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Dive Brief:

Attorneys general from eight states and the District of Columbia sent letters to 15 retailers asking them to explain their policies regarding “on-call” scheduling, seeking information and documents related to their use of on-call shifts. 

Letters were sent to American Eagle, Aeropostale, Payless, Disney, Coach, PacSun, Forever 21, Vans, Justice Just for Girls, BCBG Maxazria, Tilly’s, Inc., David’s Tea, Zumiez, Uniqlo, and Carter’s, with signatures from any attorney general involved in the state where the retailer has operations.

The coordinated move follows a similar one last year from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, an effort that prompted six retail brands, including Urban Outfitters, Gap Inc., L. Brands, J. Crew, Pier 1, and Abercrombie & Fitch to end on-call scheduling.

Dive Insight:

Algorithms in software have helped retailers lower costs through efficient staffing, cutting workers loose in slow times, having them wait "on call" in case things get busy, and leaving little room for flexibility. The practice makes it difficult for retail employees to juggle the realities of their those jobs while also trying to manage their households and earn enough money to get by.

“On-call shifts are unfair to workers who must keep the day free, arrange for child care, and give up the chance to get another job or attend a class–often all for nothing,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “On-call shifts are not a business necessity, as we see from the many retailers that no longer use this unjust method of scheduling work hours.”

Schneiderman’s office has been keen on cracking down on the practice for a while now, which in most cases violates his state’s laws, and there’s been rising sentiment among lawmakers in several states—and possibly even in Congress—to pull back on the practice.

But even with this pressure, and despite its dubious legality in some areas, on-call scheduling is still fairly widespread, according to the Fair WorkWeek Initiative.

“Over the past year, workers have been speaking out about the struggles caused by increasingly unpredictable hours,” Fair Workweek Initiative director Carrie Gleason said in an email to Retail Dive. “Workers should not have to choose between living with dignity and getting enough hours to put food on the table. It is heartening to see more and more policymakers and regulators take action to address a crisis affecting millions of Americans.”

Retailers should be prepared to see more such concerns, warnings, and even legislation as just-in time scheduling gets more scrutiny, Gail Gottehrer, a labor & employment litigator at Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider in New York who works on behalf of employers, told Retail Dive last year. The practice was a major concern when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last year unanimously passed its Worker Bill of Rights law.

“This can be especially difficult for multi-state employers,” Gottehrer said. “If you’re in a lot of jurisdictions it can be complicated to get things right.”

Not all the retailers that received letters use the practice. Forever 21 emailed Retail Dive to say, "Contrary to published reports, Forever 21 does not permit on-call scheduling nor do we have a company policy around doing so." On Friday, American Eagle Outfitters also released a press release reiterating that it has banned the practice nationwide. "We decided in November 2015 to cease the use of “on-call shifts” and advised our stores," the company states. "We are taking steps to reinforce and assure adherence to this policy across our store fleet."

Spokespeople for Coach and Payless told Reuters that they don’t use on-call scheduling, and a Zumiez spokesperson told Reuters that it’s cooperating, and a spokesperson for Carter's said that company is reviewing the letter. Other retailers receiving the new letters did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to Reuters.

Recommended Reading

Reuters: US regulators probe retailers' on-call scheduling

By Daphne Howland

Source

When the Federal Reserve was established, Congress called for its policy makers to have “fair representation of the financial, agricultural, industrial, and commercial interests, and geographical divisions of the country.”

But Fed officials have recently been drawn from just two backgrounds—academics, either at universities or Fed research departments, and alumni of the financial services firmGoldman Sachs & Co.

The announcement Tuesday that Neel Kashkari would become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis marked the third Goldman Sachs alumnus in a row to be picked to become a Fed bank president. The other two—Dallas’s Robert Steven Kaplan andPhiladelphia’s Patrick Harker —took office earlier this year.

Mr. Kashkari is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a former Treasury official who ran the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis. He takes the helm of the Minneapolis Fed Jan. 1, 2016.

Of the 17 Fed officials in office next year—five members of the Board of Governors and 12 regional bank presidents—all but three will have professional backgrounds as academics or with Goldman Sachs. The exceptions will be Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhartand Fed governor Jerome Powell, who worked at other banking institutions, and Kansas City Fed President Esther George, who was primarily a bank supervisor.

“The obvious downside of this is there’s more of a groupthink within the Fed,” said George Selgin, the director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank, referring to the shift toward a narrow range of backgrounds at the central bank. “That can be very dangerous if the groupthink is based on ways of thinking about the economy that are not necessarily sound.”

Mr. Kaplan, a former Harvard Business School professor, had worked as a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., leading investment banking activities. Mr. Harker, the former president of the University of Delaware, served as a trustee of Goldman Sachs Trust and its Variable Insurance Trust.

New York Fed President William Dudley also spent most of his career at Goldman, ultimately serving as its chief economist.

Since the central bank’s founding a century ago, the background of Fed officials has undergone a dramatic shift.

In the early days after the Fed began in 1913, the people selected to run the nation’s central bank were primarily small bankers, reflecting that in the early days, the Fed’s key function was providing banking services to a highly fragmented banking industry. The notion of using Fed policies to steer the broader economy had not yet taken hold.

Through the Fed’s first 40 years, the backgrounds of officials grew increasingly diverse. In the late 1940s, for example, Fed officials included Chester Davis, a former agriculture commissioner and grain marketer; Laurence Whittemore, of the Boston and Maine Railroad and H. Gavin Leedy, a private practice attorney.

The central bank’s leadership also contained many functionaries who rose through the ranks as Fed administrators, such as Robert Gilbert, who in his 20s become one of the first 14 employees of the Dallas Fed. He worked as a loan and discount clerk and in the war loan department, before becoming manger of the Dallas Fed’s El Paso branch and eventually the Dallas Fed President.

Such quaint backgrounds were common among officials in the central bank’s early days but were beginning to dwindle by the 1960s. Today Fed officials who rose through the ranks are almost entirely Ph.D. economists who headed the regional banks’ research departments; the lone exception is Ms. George, who worked as a bank supervisor and Kansas City Fed administrator. Ms. George holds an M.B.A.

Gradually backgrounds in industry, law, and other aspects of government or administration fell out of favor.

“Keep in mind, for much of the Fed’s first half, the focus was really on financial stability,” said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University professor who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “There wasn’t a well-worked out body of knowledge about monetary policy.”

As it became apparent that Fed policy held vast sway over the economic fortunes of the country, presidents and regional Fed boards increasingly turned to Ph.D. economists to guide the central bank and to be effective participants during the debates of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.

Ms. Binder thinks the narrow range of backgrounds among Fed officials may lead to a central bank that is thin on expertise when it comes to “the responsibilities that are laid on top of the board, in particular, that extend beyond monetary policy.”

The central bank is tasked, for example, with regulating much of the financial system, not only the giant Wall Street banks, but also community banks, insurers and other financial institutions. The Fed retains some responsibilities for consumer protection and community development, is responsible for the nation’s payment systems and continues to operate the discount window and other low-profile back-office banking functions.

Liberal activist groups, led by the Center for Popular Democracy, have pushed for diversity in the appointment of new Fed officials, pressing for representatives of workers and consumers or labor and community leaders. They have had no luck, and with the filling of the Minneapolis Fed presidency and inaction in Congress over two current nominees to the Fed board, there are no looming vacancies for the central bank’s composition to begin a shift.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Salon - October 29, 2013, by Josh Eidelson -

If the potential president does business's bidding on a new scaffolding bill, workers will die, an advocate warns.

Industry groups hope New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo – a presumed presidential aspirant who’s frequently defied liberals on economics – will back their push to “reform” the country’s toughest law holding contractors responsible when workplace falls end in injury or death.

“I think we’d be picking workers up off the street,” if the state’s “scaffold law” is gutted, said Joel Shufro, who directs the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. “Because I think employers would cut corners in ways that would result in workers being injured or killed.” Cuomo’s office did not respond to inquiries.

In an Oct. 16 letter, dozens of business groups and the New York Conference of Mayors urged Cuomo to reform the stat’s “scaffold law,” a move they said would “help alleviate fiscal stress by saving taxpayer dollars, creating jobs, and increasing revenue to the state and localities.” Signatories included the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, whose director Tom Stebbins told Salon that the group has made the issue a priority because “insurance rates put people of business, they take jobs away, and as we’re finding out more and more, it’s costing us more and more in our public projects.”

The 128-year-old “scaffold law” allows contractors to be held liable for “gravity-related” injuries suffered by their employees when management failed to comply with a safety rule, even (with certain exceptions) if the employee was also at fault. Stebbins contended there was “no data that supports” the claim that it improves safety, and argued that what he called the law’s “absolute liability” standard means “you’re assigned fault without negligence,” and actually “makes job sites less safe.”

“If you absolve employees from responsibility for their actions, they’re less responsible,” said Stebbins. “And if employers are guilty under almost any circumstances, they’re not as incentivized.”

NYCOSH’s Shufro countered that the law holds employers liable “if they violate OSHA regulations or other city, state ordinances, do not provide appropriate training, do not provide appropriate personal protective equipment … But if they are in compliance … they are not liable, they will not be found at fault.”

Stebbins acknowledged that “if you were the only cause of your injury, then that absolute liability doesn’t apply,” but he told Salon that “even the responsible contractor can’t stop every situation.” Stebbins cited the case of a worker who he said intentionally “jumped off the building in order to make a scaffold law claim.” Under current law, he said, a contractor “could be a fraction of a percent responsible and be held liable for 100 percent of the judgment,” rather than having “liability apportioned by fault.” He argued that the law also hurt workers because cash devoted to insurance costs is “money that’s not being spent on jobs, not being spent on union labor.”

Labor groups rejected such claims. “Opponents claim that the Scaffold Law drives up costs and is a job killer; the reality is that it helps prevent a job from being a worker killer,” New York AFL-CIO president Mario Cilento told Salon in an email. Cilento credited the law with “placing responsibility for providing adequate safety equipment and measures squarely in the hands of contractors and owners, ensuring that there is absolutely no ambiguity in who is responsible for maintaining a safe workplace in a very dangerous occupation.” He added that “insurers and contractors try to gut the Scaffold Law and in turn workplace safety” over and over, but “they’ve been rebuffed because the Legislature has recognized that there is no price tag on the lives and well-being of New Yorkers.” Cilento’s Illinois counterpart, state AFL president Michael Carrigan, emailed that the labor federation “regrets the repeal” of the similar Illinois Scaffolding Act, prior to which “Illinois had been the second safest state in construction deaths and accidents.” (The business groups’ letter to Cuomo credited the repeal of Illinois’ law for a subsequent 53 percent decline in construction injuries and said it gave the state “the 10th lowest injury rate in the country”; NYCOSH attributed the decline in injuries to overall national trends.)

“All this law says is that the employers shall be liable if they do not follow rules and regulations that govern safety on these jobs,” said NYCOSH’s Shufro. “So it seems to me that the best way of reducing their costs is to require employers to follow the law.” An NYCOSH analysis of OSHA data on New York state construction found that “At least one OSHA fall prevention standard was violated in nearly 80 percent of accidents in which a worker fell and was killed.”

A study released Thursday by progressive Center for Popular Democracy argued that the industry’s death and injury toll is disproportionately borne by immigrant workers and Latinos. CPD found that Latino and/or immigrant workers made up 60 percent of “fall from elevation fatalities” investigated by OSHA in New York State, and reported that “In 2011 focus groups, Latino construction workers reported fearing retaliation as a key deterrent to raising concerns about safety.”

While business groups have long sought changes in the scaffold law, both sides said this year’s showdown on the issue could be particularly acute. “More and more we’re seeing the cost to the public,” said Stebbins, including insurers “leaving because they can’t sustain an absolute liability and it’s impossible for them to gauge risk.” Shufro countered that insurers “have refused” when asked by legislators to “open the books” and document their losses; NYCOSH also notes that New York experienced only a 9.1 percent drop in construction employment from 2006 to 2011, while the national decline was 28.4 percent.

Cuomo has previously clashed with labor on issues ranging from public workers’ pensions to an expiring (ultimately partially extended) millionaire’s tax. Salon’s Blake Zeff argued in a January BuzzFeed essay that Cuomo’s “approach to balancing two competing interests – piling up points to advance in a Democratic primary for president, while steering to the center in key areas (and carefully avoiding antagonizing monied interests who fund campaigns and influence elite opinion) – has consisted of aggressive advocacy of ‘cultural’ or ‘social’ progressive causes, while downplaying economic ones.” Cuomo this month appointed GOP former Gov. George Pataki to co-chair a commission on reducing tax rates, a move that Michael Kink, who directs the labor-backed coalition A Strong Economy for All, compared in a Capital New York interview to “bringing in Godzilla to oversee the rebuilding from a Godzilla attack.”

Shufro said the scaffold question would “be one of the major political battles that will go on and dominate Albany for the next session,” and so Cuomo was “going to have to make a certain decision about which side he’s going to come out on … I know that this is an important issue to labor, just as it seems to be an important issue to the business community.” Shufro predicted Cuomo’s approach to the scaffold law would be “one of the major issues that will help unions make decisions about how they see him going forward.” He added, “It’s not an easy place to be in.”

Source:

It’s not surprising that the same sort of coalition of elected officials advancing the fight against SB4 have turned to this issue,” said Sarah Johnson, the director of Local Progress. “Workers and immigrants are important to the foundation of cities. The work being done around SB4 has created a strong coalition that has advanced from defense to offense.

 

Read the full article here.