CPD IN THE NEWS

Art Reyes III is Director of Training and Leadership Development at Center for Popular Democracy. He along with the Genesee County Hispanic Latino Collaborative and a powerful group of organizers from around the country are working in Flint to be sure undocumented immigrants in Flint are getting the help they need in the midst of the water crisis there. The need is real. Many undocumented people are not getting the information they need and still more are too afraid of being detained to go to water distribution sites. It’s a legitimate fear as the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reported to detaining people in grocery stores and other areas around Flint:

Juani Olivares, says there are roughly a thousand undocumented immigrants in Flint – and many have spent years hiding from authorities to avoid deportation.

“Water was being delivered,” she says, “and they (immigrants) were not opening the door. Because that is the one rule. Do not open the door.”

Let’s face it, undocumented immigrants aren’t paranoid: The government really does want to get them.

Juani Oliveras works with the Genesee County Hispanic/Latino Collaborative. She says rumors are flying about sporadic raids at grocery stores.

“That’s another reason why people are not getting the water,” she says.

What’s worse is that many of these folks are still boiling water before drinking it because that’s what they have been told to do in the past when e. colicontaminated the city’s drinking water. In the case of lead contamination, however, it’s exactly the WRONG thing to do because it concentrates the lead even further.

This past Wednesday, Reyes and other organizers held a training for lead canvassers in Flint, setting the stage for what they hope will become regular daily canvasses until the water issue is resolved.

I spoke with Reyes after the organizing meeting to get a better understanding of what they are hoping to accomplish. He told me that there is currently no infrastructure in place to do what needs to be done in the undocumented community so they are literally building it as they go. He told me that there are an estimated 1,000 undocumented people in Flint. The goals of his group are fourfold:

First, they want to educate people about the water situation to ensure they know what precautions to take and what things to avoid (like boiling the water.)

Second, they want to make sure people are getting the water, water filters, and other necessary items that they need to stay healthy. The state has already been neglected this marginalized population and the poisoning of Flint’s drinking water is making things much, much worse.

Third, they are collecting stories from people. Unless the stories of those who are impacted are lifted up and heard, there will be nothing to stop this from happening again.

Fourth, they are trying to create a database of undocumented immigrants so that they can continue to work with them as needed until the crisis is over. This one is very difficult. The idea of getting into any database is, of course, the greatest fear of people here without documentation.

Finally, they are working to build a database of partners and volunteers who can help them with their effort.

How can you help? There are several ways. First, you can donate money. The Genesee County Hispanic Latino Collaborative has set up a fundraising page HERE.

Second, you can volunteer your time and resources to the effort. This will be an ongoing project and they will need assistance for the foreseeable future. Spanish-speaking volunteers are in particularly high demand. They also need things like storage and organizing spaces, trainers, printing, and all of the things that go along with a long-term effort like this. Click HERE to volunteer.

Third, you can donate water.

Finally, educate yourself about the issue. A good starting point is this essay by Art Reyes titled, “I Grew Up in Flint. Here’s Why Governor Snyder Must Resign. “.

One of the groups assisting with this effort is a small non-governmental agency (NGO) called Crossing Water. The group is headed up by social worker Michael Hood who has brought together around 150 social workers from around the country along with several hundred other volunteers and donors. They have already put up several billboards around Flint in both English and Spanish letting people know not to boil the water. They have plans for more billboards, including trailer mounted billboards that they can drive around Flint. They are also using donations to pay for public service announcements on television and radio. They’ve created videos on how to properly install and use water filters and teaching new parents not to use tap water to mix with baby formula. They have recruited plumbers to help replace lead-containing plumbing. This single group is making a huge difference.

Please do what you can to help with this important outreach effort. There are literally lives on the line, including the lives of babies and children.

Source: Eclecta Blog

The Avengers, and friends, assembled in Atlanta on Monday night, though without their usual armor, shields, and superpowers. The event, dreamed up by Scarlett Johansson, brought together some of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest stars—all in town filming Avengers: Infinity War at Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios—for a stage reading of Thornton Wilder’s theater classic Our Town, a benefit for hurricane relief in Puerto Rico.

Read the full article here.

"Following discussions with my office, L Brands' (LB) subsidiary Bath & Body Works has agreed to end on-call shifts for employees in all U.S. stores next month," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said Wednesday in a statement.

The agreement comes after the Columbus, Ohio-based retailer made the same moves at youth-focused retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) and underwear purveyor Victoria's Secret.

L Brands, which operates nearly 1,600 Bath & Body Works stores in the United States, declined to comment. A company source, however, said the company is phasing out on-call scheduling.

The company's move drew limited praise from one group advocating for workers, which said the change, while positive, still leaves troublesome policies in place.

"Since July, they have been relying on shift extensions at Victoria's Secret, which are on-call shifts by another name," Erin Hurley, an organizer for Rise Up Georgia in Atlanta, a partner of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. "While we celebrate the step forward, we call on L Brands to take a definitive step toward a fair workweek by giving workers shifts with definite start and end times, and enough hours to support their families," added Hurley, a former Bath & Body Works employee.

Schneiderman in August said Gap (GPS) would this month end its policy of requiring workers to remain on-call for short-notice shifts after his office launched an inquiry, requesting information about scheduling practices from 13 retailers, including Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch and Bath & Body Works.

At the time, the attorney general said his office had received reports of more employers setting shifts the night before or even just a few hours in advance. The practice left workers with little time to arrange for childcare or work other jobs.

In New York, if workers shows up for a shift that they end up not being needed for, they're legally entitled to four hours of pay. Schneiderman's investigation delved into possible violations of that law.

"Employees deserve stable and reliable work schedules to adequately plan for childcare, transportation and other basic needs," Schneiderman said, adding that his inquiry had yielded "positive results for tens of thousands of workers."

Roughly a dozen states and a few municipalities have passed legislation addressing on-call scheduling, and a bill, the Schedules That Work Act, was reintroduced on Capitol Hill in July, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, among the sponsors.

"You can't win what you don't fight for," Warren told a news conference in acknowledging that the bill stood little chance of being enacted by the Republican-led Congress.

Source: CBS News

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.

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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.

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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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