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“The Hispanic Federation, a group that outraised most of the other groups for Puerto Rico relief efforts, called a...
“The Hispanic Federation, a group that outraised most of the other groups for Puerto Rico relief efforts, called a meeting in October in New York, which led to the creation of Power For Puerto Rico, a coalition that includes longtime Latino civil rights organization Unidos.us, Make the Road, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Hedgeclippers (an organization focused on exposing the connections between Wall Street and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis).”
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Fed, Eager to Show It’s Listening, Welcomes Protesters
Fed, Eager to Show It’s Listening, Welcomes Protesters
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual...
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., they were regarded by many participants as an amusing addition.
Two years later, they have won a place on the schedule.
The protesters, who want the Fed to extend its economic stimulus campaign, are scheduled to meet on Thursday with eight members of the central bank’s policy-making committee. At the start of a conference devoted to esoteric debates about monetary policy, officials will hear from people struggling to make ends meet.
The Fed’s effort to show that it is listening to its critics reflects the central bank’s broader struggle to find its footing in an era whose great challenge is not the strength of inflation, but the weakness of economic growth.
Officials are wrestling with the limits of monetary policy, the focus of the conference, even as they try to address simmering discontent among liberals who want stronger action and among conservatives who say the Fed has done too much.
The meeting also represents an unlikely victory for Ady Barkan, the 32-year-old lawyer who decided in 2012 that liberals should pay more attention to monetary policy. He now heads the “Fed Up” campaign, a national coalition of community and labor groups that plans to bring more than 100 protesters to Jackson Hole.
“We want to make sure that regular voices are being heard,” Mr. Barkan said in beginning the campaign two years ago. The American economy, he said, was not working for all Americans — particularly not for blacks and other minority groups.
Fed officials so far have chosen to accommodate the group by applauding its efforts at public education, not by seriously engaging its arguments that interest rates should be raised more slowly. Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which hosts the Jackson Hole conference, arranged Thursday’s meeting with the activists. She said in an interview earlier this year that the Fed must balance job growth with other issues, like financial stability.
“I am completely sympathetic,” she said of the group’s concerns.
But she cautioned that the Fed’s powers were limited. Pushing too hard to lower unemployment could lead to higher inflation, or speculative bubbles, that would force the Fed to raise interest rates more quickly. The resulting economic volatility could end up doing more harm than good.
“The Federal Reserve has become somehow the answer to many problems far beyond what we can actually address,” she said. “I wish I could fix all of it with a tool like monetary policy. But we can’t.”
Even Mr. Barkan’s supporters acknowledge the long odds. Fed Up’s budget has grown to $2 million this year, from $145,000 in 2014, mostly from Good Ventures, a nonprofit foundation created by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, which describes the campaign as “relatively unlikely to have an impact.”
Fed Up’s more visible success has come in pursuit of a longer-term goal: advocating for changes in the Fed’s governance that could eventually shift its decision-making.
In a report published earlier this year, Fed Up highlighted the Fed’s lack of diversity. There are no blacks or Hispanics among the 17 officials on the Fed’s policy-making committee of 12 regional bank presidents and five governors. No black or Hispanic has ever served as president of a regional reserve bank.
Moreover, the report said that whites composed 83 percent of the directors of the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks, who select the regional presidents.
Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said that the absence of minorities was “quite troubling.”
“Those kinds of persistent absences of key demographic groups really suggest that the appointment process, there is something that can be fixed there,” he said.
Fed Up also argued that bank executives should not sit on regional Fed boards. Under current law, bankers hold three of the nine seats on each board. The regional reserve banks are owned by the commercial banks in each district, although they operate under the authority of the Fed’s board, a government agency whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
In May, 127 congressional Democrats signed a letter to Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, calling attention to the Fed’s lack of diversity and the influence of the banking industry.
On the same day, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said in a statement that “Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that common sense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve Banks — are long overdue.”
Two months later, the Democratic Party adopted a campaign platform that included similar language, the first time in recent decades it mentioned the Fed.
Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College, said Fed Up’s greatest chance for significant influence was not in framing the current debate about interest rates, but in changing the Fed itself. He co-wrote a report that the campaign published Monday detailing a proposal to make the Fed a fully public institution.
“Having a diverse set of policy makers — including African-Americans and Hispanics — will influence the Fed’s decision-making,” he said. “And it should. The public should have confidence that the public is well represented at the F.O.M.C. table.”
Mr. Barkan started the “Fed Up” campaign after joining the Center for Popular Democracy in 2012, a few years after graduating from Yale Law School. He had read a 2011 article by the journalist Matthew Yglesias, titled “Fed Up.” Unions and other advocacy groups were focused on minimum-wage laws. Mr. Barkan was compelled by the argument that they also should be focused on interest rates.
“Even if they move once less over the course of several years, that’s still massive,” he said earlier this year. “The number of people who have jobs because of that, or higher wages, that dwarves a $15-an-hour wage increase in a smaller city.”
The campaign has gained traction in part because the Fed is eager to show that it is listening. During the first protest two years ago, Mr. Barkan approached Ms. Yellen, who listened politely and invited him to bring a group of workers to Washington, where she met with them in November 2014.
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who plans to attend the Thursday meeting, made a point last year of visiting the parallel conference Mr. Barkan staged on the sidelines of the Fed event. And Mr. Barkan’s group has now succeeded in persuading each of the regional reserve presidents to meet with groups of local workers.
Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, met with Fed Up’s local affiliate, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, this month, telling the group that he shared their concern about the persistence of higher rates of unemployment among blacks and other minority groups.
Mr. Kashkari also accepted an invitation to spend a day with one of the group’s members, Rosheeda Credit, a Minneapolis resident who described the struggles she and her boyfriend faced to cover the cost of rent and child care for their five children.
“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually — it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Mr. Kashkari, who arrived at the bank in January, told reporters after the meeting. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
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April 15: National Protests on Tax Day Demand Trump Release His Tax Returns
April 15: National Protests on Tax Day Demand Trump Release His Tax Returns
WASHINGTON - Today, the National Working Families Party announced their participation in the Tax Day March. President...
WASHINGTON - Today, the National Working Families Party announced their participation in the Tax Day March. President Trump’s financial ties to Russia are causing growing questions for both Democrats and Republicans. As a result, thousands of people plan to gather in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, April 15, 2017, at 11 a.m. The Tax March was an idea that started on Twitter, but has gained momentum on and offline, with over 135 marches planned in cities across the country...
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Car wash activists release report on John Lage
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the...
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the owner of several car washes with labor law violations is still paid by the city to clean city-owned cars.
Created and distributed by Make the Road New York, Center for Popular Democracy, New York Communities for Change and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the report includes public documents that they believe show that city taxpayers have “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting” John Lage and his associate Fernando Magalhaes.
According to the report, between 2007 and 2013, Lage Car Wash Inc. had contracts with the New York City Police Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) worth over $300,000 combined. Also, the city paid Lage Car Wash at least $135,924 for the past three years for car wash services and almost $38,000 to other entities that are controlled by Lage or Magalhaes. Last year, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation in Lage’s business practices.
Currently, car wash employees of Lage’s report that they work over 50 hours a week for an hourly wage of $6 without tips or about $7.30 including tips and including overtime. Back in 2005, the U.S. Labor Department sued Lage on charges he and 15 of his companies “willfully and repeatedly” violated wage laws. The suit ended with Lage paying $4.7 million in wages and fines.
None of this was of much surprise to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union President Stuart Appelbaum.
“This report is proof that Lage Car Wash Inc. and its treatment of workers is not fair to the workers, nor do these conditions uplift and sustain our communities,” said Appelbaum. “New York City should quickly take action and truly reconsider doing business with a company who operates in this manner.”
Last week, car wash workers and supporters attended the Car Wash Workers General Assembly, where they discussed their experiences working for Lage-owned companies.
“We learned from the strike at Sunny Day [in the Bronx] and the struggle at Soho [in Manhattan] that we can defend our rights and win, and we are no longer going to accept mistreatment and poverty wages,” said Hector Gómez, a car wash worker who worked at the recently closed Lage Car Wash in Soho and currently works at Sutphin Car Wash. “Just think how much more we can win when all the car washes in New York City are organized and united.”
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These Organizations Are Working To Help Puerto Rico's Recovery Efforts
These Organizations Are Working To Help Puerto Rico's Recovery Efforts
Puerto Rico was badly damaged by Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars worth of property damage....
Puerto Rico was badly damaged by Hurricane Maria. The storm caused billions of dollars worth of property damage. Efforts to repair and rebuild houses, roads, and telecom infrastructure are going to take months. Around half of the U.S. territory's residents lack cell phone service. More than eight out of every ten people in Puerto Rico still don't have electricity.
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Líderes del Congreso reanudarán negociación con la Casa Blanca sobre futuro de “Dreamers”
Líderes del Congreso reanudarán negociación con la Casa Blanca sobre futuro de “Dreamers”
Grupos como “United We Dream”, “Women´s March” y “CPD Action” reiteraron hoy que, en las próximas primarias, apoyarán a...
Grupos como “United We Dream”, “Women´s March” y “CPD Action” reiteraron hoy que, en las próximas primarias, apoyarán a candidatos rivales que estén dispuestos a proteger a la comunidad inmigrante, si los demócratas no cumplen su promesa a los “Dreamers.”
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Quit Your Job and Go to Work
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off...
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off delivering a mirror. Her van beckoned at the curb. It was branded in Google’s playful primary colors and logo, and on the side was the image of a package getting dropped from a parachute, easy-peasy. Michanne’s job was to make same-day, seamless deliveries of bottled water and kitty litter for Google Express, but she doesn’t actually work for Google Express — not directly, anyway. If you looked carefully, just below the van door, a few small, gray letters spelled out something most people didn’t realize: this vehicle wasn’t Google’s after all. It belonged to a company called 1–800Courier.
That day had actually been a good one. Michanne, who is 27, had worked the full eight hour shift that she’d been scheduled by 1–800Courier — one of several companies that delivers for Google Express in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City. But full days like that were becoming rare. (She didn’t want to use her last name for privacy reasons.)
When I called her back a month later and asked her to rate her job from 1 to 10, she was more upfront about her level of annoyance: “If 1 is a nightmare, I’m like a 1.5.” In fact, she’d quit.
Her complaint came down to this: she says 1–800Courier had verbally assured her full-time work when she started with the company back in October. It was a paycheck the new mother was counting on, one that didn’t leave her time to work another job. And in the company’s scheduling app she was technically scheduled for 40 hours a week for weeks in advance.
Yet, increasingly, her actual hours were decided the day of work. Michanne had to check her email an hour and a half before her first shift started to see if she would actually get to work the hours she’d been allotted. Many times she did not. She was a supposedly full-time employee who was, effectively, on-call. She’d put aside the day so she could work, but when it turned out they didn’t need her, that meant no work — and no pay.
In April, an email plunked into Michanne’s inbox, describing what she says was business as usual:
Even when she got the go-ahead to turn up for the day, Michanne’s shifts would often be cut once she was already at work. Around 5 p.m., as she ate in her van during an hour-long meal break, she would frequently get a call from the dispatcher, telling her to go home early without working her scheduled second shift. She’d still get paid something— California law mandates payment of between two hour and four hours of “reporting time” depending on the length of a cancelled shift. But it was still a huge issue: Although she was expected to be on-call for 40 hours a week, shift changes meant she was regularly dipping down to 25 hours of paid work, and even once as low as 17 hours, she recalls. At $13 an hour, she was hoping for $520 of work each week — but 17 hours is just $221.
Google pointed questions towards its contractor, which manages all scheduling for its deliveries. 1–800Courier’s California Director of Operations David Finney said that across the industry, the delivery business slows down after the holidays. “I personally empathize with that,” he said about employees whose hours get cut. “But at the same time, look at any industry in the state of California — especially in the service industry — and some days it’s just like ‘Hey, we’re sorry, we don’t need you to come in.’”
Another employee of 1–800Courier, who asked to remain anonymous so as to not irk the company, says the scheduling problems were sometimes bad for the company, too. Back in January and February, when business seemed especially slow, this worker would clock in and sit in the delivery car near the hub for hours, waiting to be dispatched. “I’d have movies picked out to watch, I got a pillow and took naps, and had stuff I wanted to read and write. I’m getting paid to do nothing. But I wouldn’t call
[dispatch] and say, ‘I need a route.’ It didn’t bother me at all.”
What did bother the Netflix-watching worker was this: more than 10 times during seven months on the job, their first shift was cut while it was already happening. But the worker was booked on to a second shift, and was made to wait around until that started. Since driving the vehicle back to the parking lot in Silicon Valley from the San Francisco dispatch hub would eat up most of the time, the worker would often drive to the movies or the mall in the city to kill time until the second shift. (The worker once got written up for taking the vehicle to Safeway during that time — saying they expected employees to just wait in the vehicle for the next shift, or drive it back to the Silicon Valley lot.)
The complaint is echoed by another former 1–800Courier worker who recently quit: “I was really getting irritated. They said ‘it’s not as high demand right now, we don’t have a lot of orders coming through, so we’re cutting the hours.’” A couple times, while the worker was in a carpool on the way to work, the dispatcher would call and say, “Oh, we removed you from the 12–5 window, you can just work for 5:30 to 10. I’d just go home and say ‘Remove me from the last window.’” The current driver says things have picked up lately, especially after a major lay-off of drivers in March that has given those who remain more work to do. 1-800's David Finney wouldn’t confirm a layoff, but said drivers are now regularly working overtime hours.
The whole idea behind the on-demand economy — touch-of-a-button delivery, often guaranteed within minutes — creates the potential for a sudden rush or dearth of customers at any moment. So how does a company make sure that the right amount of workers are around at the moment it needs them to be?
You’d think that this is something that Google, the emperor of analytics, might be able to figure out. But the company it had chosen to organize the deliveries, 1–800Courier, had not. Sometimes workers lucked out and watched movies in their cars, but more often they suffered for their employer’s failure. There may have been an abundance of employees scheduled for shifts, but ultimately the people were just as on-demand as the Costco kitty litter they delivered.
Outside of Silicon Valley, American labor is looking a lot like this already. The old, sanctified status of “employee” is getting egged in the face. The days of blue-collar job, suburban tract home, Disney vacay, and pension awaiting at the end of the 9–5 rainbow looks like a curious blip on the way to a more profit-maximized, capitalist future. It’s the age of the precariat: unions are nearly kaput, many will only know pensions from history books, and most “at will” workers can be fired as easily as Uber can kick its drivers off the app. Now many old titans of industry have latched onto this idea of on-call shift work — which many call “just-in-time scheduling,” — a grayish labor abuse tailored for the age of the text message that has lawmakers hustling to curb it.
Since the recession, millions of workers have taken part-time gigs when they’d prefer to have full-time ones — especially in hospitality and retail. And those part-time jobs increasingly jerk the workers around: In a University of Chicago study of young workers in hourly jobs, 41 percent said they got their shifts a week or less in advance. It gets worse from there: as a recent story in Harper’s Magazine laid out, companies use software to track customer flow down to the minute; resulting in managers who ask workers to be on call for work shifts, or clock out while on the job and hang around without pay during slow times to see if the workflow will pick up. Sarah Leberstein is a senior staff attorney from the National Employment Law Project, which has been monitoring the hellish scheduling practices. “The companies want to unload all the flexibility onto the workers, but workers can’t afford to live in such a state of flux.”
This spring, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 national retailers including Urban Outfitters to Target to Gap to Sears, questioning them about using software tracking systems and whether they made employees get the go-ahead for work less than a day before a shift:
Re: Request for Information Regarding “on call shifts”
Our office has received reports that a growing number of employers, particularly in the retail industry, require their hourly workers to work what are sometimes known as “on call shifts” — that is, requiring their employees to call in to work just a few hours in advance, or the night before, to determine whether the worker needs to appear for work that day or the next. If the employee is told that his or her services are not needed, the employee will receive no pay for that day, despite being required to be available to appear on the job site the next day or even just a few hours later on the same day. For many workers, that is too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay.
If “just-in-time scheduling” sounds a whole lot like on-demand work, that’s because it is.
It’s not just in America that this practice is increasing. In Europe, it’s called the “zero hour” job — you’re promised work, but guaranteed nothing. And these contracts have been causing controversy in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which saw a dramatic rise in the number of just-in-time jobs as employers offloaded their risks onto the workforce. Today, almost 2 million jobs in the U.K. are now on-call. In some cases, workers are denied the benefits of full-time employees, or are prevented from finding other paying gigs without the permission of their employer — even if that employer cancels all of their shifts.
And it’s not just service industry jobs: zero hours have spread into other areas of the British economy, too. Recent figures suggest 13 percent of all healthcare workers and 10 percent of all education jobs are now in the same kind of hole that Michanne found herself in. (Finney from 1–800 said he does not consider the company’s scheduling to fall into the “just-in-time” trend.)
“The writing on the wall is we’re going to see more of an Uber and Lyft approach to workforce management in more industries,” says Carrie Gleason from the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based labor and social justice nonprofit. “You can see that in the just-in-time scheduling — you only want to pay for people when they’re doing the most productive work. The cost of doing business is put on the worker, so any time they’re not producing a car fare or a retail sale, it’s the worker paying for that time, not the company.”
On-demand companies pitch themselves as ultimate disrupters, breaking free of stuffy, old-world straitjackets of work. For many companies in this exploding area, there are no zero hour jobs — because the jobs have no set hours at all. The workers are independent contractors, not employees, and, at many companies, can log into work when they choose. In fact, Silicon Valley’s Chief Optimism Officer, Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist who is funding Lyft and Instacart to build our app-based freelancer future —recently waved away a reporter’s comment about the precarious app workers in the New Yorker:“Maybe there’s an alternate way of living,” he said. “A free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”
It also saves companies payroll taxes, wages, benefits — and the headache of scheduling workers. (“What other job out there can you just turn it on when you want to start and off when you want to stop — whenever you feel like it?” asked Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in his five-year company anniversaryspeech last week.)
“Uber doesn’t care if 100 or 200 are reporting to work because Uber will get the same percentage of the fare” says Leberstein, the National Employment Law Project attorney. “They’re shifting the burden of deciding whether there’s enough work onto the workers.” Many companies go so far as to give drivers a weekly breakdown on the most high-earning hours — in fact, there are entire apps dedicated to helping workers track that for themselves.
Companies claim these freedom-loving toilers will flee the moment they’re pinned down by shifts or bureaucracy. Their own internal studies suggest this is true: one Uber-commissioned poll of drivers showed more than 70 percent preferred to be their own boss rather than work a 9-to-5. About 50 percent of Lyft’s drivers drive five hours a week or less. A survey by the Freelancer’s Union found 42 percent went freelance to have more flexibility in their schedule.
“If everybody has to work a certain amount of hours, then it would put the model at risk because then it would be a very rigid model,” says Pascal Levy-Garboua, the head of business at Checkr, and organizer of a conference about the on-demand economy held in San Francisco last month. He has driven for Lyft in the past anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week to see how it works for himself — then goes months without driving at all. “That would be the opposite of on-demand. Demand and supply are elastic, and the model works because there’s an equilibrium. If supply” — the industry’s term for what the rest of the world usually calls “workers” — “is not elastic, the model breaks.”
Yet a survey of more than 1,000 workers released last month by Requests for Startups, a tech-booster newsletter, popped a hole in what had been the great selling point of contract work in the new economy:
Work hours are demand-dependent despite the touted schedule flexibility. Although schedule flexibility is the #1 stated reason for joining a company as a contractor, ‘Peak hours / demand’ ranked highest amongst influencers of their work schedules, with nearly 50% selecting it as a very important influencer (‘My Family’ was the 2nd highest at 35%). This influence is particularly glaring when comparing current vs. ideal hours of ridesharing respondents, whose responses suggest that their ideal working hours aren’t too far off from the traditional 9–5.
Among the top reasons for leaving the job were insufficient pay (43 percent) and — spoiler alert for industry cheerleaders — insufficient flexibility (26 percent). In short, while the apps may be good for people who have another job and merely want to pad their income, if workers want to make a living on these apps, they actually have little flexibility — they need to work full-time or more, and they better be signed into work during the peak times.
The on-demand workplace is not one-size-fits-all: while complete flexibility works well for driving services with a 24-hour demand and a ready stable of drivers, companies dependent on burritos and Thai take-out reaching hungry customers have to be a bit more organized about who is on hand at meal times.
To get around this problem, many companies have started doing to their independent contractors exactly what 1-800Courier does to its employees: schedule them onto shifts.
At Postmates, an on-demand food delivery company, contractors sign up the week before for shifts in down-to-the-hour increments — those who confirm their availability are offered potential jobs first, meaning they can end up making substantially more than those hopping on the app to work spontaneously. As further motivation, Postmates also guarantees couriers who sign up for shifts a minimum of $15 an hour on weekends — if their jobs don’t add up to that, Postmates will pay them directly.
Scheduling contractors is a legally gray thing to do — since shifts are one of the IRS’ criteria in determining that a worker is an employee. (Indeed, Postmates, like many companies, is currently facing a lawsuit over classifying the couriers as contractors.)
Postmates says they aren’t shifts, exactly: workers aren’t bound to the hours they pre-select — they could just not sign into the app during the shift. Yet there are consequences. If they miss five of their allotted hours in a week, they’ll be suspended from work for 48 hours, as this email forwarded by one courier warns:
In order to avoid banishment, Postmates contractors ask for swaps on the app, much like employees have to do when they can’t make a shift.
And, like ridesharing companies, Postmates has another mechanism to get unscheduled contractors out on the road during peak times: its own surge-pricing model called “blitzes.” While the courier’s take of the delivery fee always stays the same —80 percent — blitzes increase that fee two or even three times the usual amount.
Postmates also polices the workers once signed in: one courier in New York City who asked not to be named (he didn’t want to get kicked off the app) showed me texts from the company: sometimes Postmates asks him why he’s not accepting more jobs, sometimes it commands him to stop only accepting jobs that he determines will be worth his time, and sometimes it suspends him temporarily from the app entirely. A Postmates spokeswoman says the real-time texts are aimed at getting feedback on why certain jobs aren’t attractive to couriers.
The take-away: as traditional jobs are looking more on-demand, on-demand contractor ones aren’t looking as flexible as they claim.
So where does that leave us? Employment and contractor labor models already seem to be converging at some sort of semi-flexible purgatory.
In the eyes of those who cry that companies like Uber or Lyft or Postmates are getting rich off exploiting a labor loophole — blithely skipping out of paying wages, benefits, and expenses like gas because they classify workers as freelancers—companies like 1–800Courier are actually playing the good guy. (Or at least the less evil guy.) The company has official employees which it pays $12.50 to $13 an hour, plus worker’s comp, overtime, and expenses, including gas and the occasional parking ticket.
“I do want to go on the record to say we try really hard to do right by our employees,” Finney from 1–800Courier says. “We’re not going to pass that cost onto someone else so we can save a buck… We’re practically one of the only companies in the state of California that uses the employee model. It’s the right thing to do, and, in the long run, it will be the best solution because we’ll be able to provide the best service because we have employees. With independent contractors, there’s a lot of control you give up because you can’t tell independent contractors what to do.”
Still, 1–800Courier's own problems show that employers in the on-demand economy have to be adept at managing their workflow. Otherwise they’ll lose money on wasted labor when there’s low demand, or be caught short when there’s a sudden surge.
This is not impossible. Already some on-demand companies claim to have figured it out.
One vocal proponent of employees in the industry is Managed by Q’s CEO Dan Teran, who has written about the decision to employ its workers to clean and manage offices in New York City. Their workers get to choose their work days and receive a steady schedule, and the company books them at worksites that are on convenient subway routes from their home or other job sites. Still, the company gets off easy since most of the workflow is pre-determined and consistent week to week.
The San Francisco food service Munchery has been also held up as one of the good guys in the new push-button delivery business — one of a short list that employs its couriers. One San Francisco bike messenger named Jennifer told me Munchery pays $18-an-hour plus tips from a collective tip pool — much higher than minimum wage. Still, Munchery experienced its own trip-ups. Jennifer told me that after she started working for them at the beginning of the year, there were too many messengers working the four-and-a-half hour dinner delivery window. “They were just sitting around waiting. I was told that it had been really slow for many months,” she says.
Around the end of January, Jennifer says Munchery laid off 11 bike messengers. (CEO Tri Tran would not give details of the company’s staffing, but says the layoffs were not a huge correction considering the size of his payroll: “Ten people we need to shift around — that’s a very small number for the workforce we have.”) Munchery also gets out ahead of its demand by putting parameters on how instantaneously “on-demand” it can be: outside of San Francisco’s city limits, you have to have ordered dinner by 2:00 in the afternoon, and choose an hour-long delivery window.
The workflow problems seem to be resolved for now. Since the layoffs, Jennifer says she’s delivered a steady flow of meals with little loafing.
Still, Munchery has a strong advantage: people generally eat dinner at a predictable time. Consistency is a harder promise in truly in-the-moment businesses, like Uber and Lyft, Postmates, or Google Express. How can employees ever be scheduled with perfect accuracy in those businesses? Does an hourly employee have to work rigid shifts?
Shannon Liss-Riordan is a Boston-based labor attorney suing many on-demand companies over their attempts to classify workers as contractors. She says flexible shifts aren’t incompatible with employee status: “That’s total BS. Employees can have flexible work schedules, employers are doing that all the time. All of these arguments being made are real red herrings that they’re trying to throw out there. It’s part of the whole ‘Oh, the workers love this, because they love the flexibility.’ You can give them flexibility, andpay their worker’s comp. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” She cites one precedent-setting California case about cucumber growers who were found in California Supreme Court to be employees, even though they could set their own hours.
Of course, salaried, white-collar workers — who can call their own shots and rarely earn overtime — often have a great deal in flexibility at work. That’s harder for employees getting paid by the hour. Could part-time employees log in and out of work willy nilly, paid by the hours they actually work? Highly unlikely. If companies have to pony up for the workers, there’s little benefit to them for allowing workers to come and go as they please. Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers, which helps on-demand workers find and manage their workload, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the base cost of having employees. Companies only start recovering their employee costs if workers are putting in a baseline of hours, but not overtime, “so you’d probably have a floor and a cap [on hours], and then not more than eight hours a day. You’d start to see a lot of constraints that defeat why people work in the sharing economy.”
That’s exactly what the disgruntled New York City Postmates courier told me. Despite getting pestered by texts to accept more jobs and bad tips, he explained why he stayed: “The only thing I like about this job is the freedom and flexibility.” Take away that, and he’d do what companies fear the most, especially as the competition for these workers grows: he’d never sign in for work again.
Which was exactly what Michanne at 1-800Courier did, after being forced to be flexible when she wanted stable work. In late April, she quit. Ironically, even though she was an employee, her reasons for leaving were the same as all those on-demand workers who were surveyed: lack of flexibility and low pay. She now works at a car dealership, 9-to-6.
It appears 1–800, on the other hand, is only ramping up. In the last month, the company has blanketed Craigslist with job ads for Google Express drivers to deliver for a “new upscale concierge service,” “a really cool company” to deliver retail items to homes and businesses around Silicon Valley. “It makes me wonder why they fired all those people, if they’re just going turn around and hire more,” the current employee told me while sitting in her van waiting
for a second shift to begin last week. “Just so you can fire everyone again?”
Among the listed perks in the ad? “Stable schedules” and “multiple shift choices.”
Source: Mic
Fed chairman defends interest rate hikes as Trump’s attacks show no sign of working
Fed chairman defends interest rate hikes as Trump’s attacks show no sign of working
Several protesters from the progressive group Fed Up stood outside the conference room where Powell delivered the...
Several protesters from the progressive group Fed Up stood outside the conference room where Powell delivered the speech. Much like Trump, they say raising rates again will harm working people’s chances of getting jobs and better pay. The protesters wore green T-shirts reading “The Fed wants more of us unemployed.
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Immigrant group targets Wells Fargo for supporting ‘Trump campaign of hate’
Immigrant group targets Wells Fargo for supporting ‘Trump campaign of hate’
Advocates for undocumented immigrants gathered outside 3 Wells Fargo Center in uptown Charlotte Wednesday to demand the...
Advocates for undocumented immigrants gathered outside 3 Wells Fargo Center in uptown Charlotte Wednesday to demand the bank cut all ties with companies that profit from deportations.
Hector Vaca of Action NC says the goal of the event is to get Wells Fargo to pull its money out of private prisons and immigrant detention centers. The protesters are also demanding the bank use its political influence to stop plans for a wall along the Mexican border.
Read the full article here.
Black Unemployment Rate 2015: In Better Economy, African-Americans See Minimal Gains
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years....
International Business Times - March 8, 2014, by Aaron Morrison - Cyril Darensbourg has been unemployed for 10 years. As shocking as he knows that sounds to those who don’t know him personally, the 48-year-old native of New Orleans had enjoyed a 15-year career managing restaurants in Chicago and New York, after taking a chance on a dream and ending his third year of studying electrical engineering in Louisiana. Years of job-application submissions and temporary work here and there has persisted for far too long. Darensbourg is one of close to 2 million African-Americans in the U.S. who are currently unemployed and looking for work.
Across the American economy, the dominant story during the past several months has been a sustained recovery that resuscitated a dormant job market and the accompanying unemployment rate that has plunged below pre-Great Recession levels. But if better days are here for many workers, this feeling is shared to a lesser degree by African-Americans, whose unemployment rate is still considered high and has long been double the rate for whites. Among black working-age people, however, the unemployment rate since February 2014 has dropped more quickly than among nonblack workers.
On the surface, that improvement should signal a triumph, but it is accompanied by an asterisk, given the fact that nonblack workers’ unemployment rates fell much earlier and faster during the recovery. Government data indicates recent job creation has been less beneficial to African-American workers when compared with whites, Asians and Hispanics: Basically, blacks had more ground to make up and their labor-force representation is skewed toward lower-wage industries in which there are higher turnover rates, one study found.
These clear-cut differences mean that for people such as Darensbourg, who have been out of work for periods of several months or several years, other factors exaggerate the length of their unemployment. Many African-Americans find it hard to dismiss completely the role that race plays in their difficulty finding work, even with federal laws making discrimination illegal. Studies have found that even when black applicants possess qualifications that are on par with white applicants, variables as simple as their names or as complex as the breadth of their professional networks can many times hold them back.
“I’ve never felt secure, in my entire adult life working,” said Darensbourg, who is now married with two kids and living with his family in a New York apartment. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 eliminated his management-level job at a restaurant located within the no-traffic zone, he was forced to look for work in other restaurants, which he said wouldn’t pay him at his previous annual salary of nearly six figures.
“I’ve been in disbelief,” said Darensbourg, a 6-foot-5-inch, 220-pound man who is often told his presence is at worst intimidating and at best unforgettable. During an interview for a job he was certain he would get, he recalled feeling his younger, white, female interviewer was put off by his size and confidence. “Over time, I didn’t know what to do,” he said of the experience.
“People in my situation are giving up. They are just adapting their lives to where they are. I’m not thinking about trying to buy a home or going on vacation. I don’t know how retirement is going to work,” Darensbourg said.
Unemployment Among Blacks Still High
In February, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 10.4 percent, while the comparable rates for whites, Hispanics and Asians were 4.7 percent, 6.6 percent and 4.0 percent, in that order, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday. The national unemployment rate was 5.5 percent last month. Last year, 23.7 percent of those who are black and unemployed had attended some college, 15.4 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 4.5 percent had advanced degrees.
A 2014 study by the Young Invincibles, a nonpartisan education and economic opportunity advocacy group, found an African-American college graduate has the same job prospects as a white high-school dropout or a white person with a prison record. The study attributed the gap to racial discrimination.
The experience of joblessness for African-Americans can have a lasting effect on their economic mobility, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal think tank in New York that released a report on black unemployment this week. It was prepared with the technical assistance of the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute in Washington. On an hourly basis during the past 15 years, black workers’ wages have fallen by 44 cents, while Hispanic and white workers’ wages have risen by 48 cents and 45 cents, respectively, according to the report. Black wealth has also shrunk, while Hispanic and white wealth has stabilized.
Since March 2010, black employment climbed by about 2.3 million jobs, a 15.0 percent increase, and the black employment-population ratio rose to 54.8 percent from 52.0 percent, according to government data. Over the same period, white employment climbed by about 3.8 million jobs, a 3.4 percent increase, and the employment-population ratio rose to 60.1 percent from 59.5 percent. Because whites had less ground to make up, the increase for blacks, while statistically significant, still wasn’t large enough to suggest that they reaped more than a modest share of the gains in the economic recovery.
Most jobs that came back during the recovery, close to 45 percent, were lower-wage jobs, such as those in the retail and service industries, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s report. Those industries employ 1.85 million more workers today than they did at the beginning of the recession. The data indicate African-American representation is skewed toward the lower-wage end, rather than toward either the mid-wage range or higher-wage end, where fewer jobs came back.
The center said the U.S. Federal Reserve’s recovery initiative to stimulate job creation through its monetary policies has been most beneficial to workers in higher-wage industries and to workers in regions of the U.S. where those jobs exist, such as on Wall Street. Even with the apparently gloomy outlook, economists say things are improving for black job seekers. “The economic recovery is finally beginning to take hold,” said Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “The rate of growth that we’re seeing now, this has only been happening for a year.”
Economists have stressed the Fed’s focus should be on genuine full employment. That’s been President Barack Obama’s argument for addressing joblessness among all Americans. But critics have said this approach ignores structural reasons -- lower educational attainment and higher rates of criminal convictions -- for African-American joblessness that is more prone to fluctuation than whites. “Assuming that monetary policy continues to function in a way that allows the recovery to proceed, the prospects for finding a job should improve for African-Americans,” Wilson said.
Education Can Make A Difference (Usually)
African-Americans who have achieved higher-education degrees -- a key investment leading to the middle class -- still find themselves more likely to face long-term unemployment than their white, Hispanic and Asian counterparts. According to the Center for Popular Democracy’s study, the only proven solution to this problem are those Fed programs that ideally stimulate job creation for workers of all experience and skill levels. But that still has not been robust enough to help the broadest swath of African-American workers.
Tamica Thompson said she could use preferential hiring consideration, although she didn’t believe she needed it before her long-term unemployment set in. Thompson’s difficulty in finding a job puzzles her. A 30-year-old born to Jamaican immigrants in New York, Thompson joined the U.S. Army in 2002, right after she graduated from high school. She was stationed in South Korea, and left active duty four years later to earn a bachelor’s degree in health-service management from Berkeley College in New York. She later obtained a master’s degree in public administration from Pace University in New York.
But even with those credentials and her military experience, Thompson has struggled to find a job that values her skill set. When she did interview for a promising job at a nonprofit development corporation -- for which the hiring manager told her she was the sole applicant -- she later discovered the position was given to someone else. She also worried that the formatting of her paper resume, which received a harsh critique from a job-placement counselor, was a factor in the length of her unemployment.
“I was unemployed for a good eight months until I found myself here,” Thompson said, referring to a stipend-supported internship for Operation: GoodJobs, a work-placement program run by the Goodwill Industries for Greater New York and Northern New Jersey, an initiative that helps military veterans and their families find jobs and training opportunities. The irony of her current situation is not lost on Thompson, who works to help other veterans find jobs while she scrapes by on the stipend. “Because I was not working, I was getting behind on my rent. I couldn’t do even the simple things anymore. Money was so limited for me. That caused me to be depressed, sad and angry. It’s a little better now, but I’m still struggling,” she said.
Race And Class Are Factors In Unemployment
Despite federal laws protecting women and racial minorities from discrimination by employers, several studies point to racial prejudices and favoritism as big contributors to how blacks fare in the job market. A 2004 study by the American Economic Review found job seekers with resumes that had so-called white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. Names such as Jamal or Lakisha or others that are perceived as black-sounding names, received fewer callbacks. That racial gap is uniform across occupation, industry and employer size, researchers found.
Another study, conducted by the business school at Rutgers University in New Jersey, found that favoritism, or the race of the hiring manager, was a contributing factor to racial disparity in the workplace as well. The prevalence of a mind-set in the U.S. that the rich worked hard for everything they have and poor haven’t toiled enough certainly doesn’t help matters, said Sam Brooke, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks racial disparity and hatred. “There’s a deep, fierce resistance to setting aside that idea,” Brooke said. “That’s an incredibly valuable part of the story that we tell about America. If you view it just through that lens, it’s hard to see how we’ll overcome” the disparities, he said.
The Civil Rights Act of 1991 made changes to a law passed in the 1960s that protected workers from intentional employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin. It also provided monetary damages in cases of proved discrimination. But few cases are won in U.S. courts, and a comparatively small proportion are resolved by settlements, according to federal data.
Darensbourg, the unemployed former restaurant manager, hasn’t considered a lawsuit against a prospective employer, even when he suspected that there was something more to its rejection of him than his qualifications. “I’m pushing my kids to do way better than I did in school,” he said. “I can’t pay for them to go to school. I don’t know how that would happen unless they got a scholarship. I tell my daughter that she is not just competing with the kids at her school; she’s competing with the whole world. I try to have them see stuff that my parents didn’t show me.”
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