Urban Outfitters heeds call to end on-call shifts
WELL, THAT was fast! Yesterday I wrote about an "on-call" scheduling practice at Urban Outfitters that's...
WELL, THAT was fast!
Yesterday I wrote about an "on-call" scheduling practice at Urban Outfitters that's unbelievably abusive to its lowest-wage workers. Within hours of the column hitting print, Urban announced it was killing the practice for good.
Coincidence? You decide.
Here's yesterday's statement from the Philly-based billion-dollar retailer, which also owns the brands Anthropologie, Free People, Terrain and Bhldn.
"We are always looking for ways to improve, and as such we have decided to end on-call scheduling for all [Urban] brand associates throughout North America. We look forward to continuing to find ways to better fulfill our mission of providing fashion and lifestyle essentials to our dedicated customers."
This is amazing news for employees at Urban's 518 North American stores.
For years, they'd been receiving their work schedules only a few days in advance, with some shifts designated as "on call." But they wouldn't be told, until three hours before the shift was to begin, whether they'd actually be needed to work. If they weren't, they wouldn't be paid, even though they'd been required to hold that time for the company.
The unpredictability had wreaked havoc on workers, who are mostly young and female.
They were unable to schedule classes if they were in school. Or to schedule hours at a second job if they needed a full-time income. Or to reliably arrange day care or pay their bills, since their cost to do both was fixed even though their working hours weren't.
What a crappy way to treat members of the demographic that Urban targets so heavily.
"It's pretty messed up," one worker, a college student, told me. She was paying her way through school, but Urban's scheduling meant she couldn't schedule other work to help pay tuition. "It's hard to plan."
Readers reacted with disgust to the column.
"Retail needs to be called on the carpet!" wrote emailer rgrassia. "We need more people with the ability to do something to pressure these companies to change the ways they conduct themselves."
Reader Madeleine Pierucci excoriated Urban for "co-opting the '60s struggles and playing it to the detriment of its 2015 workers. Not cool." She also planned to picket Urban's Center City store next week.
And a furious churchgoer named Samantha C. vowed to spread the word throughout the National Baptist Convention to have its 100,000 church members boycott Urban's stores in protest.
"It's time for slavery to stop," she declared.
Urban's change of heart is a testament to the power of the press, says Carrie Gleason. She's director of the fair-workweek initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy and has been working for a very long time to get employers to end on-call staffing.
"The media has helped shift the public opinion in terms of what is acceptable around employers' expectations of their employees' time," she told me. "I think Urban's announcement is a direct response to the fact that the public is now holding the whole retail industry to higher standards."
I'd like to take credit for Urban's reversal, but the truth is, another media outlet has been hammering at on-call scheduling by retailers - and not just Urban - for a while now.
The online news site BuzzFeed has chronicled the issue so doggedly that the New York state attorney general in April called companies on the carpet for the practice, following his investigation into the legality of on-call staffing at 13 retailers whose New York stores employ thousands of low-wage workers.
As a result, huge chains like Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie and Gap announced plans to discontinue the practice not just in New York but nationally, improving hundreds of thousands of workers' lives.
Urban, though, had said it would discontinue the practice only in New York. Everywhere else, it would be exploitation as usual.
It turned my stomach that Philly-based Urban - a company that so many of us grew up with and feel affinity for - would treat its workers so shabbily. And I said as much in my column, which we - ahem - pushed on the Daily News front page and on Philly.com.
If that helped nudge Urban into doing the decent thing, then yesterday was a good day.
Not just for Urban's workers. But for Urban's shareholders:
As news hit that Urban would end its on-call scheduling, CNBC reported, the company's stock rallied 4.68 percent.
You're welcome, Urban.
And thank you.
Source: Philly.com
Jóvenes dreamers envían contundente mensaje a políticos demócratas de California
Jóvenes dreamers envían contundente mensaje a políticos demócratas de California
Un grupo de soñadores se dieron cita para pedir a líderes políticos que defiendan el Dream Act ante el gobierno. De no...
Un grupo de soñadores se dieron cita para pedir a líderes políticos que defiendan el Dream Act ante el gobierno. De no hacerlo, apoyarán y buscarán la ayuda de otros legisladores, afirmaron.
Mira el video aquí.
Toys 'R' Us and the Death of Retail
Toys 'R' Us and the Death of Retail
When Debbie Beard found out the company she'd worked at for 29 years, Toys R Us, was closing down, she was shocked--she...
When Debbie Beard found out the company she'd worked at for 29 years, Toys R Us, was closing down, she was shocked--she knew the company had been having financial difficulties for a while, but didn't realize it was that bad. The more she learned, though, about the way the company had been looted by private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR, the more she determined that no one else should have to go through this. Debbie and other Toys R Us workers are organizing to demand severance pay from the company, and beyond that, organizing to stop the kind of leveraged buyouts that saddle viable companies with unsustainable debt. She joins me along with Carrie Gleason of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy to explain what can be done.
Read the full article here.
More than one thousand march downtown in Black Lives Matter protest
More than one thousand march downtown in Black Lives Matter protest
To first-time organizer Sarafina Davis, Saturday’s Black Lives Matter protest was about one thing: The death of people...
To first-time organizer Sarafina Davis, Saturday’s Black Lives Matter protest was about one thing: The death of people who look like her.
“Our black men are being killed on these streets and there is no accountability,” Davis, a Pittsburgh resident, said.
Spreading fast through social media, Saturday’s demonstration started at Point State Park, where two separate groups gathered before meeting under the I-279 overpass. The protesters then made a loop through Downtown, along Liberty Avenue, Sixth Street, Grant Street and Fort Pitt Boulevard before returning to Point State Park. The march, coming after a week of carnage, lasted nearly three hours.
Police placed the number of protestors between 1,200 and 1,300 strong at its peak on Sixth Avenue.
Davis had never been involved in activism before this weekend but was drawn in because of concern for her children.
“[I realized] that could be my kid,” Davis said, referring to deaths like that of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Early Tuesday morning, Sterling was killed during a police confrontation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a parking lot where he sold homemade CDs. On Wednesday, Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, was killed during a traffic stop in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both deaths were filmed and went viral on social media.
An otherwise peaceful protest of hundreds of people in downtown Dallas Thursday night turned violent when 25-year-old Micah Johnson shot police officers, killing five and injuring seven.
At Pittsburgh’s protest, concern for the next generations inspired activist Rod Adams, from Minneapolis, who was in town for the People’s Convention, a weekend gathering of more than 1,500 people from community organizations across the country to discuss confronting social issues such as immigration and economic inequality.
“They are not only killing us, they are killing our future,” Adams said.
After two groups of protesters combined in Point State Park, they marched up Liberty Avenue before hooking onto Sixth Avenue.
Adams was out in front of the demonstration for the majority of the march, which swelled in numbers as it moved through Downtown.
“People were coming out of their businesses and taking off their aprons [to join the march],” Adams said.
The protesters stopped outside the Port Authority Building for 10 minutes to protest the January killing of Bruce Kelley Jr. in Wilkinsburg. Port Authority police shot and killed Kelley, who was black, after he stabbed and killed a police dog. After a five-month review that ended in June, the Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala found the two officers were justified in their use of force.
But Kelley’s case still makes Juliandra Jones, a Pittsburgh resident, concerned about police conduct with black people.
“We need to better train police officers in how to handle situations with minorities,” Jones said. By protesting, she hoped “the government would properly look at its policies.”
While Kelley was armed, reporting by The Guardian has shown that black people are more likely to be killed by police than white people regardless of situation, with 7.13 black people killed per million people, compared to 2.91 white people killed per million.
On Sixth Street, the protest erupted in an optimistic rendition of the chorus from Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” several times, but most chants expressed deep frustration. Protesters — and the occasional bystander — joined in chants of “the whole damn system is guilty as hell” and “if we don’t get [justice] then shut it down” throughout the march.
The protest itself cooperated with city police throughout the day. After walking down Sixth Avenue — with a stop in front of Allegheny County Courthouse — protesters hoped to march onto I-376. But a police barricade — which including some officers in tactical gear — stood in the way.
A call went out for parents to take their kids home, and protesters locked arms and marched towards the entrance to the parkway.
The police line did not budge, and leaders huddled with police officers as the crowd chanted slogans. After 10 minutes of conversation, the protest’s leaders announced the police’s intention to arrest anyone who entered the parkway. Instead, the protesters turned onto Fort Pitt Boulevard and marched back to Point State Park.
There, numerous speakers, including Adams, Davis and Brandi Fisher, another Pittsburgh activist, took to a previously set-up stage to engage the dwindled crowd, which police said was 400 to 500 people, for an hour.
Some made use of spoken word poetry when presenting their point. Despite differences in presentation, they all coalesced around one point — their struggle would be a long one requiring constant action.
“Every time a body hits the ground that looks like my brother or sister, I will be out in the streets,” Adams said. He pressed others to make the same commitment.
Fisher, who is president of the Alliance for Police Accountability, made reference to Thursday night’s shooting in Dallas.
“What the Dallas shooting shows us is that if there is no accountability, there is no justice, there is no peace,” Fisher said, harkening back to the much-used chant “No justice, no peace”.
After the speeches, protesters dispersed from the park. The protest was peaceful, with no arrests or citations reported. Adams was impressed by the turnout produced by a Facebook event and thought it showed the precarious state of the nation.
“This is amazing,” Adams, who protested in Ferguson, Missouri, said. “[But] it shows you the moment we are in in this country.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
By Stephen Caruso
Source
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.
Pro-Yellen Ad Hits the Air
Pro-Yellen Ad Hits the Air
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Derby reports. “The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign broadcast a 30-...
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Derby reports. “The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign broadcast a 30-second TV spot urging Mr. Trump to offer Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen a second term. The ad ran during 'Fox & Friends,' a morning show the president watches and often reacts to on Twitter.” The group is behind Twitter ads bashing Kevin Warsh, another candidate for the chairmanship, that have popped up in my feed over the past couple of weeks, too.
Read the full article here.
Many residents stand against Donald Trump
Many residents stand against Donald Trump
Queens residents have been among the thousands protesting President-elect Trump in Manhattan since the election. “It...
Queens residents have been among the thousands protesting President-elect Trump in Manhattan since the election.
“It was a rally and a march called together primarily by immigrants rights groups to provide a space for immigrant communities, people that are undocumented to be able to raise up the voices and the perpsectives of immigrant communities,” DRUM — South Asian Organizing Center Executive Director Fahd Ahmed told the Chronicle, adding that Sunday’s march would not be the last that they attend.
According to the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New York, more than 15,000 immigrant New Yorkers and their supporters attended the event.
“Well, basically we were marching because we will not tolerate the hate agenda, we’re here to stay and we reject that,” Ozone Park resident Julissa Bisono said. “We want to make sure that New York City continues to be a sanctuary for immigrant families and that’s why we decided to march yesterday, to make sure that President-elect Trump hears our message.”
Kenneth Shelton, a St. John’s University student, organized the march on Saturday from Union Square to Trump Tower with the news outlet BlackMatters US.
“It was just for people to vent their frustration, get out there and protest but also to show that we’re unified,” Shelton said. “We need to organize ourselves into a movement socially, politically and economically.”
“We reject his hate and refuse to live in constant fear under a president who does not regard us as human,” Queens resident Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a prepared statement. “[Sunday’s] rally and march marks our first, though certainly not last, line of resistance against Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime.”
Queens is believed to have more unauthorized immigrants than any other borough, nearly 250,000, who could face deportation.
“The immigrant communities here, they’re real hard-working families and they’re scared,” Bisono said.
According to Bisono, there is a serious fear among immigrants that they could be harmed after last week’s election.
“We had kids that came who didn’t even go to school because they were afraid to not come back the next day,” she said. “We shouldn’t be living in fear.”
For people who feel like they may be threatened by the Trump administration, the protests were an opportunity to stand in solidarity with others who are as worried.
Ahmed, whose group is based in Jackson Heights and used to be called Desis Rising Up and Moving, said that the protests are “to get people out of fear, to get them out of isolation and to build with each other.”
Although Trump has urged his supporters to not hurt others and commit hate crimes, those have spiked nationwide in the days following his election victory.
“The large number of people that came to these actions have been black communities, Latino communities — the people explicitly being told that they need to watch out and will be targeted,” Ahmed said.
By Ryan Brady
Source
Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at...
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at several locations across the country. Most complained that they often receive their schedules one week or less in advance, and that the schedules vary substantially every few weeks. Two said their stores still practiced clopenings.
The complaints were documented more widely in a report released on Wednesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, which gathered responses from some 200 self-identified baristas in the United States through the website Coworker.org.
“We’re the first to admit we have work to do,” said Jaime Riley, a company spokeswoman. “But we feel like we’ve made good progress, and that doesn’t align with what we’re seeing.” Ms. Riley maintained that all baristas now receive their schedules at least 10 days in advance.
Starbucks, whose chief executive, Howard Schultz, has long presented the brand as involving its customers and employees in something more meaningful than a basic economic transaction, has drawn fire for its workplace practices. But its struggles to address the concerns of its employees also open a window into a much larger problem.
In the last two years, the combination of a tight labor market and legal changes — from a rising minimum wage to fair-scheduling legislation that would discourage practices like clopenings — has raised labor costs for employers of low-skill workers in many parts of the country.
To help companies navigate this new landscape, a number of academics and labor advocates have urged a so-called good-jobs or high road approach, in which companies pay workers higher wages and grant them more stable hours, then recover the costs through higher productivity and lower turnover.
Even in service sectors where stores compete aggressively on price, “bad jobs are not a cost-driven necessity but a choice,” concluded Zeynep Ton, who teaches at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “Investment in employees allows for excellent operational execution, which boosts sales and profits.”
And yet, as Professor Ton is careful to point out, it is easy to underestimate the radical nature of the change required for a company to reinvent itself as a good-jobs employer, even when the jobs it provides are not necessarily so bad.
The example of Starbucks illustrates the point. Some of the company’s actions reflect an impulse to treat its workers as more than mere cogs in a giant coffee-serving machine.
Starbucks allows part-timers who work a minimum of 20 hours a week to buy into its health insurance plan after 90 days. In April, it pledged to paythe full cost of tuition for them and full-time workers who pursued an online degree at Arizona State University. And workers promoted to shift supervisor — about one for every four to eight baristas — typically earn a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage.
On the question of scheduling, the company, like many large retail and food service operations, uses state-of-the-art software that forecasts store traffic and helps managers set staff levels accordingly, while trying to honor workers’ preferences regarding hours and availability.
Charles DeWitt is vice president of business development at Kronos, one of the leading scheduling software makers, which has worked with Starbucks. He said that using the software to schedule workers three weeks in advance typically was not much less accurate than using it to schedule workers one week in advance. “The single best predictor of tomorrow is store demand a year ago, though other factors can come into play,” Mr. DeWitt said. “If it’s Monday, then you want to look at Monday this week a year ago.”
(Mr. DeWitt and others involved with such software concede that there are exceptions, like stores that are growing or declining rapidly, and that predictions often get substantially better very close to the target date.)
But there has long been a central obstacle to change: the incentives of store managers, who are encouraged by company policies to err on the side of understaffing. This makes it more difficult to build continuity into workers’ schedules from week to week. It often turns peak hours into an exhausting frenzy that crimps morale and drives workers away.
“The mood lately has not been not superpositive; they’ve been cutting labor pretty drastically,” said Matthew Haskins, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Seattle. “There are many days when we find ourselves incredibly — not even a skeletal staff, just short-staffed.”
Mr. Haskins said that his store’s manager received an allotment of labor hours from her supervisor, and that the manager frequently exceeded it. But in the last month or so, she announced that she would make an effort to stay within the allotment. “From what I understand, probably someone higher up said ‘You need to stick to that,’” Mr. Haskins said. “I know it’s got her stressed out, too.”
Benton Stokes, who managed two separate Starbucks stores in Murfreesboro, Tenn., between 2005 and 2008, described a similar dynamic.
“We were given a certain number of labor hours, and we were supposed to schedule only that number in a given week,” Mr. Stokes said. “If I had to exceed my labor budget — and I was careful not to — I would have had to have a conversation” with the district manager. “If there were a couple of conversations, it would be a write-up,” he added.
The understaffing ethos sometimes manifests itself in company policies. For example, Starbucks stores are not required to have assistant managers, and many do without them.
Ciara Moran, who recently quit a job as a barista at a high-volume Starbucks in New Haven, Conn., complained of a “severe understaffing problem” that she blamed on high turnover and inadequate training. She partly attributed this to the store’s lack of an assistant manager. “We had issues that we’d try to take to her” — the store manager — “but she had so much on her plate we let it go,” Ms. Moran said. “Problems would escalate and become a big thing.”
In other cases, the scheduling and staffing problems at Starbucks appear to arise from the way individual managers handle their tight labor budgets.
Some of the baristas said that clopenings were virtually unheard-of at their stores, but LaTranese Sapp, a Starbucks barista in Lawrenceville, Ga., said clopenings occurred at her store because the manager trusted only a handful of workers to close, limiting scheduling options.
Ms. Riley, the Starbucks spokeswoman, said the store’s scheduling software required at least eight hours between shifts, but that workers could close and open consecutively if the shifts were more than eight hours apart.
There are alternatives to help avoid such results, according to Professor Ton’s research. One of the most promising is to create a mini work force of floating relief employees who call a central headquarters each morning, as the QuikTrip chain of convenience stores common in parts of the Midwest and South has done. Because store operations are standardized, relief employees can step in seamlessly.
“If a worker gets sick, what happens is you’ve lost a quarter of your work force,” Professor Ton said of companies with small stores that lack such contingency plans. “Now everybody else has to scramble to get things done.”
(Starbucks employees are often responsible for finding their own replacements when they are sick. “A lot of times when I’m really sick, it’s less work to work the shift than to call around everywhere,” said Kyle Weisse, an Atlanta barista.)
Starbucks, which vowed to improve workers’ quality of life after The New York Times published an account of a barista’s erratic schedule in 2014, is far from the only chain that has faltered in the effort to adjust from low road to high road.
In many cases, the imperative to minimize labor costs has been so deeply ingrained that it becomes difficult to sway managers, even when higher executives see the potential benefits.
Marshall L. Fisher, an expert on retailing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled working on a consulting assignment for a large retailer and identifying a few hundred stores where the company could benefit by adding labor. Executives signed onto the change, but managers essentially refused to execute it.
“The managers were afraid to use their hours,” he said. “They were so used to being judged on ‘Did they stay within a budget?’”
In many cases companies end up going out of business rather than adapt. Economists Daniel Aaronson, Eric French and Isaac Sorkin studied the response to large increases of the minimum wage in states like California, Illinois and Oregon in the 2000s. In most states, employment barely budged two years after the higher wage kicked in. But that masked dozens of suddenly uncompetitive stores that went under, and a roughly equal number of new stores that opened.
The fact that the defunct stores were replaced by new ones suggests that, in principle, they could have evolved. But they simply were not capable of pulling it off.
Source: New York Times
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
Source
'Nueva York en un Minuto': el fiscal general Jeff Sessions le declara la guerra a la pandilla MS-13
'Nueva York en un Minuto': el fiscal general Jeff Sessions le declara la guerra a la pandilla MS-13
En otras noticias, la dueña de una floristería de Nueva Jersey es acusada de robar flores de un cementerio y el...
En otras noticias, la dueña de una floristería de Nueva Jersey es acusada de robar flores de un cementerio y el expresidente dominicano Leonel Fernández está en Manhattan para presentar su nuevo libro.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
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