CPD IN THE NEWS

The Fight for $15 is still being waged, but the movement is adding "Fight for a Fair Workweek" to its agenda.

Americans at the lowest rung of the wage ladder are looking forward to hourly pay hikes in cities and states including New York and California. Yet there's a troubling and escalating trend of underemployment and scheduling hurdles that make it next to impossible for many workers to get ahead, worker advocates say.

A defining feature of the post-recession recovery has been a surge in part-time workers. And despite an improving labor market, with unemployment at 5 percent, more than 6 million people in the U.S. who would rather work full-time remain stuck in part-time jobs.

California represents a large chunk of that underemployment, with more than 1 million working involuntary part-time jobs. In Silicon Valley, more than four out of every 10 hourly workers are now part-time, according to research due to be released Thursday.

The findings, based on data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and written by the Center for Popular Democracy and Working Partnerships USA, found insufficient and inconsistent hours leave hourly workers struggling in San Jose, where the minimum hourly rate currently stands at $10.30.

Of San Jose's total workforce, 47 percent, or an estimated 162,000, work hourly jobs, with 43 percent of those hourly workers employed part-time or on variable schedules as their main job, up from 26 percent a decade earlier, according to the report.

"Employers have restructured employment so that the work week is shrinking for low-wage workers," Carrie Gleason, director of the Center for Popular Democracy's Fair Workweek Initiative. "The minimum wage is finally catching up, and now we're going to see more and more policymakers pay attention to hours. They recognize $15 isn't enough if you're only working part-time."

What's occurring in San Jose helps relay "an important national story about a very prosperous region with a very low unemployment rate, yet one out of three workers isn't making it every month," said Derecka Mehrens, executive director at Working Partnerships USA. "From what we've seen, the wage fight cannot be separated from the hour fight."

Mehrens' group is gathering signatures to put an initiative on the November ballot that would require employers in San Jose offer more hours to existing qualified part-time workers before hiring new part-time or temporary workers.

Opponents to scheduling mandates include the National Restaurant Association, or NRA, which has lobbied against measures under consideration in state and local legislatures, as well as one proposed in Congress. The trade association says such measures have already caused "confusion" for restaurant owners in San Francisco and could result in fewer workers being hired.

Advocates for workers have a more sympathetic ear, if not a solution, at Starbucks (SBUX), which has drawn its share of negative attention for creating havoc with the lives of its baristas through its scheduling practices. At the company's annual meeting in Seattle last month, barista Darrion Sjoquist asked CEO Howard Schultz about addressing the scheduling issues that he and his colleagues routinely face.

"It's at the top of our list to create some balance between the pressure that exists on some people who are having a difficult time with the schedule and our ability to schedule thousands of people," said Schultz. "We understand the issues and we think they are critical," he said, adding that Starbucks believes a technological tool is needed to address the issues involved with scheduling 300,000 people around the world.

The scheduling issue last week had attorneys general from California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Rhode Island expanding a probe into the use of unpaid on-call shifts and other scheduling practices in the retail industry.

"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," New York Attorney General Eric 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."

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO), Uniqlo, Aéropostale (ARO), Payless ShoeSource (PSS), Coach (COH), and the Disney Store (DIS) are among the 15 retailers sent letters asking about their use of on-call shifts, which can involve mandating workers to be available for work without a guaranteed shift. The practice is a potential violation of state reporting pay laws, which require employers give workers minimum pay when a shift is canceled or shortened.

Maryland, Minnesota and Illinois don't have reporting pay laws, but they've signed onto the letters to express concern about the impact of on-calling scheduling on workers and their families.

The inquiry follows a similar one by Schneiderman last year that resulted in six brands including the Gap (GPS), Victoria's Secret (LB) and Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) ending on-call scheduling, a move impacting a quarter million workers.

Scheduling protections were adopted last year in San Francisco and Santa Clara County, while conversely, Indiana and Alabama are among the states that have preemptively passed legislation prohibiting cities within their borders from enacting such measures.

In Seattle, which has passed paid sick-time standards and a higher minimum wage, the city council is considering legislation that would require companies offer workers more livable schedules.

By KATE GIBSON

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Brianna Roy-Rankin, 23, is just the kind of worker Target would like to retain and promote. She says she loved her job at the retailer's store in Champaign, Illinois. She had great bosses, got along well with her co-workers and enjoyed the employee discounts. But last week, after two years as a sales associate, Roy-Rankin quit her job.

“I couldn’t really plan. I was at the mercy of the scheduling system,” she says. “Otherwise, I honestly, probably, would’ve stayed.”

Roy-Rankin went to college nearby, at the University of Illinois. Before she graduated in May, she says it was a constant challenge to balance her studies and social life with her part-time job -- usually around 20 hours a week at just under $10 an hour.

Target has an unforgiving scheduling system. Roy-Rankin says she would have to submit requests to take time off for spring break or visit her parents weeks, if not months in advance -- otherwise she’d be slotted to work without recourse. She would learn about her weekly work schedule three weeks in advance, which wasn’t too bad. But then her hours would fluctuate drastically. One week, she’d be scheduled for a 8 a.m.-to-noon shift on a particular day; the next, it might be a 5 p.m.-to-11 p.m. closing shift. Eventually, it became too much to juggle.

Roy-Rankin's situation is hardly unique.

A Common Trend

Nearly three in 10 hourly workers in the United States say they rarely get consistent work schedules, according to a study released Tuesday by WorkJam, a firm that specializes in workforce scheduling technology.

What’s more, an astounding 56 percent say they get their schedules a week or less in advance. Both trends run rampant in the fast-growing service sector, especially in low-wage fields like retail and fast food. And while policies of this sort save companies money by allowing them to tailor schedules to an expected flow of customer traffic, workers say it's the source of headaches.

Joshua Ostrega, chief operating officer and co-founder of WorkJam, admits the 56 percent figure came as a bit of a shock. “I think it’s extremely high,” he says. “We were actually quite surprised.”

Workers Employed in the Retail Trade Industries (Seasonally Adjusted) | FindTheData

An especially harsh practice among retailers is what’s known as just-in-time or on-call scheduling. Under this system, workers are required to be “on call” to come in and work on a particular day even if they’re not scheduled to do so.

The industry’s profit margins are tight, says Ostrega, and companies are looking to extract savings however they can. Software-based scheduling systems do the trick by linking labor supply to consumer demand. When store traffic is low, the system calls for fewer employees; when the system projects more patrons, it demands more workers. Employers like it because it keeps them from racking up unnecessary labor costs.

Now, unpredictable scheduling is increasingly drawing the interest of public authorities.

'The Pressure's Mounting'

In April, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to major retailers that inquired about their on-call scheduling and asked whether their policies violated state law. Like seven other states and the District of Columbia, New York has so-called reporting-time laws that require employees to be paid when they report to work, even if no work is provided.

Since the letters went out, a number of high-profile companies have announced changes to their policies. The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch, which both received the notices, said they would end the practice of on-call scheduling. And Starbucks promised last year to provide more consistent scheduling to baristas. But as a recent story in the New York Times revealed, the cafe chain has failed to do so.

Robert Hiltonsmith, senior policy analyst at Demos, a progressive think tank, expects the positive trends to continue -- even if Tuesday’s survey suggests employers overall aren’t relenting on tough and irregular scheduling demands. “I think it’s a slow burn, but the pressure’s mounting,” he says.

It’s in part a question of economic self-interest, Hiltonsmith says. Burned-out workers tend to quit their jobs fairly quickly, and high turnover is expensive. That’s one of the reasons why Walmart, the nation’s largest private-sector employer, and its top competitors voluntarily hiked wages earlier this year, according to Hiltonsmith. In fact, when Walmart announced it was boosting starting pay to at least $9 an hour, it also promised to notify workers of their schedules at least two and a half weeks in advance.

Reforms like this and others -- shifts that are scheduled the same time every week -- could prevent retailers from losing employees like Roy-Rankin, the kind of people who are otherwise content at work.

There’s also mounting political pressure, which stems from growing public concern over the livelihood of service-sector workers. Hiltonsmith attributes this to the “seismic shifts in the labor force” -- the decades-long decline of manufacturing and growth in service-sector employment.

Contrary to the popular image, retail workers are not teenagers looking to make a quick buck. The median age of a retail trade employee is 38, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I think people had less concern when it wasn’t people trying to support their families,” Hiltonsmith says. “For better or worse, the service economy is the economy of the country’s future.”

Source: International Business Times

More than 300 health care activists, disability rights advocates, and organizers gathered on second floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Monday morning to oppose Senate Republicans’ Graham-Cassidy health care bill.

The bill would sharply reduce spending for Medicaid by billions of dollars by tying it to medical inflation, blow up Obamacare’s marketplaces, and open the door for states to curtail protections for patients with preexisting conditions.

Read the full article here.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was on the hot seat Tuesday when he faced Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other angry lawmakers at a Senate Banking Committee hearing designed to investigate the bank’s widespread rip-off of its customers.

Warren told Stumpf, who earns $19 million a year: “You should resign... You should be criminally investigated.”

Wells Fargo is the nation’s fourth largest bank by assets and its leading home lender.

Warren’s verbal assault on Stumpf generated considerable publicity. But this issue wouldn’t have surfaced in the first place without the hard work of several grassroots community and labor organizations, especially the Committee for Better Banks, that first brought the scandal to the attention of the media, elected officials and regulators.

Warren demanded both the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission criminally investigate Stumpf for Wells Fargo’s practice of pressuring its low-level employees to create over 2 million unwanted checking and credit-card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or permission in order to grow the bank’s stock price. Warren reminded Stumpf that during the years Wells Fargo engaged in this “scam,” Stumpf’s own portfolio of company stock increased by $200 million.

She urged Stumpf to return the compensation he received while these practices went on.

“So, you haven’t resigned, you haven’t returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven’t fired a single senior executive,” Warren told Stumpf. “Instead, evidently, your definition of accountable is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don’t have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It’s gutless leadership.”

“You squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket,” Warren said.

Wells Fargo’s official line is that the employees were acting on their own to skim extra pay from the bogus accounts. Warren questioned Stumpf about the fraudulent accounts, asking how such an operation could have occurred without the knowledge of top management.

Wells Fargo employees say they did so because of what they call the bank’s “sell or die” quota system, which put pressure on employees to engage in these practices in order to keep their jobs. They said it was a routine practice employees referred to as “sandbagging.”

Activists are up in arms over Wells Fargo’s double standard in dealing with its employees. After the scandal was exposed by grassroots advocates, the media, and government regulators, the bank fired at least 5,300 employees and refunded millions of dollars to customers. But bank reform activists are skeptical that so many employees could have acted on their own without the knowledge of higher-up bank executives.

Meanwhile, in July, in the wake of the scandal, Carrie Tolstedt, Wells Fargo’s director of consumer banking, the operation that opened the fake accounts, abruptly left the bank where she had worked for 27 years. She took with her a $124.5 million bonus. After her retirement announcement, Stumpf praised Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

Warren criticized Stumpf for failing to withdraw Tolstedt’s bonus (a practice known as a “clawback”) in light of the revelations about her division’s behavior. Stumpf said it was up to the bank’s compensation committee, comprised of board members, to decide whether to rescind Tolstedt’s bonus.

“If you have no opinions on the most massive fraud that’s hit this bank since the beginning of time, how can it be that you get to continue to collect a paycheck?” Warren asked.

Moreover, activists say that the problem goes well beyond Wells Fargo and is an industry-wide scandal.

Ruth Landaverde, a former employee at both Wells Fargo and Bank of America, said the pressure from her supervisors at both banks was so intense she developed a tic in her eye and had trouble sleeping. She told the Associated Press that in order to keep her job she was required to sell four credit cards and four auto loans each week in addition to three home mortgages or refinances.

“I wasn’t going to do something unethical, but the sales pressure was very real,” she said. “I can see why some employees did what they did.”

Landaverde is now a member of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a statewide advocacy group that works on housing and banking issues and is a member of the Committee for Better Banks, a coalition of community and labor groups. In an email this week to ACCE members and supporters, she wrote:

“When I worked for Bank of America, I felt uncomfortable when I was given a list of bank customers and told to call them and push new accounts and credit cards that could end up sticking them with unnecessary fees and debt. What’s worse, we were targeting customers in low-income communities of color much more than the customers in more affluent zip codes.”

Landaverde said that “there are still many more banks that have not committed to stop requiring their employees to push unnecessary products in order to keep their jobs. And now, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is throwing his own employees under the bus rather than accepting responsibility for the outrageous high-pressure sales culture that he and other Wall Street executives are creating!”

“I know first-hand that predatory sales exist across the U.S. banking industry,” said Cassaundra Plummer, a former teller at TD Bank and member of the Committee for Better Banks. “At TD bank, sales goals made it impossible for frontline bank workers to help customers find the financial products best suited to them. My manager would encourage customers to take out home equity lines to go on vacation which is the worst financial advice I’ve ever heard. We need to end predatory sales goals across the industry, not just Wells Fargo.”

Last year the Committee for Better Banks delivered a petition signed by more than 11,000 people to Stumpf, along with a letter noting that workers faced “pressures to meet sales quotas under strict monitoring and threat of losing their jobs, often forcing them to push unnecessary products and fees on to their customers, causing them stress and financial hardship,” and that loan servicing departments have been using similar tactics to push consumers toward riskier products they can ill afford.

The group has now launched another petition asking elected leaders in Los Angeles and other cities around the country to ban all city business with banks that force their employees to meet sales goals for high fee products such as credit cards, new accounts and home refinance loans. They say that these incentive programs create a system where bank workers are forced to engage in predatory practices against their professional and ethical beliefs.

“Wells Fargo’s action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers who have been denouncing abusive sales goals for over two years,” said Reuben Traite, an organizer with Committee for Better Banks. “The fact that Wells Fargo turned a blind eye is appalling. But these high pressure sales goals are rampant across big banks and we need to end it across the industry.”

Activists with the Los Angeles chapter of ACCE brought the issue to the attention of the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story in 2013. Once it made the papers, Los Angeles City Attorney Michael Feuer conducted his own investigation and then sued Wells Fargo.  All that got the attention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal agency created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank reform law.

Last week, CFPB director Richard Cordray, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry, and Feuer announced that they had reached settlements with Wells Fargo over its “major breach of trust.” Wells Fargo agreed to pay CFPB $100 million (the largest fine the agency has ever imposed) in addition to $50 million to the city and county of Los Angeles and $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Wells Fargo did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlements, although it issued an apology to its customers, promised to revise its sales practices, and agreed to refund consumers for fees assessed on checking and credit cards accounts they didn’t authorize.

Activists point out that the fines being levied against Wells Fargo are a drop in the bucket compared with Wells Fargo’s 2015 profits of $20 billion. It is even less than the more than $200 million in company stock that Stumpf owns. He serves on the board of directors of Target Corporation and Chevron Corporation, and until recently, on the board of the Financial Services Roundtable, a powerful industry lobby group.

The bank’s apology and refunds won’t make the issue go away. Many consumers are suing the bank as are former employees who say they were fired (or forced to resign) when they refused to engage in the fraudulent practices in order to meet the bank’s unrealistic sales quotas.

The issue first emerged in 2013 when the Los Angeles Times uncovered Wells Fargo’s illegal practices. In response to the Times story, Feuer initiated his own investigation and sued the bank, alleging it had “victimized their customers by using pernicious and often illegal sales tactics,” including unattainable quotas that pressured bank employees to “engage in fraudulent behavior.”

The CFPB undertook its own investigation and discovered that Wells Fargo employees opened as many as 1.5 million checking and savings accounts, and more than 500,000 credit cards, without consumers’ knowledge or permission.

The LA and CFPB investigations, the resulting media coverage, and Wells Fargo’s attempt to blame its lower-rung employees for the scandal led five Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee — Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Jack Reed (R.I.), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Warren — to push its Republican chairman, Richard Shelby of Alabama, to holdTuesday’s hearings. They sent Strumpf a letter last week expressing concern that consumers and low-level employees will bear the burden of the bank’s misconduct “while senior executives walk away with multimillion-dollar awards based on what the company later finds out are fraudulent practices.”

The San Francisco-based Wells Fargo has long been a target of bank reform activists for its troublesome track record of risky and reckless behavior. For more than a decade, grassroots groups have challenged Wells Fargo’s racially discriminatory lending practices and aggressive foreclosures. They have picketed at the offices and homes of the bank’s top executives, sued the bank for violating laws against racist mortgage lending, and testified before Congress, state legislatures and city councils demanding that they investigate and rein in Wells Fargo’s troublesome practices.

The activists have primarily been bank consumers and residents of neighborhoods harmed by Wells Fargo’s redlining and other practices. But the two-year-old Committee for Better Banks is comprised of bank employees as well as consumers, representing a new and potentially powerful coalition. Not surprisingly, the Committee for Better Banks is now part of the broader movement to raise wages for service-sector employees like bank tellers to $15 an hour.

The CBB is aligned with the Center for Popular Democracy, a national network of local activist groups that work on housing, banking, and workers rights issues. CPD helped set the stage for the current campaign with its study of bank workers. The CPD report revealed that some of the nation’s largest banks, including Wells Fargo and Citigroup, pressure front-line employees to engage in fraudulent practices to keep their jobs. According to the report, the bank employees try to serve customers responsibly, but feel pressure from higher-ups to meet the quotas.

A report last year by the National Employment Law Center on banking industry wages found that almost three quarters (74.1 percent) of U.S. bank tellers and almost half (44.2 percent) of bank customer service representatives earn less than $15 an hour. The median hourly wage for bank tellers is $12.44. A study by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education found that nearly one-third of the families of all tellers are on public assistance. In New York City, the capital of the nation’s banking industry, 39 percent of tellers and their family members are on some form of public assistance program.

Other groups involved in the better banking campaign include Move On, the Communication Workers of America, New York Communities for Change, ACCE, Jobs with Justice, Make the Road, and Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group.

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has called for dismantling nearly all of the Dodd-Frank reforms. In contrast, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton last week touted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's “forceful response” to the Wells Fargo scandal, adding that it was “a stark reminder of why we need a strong consumer watchdog to safeguard against unfair and deceptive practices.”

Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, a DC-based watchdog group that has played an important part in defending the CFPB from its opponents, said, “The current Wells Fargo scandal reveals why we need a strong regulatory agency that has the backs of bank consumers as well as employees.”

“Wells Fargo’s action to eliminate sales quotas is a hard-won victory for front-line bank workers like me who have been coming together in the Committee for Better Banks and working to end to high-pressure sales goals that hurt our families and communities,” said Julie Miller, a former Wells Fargo branch manager and a member of the Committee for Better Banks.

“Wells Fargo got into this scandal because it turned a deaf ear to the alarms sounded by consumers and its own workers, and its experience proves that these sales goals have no place in the consumer banking industry,” Miller said. “Predatory sales goals are rampant at big banks across the country, and we will keep on working and organizing to make sure Wells Fargo makes good on its word and that other banks follow suit by implementing fair business practices for workers and customers.”

By Peter Dreier

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