ABQ call center workers get more family-friendly workplace rules
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company...
More than workers at Albuquerque’s T-Mobile call center began working under new workplace rules this week. The company has been under increasing pressure to modify work rules to give workers greater flexibility to balance family and work requirements.
The company operates a nationwide call center near Jefferson and Menaul in Albuquerque and recently announced plans to add more employees top the more than 1,500 local workers already employed at the site.
News of the new workplace rules came from the Communications Workers of America which has been leading efforts with local organizations for these changes:
For Immediate Release July 2, 2015
Public Pressure Pushes T-Mobile US to Provide Fairer Paid Parental Leave Policy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Responding to growing public pressure and local government initiatives, T-Mobile US announced this week that it would be adopt a paid parental leave program. The company also said it would end an oppressive policy that required call center workers to be on the phone 96.5% of their work time, leaving them with virtually no time for follow up on customer issues or to make changes in customers’ accounts as needed.
This is great news for workers who often must struggle to balance family and career. It comes as workers at T-Mobile US and a coalition of community supporters in cities like Albuquerque, N.M., step up efforts to restore a fair workweek and achieve other improvements for workers.
Members of TU, the union of T-Mobile workers, the Communications Workers of America and many organizations, including the Center for Popular Democracy, OLÉ and other coalition partners, have been raising concerns about unfair scheduling and other issues for workers at T-Mobile US and other employers. Workers want a voice in the decisions that affect them in their workplace — not just the ones that the company selectively picks and chooses. That’s why T-Mobile US workers are joining TU.
T-Mobile US’s initial scheduling changes were made just as the Albuquerque City Council was moving forward to consider a proposal to implement paid sick leave and scheduling improvements. The Albuquerque coalition hosted a town hall meeting on irregular scheduling, where Albuquerque City Council members pledged to support their fight for a fair workweek including the right to take sick leave without retaliation.
A recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision found T-Mobile guilty of engaging in illegal employment policies that prevented workers from even talking to each other about problems on the job. The judge ordered the company to rescind those policies and inform all 46,000 employees about the verdict.
Parental leave is a good first step toward helping workers balance their career and family responsibilities. But workers want real bargaining rights and the right to fairly choose union representation. That’s what T-Mobile must realize.
Source: The New Mexico Political Report
"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...
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.
Progressive Group Sues Fed, Seeking Information on Presidential Selection
Progressive Group Sues Fed, Seeking Information on Presidential Selection
The left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Federal Reserve...
The left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Federal Reserve, seeking to shine light on the central bank’s president selection process.
The lawsuit, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, is a product of the “Fed Up” campaign to strip private bankers’ influence from the Fed’s top rungs and increase transparency in its leadership selection. The suit was filed after the Fed ignored a FOIA request filed in August seeking information on president selections in 2015 and 2016, the group said.
“The leaders of the twelve Reserve Banks are among the most powerful and influential actors in shaping the nation’s monetary policies, yet the process by which they are chosen is completely non-transparent,” the group wrote in the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The lawsuit comes as Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, prepares to leave the bank in February.
“The public has a right to obtain records about how the Federal Reserve’s leaders are selected, and there is no justification for the Fed’s withholding of basic information about its governance,” said Connie Chan, an attorney representing Fed Up, in a statement. “The fact that Fed Up has to bring this FOIA lawsuit is itself further evidence of the Fed’s lack of transparency.”
By Tara Jeffries
Source
Toys `R' Us Workers Go to Congress to Seek Curbs on Buyout Firms
Toys `R' Us Workers Go to Congress to Seek Curbs on Buyout Firms
“We need to fight for all workers who are being treated like the Toys ‘R’ Us employees, who are bearing the personal...
“We need to fight for all workers who are being treated like the Toys ‘R’ Us employees, who are bearing the personal economic costs of corporate greed run amok,” Senator Gillibrand said on Tuesday in a meeting organized by Rise Up Retail and the Center for Popular Democracy, which represent retail workers. “I will keep doing everything I can in the Senate to make that happen.”
Read the full article here.
Taking on the Private Prison Industry’s Corporate Backers
Taking on the Private Prison Industry’s Corporate Backers
Activists are trying to combat both the accelerated tracking and detaining of immigrants and the use of for-profit...
Activists are trying to combat both the accelerated tracking and detaining of immigrants and the use of for-profit prisons to hold them by targeting the big banks that prop up for-profit prison companies.
Read the full article here.
Between the Lines: Charter Schools, A Better Education for Some at a Cost to Others
Five students are suing the state for a better education — for some. In September, five anonymous students...
Five students are suing the state for a better education — for some.
In September, five anonymous students filed a suit against the state in Suffolk County Superior Court alleging the cap on the number of charter schools in Massachusetts unfairly denies them their right to a quality education. The students had entered charter lotteries, but failed to win coveted spots in one of the public-ish schools. Instead, the students say, they were assigned to attend schools in their home districts that had been deemed “underperforming” by the state.
Since No Child Left Behind, school reform has been more concerned with helping some children find ways out of the traditional public school system than improving education for everyone. Charter schools are a symptom of this escapist philosophy, which is unfortunate because the idea of a charter school education is a good one.
Typically founded by nonprofits and members of the community, charter schools often concentrate education around one subject. Locally, these concentrations include the arts, social justice, and Mandarin. Students enroll in charters through a blind lottery that anyone can enter. Placing students in schools that encourage their passions is excellent education. And it produces some positive results. For example, in 2013, Credo, an independent education research firm, analyzed the impact charter schools have had on Massachusetts. In math and reading, researchers found that charter school students perform better in the subjects compared to those in traditional public schools.
The problem with charter schools is the education provided comes at the cost of traditional public schools. Charter schools are publicly funded, but work independently of a hometown district. Last year in Massachusetts, participating school districts paid charter schools $369.7 million to educate students. Charters receive per-student fees from sending districts — money that would otherwise stay in the home school’s till. Children fleeing an underperforming school district take money with them that is needed to improve the local education system.
I’m not proposing students be forced to attend failing schools. A student should have the choice to attend the school that best fits her educational needs. I am asking the state’s politicians to take a hard look at how charters are managed, funded, and how students are enrolled – because the current system is inadequate. Earlier this month, Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill that would increase the number of charter schools in the state. The bill would permit 12 new or expanded charter schools each year in districts performing in the bottom 25 percent on standardized tests. Massachusetts already has 81 charter schools with a waiting list of 37,000 students. A bill to expand the cap on charter schools in the state passed the House last year, but floundered in the Senate.
Here’s what needs to happen with charters:
Improve special education and non-native English speaker recruitment: While charters typically serve about the same number of low-income students — and more students of color — as traditional public school systems, they enroll far fewer non-native English speakers and students with special education needs. The Credo audit found that in traditional Massachusetts public schools that send children to charters, 17 percent of students received special education services, whereas in charter schools this population made up 12 percent of the student body. Traditional public schools had 10 percent English language learners in the student body, while charters had 6 percent.
Submit to School Committee authority: Charters don’t play by the same rules as traditional public schools. The schools aren’t subject to the authority of an elected school committee and have a legal pass around some of the state’s educational and special education requirements.
There’s good reason for more oversight. Private management of charter schools. A new report claims more than $200 million in fraud and wasted taxpayer funds has been lost to the charter school sector (“The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities To Waste, Fraud, And Abuse” by Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy). It’s hard to say whether this same kind of scandal could occur in Massachusetts. Charter schools need to, at the very least, be subject to more public scrutiny and submit to the budgeting and policy authority of a local, elected school committee.
Analyze funding strategy: Charter schools should not be succeeding at the cost of the education of students in underperforming districts. Something must be done that will allow students to pick the education that is best for them without penalizing struggling schools.
The student plantiffs suing for their right to attend charter schools say the state charter cap unfairly denies their right to a quality education, but that right cannot come at the cost of the rest of Massachusetts’ students.•
Source: Valley Advocate
The Spy Who Fired Me
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of...
Harpers Magazine - March 2015, by Esther Kaplan - Last March, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s Mad Money, devoted part of his show to a company called Cornerstone OnDemand. Cornerstone, Cramer shouted at the camera, is “a cloud-based-software-as-a-service play” in the “talent-management” field. Companies that use its platform can quickly assess an employee’s performance by analyzing his or her online interactions, including emails, instant messages, and Web use. “We’ve been managing people exactly the same way for the last hundred and fifty years,” Cornerstone’s CEO, Adam Miller, told Cramer. With the rise of the global workforce, the remote workforce, the smartphone and the tablet, it’s time to “manage people differently.” Clients include Virgin Media, Barclays, and Starwood Hotels.
Cornerstone, as Miller likes to tell investors, is positioning itself to be “on the vanguard of big data in the cloud” and a leader in the “gamification of performance management.” To be assessed by Cornerstone is to have your collaborative partnerships scored as assets and your brainstorms rewarded with electronic badges (genius idea!). It is to have scads of information swept up about what you do each day, whom you communicate with, and what you communicate about. Cornerstone converts that data into metrics to be factored in to your performance reviews and decisions about how much you’ll be paid.
Miller’s company is part of an $11 billion industry that also includes workforcemanagement systems such as Kronos and “enterprise social” platforms such as Microsoft’s Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and, soon, Facebook at Work. Every aspect of an office worker’s life can now be measured, and an increasing number of corporations and institutions—from cosmetics companies to car-rental agencies—are using that informationto make hiring and firing decisions. Cramer, for one, is bullish on the idea: investing in companies like Cornerstone, he said, “can make you boatloads of money literally year after year!”
A survey from the American Management Association found that 66 percent of employers monitor the Internet use of their employees, 45 percent track employee keystrokes, and 43 percent monitor employee email. Only two states, Delaware and Connecticut, require companies to inform their employees that such monitoring is taking place. According to Marc Smith, a sociologist with the Social Media Research Foundation, “Anythingyou do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls, private photos—if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it. They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not your data.”
With the advent of wireless connectivity, along with a steep drop in the price of computer processors, electronic sensors, GPS devices, and radio-frequency identification tags, monitoring has become commonplace.Many retail workers now clock in with a thumb scan. Nurses wear badges that track how often they wash their hands. Warehouse workers carry devices that assign them their next task and give them a time by which they must complete it. Some may soon be outfitted with augmented-reality devices to more efficiently locate products.
In industry after industry, this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional, and physical limits; claims control over their working and nonworking hours; and compensates them as little as possible, even at the risk of violating labor laws. In some cases, these new systems produce impressive results for the bottom line: after Unified Grocers, a large wholesaler, implemented an electronic tasking system for its warehouse workers, the firm was able to cut payroll expenses by 25 percent while increasing sales by 36 percent. A 2013 study of five chain restaurants found that electronic monitoring decreased employee theft and increased hourly sales. In other cases, however, the return on investment isn’t so clear. As one Cornerstonereport says of corporate social-networking tools.“ There is no generally accepted model for their implementation or standard set of metrics for measuring R.O.I.” Yet this has hardly slowed adoption.
Read the full article here.
Fed officials tell activists rate hikes won't derail economy
Fed officials tell activists rate hikes won't derail economy
An unusually large group of Federal Reserve policymakers appeared before activists on Thursday and defended their plans...
An unusually large group of Federal Reserve policymakers appeared before activists on Thursday and defended their plans to raise interest rates to keep the U.S. economy from eventually overheating.
Several policymakers said raising interest rates gradually would allow them to stimulate the economy for longer, but that an overheating economy could end in a recession.
"It's not about trying to stop the economy from growing," San Francisco Fed President John Williams told about 100 labor activists from the Fed Up coalition who pressed policymakers not to raise interest rates. "We're going to keep this economy growing, we are going to run it hot."
"My objective is not to slow down the economy," said Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who organized the meeting ahead of the annual central banking conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Fed policymakers have yet to decide when to raise rates again after lifting them in December for the first time in nearly a decade. Policymakers are divided whether to hike soon or take a more cautious approach.
A core group of Fed policymakers, the Board governors, are currently debating what is going on in the U.S. economy and how to set policy, Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer told the meeting.
"Everything that's being argued here is being argued in the board as well," Fischer said.
Much of the public commentary of Fed officials in recent weeks suggests the central bank is moving closer to a hike.
But the activists, who met with 11 Fed policymakers, used catcalls and applause to signal they were not buying it.
Years of lackluster wage gains and underemployment have left many Americans feeling left out of the country's economic recovery despite a 4.9 percent jobless rate.
Raising rates at this point in the recovery, said Rod Adams of Minneapolis, means "You'll be leaving us behind, pulling up the ladder right after you've climbed it."
The meeting, billed by organizers as a polite "listening session" for exchanging ideas, turned out to be a tough grilling for the Fed policymakers, who rarely appear in public in such numbers.
Fed officials worry that leaving rates too low for too long could stoke inflation, forcing the Fed to raise rates aggressively.
"One of the key goals should be that we don't have another recession," said Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir and Jason Lange; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Andrew Hay)
By Ann Saphir and Jason Lange
Source
Texas Gives The Green Light To Racial Profiling
Texas Gives The Green Light To Racial Profiling
Today, a judge in San Antonio will be hearing opening arguments on a lawsuit against Senate Bill 4, a law passed in...
Today, a judge in San Antonio will be hearing opening arguments on a lawsuit against Senate Bill 4, a law passed in Texas last month that is the single biggest attack on immigrants this country has seen in decades. SB 4 commands police to search the papers of anyone who looks like an immigrant and levels hefty fines and even jail time for law enforcement officers who resist. Under SB 4, even campus police will have the power to do random searches, transforming college campuses, traditionally a site of sanctuary, into a source of terror.
Read the full article here.
Maggie Bulmer: Pause Charter School Expansion
Providence Journal - January 27, 2015, by Maggie Bulmer - Does supporting two parallel school systems make sense?...
Providence Journal - January 27, 2015, by Maggie Bulmer - Does supporting two parallel school systems make sense?
Did The Providence Journal editorial board research thoroughly before deciding to support the expanding of charter schools in Rhode Island (“Expand R.I. charters,” editorial, Jan. 25)?
There are several reliable studies that advocate caution before jumping into support for charters schools. The studies have uncovered waste, fraud and abuse totaling over $100 million in taxpayer loss in 15 large charter markets: Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Texas.
My notes, from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, indicate that half of the $100 million was spent on federal prosecution of charter school officials and staff.
The Center suggests pausing charter school expansion until problems are addressed. I agree. Inadequate oversight hurts kids and taxpayers. Let’s not plunge into the newest privatizing idea without studying the data and getting the facts.
Maggie Bulmer
Middletown
Source
2 days ago
2 days ago