “in the name of intellectual integrity.” If not, it would just be an example of pursuing a political agenda, the coalition said.
Not surprisingly, the president of the National Education Association issued a statement trumpeting the report’s findings and blasting charter school supporters, especially Gov. Tom Corbett. “It’s time for lawmakers to stop providing charter industry players a blank check with little oversight and no accountability,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia.
“Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and other politicians in the state continue to push for privatization, despite compelling evidence of fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds in the charter school industry,” Garcia said.
Source
A Campaign for Full Employment, and the Federal Reserve
Fed Up Field Director Shawn Sebastian with the Center for Popular Democracy joins us to talk about their campaign pushing the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies, keeping interest rates...
Fed Up Field Director Shawn Sebastian with the Center for Popular Democracy joins us to talk about their campaign pushing the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies, keeping interest rates low, and how they re getting public support to build a better economy.
CHARLES SHOWALTER AND SHAWN SEBASTIAN
Source
Rage Against the Scheduling Machine
The Boston Globe - December 21, 2014, by Dante Ramos - Most of the time, it’s a cop-out to...
The Boston Globe - December 21, 2014, by Dante Ramos - Most of the time, it’s a cop-out to blame technology for the human misbehavior that it enables. It isn’t PowerPoint’s fault that your co-workers add too many slides to their presentations. It isn’t Facebook’s fault that “friends” whom you barely know make odd comments on your photos. It isn’t Auto-Tune’s fault that Paris Hilton thinks she’s a singer.
But when the stakes are much higher, even software engineers should do some soul-searching. Late last month, just as shoppers around the country were girding for Black Friday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a “retail workers bill of rights” designed to give workers at retail chains more predictable schedules and discourage last-minute scheduling changes. It was a direct response to a powerful new employment trend: Increasingly, major retail and restaurant chains fine-tune their staffing — and hold down labor costs — via sophisticated software that looks at a store’s past performance, weather patterns, and real-time sales data.
The software plays an integral role in so-called just-in-time scheduling systems, which help ensure that a store won’t have eight cashiers working when there’s only enough business for four. For workers, though, these systems have serious downsides: irregular shifts, significant schedule changes on short notice, and huge variations in hours from week to week.
Earlier this year, The New York Times profiled part-time Starbucks barista Jannette Navarro, a San Diego single mom who couldn’t arrange child care or take classes because her hours fluctuated so wildly. Workers at chains from Walmart to Jamba Juice have gone public with their frustrations. “These hours don’t match the basic realities of people’s lives,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. The burden for workers with families is particularly heavy, she added. “Kids need routine, but when you work in retail routine doesn’t happen.”
The market leader in this workforce-management industry is Chelmsford-based Kronos Inc.; other players include SAP, ADP, and Oracle. What these firms have to decide is whether their products can be a force for greater equity in the workplace — or will remain one more way, in an uncertain economy, to shift more of the risk onto low-wage employees with little leverage.
Strikingly, none of the researchers or labor advocates whom I contacted blamed Kronos or its competitors for schedules that, ultimately, reflect the employer’s values. Still, all the evidence suggests that relying on faceless algorithms makes it easier for employers to casually jerk workers around.
If you worked in retail 20 years ago, your manager would post a handwritten schedule on the back of the bathroom door every week or two. She might have expected you to work every other Friday night, because spreading unpopular weekend shifts around helps morale. If you worked Tuesday and Thursday last week, she might give you the same shifts this week, because reinventing the schedule from scratch would be a hassle. She made judgments about which inconveniences you might grumblingly accept — and which ones were too burdensome to demand.
A robo-scheduler doesn’t recognize such objections unless it’s programmed to. “The algorithm did it,” a manager might rationalize — especially when headquarters is keeping a close eye on staffing at every store.
It also can’t be a coincidence that, as scheduling software proliferated over the last decade, so did the widespread use of on-call shifts, which require part-time employees to check in an hour or two beforehand to see if they’re needed. For workers who need to arrange child care, or work a second part-time job, being called in with a couple of hours’ notice is a disaster.
The workforce-management industry is a little cagey about how its products affect workers. “Reduce labor costs by efficiently scheduling, monitoring, and managing your workforce,” promises an Oracle marketing website. “Provide outstanding customer service as you control labor costs,” says the pitch for a Kronos product . But in a recent interview, Kronos’s vice president for business development, Charles DeWitt, argued that minimizing labor costs is “an afterthought in the calculation.” As he tells it, it’s hard enough just to match the mix of skills and certifications that a retailer needs at a given time (fluency in Spanish, the capacity to perform certain management duties) with the availability of workers, whose time constraints vary greatly.
In our conversation, DeWitt sounded genuinely interested in addressing some of the problems worker advocates have raised. Kronos is developing metrics for how often the hours an employee works differ from what’s on the original schedule, how well staffing respects workers’ preferences, and how widely a given employee’s hours vary from week to week. This is encouraging, but also unsettling: Shouldn’t such considerations have been part of the equation all along?
Eventually, labor laws have to adapt as well. Earlier this year, US Representative George Miller of California introduced the Schedules that Work Act, which would compensate retail, food service, and janitorial workers for last-minute schedule changes. But nobody thinks the federal legislation will pass anytime soon. If history is any guide, liberal states like California and Massachusetts will enact some controls, while other states will blow the issue off entirely.
Worker advocates need to look for additional pressure points — and software makers ought to own up to their own role in creating the current system. If technology firms and the retailers who hire them are looking at the right data, over a period of time that extends beyond the current quarter, they’ll be able to verify what labor activists have long believed: that more stability for workers reduces turnover and improves customer loyalty.
Maybe it’s too simplistic to hope for a simple software tool that allows employers to upgrade their schedules from 1 (“sadistic”) to 10 (“workers’ paradise”). If nothing else, Kronos and its competitors can help simply by confronting retail chains up front with the sacrifices they’re expecting from their workers.
Source
Schumer and Pelosi on Opposite Sides of Budget Deal, As the Fate of DREAMers Hangs in the Balance
Schumer and Pelosi on Opposite Sides of Budget Deal, As the Fate of DREAMers Hangs in the Balance
After failing to force a government shutdown before Christmas, advocates from a variety of groups, including United We Dream, The Center for Popular Democracy, and Make The Road, managed to...
After failing to force a government shutdown before Christmas, advocates from a variety of groups, including United We Dream, The Center for Popular Democracy, and Make The Road, managed to convince Senate Democrats to do so in January.
Read the full article here.
Systemic Fraud Found In GOP-Endorsed Charter Schools
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3 million in taxpayer money to charter schools; schools that both Democrats and...
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3 million in taxpayer money to charter schools; schools that both Democrats and Republicans are lining up behind. In the wake of this, Ring of Fire took a critical eye to some of the rampant abuses in the system with guest and Bill Moyers.com senior digital producer, Joshua Hollands, present to help explain what it meant.
While discussing how abused the system is, Joshua Holland referenced a report by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy in regards to the systematic abuse and waste in charter schools:
[They found] in fifteen states, just fifteen states they looked at, they found $140 million dollars in public funds that were lost to fraud, waste, and abuse . . . This is all taxpayer money, so, that’s right. What they found, for example, was using public education dollars, these private operators were using them to prop up other businesses. There was an incident where somebody was feeding these public dollars into their health food store. In another instance, there was somebody who was using these dollars to make repairs on their apartment complex that they’d rented out. This again is somewhat unsurprising given that you have such limited oversight.And the reason for that limited oversight? Charter schools try to have it both ways; when it comes to public money, they’re suddenly public institutions. When it comes to public oversight, they change the color of their scales and become private institutions with “proprietary secrets.”
There are other problems as well; charter school teachers are paid less than public school teachers, administrations are paid more, and they’re less likely to be unionized than public school teachers. And that’s the union busing angle: the private sector unionization is at an all time low — only 7%. The majority of unionized workers are in the public sector, which is what the big businesses are targeting in an systematic, widespread anti-union, anti-worker putsch to restore our nation to the gilded glory days of the 1870s and 1880s.
Our public schools are not the problem. In wealthy districts, the public schools are top in the world as far as reading, writing, and other testing goes. It’s only in the poorer districts, where childhood poverty is rampant, that we find the lower numbers pulling down the average. Since “we tolerate a high level of childhood poverty relative to other nations,” in the words of Joshua Holland, and poor children don’t preform as well as their wealthy counterparts do, low test scores should come as no surprise. Out of 35 nations tested, the United States rates 34 in child poverty; the only country below us is Romania. And until we do something about the rampant poverty, instead of blaming it on the teachers, the problem won’t be going away.
Source
‘Clopening’ time: Seattle on the clock for secure scheduling
‘Clopening’ time: Seattle on the clock for secure scheduling
The subject has been bubbling up in Seattle public discourse for around six months now. Last fall, local progressive labor advocacy organization Working Washington and Starbucks baristas protested...
The subject has been bubbling up in Seattle public discourse for around six months now. Last fall, local progressive labor advocacy organization Working Washington and Starbucks baristas protested their inconsistent and unpredictable work schedules, which labor advocates say act as barriers for low-income workers to scheduling life necessities like college classes or childcare or budgeting living expenses. A few months later, in his 2016 state of the city speech, Mayor Ed Murray highlighted secure scheduling as a key low-wage worker equity issue and said his office would work with the City Council to address it.
“We know that having a secure schedule of hours helps workers plan their budget, plan for childcare, enroll in school or take a second job – and we know schedule predictability will most help low-wage hourly workers,” Murray said in his speech.
SECURE SCHEDULING
Here are a couple chances to get involved or learn more: Thursday night, “join a live tele-town hall over the phone and over the internet about the fight for secure scheduling in Seattle. When: 6:00 pm, Thursday, May 26, 2016. Where: You can listen in live over the phone by calling 855-756-7520 Ext. 32020#, or join live online athttp://workingwa.org/ourtimecounts/townhall.” On Friday, the committee will hear from Lonnie Goldan, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute who has studied the issue, on her findings and national data. Tune in to Seattle Channel at 9:30AM to watch. On June 16th,Working Washington is holding a “Secure Scheduling Story Slam.”
With a $15 minimum wage already under Seattle’s belt, City Hall along with labor and business interests have turned their attention to the next big issue affecting the city’s proletariat and their bosses: secure scheduling.
“The response has moved pretty quickly from when workers first spoke out about it, and that’s heartening. There’s been a tremendous amount of support expressed by both the council and the mayor’s office on the need to move forward and do something to address secure scheduling,” said Sage Wilson, a spokesperson for Working Washington. “This is a really urgent issue for workers week to week.”
“Clopenings” — when a worker works a late-night closing shift and is also directed to work a early-morning opening shift with only a few hours in between
On March 8th, the mayor’s office convened a group of stakeholders of both labor and employers representing—including representatives from the likes of Working Washington, the Washington Restaurant Association, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and unions like SEIU 775 and UFCW Local 21—who have been meeting separately and then “reporting out” regularly to the the city council’s committee on Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development & Arts (of which Herbold is the chair and District 3’s own Kshama Sawant is a committee member) on their discussions to help inform the Council. The mayor’s office says these stakeholders will be submitting formal recommendations to the council at some unidentified date.
The council committee has also been bringing in experts on the issue and model secure scheduling ordinances. Last week, the committee heard from representatives from the Center for Center for Popular Democracy (CPD)—a non-profit left advocacy group—on their model secure scheduling policy and the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, who enacted their own scheduling ordinance specifically for retail workers several years ago.
The Council and the mayor’s office also commissioned a study from researchers at the University of Washington Evan’s School of Public Policy and Governance on the state of irregular scheduling in Seattle, including focus groups and a employer/manager survey of scheduling practices. The study is slated to come back on July 4th.
The plan, according to staffers in Herbold’s office, is to keep meeting with the stakeholders, receiving input from experts and looking at available data into early June, after which Herbold’s office will start drafting the actual policy.
The claims of Working Washington and picketing Starbucks baristas have merit. Researchers in addition to advocates have documented the impacts of unpredictable scheduling on workers (especially employees receiving hourly compensation), namely the association between irregular schedules and work/family conflicts (like picking up kids from school or childcare), the inability to schedule and maintain routines (e.g college classes or other jobs), and general increased worker stress from having to be on-call all the time. These types of jobs are concentrated in the retail, food service, hospitality, and healthcare industries.
Last year’s report from the Restaurant Opportunity Center on the state of the restaurant industry in Seattle showed that 26% of local restaurant workers receive their schedules less than a week in advance and 30% see schedule changes every two weeks. And women and people of color (who are heavily represented in low-wage food industry jobs) are disproportionately impacted by erratic scheduling.
“The issues that we’ve heard most about from workers are about two weeks advance notice of schedules”
The utilization of new scheduling software by employers and managers has been identified as a major cause of irregular scheduling. Starbucks has come under fire in recent years for its scheduling policies, specifically its utilization of scheduling software designed to maximize company efficiency by predicting store traffic and corresponding required staffing levels when and where. Advocates say the software incentivizes managers to under-staff stores, keeps employee hours at part time levels (which also allows employers to avoid giving full-time employee benefits and overtime), and quickly patch together weekly schedules from a large pool of part-time employees, often with little advance notice for the employee.
One of the often cited extreme results of digitized, maximum-efficiency scheduling is “clopenings,” when a worker works a late-night closing shift and is also directed to work a early-morning opening shift with only a few hours in between.
Advocates want to see these issues addressed in any future policy in Seattle.
“The issues that we’ve heard most about from workers are about two weeks advance notice of schedules,” said Wilson of Working Washington. “There’s access to hours. before companies hire more and more extremely part time workers, they should give more hours to employees they already have. And then there’s the eliminating ‘clopening shifts’ and the right to rest. You should have the ability to rest at least eleven hours between shifts.”
What the final ordinance will look like is still unclear, though based on the arch of the committee and stakeholder discussions, we know what they’re considering. It’s a balancing act between the real need to crack down on scheduling policies that leave employees at the mercy of their employer and employer’s legitimate need for scheduling flexibility, such as when a restaurant gets slammed during a understaffed dinner rush or someone calls in sick.
There is a potential ways to find that middle ground, as was illustrated at last Tuesday’s committee meeting and presentations on CPD’s model ordinance and San Francisco’s own retail worker secure scheduling ordinance. Both the CPD and San Francisco model use a “predictability pay” mandate as an incentive for employers to give workers adequate notice, where employers would compensate a worker for an hour’s worth of wages if they fail to provide a schedule two weeks or more in advance, and then dialing it up for schedule changes or notices that occur within 24 hours by raising the mandated compensation to two to four hours of pay. The San Francisco ordinance does provide exceptions for employee initiated shift swaps, like when an employer needs another worker to cover the shift of an employee who is out sic). Both models also require that employers must make hours available to veteran employees before hiring more part-time employees, a requirement aimed at combating the proliferation of part-time employee labor.
“The policy is designed to both preserve the flexibility that workers and employers need in making work schedules while also promoting stability for hourly workers,” Rachel Deutsch of the CPD told the Council.
District 3’s Kshama Sawant told CHS that she wants to see a policy that affects all businesses in Seattle, not just big retail and foodservice businesses. San Francisco’s ordinance is structured to only affect big box retailers.
“While it’s true that the issue is experienced more by workers in the service industry and retail industry, like Starbucks, the best way to ensure secure scheduling for all workers is to ensure a citywide policy for all businesses across Seattle,” Sawant said.
Naturally, the issue pits the local labor and employer camps duking it out during Seattle’s $15 minimum wage debate against each other yet again. However the tone and dynamic of the debate in this round, is a little different, along with the format. While the Seattle Chamber of Commerce has indicated that it is certainly uncomfortable with the secure scheduling initiative and initial stakeholder discussions with council committee back in March resulted in the employer representatives claiming that scheduling wasn’t really a problem, loud pushback from the business community has been noticeably lacking in recent weeks.
“It was the early committee meetings that employers were spending time and energy to try and deny that scheduling was a problem,” said Wilson. “One the things that has happened through the stakeholder process is that employers have stopped trying to make that case. They’re largely in agreement [with labor] that people should have predictable schedules.”
Sierra Hansen, head of the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, said that the issue is barely on the radar of the chamber’s board and that she hasn’t heard anything about it from member businesses.
“I would prefer we draft an ordinance and then debate it rather than closed room discussions and that the public got involved”
Wilson with Working Washington attributes the change in the dynamic of the stakeholder group conversations to the political climate of the city, the unity between the executive and the council to push the issue, and previous local labor victories, like $15 and paid sick and safe leave.
“It does seem to me to be both a product of the process as well as a strong consensus on Council and the mayor to do something on this,” said Wilson. “[And] the mood of the city is pretty clear: people want workers to have basic rights.”
Sawant, who was voted into office on her fiery platform of rent control, a $15 dollar an hour minimum wage, and a fundamental change in labor and equity in the city, said that the stakeholder workgroup process is “not an approach that I would choose.”
“I would prefer we draft an ordinance and then debate it rather than closed room discussions and that the public got involved,” said Sawant. “That’s how we won $15 dollar an hour, that’s how we won the SHA rent hikes. A lot of historic things have happened, and that’s because of the approach of my office.”
“What was different around $15 was that we were very clear. If you were for $15 you were with working people and had to go up against big business and be courageous about that,” Sawant said. “I know that there is this narrative from the mayor and big business and Tom Douglas that we won 15 because we all came together and agreed to raise the minimum wage. That’s absolutely untrue. The reason we won 15 is because we had a mass movement in Seattle.”
by Josh Kelety
Source
States Expand Inquiry Into On-Call Scheduling
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies, asking a group of national chains to provide detailed information on their use of...
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies, asking a group of national chains to provide detailed information on their use of the controversial practice.
On-call shifts, where a worker must be available to work a shift that can be cancelled at the last minute without compensation, has become popular in retail. But the practice wreaks havoc on the lives of low-paid hourly workers trying to plan plan around child care, schooling, or second jobs, as a BuzzFeed News investigation found last year.
At the time, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent a letter to 14 chains (published below), inquiring about their use of on-call scheduling and warning it may be illegal. Since then, Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Workers, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and Gap have committed to ending the practice.
“On-call shifts are not a business necessity, as we see from the many retailers that no longer use this unjust method of scheduling work hours,” said Schneiderman in a statement.
A study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest income workers receive the most irregular schedules, with unpredictability leading to increased stress.
“It’s heartening to see more and more policymakers and regulators take action,” said Carrie Gleason, Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group.
On Tuesday, the offices of the Attorneys General in California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island sent a letter requesting employee handbooks, schedules, and payroll information.
In these states, the Attorneys General warn, the practice may be a violation of a law mandating a minimum of four hours of pay for employees who report for work.
The following retailers received the letter: Aéropostale, American Eagle, BCBG Max Azria, Carter’s Inc., Coach, DavidsTea Inc., Walt Disney Co., Forever 21 Inc., Ascena Retail Group Inc.’s Justice, Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., Payless ShoeSource, Tilly’s Inc., Uniqlo, VF Corp.’s Vans, and Zumiez Inc.
Spokespeople from Uniqlo and Coach told the Wall Street Journal that the companies don’t use the practice. BuzzFeed News has reached out to the companies listed for comment and will update the post with responses.
UPDATE
A spokesperson for American Eagle Outfitters said in a statement, ““American Eagle Outfitters is committed to providing our associates with a positive working environment. We decided in November 2015 to cease the use of ‘on-call shifts’ and advised our stores. We are taking steps to reinforce and assure adherence to this policy across our store fleet.”
A spokesperson for Forever 21 said, “Contrary to published reports, Forever 21 does not permit on-call scheduling nor do we have a company policy around doing so.”
A spokesperson for Vans said the company does not use on-call scheduling and will comply with the request for information.
A spokesperson for Uniqlo said that Uniqlo has received the letter and that on-call scheduling is not a Uniqlo practice or policy.
A spokesperson for Payless ShoeSource says the company does not engage in on-call scheduling, has received the inquiry and will respond accordingly.
A spokesperson for Zumiez said, “It is our practice to cooperate with any request from the attorney general or other state agencies and we will do so in this case as well.” Apr. 14, 2016, at 10:21 a.m.
By Cora Lewis
Source
4 days ago
4 days ago