Will last-minute work soon be history?
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’d have to show up to work until an hour in advance.
...
When Russell Miller worked at Abercrombie, one of his days each week had to be an on-call day. He wouldn’t know if he’d have to show up to work until an hour in advance.
“You had to block out that time period as if you were working,” he says. One store he worked at was 45 minutes from his house. “We had to be ready to be there on time. With all the regulations about what we wear, how we look and how we present ourselves, I had to get fully ready for my shift and ready to walk out the door at the time I made the phone call to find out if they were even going to need me or not.”
For Miller, this was more than an inconvenience.
“Having a second job wouldn’t work at a time when I was scheduled for an on-call shift. If they scheduled me for an on-call shift and they didn’t call me, that was real money lost and real time opportunity lost.”
On-call scheduling “means you have to put your life on hold,” says Rachel Laforest, director of the Retail Action Project, a division of the Retail Wholesale and Department Stores Union. “It becomes very difficult to lead full lives, so for example, if I’m a parent and I have to figure out arranging for child care, it’s impossible for me to do that” with such short notice, she says.
There isn’t good national data on the prevalence of on-call scheduling, but regional surveys suggest it’s widespread and not limited to retail, says Stephanie Luce, professor of labor studies at CUNY. “We see it in fast food, airlines, beauty services, domestic services, child care services," she says. "Smaller studies seem to suggest this practice really picked up after the recession, however, over the past couple of years, there’s been a real push back.”
After New York’s attorney general suggested Abercrombie and 12 other companies were potentially violating New York law through the practice, Abercrombie announced it would work to discontinue the practice.
The company responded on August fifth “...we understand – and share – the attorney general’s concerns about call-in shift scheduling. The attorney general’s letter helped focus our ongoing internal discussions about how to create a stable and predictable work environment as possible for our employees.”
Gap Inc. told Marketplace: “Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores.”
Gap also says it’s working on a pilot project with University of California, Hastings College of the Law “to examine workplace scheduling and productivity. Led by recognized expert professor Joan Williams, the goal of the Gap Hourly Scheduling Initiative is to use research and data to create solutions that will be sustainable and can be implemented across our company’s entire footprint and fleet."
Under pressure from a lawsuit, Victoria’s Secret discontinued on-call scheduling earlier this year.
To the extent firms are reconsidering the practice, the reasons are both technological and monetary.
On-call scheduling resulted from pressure to restrict the ratio of hours to sales and an attempt to more nimbly adapt to changes in demand, says University of Chicago associate professor Susan Lambert. It also results in companies “overhiring,” using many part time workers instead of fewer full time workers. But Lambert says “the costs of managing this way do not enter the balance sheets of firms.” Employees who work irregularly, for example, may not always be up to speed with the latest changes to the store or the layout, she says.
“From a very engineering standpoint,...[on-call scheduling] may look efficient but when you look on front lines of firms, you see all the opportunities costs there are in terms of people walking out because they can’t find something or can’t get help.”
Another factor is technology.
“New technologies give us now the ability to predict very well variations in demand,” Lambert says.
Companies don’t need to keep workers on hold; they can figure out pretty well whether they need to have someone show up to work far in advance of two hours before the shift starts, she says. Companies are so good at predicting demand that they tried to "overoptimize" down to the minute, keeping workers on call to cover even slight changes in demand.
“You don’t need to do that micro-management,” she says. “Retailers are learning that."
So it may be, she says, that workers and firms are finding on-call scheduling is a headache for everyone.
Here are the responses from the 13 companies the New York attorney general wrote warnings to:
Ann Inc.: "Staffing guidelines do not include the practice of on-call shifts."
Gap Inc.: "Each of our brands have made a commitment to evaluate their practices and determine where we may be able to improve scheduling stability for our employees, while continuing to drive productivity in stores. As part of our commitment to more sustainable scheduling practices, we are working on a pilot project with Gap Brand and UC Hastings College of Law to examine workplace scheduling and productivity."
J.C. Penney Co: "We do not utilize on-call scheduling, and JCPenney has always maintained a policy against the practice."
Sears Holdings Corp: "Sears Holdings does not use on-call scheduling for store associates. That said, we will fully cooperate with the New York Attorney General’s office’s requests."
Target Corp: "Target does not use on-call scheduling."
TJX Cos: "We don’t use on-call shifts at TJX and it hasn’t been our practice, i.e. nothing new since April."
Williams-Sonoma Inc: "We actually discontinued [on-call scheduling] for the entire country."
Burlington Stores Inc., Crocs Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Urban Outfitters Inc. did not return requests for comment.
Source: Marketplace
Pressure On Hillary To Pick A Progressive Running Mate Mounts
Pressure On Hillary To Pick A Progressive Running Mate Mounts
Few people outside the Beltway and San Antonio, where he was mayor, have ever heard of Julián Castro, the centrist Democrat Clinton picked as her running mate over a year ago. (It's supposed to be...
Few people outside the Beltway and San Antonio, where he was mayor, have ever heard of Julián Castro, the centrist Democrat Clinton picked as her running mate over a year ago. (It's supposed to be a surprise so… shhhhhhhhh.) Anyway, once she settled on Castro she asked him to get a tutor and learn to speak passable español– he already had one, a Jewish lady from Laredo– and she told Obama to give him some cabinet position to raise his stature. (His twin brother, Joaquín, is a New Dem congressman and vigorous Hillary surrogate.) They figured he wouldn't be able to screw anything up if they made him Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He's been told to stop telling reporters that “Joaquín and I got into Stanford because of affirmative action. I scored 1210 on my SATs, which was lower than the median matriculating student. But I did fine in college and in law school. So did Joaquín. I’m a strong supporter of affirmative action because I’ve seen it work in my own life.” His appeal to fellow Hispanic voters may be limited by his own assimilation. He's the son of Rosie Castro, an inspiring activist who helped found La Raza but he supports “free” trade, including NAFTA, advocates an energy policy that includes fossil fuels, believes in balanced budgets and refers to David Souter as his ideal Supreme Court justice. Hillary's kind of Democrat.
Castro “has all the assets to become the next favorite son,” is how John A. Garcia, a political-science professor at the University of Arizona, puts it. “He has an elite education, which has given him a national network, and a quiet, serious public persona that appeals to a lot of younger Hispanic voters,” Garcia says. “People look at him and say, ‘Finally, we have somebody who won’t screw up.’ Of course, he’s still young, and he might be too good to be true, but if I were betting on the next national Hispanic political leader, I’d bet on Julián.”
In 1984, Mexican-American political activists were thrilled when Walter Mondale publicly considered Cisneros for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. But second place no longer seems such a great prize. “In 1984, there were 20 million Hispanics in America,” according to the political activist Antonio Gonzalez, who heads the William C. Velasquez Institute. “Today, we are 50 million, and more and more people are registering to vote.” Who they will vote for and what issues will cement their party loyalty is one of the great questions of American politics. This year Democrats hope to exploit the ire among Hispanics over the new G.O.P.-inspired law in Arizona that empowers local police forces to crack down on illegal immigrants.
This week, progressive groups shined a different kind of light on Julian-boy-wonder than he's been used to. I got this from Rootstrikers, for example, yesterday:
Imagine if the federal government was helping big bankers on Wall Street profit off the foreclosure crisis they helped create.
Sadly, you don’t have to imagine.
Under Secretary Julian Castro, the federal housing department has operated an egregious Wall Street giveaway.
The program is supposed to stabilize communities by transferring overdue mortgage loans to institutions that will help homeowners avoid foreclosure– instead, 98% of recent mortgage sales have gone straight to Wall Street, and at a HUGE discount.
Today, we’re launching a major campaign at DontSellOurHomesToWallStreet.org with partners representing some of the hardest hit communities. We’re demanding that Secretary Castro stops selling our communities to Wall Street and focuses on helping people stay in their homes.
Housing advocates have been advocating for fixes to this “Distressed Assets Stabilization Program” for years.
Big names have spoken up too– last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called out the department for “lining up with the Wall Street speculators.”
Under pressure, last April Secretary Castro’s Department of Housing and Urban Development promised to reform the program and help homeowners avoid foreclosure by selling more overdue mortgage loans to nonprofit community organizations rather than Wall Street banks.
Those were empty promises. The two most recent sales under Secretary Castro have sent 98% of the mortgages straight to Wall Street– and at rock-bottom prices.
A measly 1% got sold to nonprofit community organizations, which can better work with homeowners to figure out a plan to keep them in their homes.
Just last week, Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva sent a letter to Secretary Castro calling for fundamental reforms of HUD’s mortgage sales.
Today, we’re joining that effort alongside a national coalition of 14 housing advocacy, civil rights, and progressive groups, from Presente.org to the Working Families Party to MoveOn.org.
And here’s another reason our pressure is likely to work:
Julian Castro is widely rumored to be a likely vice-presidential nominee. But becoming vice president will be tough if he doesn’t first prove he’s willing to take on Wall Street, and not just pad their profit margins.
Politico's Edward-Issac Dovere asserted yesterday that the dozen groups stirring the pot on Castro were sending a message to Hillary. “They’re just as open with their political aims,” he wrote: “to publicly discredit Castro as a progressive, latching onto the mortgage issue to seed enough suspicion to keep him off Clinton’s shortlist.
“It’s a situation where the Clinton campaign wants Castro to be a major asset to her chances of winning the White House, and unless he changes his position related to foreclosures and loans, he’ll be a toxic asset to the Clinton campaign,” said Matt Nelson, the managing director for Presente.org, the nation’s largest Latino organizing group that focuses on social justice.
“All year, we’ve seen the candidates tripping over themselves to show how tough they’ll be on Wall Street,” said Kurt Walters, the campaign manager for Root Strikers, a 501(c4) group of Demand Progress and its 2 million affiliated activists, who is planning to deliver the petitions to Castro’s office when they’re ready. “Then to turn around and take a step backwards on that exact question, and put someone who has been doing the exact opposite– I think it would be tough for a lot of people who care about Wall Street accountability to get excited about that pick.”
…“If Secretary Castro fails to create significant momentum in terms of stopping the sale of mortgages to Wall Street, then I do think it disqualifies him. But there’s time left on the clock,” said Jonathan Westin, the director of New York Communities for Change, which was formed out of the remains of the community activist group ACORN. “I think a lot of the progressive movement would not be in support of a Castro ticket if he fails to make traction here.”
…Maurice Weeks, an Atlanta-based organizer who works on housing justice in communities of color for the Center for Popular Democracy/CPD Action, said that Castro’s lack of action at HUD is breeding more gentrification and suffering in a way that should make blacks and Latinos pay attention.
…[Color of Change's Brandi] Collins said this complaint about Castro’s leadership is reflective of a whole range of issues her organization has had with what members say is the secretary’s closeness to Wall Street and lack of attention to black and brown communities.
“If he’s not showing up for our communities while the cameras aren’t there, we don’t know that he’ll show up when he’s on his way to the White House,” Collins said.
According to Julia Gordon, formerly at the Center for American Progress and currently an executive vice president at the National Community Stabilization Trust, the coalition may have a point– if only because it is taking advantage of opaque accounting at HUD. Gordon said she’s met often with HUD about these issues but hasn’t seen the kind of progress she’d like or evidence that the program matches the claims that officials make.
“We know it’s been good for investors. According to HUD, it’s been good for the fund, although the level of detail that they release to account for it is minimal. We really don’t know how good it’s been for the homeowners, and that’s where this wave of protests is coming from,” Gordon said… “Both HUD and [the Federal Housing Finance Agency] have let down communities by not focusing on what they want the buyer to do with these,” Gordon said, arguing that they’ve been focused instead on offloading the debt. “They’re just like, ‘Get it away from me.’”
The idea that Castro would be the first Latino on a national ticket means something, Nelson said, though he argued that this only adds to the burden for the secretary to show leadership on the mortgage issue in the way progressives want at this moment of added attention to their concerns.
Nelson said that at Presente, they think of it like a parable– it doesn’t make it any better to be hurt if the hurt is coming from one of their own.
There are two trees in a forest, Nelson said, and they see an ax coming to chop them down. “Don’t worry,” says one tree to the other, “the handle’s one of us.”
“Basically,” Nelson said, “we’re fighting to make sure Castro isn’t the handle.”
I'd guess Elizabeth Warren would be Bernie's first choice and that, given his age, she'd be the nominee for president in 2020. What a one-two punch that would be! Imagine a first woman president that is going to make voters think, we should get more like that!
“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” — Sinclair Lewis
Source
"You Can Save My Life": Traveling on Same Plane, Man With ALS Confronts Sen. Flake Over GOP Tax Bill
"You Can Save My Life": Traveling on Same Plane, Man With ALS Confronts Sen. Flake Over GOP Tax Bill
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) boarded a plane leaving Washington, D.C. on Thursday, less than a week after voting for a tax bill that could result in devastating cuts to disability programs.
...
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) boarded a plane leaving Washington, D.C. on Thursday, less than a week after voting for a tax bill that could result in devastating cuts to disability programs.
Ady Barkan, a 33-year-old father living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), boarded the same flight after spending several days protesting the very legislation Flake helped ram through the Senate.
Read the full article here.
Fed Pressed on Questions of Diversity
The Federal Reserve faces criticism from lawmakers and others over its record on diversity at the same time the central bank is highlighting the economic outlook for minority groups.
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The Federal Reserve faces criticism from lawmakers and others over its record on diversity at the same time the central bank is highlighting the economic outlook for minority groups.
Several Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee questioned Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Tuesday about the selection process for regional Fed bank presidents, echoing the concerns of advocacy groups who have said the system should be more open and allow more public input.
The 12 regional bank presidents are appointed by regional boards, subject to approval by the Washington, D.C.-based Fed board of governors. As heads of regional Fed branches, they are expected to keep their fingers on the pulse of their local economies and participate on decisions about interest rates. Just two of the current presidents are women and none are black or Hispanic. The last black president stepped down in 1974.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) criticized the selection process, saying Washington officials represented little more than a rubber stamp. Earlier this year, Fed governors signed off on the reappointment of most bank presidents until 2021 “without any public debate or any public discussion,” she said.
“If you’re concerned about this, why didn’t you use either of these opportunities to say enough is enough. Let’s go back and see if we can find qualified regional presidents who also contribute to the overall diversity of the Fed’s leadership?” Ms. Warren asked.
“It just shows me that the selection process for regional Fed presidents is broken,” retorted Ms. Warren, calling on Congress to consider changing the process.
The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy group, has been pressing the Fed for months to increase the diversity of its leadership, as have many Democrats on Capitol Hill who signed onto a letter from Ms. Warren to Ms. Yellen on the matter last month.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has also weighed in. Her campaign released a statement saying the Fed “needs to be more representative of America as a whole.”
In a June 13 response to the lawmakers’ letter, Ms. Yellen acknowledged “there is still work to be done” on diversity within the Fed ranks “and I assure you that workforce diversity remains a priority for the Federal Reserve.”
In her prepared testimony Tuesday, Ms. Yellen stressed the need to ensure that the gains from the economic recovery are widely distributed.
She noted that blacks and Hispanics are still suffering some of the effects of the recession in more pronounced ways than other groups. Black and Hispanic workers still face higher unemployment rates than the workforce as a whole, she said.
“It is troubling that unemployment rates for these minority groups remain higher than for the nation overall, and that the annual income of the median African-American household is still well below the median income of other U.S. households,” Ms. Yellen said.
Diverging economic circumstances between white and black households predate the recession but the gaps widened after the financial crisis and have only barely narrowed in the recovery.
A Fed report released alongside Ms. Yellen’s testimony found that black households, which saw their median incomes fall 16% during the recession, are only 88% of the way back to prerecession levels. White households, by contrast, saw incomes fall only 8% and are already back to 94% of prerecession levels, the report said.
It is rare for the Fed to address the economic conditions for individual demographic groups. The central bank’s congressional mandate requires that it seek to hold down unemployment and keep inflation stable for the country as a whole. In the past, Ms. Yellen has said she was sympathetic to the economic troubles of minority groups but stressed the Fed’s options for addressing them were limited.
Ms. Yellen’s comments Tuesday suggest a rising recognition within the Fed that the racial gaps in the economy are becoming more pronounced and that there is a role for monetary policy to play in shrinking those gaps.
“It’s important for us to be aware of those differences and to focus on them as we think about monetary policy and work that the Federal Reserve does in the area of community development,” she said.
Ms. Yellen is set to address the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday and could face many of the same questions.
By David Harrison
Source
These Cities Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Decide Whether or Not to Gut Unions
These Cities Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Decide Whether or Not to Gut Unions
In the face of the Janus case, local elected officials across the country are renewing our efforts to help workers organize—in traditional ways, and in new ones. Brad Lander is a New York City...
In the face of the Janus case, local elected officials across the country are renewing our efforts to help workers organize—in traditional ways, and in new ones. Brad Lander is a New York City Council Member from Brooklyn and the chairman of the board of Local Progress, a national association of progressive municipal elected officials. Helen Gym is a Councilmember At Large from Philadelphia and Vice-Chair of Local Progress, a national network of progressive elected officials.
Read the full article here.
Yellen to Meet Group Seeking Low Rates, Greater Openness
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of...
Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of community groups, labor unions and faith leaders seeking to influence monetary policy and the way some Fed officials are appointed.
The group has called for the Fed to place greater weight on lowering unemployment. They also want more public say in the appointment of district Fed leaders, just as regional Fed presidents in Dallas and Philadelphia plan to retire next year.
“The most important thing is to keep interest rates low,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers. “The hawks in the Fed are pushing hard to raise rates soon, but most people in the public realize we are not three months away from a recovery.”
The meeting comes as the Fed moves closer to a decision on when to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006.
Unemployment fell to 5.8 percent in October, and most Federal Open Market Committee officials expect the U.S. central bank will lift its benchmark rate at some point next year, after leaving it near zero since December 2008.
The organizers look to add to pressure on the central bank to be more transparent. The Fed has come in for criticism from Congress, where Republicans have proposed legislation limiting its discretion on monetary policy and banking supervision. Congress has already curbed the Fed’s emergency lending powers.
The FOMC, the Fed’s main policy-setting panel, has 12 voting seats. Eight of those are reserved for the bank’s board of governors and the president of the New YorkFed. The heads of the other 11 regional banks rotate through four remaining spots.
Regional Feds
The governors are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Regional bank heads are picked by their respective boards, which are typically dominated by business executives. The group meeting with Yellen say there should be more public input when Philadelphia’s Charles Plosser and Dallas’s Richard Fisherstep down in 2015.
“The Dallas Fed needs to create a transparent and inclusive process for selecting” a new president, Danny Cendejas, an organizer at the Texas Organizing Project, said in a statement. “Members of the public have the right to know who is making this crucial decision and what criteria they are using.”
The group sent an open letter to Yellen, and to the Philadelphia and Dallas boards, demanding more transparency and public engagement.
Marilyn Wimp, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Fed, said in an e-mail the bank had received the letter. She declined to comment further. James Hoard, spokesman for the Dallas Fed, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Plosser and Fisher have been among Fed officials favoring raising rates sooner to prevent inflation and financial-instability pressures from building.
Source
Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at several locations across the country. Most complained that they often receive their...
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at several locations across the country. Most complained that they often receive their schedules one week or less in advance, and that the schedules vary substantially every few weeks. Two said their stores still practiced clopenings.
The complaints were documented more widely in a report released on Wednesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, which gathered responses from some 200 self-identified baristas in the United States through the website Coworker.org.
“We’re the first to admit we have work to do,” said Jaime Riley, a company spokeswoman. “But we feel like we’ve made good progress, and that doesn’t align with what we’re seeing.” Ms. Riley maintained that all baristas now receive their schedules at least 10 days in advance.
Starbucks, whose chief executive, Howard Schultz, has long presented the brand as involving its customers and employees in something more meaningful than a basic economic transaction, has drawn fire for its workplace practices. But its struggles to address the concerns of its employees also open a window into a much larger problem.
In the last two years, the combination of a tight labor market and legal changes — from a rising minimum wage to fair-scheduling legislation that would discourage practices like clopenings — has raised labor costs for employers of low-skill workers in many parts of the country.
To help companies navigate this new landscape, a number of academics and labor advocates have urged a so-called good-jobs or high road approach, in which companies pay workers higher wages and grant them more stable hours, then recover the costs through higher productivity and lower turnover.
Even in service sectors where stores compete aggressively on price, “bad jobs are not a cost-driven necessity but a choice,” concluded Zeynep Ton, who teaches at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “Investment in employees allows for excellent operational execution, which boosts sales and profits.”
And yet, as Professor Ton is careful to point out, it is easy to underestimate the radical nature of the change required for a company to reinvent itself as a good-jobs employer, even when the jobs it provides are not necessarily so bad.
The example of Starbucks illustrates the point. Some of the company’s actions reflect an impulse to treat its workers as more than mere cogs in a giant coffee-serving machine.
Starbucks allows part-timers who work a minimum of 20 hours a week to buy into its health insurance plan after 90 days. In April, it pledged to paythe full cost of tuition for them and full-time workers who pursued an online degree at Arizona State University. And workers promoted to shift supervisor — about one for every four to eight baristas — typically earn a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage.
On the question of scheduling, the company, like many large retail and food service operations, uses state-of-the-art software that forecasts store traffic and helps managers set staff levels accordingly, while trying to honor workers’ preferences regarding hours and availability.
Charles DeWitt is vice president of business development at Kronos, one of the leading scheduling software makers, which has worked with Starbucks. He said that using the software to schedule workers three weeks in advance typically was not much less accurate than using it to schedule workers one week in advance. “The single best predictor of tomorrow is store demand a year ago, though other factors can come into play,” Mr. DeWitt said. “If it’s Monday, then you want to look at Monday this week a year ago.”
(Mr. DeWitt and others involved with such software concede that there are exceptions, like stores that are growing or declining rapidly, and that predictions often get substantially better very close to the target date.)
But there has long been a central obstacle to change: the incentives of store managers, who are encouraged by company policies to err on the side of understaffing. This makes it more difficult to build continuity into workers’ schedules from week to week. It often turns peak hours into an exhausting frenzy that crimps morale and drives workers away.
“The mood lately has not been not superpositive; they’ve been cutting labor pretty drastically,” said Matthew Haskins, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Seattle. “There are many days when we find ourselves incredibly — not even a skeletal staff, just short-staffed.”
Mr. Haskins said that his store’s manager received an allotment of labor hours from her supervisor, and that the manager frequently exceeded it. But in the last month or so, she announced that she would make an effort to stay within the allotment. “From what I understand, probably someone higher up said ‘You need to stick to that,’” Mr. Haskins said. “I know it’s got her stressed out, too.”
Benton Stokes, who managed two separate Starbucks stores in Murfreesboro, Tenn., between 2005 and 2008, described a similar dynamic.
“We were given a certain number of labor hours, and we were supposed to schedule only that number in a given week,” Mr. Stokes said. “If I had to exceed my labor budget — and I was careful not to — I would have had to have a conversation” with the district manager. “If there were a couple of conversations, it would be a write-up,” he added.
The understaffing ethos sometimes manifests itself in company policies. For example, Starbucks stores are not required to have assistant managers, and many do without them.
Ciara Moran, who recently quit a job as a barista at a high-volume Starbucks in New Haven, Conn., complained of a “severe understaffing problem” that she blamed on high turnover and inadequate training. She partly attributed this to the store’s lack of an assistant manager. “We had issues that we’d try to take to her” — the store manager — “but she had so much on her plate we let it go,” Ms. Moran said. “Problems would escalate and become a big thing.”
In other cases, the scheduling and staffing problems at Starbucks appear to arise from the way individual managers handle their tight labor budgets.
Some of the baristas said that clopenings were virtually unheard-of at their stores, but LaTranese Sapp, a Starbucks barista in Lawrenceville, Ga., said clopenings occurred at her store because the manager trusted only a handful of workers to close, limiting scheduling options.
Ms. Riley, the Starbucks spokeswoman, said the store’s scheduling software required at least eight hours between shifts, but that workers could close and open consecutively if the shifts were more than eight hours apart.
There are alternatives to help avoid such results, according to Professor Ton’s research. One of the most promising is to create a mini work force of floating relief employees who call a central headquarters each morning, as the QuikTrip chain of convenience stores common in parts of the Midwest and South has done. Because store operations are standardized, relief employees can step in seamlessly.
“If a worker gets sick, what happens is you’ve lost a quarter of your work force,” Professor Ton said of companies with small stores that lack such contingency plans. “Now everybody else has to scramble to get things done.”
(Starbucks employees are often responsible for finding their own replacements when they are sick. “A lot of times when I’m really sick, it’s less work to work the shift than to call around everywhere,” said Kyle Weisse, an Atlanta barista.)
Starbucks, which vowed to improve workers’ quality of life after The New York Times published an account of a barista’s erratic schedule in 2014, is far from the only chain that has faltered in the effort to adjust from low road to high road.
In many cases, the imperative to minimize labor costs has been so deeply ingrained that it becomes difficult to sway managers, even when higher executives see the potential benefits.
Marshall L. Fisher, an expert on retailing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled working on a consulting assignment for a large retailer and identifying a few hundred stores where the company could benefit by adding labor. Executives signed onto the change, but managers essentially refused to execute it.
“The managers were afraid to use their hours,” he said. “They were so used to being judged on ‘Did they stay within a budget?’”
In many cases companies end up going out of business rather than adapt. Economists Daniel Aaronson, Eric French and Isaac Sorkin studied the response to large increases of the minimum wage in states like California, Illinois and Oregon in the 2000s. In most states, employment barely budged two years after the higher wage kicked in. But that masked dozens of suddenly uncompetitive stores that went under, and a roughly equal number of new stores that opened.
The fact that the defunct stores were replaced by new ones suggests that, in principle, they could have evolved. But they simply were not capable of pulling it off.
Source: New York Times
Activista colombiana de Queens confrontó a Senador Flake en ascensor sobre caso Kavanaugh
Activista colombiana de Queens confrontó a Senador Flake en ascensor sobre caso Kavanaugh
Ana María Archila, un activista colombiana residente en Queens que ha liderado muchas protestas en Nueva York, ganó atención nacional ayer al confrontar al senador Jeff Flake en un elevador del...
Ana María Archila, un activista colombiana residente en Queens que ha liderado muchas protestas en Nueva York, ganó atención nacional ayer al confrontar al senador Jeff Flake en un elevador del Capitolio.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Texas’ War on Local Control is Part of National Trend
Nearly 150 progressive officials gathered in Austin last weekend to build the fight against GOP-controlled state legislatures.
...
Nearly 150 progressive officials gathered in Austin last weekend to build the fight against GOP-controlled state legislatures.
Read the full article here.
Im Hinterhof eines Mythos
Silicon Valley - Sitz von Google, Facebook und Co.: If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. Was aber, wenn man es nicht schafft? Oder wenn man kein Hightech-Jünger ist, sondern einfach...
Silicon Valley - Sitz von Google, Facebook und Co.: If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. Was aber, wenn man es nicht schafft? Oder wenn man kein Hightech-Jünger ist, sondern einfach nur Busfahrer? Das Silicon Valley ist das krasseste Exempel der immer weiter auseinander driftenden US-Gesellschaft.
Das Silicon Valley ist die Pilgerstätte der Hightech-Jünger, ein Magnet für Talente aus aller Welt. Eingeklemmt zwischen Pazifik und San Francisco Bay, liegt die Heimat von Apple, Intel, Google, von Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Facebook und etlichen weiteren Technologiefirmen - und von knapp drei Millionen Menschen. Während die Hard- und Softwarefirmen Spitzengehälter zahlen, fallen die Einkommen der weniger noblen Jobs.
Wer als Lehrer, Verkäufer, Busfahrer oder Maurer arbeitet, kann sich ein Leben im superteuren Silicon Valley kaum mehr leisten, die Zahl der "working poor" wächst - also derjenigen, die trotz Job in Armut leben. Auch die Zahl der Obdachlosen nimmt zu. Der soziale Abstieg kommt mitunter rasant: Eine Trennung, eine Firmenpleite oder ein Unfall können auch einen Aktienmillionär über Nacht zum Sozialfall machen. In den Hinterhöfen des Valley finden sich immer mehr Asyle und Ausgabestellen für Essen und Kleidung. Die Schlangen sind lang für die, die im Schatten des amerikanischen Traums leben.
Das Silicon Valley
"Silicon Valley" ist nur ein Spitzname. Weil Silicon – Silizium – der Grundstoff der Computerchips ist, die hier erfunden wurden. Computerchips, die längst auch in Smartphones, Autos, Spielzeug und Küchenmaschinen stecken. Das Silizium-Tal liegt zwischen San Francisco und San Jose auf einer Halbinsel, die im Westen vom Pazifik und den Santa Cruz Mountains begrenzt wird, im Osten von der San Francisco Bay und, dahinter, dem Höhenzug Diablo Range.
Source: Bayern
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