Campaign News

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A coalition of New York-based advocates on Tuesday launched a national campaign to press large retailers, restaurant chains and other companies to end on-call and last-minute scheduling, which allows companies to assign shifts to workers with only a few hours’ notice.

The campaign follows recent agreements by several large retailers with New York’s attorney general to end the practice in that state.

The Center for Popular Democracy, the Rockefeller Foundation and the online organization Purpose are calling for scheduling at least two weeks in advance, eliminating on-call assignments that leave employees scrambling for child care, unable to hold second jobs and with uncertain paychecks.

“Already major employers are responding to mounting public pressure to deliver more stable work schedules to their front-line employees,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the center’s Fair Workweek Initiative. “This movement is about a greater voice in how much and when we work — predictable and stable hours, more input and the opportunity to work enough hours to make ends meet.”

They say three in five American workers — about 75 million people — are paid hourly, with recent job growth mainly in low-wage jobs, often part-time and subject to last-minute scheduling practices.

The Workshift campaign, formed by Purpose and the Rockefeller Foundation last year, says employer software aimed at savings and efficiency is behind the growth in last-minute worker scheduling with broad consequences. Those include lower pay, higher job turnover and unhealthy series of changing or extended shifts with little rest.

“For too long, hourly workers at retail chains, fast food companies and other businesses have been squeezed by companies who employ unfair scheduling practices to maximize their profits at the expense of their workers,” said Jose Martinez Diaz, Workshift campaign director. The organization is asking people to sign its online petition for predictable scheduling.

In December, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Pier 1 Imports had agreed to end on-call shifts at stores nationally, posting schedules at least 10 to 14 days in advance.

His office had sent letters to 14 retailers questioning the practice and citing possible violations of New York’s requirement to pay hourly staff for at least four hours when they report for work.

Retailers that have agreed to stop included Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret. Other companies contacted say they weren’t using on-call scheduling.

In April, attorneys general from eight states and the District of Columbia sent letters to retailers with outlets in their states expressing concerns about on-call scheduling. Companies included American Eagle, Aeropostale, Payless, Disney, Coach, PacSun, Forever 21, Vans, Justice Just for Girls, BCBG Maxazria, Tilly’s Inc., David’s Tea, Zumiez, Uniqlo and Carter’s.

The states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island.

By MICHAEL VIRTANEN

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In April, the New York attorney general’s office launched an investigation into the scheduling practices of 13 national retail chains, distributing a letter to the Gap, Target, J.C. Penney, and 10 other companies. The letter asked, among other things, whether these companies’ store managers use software manufactured by a company called Kronos to algorithmically generate schedules.

A few months later, Kronos was also featured prominently in an article published by the New York Times about the ill effects of erratic scheduling on Starbucks employees, especially one particular family. In a follow-up piece, the author, Jodi Kantor, points directly to Kronos’ scheduling software as the root of the problem. “I saw that her life was coming apart and that the Starbucks software had contributed to the crisis,” Kantor wrote of one of the story’s subjects.

The piece’s argument centered around the financial and scheduling unpredictability engendered by platforms like Kronos. When you don’t know if your shift might be canceled, if or when you’ll be called in, or what your hours will look like next week or the week after, it becomes very difficult to make even the most basic plans for your future. This can have devastating long-term financial and emotional impacts on workers. According to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., 17 percent of the American workforce is negatively affected by unstable schedules.

For their part, Kronos representatives argue that the algorithm is far from the root of the problem. “The populist view is that scheduling is evil, in that it’s causing erratic schedules for employees, and so forth,” Charlie DeWitt, vice president of business development for Kronos, told BuzzFeed News. “The fact of the matter is it’s an algorithm. It does whatever you want it to do.”

And you don’t necessarily need to work for Kronos to believe that in a competitive retail climate, the problem is more complicated than technology alone. Lonnie Golden, a Penn State economist who has extensively studied the impact of erratic scheduling, acknowledges that Kronos’ product itself is less to blame than the managers who make staffing decisions based on the data it provides. “It’s not necessarily the technology that’s responsible for minimum to no advance notice,” he said. “It’s the way in which it’s applied.”

But, he added, “where there’s a technology problem, there’s usually a technology solution.” And while Kronos maintains that managers, and not the software, are responsible for early dismissals and last-minute shift cancellations, the company is nonetheless pursuing some technological solutions.

Kronos wants to help managers better understand how scheduling adjustments affect workers and, ultimately, the bottom line. Though the company maintains that its software doesn’t produce the kind of erratic schedules that hurt wage workers, DeWitt said there was nonetheless an interest in figuring out why that perception existed — and, if possible, fixing it.

To that end, earlier this month at a retail conference in Philadelphia, the company announced that it’s working on a new plug-in that will give managers better insight into workers’ schedule stability, equity of hours worked among employees, and the consistency of schedules from week to week. In addition, Kronos is improving a feature meant to help give employees more control over their schedules: Though the software already incorporates employee availability and preferences into its scheduling calculations, improvements to a shift-swapping feature on its employee-facing web and mobile apps will theoretically allow employees to work around conflicts among themselves.

Golden said increased employee input and control would be a good thing. But some retailers, DeWitt pointed out, are uncomfortable making workers use an app outside of work hours; indeed, the practice could be seen as a shift of management responsibilities onto lower-paid individuals.

Part of the idea behind the new Kronos plug-in is to help companies tie fairer scheduling practices to reduction in absenteeism and turnover, which can be enormously costly. In other words, if Kronos can help executives see the connection between treating workers fairly and a store’s ability to increase revenue, DeWitt said, managers will have an impetus to create more predictable, stable schedules.

And just because companies are looking at this kind of data doesn’t mean they have to use it. “Companies like Kronos and Workplace Systems are starting to integrate some of these principles into their software,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, “but it’s all optional, so companies can decide not to do it.” While 12 states are currently considering legislation that would create new labor standards around the workweek, Gleason said the technology alone lacks a mechanism for enforcement.

Given market pressures and standard management practices, it’s unlikely that any change to Kronos’ technology would give workers more power — especially because, given the competitive retail climate at the moment, the bottom line tends to be the priority. “It’s not just bad managers. They have extreme pressure to increase productivity on an ever-shrinking labor budget,” Gleason said.

With these changes, Kronos has taken logical steps toward both repairing its reputation and making sure its software creates sustainable work environments. But while the company cannot control exactly how the algorithm that forecasts schedules and optimizes workforces is deployed inside different workplaces, the Kronos engineers who designed the product are nonetheless the partial architects of work environments that have been proven to be untenable for low-wage workers. The Kronos scheduling algorithm isn’t designed to serve those people; it’s designed to be sold to their bosses, and as such, will ultimately be shaped to serve the needs of management — until regulations exist that compel them to change how it’s used.

Source: Buzzfeed

Washington — Rep. John Conyers, the longest serving member of Congress, is leading a group of 127 lawmakers who are urging the Federal Reserve System to add more diversity to its leadership ranks and become more attuned to economic problems in minority communities.

The lawmakers complained that all but one of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank presidents across the nation are white and 10 of them are men. In addition, they said none of the current Federal Reserve presidents are African-American or Latino, and the system has never had a regional president who is black.

“Far too often, the voices of minorities are silenced because they aren’t sitting at the table,” Conyers, the longtime Democrat and African-American Detroiter, said in a statement. “The Federal Reserve needs leadership that models the diversity that exists in this Nation.”

The Federal Reserve has banks in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas and San Francisco. Detroit is part of the Chicago bank.

Conyers said the diversity of the bank’s regional presidents is important to Detroit and other urban cities, however.

“Detroit and cities across the country with high minority populations have the highest unemployment rates and will be harmed if the Federal Reserve does not consider our needs when they make key policy decisions,” he said. “Increasing diversity at the Federal Reserve will help ensure that the needs of people of color, women, labor, and consumers are part of the crucial conversation in our nation’s central bank.”

A spokesman for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors said the system has been committed to bolstering diversity and continues to aim for increasing ethnic and gender diversity.

“Minority representation on Reserve Bank and Branch boards has increased from 16 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2016,” spokesman Dave Skidmore said in a Thursday statement. “The proportion of women directors has risen from 23 percent to 30 percent over the same period. Currently, 46 percent of all directors are diverse in terms of race and/or gender (with a director who is both female and a minority counted only one time).

“We are striving to continue that progress.”

The letter, which is signed by 116 House members and 11 Senate members, is being spearheaded by Conyers and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts.

Other Michigan representatives who signed the letter were Brenda Lawerence, D-Southfield; Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak; Dan Kildee, D-Flint Township; and Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn. Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was also a signatory.

By Keith Laing

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Bloomberg News - August 22, 2014, by Jeff Kearns, Simon Kennedy and Michael McKee - Divisions within the Federal Reserve over how long to keep easy monetary policy are already in evidence in Wyoming as investors prepare for Chair Janet Yellen’s keynote speech.

Fed Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard told Bloomberg Radio that the U.S. central bank may begin tightening monetary policy earlier than officials previously expected.

“The evidence is leading toward an earlier increase than would have been in the works earlier this year,” said Bullard. “Labor markets have improved quite a bit relative to what the committee was thinking.”

Bullard spoke after Kansas City Fed President Esther George told Bloomberg Television that broad-based employment gains suggest the U.S. economy is strong enough to withstand higher interest rates. Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser, who voted against the Fed’s policy statement last month, told CNBC he’s concerned about the Fed not adjusting policy appropriately.

By contrast, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart urged more patience, warning in a separate interview with Bloomberg Radio against “moving prematurely and snuffing out some progress.”

* * *

Robots don’t steal jobs, the U.S. labor market is less flexible than it was and workers haven’t suffered unprecedented periods out of work.

Photographer: Bradly Boner/Bloomberg

Fed Chair Janet Yellen arrived at the dinner to be greeted by about 10 people wearing bright green T-shirts emblazoned with “What Recovery?” and carrying placards with labor market data. Close

Those are among the conclusions of papers being presented at the symposium. Here is a review of their contents, which can be read in full on the Kansas City Fed’s website.

Robots and computers don’t steal as many jobs as some believe, and automation actually benefits many workers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David Autor said in his paper.

A key reason humans aren’t obsolete yet is that simple tasks such as visually identifying a chair, which any child can do, aren’t so easy for engineers to teach to computers, Autor said.

“Journalists and expert commentators overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for skilled labor,” he wrote. “Challenges to substituting machines for workers in tasks requiring flexibility, judgment, and common sense remain immense.”

* * *

The U.S. labor market became less fluid in recent decades partly because of an aging workforce, a shift to older businesses, and the spread of occupational licensing and certification, economists Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger wrote in their paper.

The economists define labor market fluidity as “flows of jobs and workers across employers.” The paper found the U.S. “underwent a large, broad-based decline in the pace of labor market flows in recent decades.”

“An aging workforce is a factor behind the slowdown of worker reallocation,” the paper said.

* * *

U.S. workers in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession haven’t experienced unprecedentedly long bouts of non-employment, according to a paper by economists Jae Song and Till von Wachter.

Their findings “suggest that the potential for hysteresis in the aftermath of the Great Recession is moderate,” the paper said. Hysteresis posits that people out of work for too long have a harder time finding work, leading to a persistent decline in the employment-to-population rate

* * *

Policy makers would benefit from a better understanding of labor markets, economist Giuseppe Bertola argued in a paper that weighed the impact of rules making those markets rigid or flexible.

Rules that protect workers from job losses and provide more generous unemployment benefits can soften and smooth shocks to the economy, said Bertola.

* * *

George opened the symposium late yesterday by putting the presenters on the spot.

The last conference devoted to labor markets was 20 years ago, George told the group of almost 200 as they ate steak and salmon dinners beneath elk antler chandeliers.

The presenters and discussants back then included five future Nobel Prize winners and two academics who would go on to be central bankers: Bank of England Deputy Governor Charles Bean and Stanley Fischer, the Bank of Israel governor who became Fed vice chairman in June. Fischer sat at one of the front tables last night.

“So for those of you that will be on the program,” George said to laughter, “We’re either setting you up for a blessing or a curse.”

This year’s topic is “Re-Inventing Labor Market Dynamics.” In 1994 it was “Reducing Unemployment: Current Issues and Policy Options.”

George said she went through the 1994 proceedings only to find central bankers and economists are still grappling with some of the same basic issues today.

“I saw that the discussion included things like the decline in demand for low-skilled workers due to technology and the challenge of the long-term unemployment,” George said. “And questions were raised by that symposium, as they are today, about the usefulness of the unemployment rate as a measure of economic slack.”

It reads like a list of the most vexing issues the Fed faces now and will be attempting to tackle today and tomorrow.

* * *

Fed Chair Janet Yellen arrived at the dinner to be greeted by about 10 people wearing bright green T-shirts emblazoned with “What Recovery?” and carrying placards with labor market data.

The protesters had traveled to Wyoming to highlight the plight of “struggling workers from around the country” who want the Fed to pursue “full employment that reduces poverty and expands the middle class,” according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based organization. The backs of their T-shirts had a graph comparing the performance of wage growth among the top 1 percent and the rest.

Ady Barkan, a staff attorney with the group, spoke briefly with Yellen at the door of the lodge’s Explorers Room. “She said she understands the issues we’re talking about and is doing everything they can,” he said, after she had entered the room.

Yellen has regularly cited weak labor markets as a scourge of the economy she’s trying to boost with easy monetary policy.

Shemethia Butler, who works part time at a McDonald’s Corp. restaurant in Washington, was one of those to make the trip. The 34-year-old said that while she isn’t up on monetary policy, she wants policy makers to know she fears higher interest rates for her and her community. She said she works 25 to 35 hours a week for $9.50 an hour at a job she’s had for just over a year. Before that she was unemployed for two years.

“There’s no recovery,” Butler said. “The economy is broken because there aren’t enough jobs for people like me.”

* * *

Yellen’s speech will be the main event of the first full day of the conference. She will speak at 8 a.m. Mountain Time today.

Her address will be followed by the presentation of the paper by Davis and Haltiwanger.

Autor will then discuss job polarization before a panel on demographics featuring Karen Eggleston of Stanford University, David Lam of the University of Michigan and Ronald Lee of the University of California, Berkeley.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi will deliver the keynote luncheon speech.

Tomorrow, Von Wachter and then Bertola will present their papers.

The final panel will provide an overview of labor markets and monetary policy. It will include Bank of England Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda and Brazilian central bank chief Alexandre Tombini.

* * *

The conference is lacking Wall Street participants for the first time.

An exception is Jacob Frenkel, chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, who is attending in his capacity of chairman of the board of trustees of the Group of 30, a private-sector group of mainly former policy makers which advises central banks and governments. Tim Adams, president of the Institute of International Finance, is also present.

Draghi, Kuroda and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz provide international central banking firepower.

Among academics in attendance are Alan Blinder of Princeton University, Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff and Martin Feldstein, and John Taylor of Stanford University. President Barack Obama’s administration is represented by Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council.

* * *

The backdrop for the symposium and Yellen’s speech was set by the release of the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s July discussions.

Fed officials in July raised the possibility they might raise rates sooner than anticipated, as they neared agreement on an exit strategy. Some participants were “increasingly uncomfortable” with the pledge to keep interest rates low for a “considerable period,” the minutes said.

At the same time, “many participants” still saw “a larger gap between current labor market conditions and those consistent with their assessments of normal levels of labor utilization.”

* * *

* * *

Some recent stories on the U.S. labor market:

* * *

The opening day of Jackson Hole has been associated with stock-market gains in each of the past seven years. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose an average 1.3 percent on each of them from 2007 to 2012, following speeches by then-Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who skipped last year’s conference.

The biggest climb was the 1.9 percent of 2009, when Bernanke said the economy appeared to be “leveling out.” Gains also followed his signals of 2010 and 2012 that fresh asset-purchases were imminent.

The bar is therefore set high for Yellen who identifies slack labor markets as a reason for easy monetary policy. Economist Ed Yardeni says the “Fairy Godmother of the Bull Market” won’t let us down.

Still, Steven Englander of Citigroup Inc. says that because “dovishness is increasingly anticipated,” Yellen may have to intensify her support for low interest rates if risk-assets such as stocks are to rally anew.

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