Commentary: Emeryville action could change working world
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of...
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of bed is that precious hour I have with my young son. We eat breakfast together, we race to see who can get dressed first, and then I walk him to school.
I’m lucky– as a salaried employee at an organization that values flexibility and family, I can arrange my schedule around my son if need be. But for people working low-wage hourly jobs, that kind of control over their scheduling is virtually unheard of.
Today, corporations that pay low wages rarely provide their employees with full-time work or reliable hours. Take Manuel, who works at one of Emeryville’s many retail chains. He had his hours cut from 20 a week down to four, and then nothing for two weeks — throwing his family into massive debt.
Emeryville may be the first city in the East Bay to change that, where the City Council is voting on a Fair Workweek policy on Oct. 18. This is part of a simple set of standards needed to ensure that working people can afford to stay in the East Bay region.
What is a Fair Workweek? It means employers must provide reliable, predictable hours so their employees can budget. Workers get schedules two weeks in advance so they can plan childcare, second jobs, family time, and even rest. And when more hours are available, current employees get priority so they can get closer to full-time work.
In Emeryville, the policy would only apply to large companies with more than 12 locations worldwide. These simple improvements would cost employers almost nothing if they follow the law and have a huge impact on the lives of thousands of Emeryville workers. Hundreds of thousands more working people would benefit if other East Bay cities follow suit.
Emeryville’s own Economic Development Advisory Committee – the city’s business advisory group – said even they agree that increasing stability of schedules, reducing employee turnover, and decreasing underemployment in Emeryville is important. And that’s what a Fair Workweek policy would do.
Many companies are already doing the right thing. This policy would reinforce that good behavior and target companies that are bad actors. However, global, multi-billion dollar corporations and their lobbyists are coming out against this low-cost policy, claiming it will kill the economic climate. But I wonder: how exactly would reliable schedules hurt companies like IKEA, The Gap or Home Depot?
Before the recession, big business painted doomsday scenarios saying that raising wages would force them to close shop. During the Great Recession, working people bore the brunt of tough times in the form of reduced pay, slashed benefits, and a cutback to part-time hours. And now that big business has not only recovered but is booming, companies are back to the mantra that improving standards for their workers will hurt them.
Common sense tells us that business — especially big business — is doing fine. Look at quarterly earning reports of Emeryville’s global retail chains. Sales tax revenue in Emeryville was up 2.4 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year according to the city’s Finance Department. Retail vacancies in the region are at a post-recession low of 6 percent. And of course, there are growing lines of cars and customers coming in and out of Emeryville’s shopping centers.
While business is thriving, working people have waited long enough for something so very basic: a single job that pays enough with enough hours to allow folks to meet their basic needs.
Raising the minimum wage helped struggling workers. Now we must finish the job by providing reliable, predictable hours. This economic boom shouldn’t just be a boon for shareholders. It should also lift the working people who are the backbone of our economy.
By Jennifer Lin
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Three honored by Jefferson Awards for public service
Barkan, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2016, started two programs at the Center for Popular...
Barkan, who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2016, started two programs at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national advocacy group that promotes progressive political groups. The programs include “Fed Up,” a pro-worker policy group, and “Local Progress,” a network of progressive politicians. For one of his projects, “Be a Hero,” Barkan traveled across a country in a wheelchair-accessible RV to campaign for political candidates who will “stand for” families so that “health care benefits [families have] paid for [will be] there for them when they most need it,” according to the campaign’s website.
Read the full article here.
Who were the women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake about Kavanaugh vote in an elevator?
Who were the women who confronted Sen. Jeff Flake about Kavanaugh vote in an elevator?
Two women who said they were survivors of sexual assault angrily confronted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in an...
Two women who said they were survivors of sexual assault angrily confronted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona in an elevator Friday morning over his decision to vote yes on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Read the article and watch the video here.
Report: Women unduly harmed by unpredictable scheduling
Al Jazeera - 05-12-2015 - Irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling are pervasive throughout the low-wage...
Al Jazeera - 05-12-2015 - Irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling are pervasive throughout the low-wage economy, but they do particular harm to working women, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy.
Women still disproportionately shoulder responsibility for child care and other family obligations, and more than 6 million women have cited those constraints as the primary reasons they are not employed full time, according to the report.
The Center for Popular Democracy argues that juggling family responsibilities with the unsteady work hours that often come with part-time employment leads to additional challenges for women.
“Women working more hours are likely to experience the stressful effects of overwork and may often have no choice but to work overtime hours or lose their job,” the report says. “However, the over 12 million women working part time in hourly jobs are at greatest risk of both highly erratic schedules and of extreme income fluctuation."
Women were found to be slightly more likely to work jobs paid on an hourly basis: 61 percent compared with 56 percent of men. As a result, their income is more likely to fluctuate based on how many hours they are assigned to work per week or month. Additionally, their off time can be difficult to control or predict because of last-minute scheduling.
Erratic hours can be particularly hard on women, who tend to spend more time than men performing household chores and caring for children. A 2014 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found women in households with children under the age of 6 spent roughly an hour a day attending to their physical needs, whereas men spent roughly half an hour.
On a conference call with reporters to discuss the report, Albuquerque, New Mexico, activist Kris Buchmann said she has been “treated like my life outside of work didn’t matter” while working hourly jobs in retail.
“I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to close and then turn around and come back in after five or six hours off,” she said. “It’s not enough for a full night’s sleep or showering or anything else I have to do."
Other times, “they would call me into work, I would show up, and they would say, ‘Oh, never mind. We don’t need you,’” she said. Such unpredictability made it difficult for her to know when she would need to find child care for her son.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Naomi Gerstel, who wrote the book “Unequal Time: Gender, Class and Family in Employment Schedules” with Dan Clawson, said erratic scheduling exists “across the entire class spectrum” but falls especially hard on low-wage workers.
If you’re in a stable, full-time position, “you’re more likely to be able to say no or find substitutes” such as baby sitters and other care workers, she said. Additionally, some higher-paying workplaces are “changing occupations to make it possible for especially women workers to take on what’s defined as flexibility."
But perks such as maternity leave have not filtered down the income ladder. And long-term changes in family structure have created a “double-edged sword” for some workers, said Gerstel. Births to unmarried women have risen steadily since the 1940s, according the U.S. Census Bureau, so more single mothers have been forced to negotiate child care on top of their work schedules.
That’s beginning to change in some parts of the country. Carrie Gleason, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative director, told reporters on a conference call that 11 states “have introduced some form of work hours legislation, and this is an issue that was basically not on the map last year.”
Buchmann is part of a campaign to get predictable scheduling legislation passed in New Mexico. In November, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved a legislative package known as the Retail Worker Bill of Rights, which is, in part, intended to enforce more predictable scheduling for retail workers.
Source: Al Jazeera
Report: Starbucks falls short on vow to make workers' schedules more fair
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its...
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its commitment on a number of fronts, according to a new report released Wednesday based on interviews with the coffee chain’s workers across the country.
The report, titled “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks” (PDF), said Starbucks baristas across the country were still complaining that they often don’t receive their work schedules soon enough before shifts and that they are under pressure to avoid taking sick days.
The New York-based advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy produced the report, which cited survey data collected from more than 200 Starbucks baristas in 37 states and compiled by Coworker.org, an online platform that supports workplace rights.
“More than six months after Starbucks publicly recommitted to scheduling policies and mandated ten days’ notice, the scheduling issues they sought to address still persist in their frontline stores,” the report said.
After a New York Times investigation in August 2014 highlighted the scheduling travails of a Starbucks worker and single mother named Janette Navarro, the company announced that it would strive to improve work schedules for its employees, whom the company calls “partners.” The workers’ survey cited in Wednesday’s report was conducted in March this year.
“Taking care of our partners is a responsibility I take very personally,” Cliff Burrows, a high-level Starbucks executive, said in an internal company email at the time, according to the New York Times and other news outlets. Burrows was quoted as saying the company would work to aid “stability and consistency” in the schedules of its more than 130,000 baristas.
Burrows pledged then that the company would improve its scheduling software to make it easier on employees to plan their lives.
But the directive has only partially trickled down to the company's more than 12,000 U.S. locations, Wednesday's report says.
“They’ve made some improvements, but they’ve been minor,” said Carrie Gleason, co-author of the report. “A fair workweek at Starbucks exists in some stores,” she said, but “the issue is inconsistency.”
Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on the report's findings before the time of publication.
The report said many baristas noted a high incidence of so-called “clopening” shifts, in which a person closes and opens in consecutive shifts, often leaving a span of only a few hours in which to return home before working again.
Last year Starbucks' Burrows pledged an end to the dreaded clopening shifts, saying “district managers must help store managers problem-solve issues specific to individual stores to make this happen.”
But the report indicated that such shifts were still widespread, with nearly a quarter of workers regularly getting them.
“I feel that baristas should have a minimum of 10 hours in between shifts. Everyone should have a fair chance to get home, settled, and be able to sleep for eight hours before having to get up for another shift," the survey report quoted an Illinois Starbucks worker as saying.
But the majority of workers who do clopening shifts are able to get fewer than seven hours of sleep, the report said.
“Because I was frequently scheduled for clopening shifts, I got just four or five hours of sleep a night. I was doing all I could to get ahead, but Starbucks’ scheduling practices made me question whether that was possible,” said Ciara Moran, a former Starbucks barista wrote in a petition she launched with Coworker.org, asking for further scheduling reforms.
The report released Wednesday said that 48 percent of surveyed Starbucks workers said they received their work schedules a week or less in advance, and that 40 percent reported they had experienced pressure to avoid taking sick days.
"Employees say that it can be extremely difficult to take sick days because they face pressure to work while sick, fear negative consequences or are forced to find their own replacement," the report said.
The report suggested that the experiences of individual workers varied considerably, depending on store locations and personnel.
“Many of us have different experiences at Starbucks, depending on our manager,” Moran said, asking others to support the cause “for consistent protections across the company, starting with healthy schedules across the board.”
“On a corporate level there isn’t that level of accountability. They’re not looking whether their polices are going far enough,” Gleason said. “For Starbucks, it can be a model for the industry for how to deliver a sustainable workweek.”
“I think they need to engage their workforce in a different way,” she said.
Source: Al Jazeera America
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...
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
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NYTimes Letter to the Editor: Deportations for Minor Offenses
New York Times - April 13, 2014 To the Editor: Re “...
New York Times - April 13, 2014
To the Editor:
Re “More Deportations Follow Minor Crimes, Data Shows” (front page, April 7):
It’s a mistake to focus the debate about immigration enforcement on the question of which immigrants are sufficiently “criminal” to deserve deportation. When the Obama administration talks about deporting people with convictions, they are talking about people who have already served their sentences for those convictions.
If you are a citizen who commits an offense, you pay the penalty issued by the criminal legal system, and then you are free to try to rebuild your life. If you are a noncitizen who commits that same offense and pays that same penalty, you can be subjected to the double punishment of permanent exile from your home and family.
This two-tiered system of justice is morally abhorrent regardless of how serious the underlying offense may have been. It’s an unfairness compounded by the well-documented unfairness of the criminal legal system itself, which disproportionately targets poor people and minorities.
Let’s not rely on our corrupt criminal justice system to justify the operations of our corrupt immigration system.
EMILY TUCKER Brooklyn, April 7, 2014
The writer is staff attorney for immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy.
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Democratic activist Ady Barkan launches six-figure ad blitz in CD8 race
Democratic activist Ady Barkan launches six-figure ad blitz in CD8 race
Ady Barkan, the progressive health care activist whose video pleadings with U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake last year briefly...
Ady Barkan, the progressive health care activist whose video pleadings with U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake last year briefly became a viral hit, is starting a group to tout select Democratic candidates across the country, starting with Hiral Tipirneni's congressional bid in Arizona.
Read the full article here.
Austin, Texas: If We Can’t Be a Sanctuary City, How about a Freedom City?
Austin, Texas: If We Can’t Be a Sanctuary City, How about a Freedom City?
The ACLU has said it supports advocacy for freedom cities. Sarah Johnson, director for Local Progress, said, “There is...
The ACLU has said it supports advocacy for freedom cities. Sarah Johnson, director for Local Progress, said, “There is an interest from all of our members in Texas and in other states across the country in really pursuing the strongest possible policies to protect immigrants at this time.”
Read the full article here.
Healthcare protesters arrested at Republican Senate offices
At least 20 health care activists with pre-existing conditions were arrested during sit-ins at Republican senators’...
At least 20 health care activists with pre-existing conditions were arrested during sit-ins at Republican senators’ offices on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, with the numbers of arrests poised to skyrocket into the hundreds.
The sit-ins were organized by a coalition of liberal interest groups to protest the lack of protections for people with pre-existing conditions in the Republican health care bill, which has temporarily stalled in the Senate. As they obstructed access to the senators’ offices, tens of activists were arrested by Capitol Police in a show of civil disobedience.
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