Bank Workers Tell Their Bosses: Stop Making Us Sell Shady Products To Poor People
ThinkProgress - April 9, 2015, by Alan Pyke - The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from...
ThinkProgress - April 9, 2015, by Alan Pyke - The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from within, as a group of rank-and-file banking employees prepare to demand that their employer stop ordering them to use predatory sales tactics and start treating them as a valued piece of the workforce.
A group of tellers, loan officers, and customer service representatives from the country’s largest commercial banks will rally Monday outside office towers in Minneapolis to call attention to their own low pay and to consumer-harming sales policies they say are imposed on them by management. As part of the demonstrations, workers will ask to meet with executives at Wells Fargo to deliver a petition calling for the bank to do away with high-pressure sales quotas for its customer service staff.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), one teller “says she has to ‘practically chase customers out of the door hawking unwanted credit and debit card accounts'” or face reproach from her manager, despite corporate policy that ostensibly prohibits disingenuous or high-pressure tales tactics.
“What they want, what they need, isn’t important to us. Selling them a product is,” a call-center worker at another bank said, summarizing the approach her managers take toward customers.
The CPD report details how the largest banks exacerbate inequality on the macro level and prey upon trusting customers on the micro-level. It argues that the largest American consumer banks are contributing to economic inequality and mining huge profits while freezing tens of millions of un-banked Americans out of basic financial services.
The kinds of basic banking products that are essential to working people trying to save for their retirement or their children “are what industry insiders consider ‘low-value’ or ‘low-margin’ services,” CPD notes, and “are not currently a priority for the big banks.” Instead, banks have put tellers and call center employees under ever more pressure to sell people credit cards and additional bank accounts regardless of whether those products suit the customer’s real needs. At one bank, customer service staff must “make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up.”
For providing this warped version of “customer service” and surviving the high-pressure work environment the banks create for them, frontline workers are rewarded with falling pay. Pay for tellers fell by more than 5 percent from 2007 to 2013 after adjusting for inflation. Bank workers who conduct interviews for people requesting loans have seen their wages drop by 3.2 percent, and customer service reps have gotten a 2.5 percent cut in that same window.
Out of every 10 bank tellers in the country, three are enrolled in food stamps or another public assistance program. Considering that most such programs have far fewer people enrolled than are eligible for them, it’s likely that the ratio of tellers who qualify for public aid is even higher. Taxpayers spend nearly $900 million a year providing benefits to bring bank tellers and their families up to a subsistence-level income, which means everyone in the country is helping to subsidize bank profits.
Those profits are massive, as the CPD report notes. For every dollar in revenue that the 10 largest consumer banks in America bring in, they manage to keep 20 cents as pure profit after paying workers, overhead, and taxes. That large profit margin leaves plenty of room to pay workers enough to avoid poverty.
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The Government Should Guarantee Everyone a Good Job
The Government Should Guarantee Everyone a Good Job
Progressives have begun to dream more boldly. We have graduated from a public option to single payer. From lower...
Progressives have begun to dream more boldly. We have graduated from a public option to single payer. From lower sentences to eliminating cash bail. From motor-voter to automatic-voter registration. From affordable to free college. And from a $15 minimum wage to guaranteed good jobs for all.
Read the full article here.
I often can't afford groceries because of volatile work schedules at Gap
As the movement for a $15 minimum wage grows, low-wage workers know the problem isn’t just the hourly pay rate. It’s...
As the movement for a $15 minimum wage grows, low-wage workers know the problem isn’t just the hourly pay rate. It’s also the number of hours scheduled. I’ve worked at Gap in multiple locations since October 2014. I’d like to earn a living wage – but a raise alone won’t help me pay the bills if exploitative schedules aren’t fixed too.
I spent most of 2014 unemployed while applying to dozens of jobs. Then, in October, I finally got a job at Gap. Our schedule comes out less than a week in advance. Some of the shifts leave workers “on-call,” meaning we don’t know if we’re going to be working at all that day. The earliest we find out is two hours before the shift is scheduled to start. At my first store, I had 18 hours of penciled-in shifts with only nine guaranteed hours some weeks. This is not uncommon in the industry.
The volatility of on-call scheduling, in combination with the low pay, meant my life at Gap wasn’t all that different from when I was unemployed. Though I was working, I still had to go to a food pantry for groceries. In winter, I had to choose between racking up heat bills I couldn’t afford and freezing in my apartment. My landlord would ask me when I’d have the rent money, but I couldn’t give her an answer because I never knew how many hours I’d actually work in a given week. I couldn’t afford to live in the city where I worked, so I had to transfer to a Gap store back home.
I’m not the only one struggling. Retail workers have the second-lowest average weekly earnings of workers in any sector in the US economy: $444 per week. We also have the second-lowest average weekly working hours. From 2006 to 2010, the number of people working part-time for economic reasons and not by choice, grew from 4 to 9 million. It’s called involuntary part-time work, meaning we want full-time employment but a lack of opportunities prevents us from doing so.
Unpredictable last-minute scheduling makes it difficult to budget and turns even the most basic decisions into headaches. Will we need babysitters for our children? Will we be able to make a doctor’s appointment? Will we have to rush to Gap from our second jobs?
One of my co-workers, started working at Gap as she was transitioning out of homelessness, but she wasn’t making enough to get stable housing on her own. Most so-called middle class jobs lost in the recession have been replaced by low-wage work like retail jobs. I’m thankful to be working, but gratitude born of desperation is no comfort and it certainly doesn’t pay the rent.
As the involuntary part-time worker population has drastically grown, so too has Gap’s executive compensation. Since 2010, total executive compensation packages exploded from $19m to over $42m by 2014. Former CEO Glenn Murphy’s compensation increased from $5.9m in 2010 to $16m in 2014. So-called ‘on-call scheduling’ creates a cheap on-demand workforce, enabling the Gap to pad its bottom line. The gains don’t go to us; they flow to the top-earners in the company. We make the sacrifices, they reap the rewards.
Another co-worker began working at Gap, in addition to a second retail job, as a way to escape the illicit drug trade. My colleague once told me: “everybody wants a job, no one wants to really be out hustling in the streets.” But the on-call shifts became unbearable, and he struggled to pay rent. For him, the trade-off between street money and regular employment was costly. This structural combination of low wages and unfair scheduling pressures workers into the underground economy, and is a hidden pipeline to the prison system.
I do, however, feel hope. Here in Minnesota, lawmakers are considering new legislation, supported by workers and community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, that would require three weeks’ advance notice of work schedules. Across the country, low-wage workers are fighting for fair scheduling and the tide is turning. Just this summer, Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch have announced an end to their on-call shifts. The Gap can be part of this rising tide.
Source: The Guardian
More states adopt tough paid sick-leave laws
More states adopt tough paid sick-leave laws
PHOENIX — A new paid sick-leave law took effect Saturday in Arizona, which joins a cluster of other states in...
PHOENIX — A new paid sick-leave law took effect Saturday in Arizona, which joins a cluster of other states in continuing momentum on an issue that has seen broadening political support.
Measures adopted across the nation typically require a minimum number of paid sick hours or days each year and often mandate other guidelines in terms of permissible reasons for leave and record-keeping duties for employers.
Read the full article here.
Hillary Clinton wants to shake up the Fed
Hillary Clinton wants to shake up the Fed
Hillary Clinton wants the Federal Reserve to look a lot different. The Democratic candidate's campaign said Thursday...
Hillary Clinton wants the Federal Reserve to look a lot different.
The Democratic candidate's campaign said Thursday that it supports a plan presented by Democratic lawmakers calling for more diversity at the Federal Reserve and removing bankers from the boards of regional branches.
A statement from Clinton campaign spokesperson Jesse Ferguson argued that the changes were necessary in order to make the central bank more representative of the American people (emphasis ours):
The Federal Reserve is a vital institution for our economy and the well-being of our middle class, and the American people should have no doubt that the Fed is serving the public interest. That's why Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that commonsense reforms -- like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks -- are long overdue. Secretary Clinton will also defend the Fed's so-called dual mandate -- the legal requirement that it focus on full employment as well as inflation -- and will appoint Fed governors who share this commitment and who will carry out unwavering oversight of the financial industry.
The biggest issue raised in Secretary Clinton's statement is that employees of banks make up a considerable portion of the boards of the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks.
The original letter, signed by Congressional Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was sent to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Thursday morning. It cited some gains made by the Fed, but said there is more work to be done.
"However, despite these gains, we remain deeply concerned that the Federal Reserve has not yet fulfilled its statutory and moral obligation to ensure that its leadership reflects the composition of our diverse nation in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, economic background, and occupation, and we call on you to take steps to promptly begin to remedy this issue," said the letter.
The Democrats' letter also cited statistics that showed that 92% of regional bank presidents are white; 100% of the current voting members of the Federal Open Markets Committee are white, and 75% of the regional bank directorships are male.
The Fed's leadership is made of three levels. The lowest level is made up of the 12 regional banks' boards of directors. Those elect the next level, the presidents of the regional branches. At the top level are the seven members of the Fed's Board of Governors appointed by the US president, including the chair.
The seven governors and the regional presidents make up the Federal Open Markets Committee, which determines monetary policy for the US.
The letter from Democrats also advocated for caution in monetary-policy decision-making at upcoming meetings, taking into consideration how policy would affect average Americans.
"Moreover, as you make crucial monetary policy decisions in 2016, we urge you to give due consideration to the interests and priorities of the millions of people around the country who still have not benefited from this recovery," said the letter.
"We share the vision that you laid out in Chicago two years ago: an economy in which all working families 'get the chance they deserve to build better lives'."
There has been a push among Democrats in Congress urging the Fed to keep interest rates near their historically low levels in order to allow more workers to find jobs and increase wages.
Chair Yellen said in her regular testimony before Congress that she is sympathetic to the position.
By Bob Bryan
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A Call to Action From NMAC & Housing Works
A Call to Action From NMAC & Housing Works
People in the movement might be surprised by a joint letter from Charles King of Housing Works and me, but these are...
People in the movement might be surprised by a joint letter from Charles King of Housing Works and me, but these are not ordinary times. NMAC is writing this letter to invite constituents at this year’s United States Conference on AIDS to join Housing Works efforts on Wednesday, September 6, to greet Congress on its return from summer recess with a rally for the care we need to survive—sign up here!
These are confusing times with no clear roadmap. Since NMAC is hosting the HIV/STD Action Dayon the same day, we want everyone to be aware of our mutual support and collective goal to not just save the Affordable Care Act, but to also strengthen our vision of ending AIDS as an epidemic. This can only happen when affordable health care becomes a human right for everyone.
Read the full article here.
In Service Sector, No Rest for the Working
New York Times - February 21, 2015, by Steven Greenhouse - On the nights when she has just seven hours between shifts...
New York Times - February 21, 2015, by Steven Greenhouse - On the nights when she has just seven hours between shifts at a Taco Bell in Tampa, Fla., Shetara Brown drops off her three young children with her mother. After work, she catches a bus to her apartment, takes a shower to wash off the grease and sleeps three and a half hours before getting back on the bus to return to her job.
At Hudson County Community College in Jersey City, Ramsey Montanez struggles to stay alert on the mornings that he returns to his security guard station at 7 a.m., after wrapping up a 16-hour double shift at 11 p.m. the night before.
And on many Friday nights, Jeremy Little waits tables at a Perkins Restaurant & Bakery near Minneapolis and doesn’t climb into bed until 3 a.m. He returns by 10 a.m. for the breakfast rush, and sometimes feels so weary that he forgets to take rolls to some tables or to tell the chef whether customers wanted their steak medium rare.
“It makes me feel really tired,” Mr. Little said. “My body just aches.”
Employees are literally losing sleep as restaurants, retailers and many other businesses shrink the intervals between shifts and rely on smaller, leaner staffs to shave costs. These scheduling practices can take a toll on employees who have to squeeze commuting, family duties and sleep into fewer hours between shifts. The growing practice of the same workers closing the doors at night and returning to open them in the morning even has its own name: “clopening.”
“It’s very difficult for people to work these schedules, especially if they have other responsibilities,” said Susan J. Lambert, an expert on work-life issues and a professor of organizational theory at the University of Chicago. “This particular form of scheduling — not enough rest time between shifts — is particularly harmful.”
The United States decades ago moved away from the standard 9-to-5 job as the manufacturing economy gave way to one dominated by the service sector. And as businesses strive to serve consumers better by staying open late or round the clock, they are demanding more flexibility from employees in scheduling their hours, often assigning them to ever-changing shifts.
Workers and labor advocates are increasingly protesting these scheduling practices, which often include giving workers as little as two days’ advance notice for their weekly work schedule. These concerns have gained traction and translated into legislative proposals in several states, with proponents enviously pointing to the standard adopted for workers in the 28-nation European Union. It establishes “a minimum daily rest period of 11 consecutive hours per 24-hour period.”
Britain, Germany and several other countries interpret that to require that workers be given at least 11 hours between shifts, although waivers are permitted. “If a retail shop closes at midnight, the night-shift employees are not allowed to start before 11 o’clock the next morning,” said Gerhard Bosch, a sociology professor and expert on labor practices at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
Continue reading the main story
In the United States, no such national or state labor law or regulation governs the intervals between shifts, except for some particular jobs like airline pilots, although some unions have negotiated a minimum time for workers to be off, sometimes eight, 10 or 12 hours.
But at the state level this year, bills have been introduced in Maryland and Massachusetts and will be introduced in Minnesota on Monday, each of them calling on employers to give workers at least 11 hours between shifts and three weeks’ advance notice for schedules. Those proposals would require businesses to pay some time and a half whenever employees are called in before 11 hours have passed between shifts.
Paul Thissen, the Democratic leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives, supports the legislation. “When it comes to scheduling, the playing field is tilted very dramatically in favor of the employer,” Mr. Thissen said. “What we’re proposing is just trying to rebalance the playing field.”
Anthony Newby, executive director at Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, a Minneapolis-based group that advocates for worker rights, among other issues, said that clopenings have become a big issue in his region. “Clopenings are hurting many of our members; many are in the restaurant field and some in construction and nursing,” he said. “We worry it has an effect on safety — workers feel they’re on autopilot. It also has a big impact on families, on mothers trying to manage a family and arrange child care.”
Ms. Brown, who works as a cashier at Taco Bell, said her children — ages 5, 4 and 2 — don’t like it when she has just seven hours between shifts. That usually means they hardly see her for two nights in a row; they sleep at their grandmother’s both nights. On the second night, after just three and a half hours’ sleep the previous day, Ms. Brown says she stops by her mother’s for an hour or two to see her children, and then heads home to sleep.
“My kids say, ‘Mommy, I miss you,’ ” she said. “I get so tired it’s hard to function. I feel so exhausted. I don’t want my kids suffering not seeing me. I try to push to go see them.”
Although Ms. Brown dislikes clopenings, she doesn’t turn them down because she needs as many hours as she can get. She makes $8.10 an hour and works about 25 hours a week.
Brandon Wagner, who works for a Zara apparel store in Manhattan, often works from 1 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m., getting back to his apartment in Brooklyn around midnight. He often must be back at work at 8 the next morning, and as a result he sleeps just five hours.
“When you question this, they give a shrug of the shoulder,” Mr. Wagner said. “They say, ‘Everybody does this. You have to put up with it or go somewhere else.’ ”
Last summer, Starbucks announced that it would curb clopenings on the same day that The New York Times published an article profiling a barista, Jannette Navarro, mother of a 4-year-old, who worked a scheduled shift that ended at 11 p.m. and began a new shift at 4 a.m.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
At the time, Cliff Burrows, Starbucks’s group president for the United States, said: “Partners should never be required to work an opening and a closing shift back-to-back. District managers must help store managers problem-solve issues specific to individual stores to make this happen.” (“Partners” is the term Starbucks uses for its employees.)
Neil Trautwein, a vice president with the National Retail Federation, acknowledged that some instances of scheduling were egregious, but he pointed to Starbucks’s voluntary response to argue that states should not enact any laws to address the issue.
“Advocates have it wrong to think you can legislate and just outlaw the process,” Mr. Trautwein said. “The market adjusts to the needs of workers.” He added that what Starbucks did “demonstrates that businesses listen to their employees and adjust.” (In response to complaints about schedules changing week to week, Walmart said on Thursday that it would give workers more predictable schedules.)
But several people who identified themselves as Starbucks employees complained on a Facebook private group page that they still were scheduled for clopenings, despite the company’s pronouncement. One worker in Texas wrote on Jan. 30, “I work every other Sunday as a closer, which is at 10:30 or really 11-ish, then scheduled at 6 a.m. the next morning.” Another worker in Southern California wrote, “As a matter of fact I clopen this weekend.”
Laurel Harper, a Starbucks spokeswoman, questioned the authenticity of the Facebook posts. She said company officials had held conversations nationwide “to make sure we are giving our partners the hours they want” and to prevent clopenings.
Some managers say there are workers who don’t mind clopenings — like students who have classes Monday through Friday and want to cram in a lot of weekend work hours to maximize their pay.
Tightly scheduled shifts seem to have become more common for a number of reasons. Many fast-food restaurants and other service businesses have high employee turnover, and as a result they are often left with only a few trusted workers who have the authority and experience to close at night and open in the morning. Professor Lambert said no studies had been done on the prevalence of clopenings nationwide.
Carrie Gleason, director of the fair workweek initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group, said one reason for the increasing prevalence of clopenings was that many companies had shifted scheduling responsibilities away from managers and to sophisticated software that she said was not programmed to prevent such short windows between shifts.
But David Ossip, chief executive of Ceridian, a human resources and payroll company, said that when his company provided scheduling software to companies, it generally recommended programming a mandated rest period. The software would then warn managers when an added shift violated that rest period.
“You would make sure you have a minimum rest period between shifts,” he said. “We would set up fairness results that call for regular working hours — not one day work at night, the next day work in the morning.” He added, “You have to be home for eight, 10 or 12 hours.”
Andy Iversen, a stocker at Linden Hills Co-op in Minneapolis, said the grocery store’s managers used to schedule him two or three times a week to work until 9 p.m., and then be back at 5 a.m.
“I was beyond exhausted,” he said, noting that he was getting to bed at midnight and waking around 3:45 a.m. At the time, he was pursuing a master’s degree and taking a course in neuroscience. “I couldn’t concentrate because I was so tired,” he said. “I had to drop out of class.”
Mr. Iversen praised his store’s managers for no longer giving him clopenings. Marshall Wright, the store’s produce manager, said, “We think it’s the right thing to do. We don’t feel people should work shifts like that.”
Mr. Iversen couldn’t agree more: “It doesn’t take that much empathy or reasoning to see that clopenings stink, and people don’t want to do it.”
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Minimum wage going up
Minimum wage going up
Voters have decided it’s time to give Colorado’s minimum-wage workers a long-overdue raise. Amendment 70, a measure...
Voters have decided it’s time to give Colorado’s minimum-wage workers a long-overdue raise.
Amendment 70, a measure that would increase Colorado’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, was passing by a 10-percent margin. Minimum wage in the state is now $8.31 an hour.
With 25 of 64 counties reporting, the vote-count as of this posting was 55 percent yes to 45 percent no.
In a crowded, jubilant second-floor conference room at the Westin Downtown, a group of minimum wage earners, business owners and advocates celebrated.
“Amendment is going to help our local economy,” said Edwin Zoe, proprietor of restaurant Zoe Ma Ma. “When low income workers do well, we all do well.”
The amendment alters the state constitution to increase the minimum wage by yearly 90-cent increments until it reaches $12 in 2020. In 2020, it will be fixed at $12, except for yearly adjustments to account for inflation.
Who pushed it over the finish line?
Supporters of the increase coalesced in mid-2016 into a group called Colorado Families for a Fair Wage, a coalition of unions, economic justice advocates and progressive policy analysts. Many of them had been part of an informal consortium of anti-poverty groups called The Everyone Economy that came together to strategize about raising the minimum wage back in February 2014. Partnering with Democratic legislators, they advocated for a pair of bills in the 2015 legislative session to help low-wage workers. One would have allowed municipalities to set their own minimums, and the other would have created a ballot measure to reach a $12.50 per hour minimum by 2020. Republicans killed both bills in the Senate.
Democrats floated another bill in 2016 to allow cities to set their own minimum wages, which met the same fate as its predecessors. After that, Everyone Economy members decided they had no recourse but to pursue a ballot measure themselves and formed Colorado Families for a Fair Wage.
What does it mean that it passed?
The work is just beginning for Colorado labor unions and low-wage worker advocates. Most CFFW members acknowledge that $12 per hour is not in fact a living wage for workers with families in some parts of Colorado. Most estimates put a living wage for a single parent of two children in Denver at around $30 per hour. But advocates also believe that the current $8.31 per hour is inexcusable, and any more than $12 was not politically viable this time around.
But for some, the increase means a change in their lives. April Medina currently makes $11 per hour in assisted living. She works 60-70 hours per week, leaving very little time to spend with her four children. She brought her 9-year-old daughter, Jasmine, to the Westin Downtown to celebrate Amendment 70’s passage.
Medina said she was thrilled by the news.
“I’m excited to go to some basketball games,” Medina said.
How much firepower was against it?
Keep Colorado Working had a slower start raising funds, but raised $1.7 million in the last reporting period. It has spent just under $1.4 million as of the most recent campaign finance filings, primarily on television advertising and consultants. About half of its funds ($650,000) come from the Alexandria, Virginia-based Workforce Fairness Institute. It has also gotten $525,000 from Colorado Citizens Protecting Our Constitution, a committee that has donated hefty sums to pro-fracking campaigns and to a 2013 effort to recall legislators who had passed gun-control legislation.
CCFW outraised its rivals almost 3 to 1, raising about $5.3 million in donations, much of it from out-of-state groups like its largest donor, the Center for Popular Democracy, which has kicked in over $1 million. Its second-largest donor is the Palo Alto-based Fairness Project, which has contributed over $960,000 to CFFW and is also supporting minimum wage ballot measures in Maine, Arizona and Washington, D.C.
Keep Colorado Working wants to make sure you know that some of CFFW’s donors are not from Colorado. Virtually all of its communications use the terms “wealthy out of state special interests” liberally.
According to the most recent campaign finance filings, CFFW has spent $4.6 million on television and digital advertising, outreach efforts like canvassing and hosting events, mailers, polling and research.
By Eliza Carter
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Thomas DiNapoli urged to stop investments that hurt P.R.
Activist groups are asking state Controller Thomas DiNapoli to halt investments in two private equity firms they blame...
Activist groups are asking state Controller Thomas DiNapoli to halt investments in two private equity firms they blame for worsening the foreclosure crisis in Puerto Rico.
In a letter to DiNapoli, the anti-hedge fund group Hedge Clippers and other organizations say the state Common Retirement Fund should make no new investments in the Blackstone Group and TPG Capital.
Read the full article here.
The #MeToo Movement and Everyday Industries, Part 2
The #MeToo Movement and Everyday Industries, Part 2
The Center for Popular Democracy reports that 18 percent of women have upper-management positions, even though they...
The Center for Popular Democracy reports that 18 percent of women have upper-management positions, even though they make up 60 percent of first-line supervisors. People of color, namely black and Latino, are also delegated to low-level, low-paying positions, such as cashiering. Older, experienced employees often do not receive benefits or long-term rewards, according to The Washington Post.
Read the full article here.
2 days ago
2 days ago