Explosion of Gig Economy Means There’s an App for Juggling Jobs
One of the reasons Mustafa Muhammed finally broke down and bought a smartphone was because he needed to find a job.
The 57-year-old cook was tired of using a...
One of the reasons Mustafa Muhammed finally broke down and bought a smartphone was because he needed to find a job.
The 57-year-old cook was tired of using a library computer to look for work and watching friends get a jump on leads via alerts on their phones. After picking up his first phone about two years ago, he downloaded a mobile app called Snagajob. This summer he landed a gig at a new IHOP opening in Harlem after seeing it pop up in his inbox.
“This is job No. 2,” says Muhammed, who also works in the dining hall at Fordham University. “I wanted to pick up a little something extra for the summer. I don’t like to be lazy.”
Snagajob is one of a slew of apps that have sprung up in recent years to serve the so-called gig economy. This year alone human-resources startups have attracted $1.2 billion in venture capital, with much of the funding going to companies designed to profit from the fluid nature of temporary or contract work, according to research firm CB Insights. In an election year dominated by concerns over economic inequality, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are pledging to generate more full-time jobs. But Silicon Valley is betting the gig economy is here to stay.
“Two or three years ago, it was pretty rare to have more than one job” says Snagajob.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Peter Harrison. “Now it’s really very common. What we are really building our business on is the blurring of the line between snagging a job and snagging a shift.”
Founded in 2000 as an online job board focused on “lightly skilled” hourly work, Snagajob says it has nearly doubled revenue derived from employers in the past three years. It claims 10 million unique monthly users and about 425 employees. In June, the Virginia company unveiled a mobile messaging app that lets employers assign shifts and lets workers trade them.
Snagajob charges employers for the number of clicks, applicants, interviews and hires it lines up. It also sells annual subscriptions for use of its hiring software. Harrison, 53, declines to specify revenue but says Snagajob is breaking even. In February, the startup raised $100 million to develop new features and fund acquisitions. The same month, Snagajob announced a partnership with LinkedIn, which has typically represented salaried professionals, to share research and data on hourly workers.
Similar apps are taking off in Europe, as well. Spain, with a large service sector and 20 percent unemployment, has become a testing ground for startups bringing the simplicity of swipes, geolocation and people-matching algorithms to hourly job recruitment. Three of them -- Job Today, Jobandtalent and CornerJob -- have raised some $87 million combined this year.
Job Today helps restaurants and retail mom-and-pops find and interview waiters, sales associates and drivers. Employers can post as many jobs as they like and have 24 hours to shortlist candidates, after which they use a chat feature to discuss the job and schedule face-to-face interviews. Posting a position on Job Today is gratis for now. Eventually, it plans to sell subscriptions that will let employers browse candidates and post jobs on an unlimited basis. The startup says it has about 100,000 business customers and has processed 15 million job applications since its founding a year ago.
Workforce trends are moving in favor of these apps as more people prefer to choose their own hours. In the U.S., even if they would rather work full-time, government policy has increased the incentive for companies to hire temps and contract workers, Snagajob’s Harrison says. To avoid providing health care as mandated by Obamacare, many businesses deliberately ensure workers toil less than 30 hours a week. They may also prefer temps to avoid paying overtime now that the Obama administration has expanded eligibility to millions more Americans.
According to research from Harvard and Princeton universities, “alternative work arrangements” -- including temp work, on-call work, contractors, and freelancers -- accounted for all the net employment growth in the U.S. from 2005 to 2015. That trend is widely expected to continue.
“These new labor platforms are helping people deal with the volatility of their income and the volatility of work,” says Louis Hyman, a professor of economic history at Cornell University’s ILR School and author of a forthcoming book on the rise of temp work in the U.S. “The tech reflects social reality.” Snagajob’s Harrison says companies are “essentially sharing workers” much the way consumers are sharing car rides and vacation rentals.
A handful of large deals, crowned by Microsoft’s $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, has fueled investor enthusiasm. In June, Monster Worldwide Inc. bought San Francisco-based Jobr, which applies Tinder-like matching algorithms to job hunters and employers. Last month, Tokyo’s Recruit Holdings, which controls top-ranked job search site Indeed Inc., bought Simply Hired, which operates a global network of job search engines.
Of course, not everyone is as enamored of the gig economy as the tech industry. “This glorification of flexibility is not in line with the reality of what most working people really want,” says Carrie Gleason, who runs the Fair Workweek Initiative, a network of activist groups that has pushed for laws to support predictable scheduling and guaranteed hours in low-wage industries. Shift-swapping is “a survival tool,” she says. “It is not the ideal.”
By Polly Mosendz
Source
Labor Activists Applaud First Statewide ‘Fair Scheduling’ Law
Starting next summer, companies in Oregon will have to give workers at least seven days’ notice about when they’ll have to work, according to legislation signed Tuesday by Governor Kate Brown. A...
Starting next summer, companies in Oregon will have to give workers at least seven days’ notice about when they’ll have to work, according to legislation signed Tuesday by Governor Kate Brown. A handful of major cities have passed “fair scheduling” laws, but Oregon is the first state to do so and the biggest victory on the issue so far for labor activists.
Read the full article here.
Secrecy Surrounds Half Billion Handout to Charters
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while the public is being kept in the dark about which states have applied for the...
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while the public is being kept in the dark about which states have applied for the lucrative grants, and what their actual track records are when it comes to preventing fraud and misuse.
Already the federal government has spent $3.3 billion in American tax dollars under the Charter Schools Program (CSP), as tallied by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
But the government has done so without requiring any accountability from the states and schools that receive the money, as CMD revealed earlier this year.
Throwing good money after bad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for a 48 percent increase in federal charter funding earlier this year, and the House and Senate budget proposals also call for an increase—albeit a more modest one—while at the same time slashing education programs for immigrants and language learners.
The clamor for charter expansion comes despite the fact that there are federal probes underway into suspected waste and mismanagement within the program, not to mention ongoing and recently completed state audits of fraud perpetrated by charter school operators.
Earlier this year, the Center for Popular Democracy documented more than $200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry in 15 states alone, a number that is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Is now really the right time to plow more tax money into charters?
Insiders Deliberate Far from the Public Eye
The Department of Education is currently deciding what states to award $116 million this year, and more than half a billion during the five-year grant cycle.
So who is in the running and what are their track records?
Which states have applied for a grant designed to eviscerate the public school system in the name of “flexibility?” (CMD's review of state applications and reviewers' comments from the previous grant cycle exposed “flexibility” as a term of art used by the industry for state laws that allow charter schools to: operate independently from locally elected school boards, employ people to teach without adequate training or certification, and avoid collective bargaining that helps ensure that teacher-student ratios are good so that each kid gets the attention he or she deserves.)
There is no way of knowing.
The U.S Department of Education has repeatedly refused to honor a CMD request under the Freedom of Information Act for the grant applications, even though public information about which states have applied would not chill deliberation and might even help better assess which applicants should receive federal money.
The agency has even declined to provide a list with states that have applied:
“We cannot release a list of states that have applied while it is in the midst of competition."
The upshot of this reticence is that states will land grants—possibly to the tune of a hundred million dollars or more in some cases—all at the discretion of charter school interests contracted to evaluate the applications, but without any input from ordinary citizens and advocates concerned about public schools and troubled by charter school secrecy and fraud.
But, if people in a state know that a state is applying they can weigh in so that the agency is not just hearing from an applicant who wants the money, regardless of the history of fraud and waste in that state.
Charter Millions by Hook or by Crook: The Case of Ohio
Despite ED’s unwillingness to put all the cards on the table, state reports tell us that Ohio has once again applied for a grant under the program.
The state, whose lax-to-non-existing charter school laws are an embarrassment even to the industry, has previously been awarded at least $49 million in CSP money—money that went to schools overseen by a rightwing think-tank, and, more worryingly, to schools overseen by an authorizer that had its performance rating boosted this year by top education officials who removed the failing virtual schools from the statistics so as not to stop the flow of state and federal funds.
As The Plain Dealer put it in an exposé: “It turns out that Ohio’s grand plan to stop the national ridicule of its charter school system is giving overseers of many of the lowest-performing schools a pass from taking heat for some of their worst problems.”
Another component of this plan, it turns out, was to apply for more federal millions to the failing schools that—by a miraculous sleight of hand—are no longer failing.
The director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice, David Hansen, fell on the sword and announced his resignation in June. But Democratic lawmakers suspect that this goes higher up in the chain of command, and have called on State Superintendent Richard Ross to resign.
Did the scrubbed statistics touting the success of Ohio’s charters find its way into the state application for federal millions, signed by Superintendent Ross?
What about other states, such as Indiana, with a similar history of doctoring data to turn failing charter schools into resounding success stories?
After Abysmal Results, States Re-apply for More Money
While the known unknowns are troubling, the known knowns—to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—are also equally disturbing.
For example, Colorado applied for grant renewal this year.
But, the last time around, in 2010, the state landed a $46 million CSP grant thanks in no small part to the lax “hiring and firing” rules and the lack of certification requirements for charter school teachers--a reviewer contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application noted.
Look at California.
Through meeting minutes from the California State Board of Education we also know that the Golden State submitted an application this year. In 2010, California was awarded $254 million over five years in CSP money, but as the Inspector General discovered in a 2012 audit, the state department of education did not adequately monitor any of the schools that received sub-grants. Some schools even received federal money “without ever opening to students.” A review by CMD revealed that a staggering 9 out of the 41 schools that shuttered in the 2014-'15 school year were created by federal money under CSP.
How about Wisconsin?
Wisconsin received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charter schools awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle, one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since, as CMD discovered.
Then there’s Indiana.
Indiana was awarded $31.3 million over the same period, partly because of the fact that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable solely to authorizers under Indiana law,” one reviewer enthused, awarding the application 30/30 under the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.”
This “flexibility” has been a recipe for disaster in the Hoosier state with countless examples of schools pocketing the grant money and then converting to private schools, as CMD discovered by taking a closer look at grantees under the previous cycle:
The Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.
Padua Academy lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school, but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.
Have They Learned Anything?
Secretary Duncan has previously called for “absolute transparency” when it comes to school performance, but that’s just a talking point unless he releases the applications, or even a list of the states that are in the running, before they are given the final stamp of approval.
As it stands, there is no way of knowing if the state departments of education seeking millions in tax dollars:
Have supplied actual performance data that reflect the reality for students enrolled in charter schools rather than “scrubbed” or doctored numbers;
Try to outbid each other in “flexibility” by explaining, say, how charter schools in X can hire teachers without a license and fire them without cause. In its 2010 application, the Colorado Department of Education, for example, boasted of how charter school teachers are “employed at will by the school”;
Have corrective action plans so as to avoid repeating the costly waste and mistakes from the previous grant cycle (such as schools created by federal seed money closing within a few years or never even opening).
Because the federal charter schools program is designed to foster charter school growth, which in turn means that money will be diverted from traditional public schools to an industry that resists government enforcement of basic standards for financial controls, accountability, and democratic oversight, the public has a big stake in this and a right to know more, before their money disappears down black holes.
Source: PR Watch
Fatally Flawed: Why the Rockefeller Institute’s Scaffold Law Report Doesn’t Add Up
New York State’s Labor Law §240 (commonly known as the Scaffold Law) helps keep workers safe by holding employers and owners liable if unsafe conditions at their worksites result in injuries or...
New York State’s Labor Law §240 (commonly known as the Scaffold Law) helps keep workers safe by holding employers and owners liable if unsafe conditions at their worksites result in injuries or death of workers working at an elevation. The law is crucial: falls from elevations kill more than one-third of all construction workers killed at work, by far the leading cause of on-the-job deaths in the industry.
Read the full report.
The construction industry has been trying for years to water down New York’s critical protections of workers’ health and safety. Most recently, those lobbying to weaken New York’s worker safety laws have trumpeted the findings of a report published by the Rockefeller Institute and funded by the so-called New York Civil Justice Institute, which paid $82,800 to commission the report and is a poorly-disguised front group for the right-wing Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York.
The Cost of Labor Law 240 on New York’s Economy and Public Infrastructure takes a far-fetched approach: blaming New York’s strong safety laws for allegedly causing more accidents. Professor Richard W. Hurd, Professor and Associate Dean at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, called this argument “counterintuitive,” asking, “If employers are financially liable for injury and death, would they not be more likely to invest in safety?”
Common sense tells us that industry hazards, not worker protection laws, cause injuries on the job. A look at the evidence confirms this. The October 2013 report Fatal Inequality, published by the Center for Popular Democracy, starkly illustrates how important the Scaffold Law is because of the ongoing rates of injury in construction in New York and, notably, how the risks are disproportionately borne by immigrant workers and workers of color.
Meaningful worker protection requires putting responsibility where it belongs: on the employers and site owners who control the worksite and can ensure proper protective equipment, training, and safety measures are provided and followed. This is precisely what New York’s Scaffold Law does. The Rockefeller study tries to distract from the common sense importance of New York’s law with analysis full of flaws and misstatements. Below, we detail a number of the key flaws that debunk the report’s incredible assertion that New York’s scaffold law, not industry hazards, cause worker injuries.
Read the full report here.
NYCOSH & CPD also released a new one-pager explaining how the Scaffold Safety Law works, read it here.
Futures and Commodity Market News: United States : Sanders, Sherman Introduce Legislation to Break Up Too Big to Fail Financial Institutions
Futures and Commodity Market News: United States : Sanders, Sherman Introduce Legislation to Break Up Too Big to Fail Financial Institutions
The bill is supported by the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform, Center for Popular Democracy Action and Demand Progress Action. Experts supporting the bill include: Simon...
The bill is supported by the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Americans for Financial Reform, Center for Popular Democracy Action and Demand Progress Action. Experts supporting the bill include: Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, Robert Reich, UC Berkeley, Bob Hockett, Cornell Law School, Jennifer Taub, Vermont Law School, Nomi Prins, former investment banker, and Rep. Brad Miller, Roosevelt Institute.
Read the full article here.
Supreme Court deadlocks on immigration case
Karla Cano faces uncertainty. She had expected to qualify for deferred action under the Obama administration’s executive orders on immigration. But a tied decision by the U.S. Supreme Court...
Karla Cano faces uncertainty. She had expected to qualify for deferred action under the Obama administration’s executive orders on immigration. But a tied decision by the U.S. Supreme Court creates uncertainty for Cano and her family.
“All that is unjust about my situation will continue,” said Cano, 21, a senior at Mount Mary University and the mother of a 2-year-old son.
“I am in college so I can have a career helping others, but I cannot start a career like that without work authorization,” she said. “We just want to help this country and support our families like anyone else.”
The court on June 23 deadlocked on President Barack Obama’s executive actions taken to shield millions living in the United States from deportation.
The 4–4 tie means the next president and a new Congress will determine any change in U.S. immigration policy. The president said the court’s deadlock “takes us further from the country we aspire to be.”
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, called the court ruling unacceptable and pledged to “do everything possible under the law to go further to protect families.”
The dispute before the eight justices — the case was heard in April, after the death of Antonin Scalia — was over the legality of the administration’s orders creating “deferred action for parents of Americans and lawful permanent residents” or DAPA and expanding “deferred action for childhood arrivals” or DACA.
Basically the actions would have provided protection from deportation and three-year work permits to about 5 million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, as well as undocumented people who came to the United States before the age of 16.
The president announced the orders in 2014 and, soon after, they were challenged by 26 states led by Republican governors, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Federal district and appeals courts sided with the states and said the executive office lacked the authority to issue orders shielding immigrants from deportation.
The high court tie means the appeals court ruling stands. But the ruling in United States v. Texas did not set any landmark standards in the dispute over immigration.
The U.S. Justice Department brought the case to the Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the appeals court decision.
The American Civil Liberties Union was among the many groups to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.
Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, the “4–4 tie has a profound impact on millions of American families whose lives will remain in limbo and who will now continue the fight. In setting the DAPA guidelines, President Obama exercised the same prosecutorial discretion his predecessors have wielded without controversy and ultimately the courts should hold that the action was lawful.”
Reaction from the U.S. progressive community was swift and compassionate.
“This split decision deals a severe blow to millions of immigrant families who have already been waiting more than 18 months for the DAPA and DACA programs to be implemented,” said Alianza Americas’ executive director Oscar Chacón. “The cold fact is that millions of parents and children will go to bed tonight knowing once again that their families could be torn apart at any moment.”
At the Center for Popular Democracy, co-executive director Ana Maria Archila said, “If the highest court in the land cannot find a majority for justice and compassion, there is something truly broken in our system of laws, checks and balances.”
In Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera held news conferences in Green Bay, Madison and in Milwaukee. LULAC, Centro Hispano and the Southside Organizing Committee also were involved.
“This is very sad for me,” said Jose Flores, a factory worker, father of four and also the president of Voces de la Frontera. “I have been waiting and fighting for reform like DAPA for years. But we are not giving up. I refuse ... to shrink back into the shadows.”
Cano, a member of Voces de la Frontera, said, “I am not giving up on the struggle. We need more people to get involved in the upcoming elections, because this decision shows the importance of both the presidential and U.S. congressional elections and whom the next president will nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
BY LISA NEFF
Source
Las ciudades advierten a las empresas que no cooperen con Trump
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus planes de tomar medidas contra los inmigrantes.
Las ciudades se han...
Las ciudades han sido los principales puntos de resistencia contra la política de Donald Trump, en particular sus planes de tomar medidas contra los inmigrantes.
Las ciudades se han mantenido firmes y proclamado orgullosamente ser santuarios de inmigrantes ante las amenazas de la Casa Blanca de quitarles fondos federales. Han prometido apoyar el acuerdo de París sobre el clima después del sorpresivo anuncio de Trump de que Estados Unidos dejará de respaldar el histórico pacto.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Jobs Numbers Offer No Evidence for Rate Increase in September; All Data Points to Persistent Labor Slack, No Signs of Inflation
“Today’s jobs numbers offer even more proof that the Fed officials insisting on raising interest rates at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting are refusing to look at reality. The latest...
“Today’s jobs numbers offer even more proof that the Fed officials insisting on raising interest rates at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting are refusing to look at reality. The latest numbers confirm what we have already known: labor slack persists, inflation is not a threat, and an interest rate hike would be premature, with devastating effects on working people, particularly communities of color.
“Wage growth has been flat for the last 5 years and the latest numbers do not show signs of significant acceleration. Furthermore, the employment to population ratio remains well below its pre-recession levels. These indicators of labor slack are – yet again – coupled with no evidence pointing to a threat of inflation. The data just does not support a rate increase. The data just does not support a rate increase. If the Fed wants to maintain credibility as a data-driven institution, it cannot not increase rates.
“Many Fed members have hinted at an imminent interest rate liftoff in September, but these numbers show that a rate increase should – at the very least – be off the table for the remainder of 2015. A premature interest rate hike would sacrifice potentially millions of jobs and hundreds of millions in wages – disproportionately lost by people of color. The latest jobs numbers show just how inadvisable – and damaging – a September rate hike would be.”
Rod Adams, a member of the community-based organization Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (MNNOC), and a member of the Fed Up Campaign added:
“I worked my way through college, sometimes working the closing shift at Chipotle until 2 am and coming back to open at 6 am. I worked hard, studied hard, and gave up sleep so I could get a better job. This spring, I graduated with my associate's in business management, but I’ve been looking for a job since April. I still can’t find anything to match my skills.
“It’s not only me. My friends with four-year degrees can only find jobs at McDonald’s or Taco Bell. I didn’t go to college so I could make $10.10 working fast food. I have a daughter. I can't support myself and my daughter working at one of these places. I’m worth more than $10.10. The Fed needs to listen to what real people have to say. We are not just data on spreadsheets. We are real people with real bills. If the Fed raises the interest rates, what’s going to happen to my wages?”
To schedule interviews with Connie Razza, send an email topress@populardemocracy.org.
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The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
Hour by Hour: Women in Today’s Workweek
Nationwide, more than 38 million women work in hourly jobs. Most women, and most Americans, are paid by the hour, yet today’s workweek is changing—the 40 hour workweek and the 8-hour day are no...
Nationwide, more than 38 million women work in hourly jobs. Most women, and most Americans, are paid by the hour, yet today’s workweek is changing—the 40 hour workweek and the 8-hour day are no longer the norm for a significant part of this workforce.
Our nation’s workplace protections are badly out of sync with the needs of today’s working families and we need policies that provide everyone an opportunity to get ahead. Particularly, labor standards have not kept up with rapid changes to the fastest growing industries like retail, healthcare, and food service. Part-time workers in the service sector—overwhelmingly women—have borne the greatest burden of these new just-intime scheduling practices, which have largely gone unregulated. But what begins in these sectors will soon spread, as the distinctions between part-time and full-time work grow increasingly blurred, and more and more Americans experience work hour instability and economic uncertainty.
Women − over a third of whom work part-time in order to juggle economic survival, family responsibilities, and advancing their careers − are at the greatest risk of being further marginalized in the workforce if unsustainable scheduling practices on the part of employers go unchecked. As we seek to create family-sustaining jobs in the burgeoning service sector, we must also consider scheduling practices in low-wage employment. Without an update to labor standards for these workers, more and more workers across the economy will be subject to this type of extreme economic uncertainty. New policies that ensure predictable schedules, give employees a voice in their schedules, ensure quality part-time employment and access to stable, full-time schedules will improve the lives of working people in general and especially benefit working women and mothers.
Download the full report
Celebs, supporters of Dream Act face off with anti-DACA protesters
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and...
For many DREAMERS, or undocumented young immigrants fighting to stay in the country, their battle could depend a lot on what happens in the next few weeks in Congress.
Supporters and protestors of those DREAMERS clashed in West LA Wednesday in front of Senator Feinstein's office.
Read the full article here.
4 days ago
4 days ago