States Expand Inquiry Into On-Call Scheduling
States Expand Inquiry Into On-Call Scheduling
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies,...
Eight states and the District of Columbia have expanded their probe into on-call scheduling at retail companies, asking a group of national chains to provide detailed information on their use of the controversial practice.
On-call shifts, where a worker must be available to work a shift that can be cancelled at the last minute without compensation, has become popular in retail. But the practice wreaks havoc on the lives of low-paid hourly workers trying to plan plan around child care, schooling, or second jobs, as a BuzzFeed News investigation found last year.
At the time, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent a letter to 14 chains (published below), inquiring about their use of on-call scheduling and warning it may be illegal. Since then, Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Workers, J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and Gap have committed to ending the practice.
“On-call shifts are not a business necessity, as we see from the many retailers that no longer use this unjust method of scheduling work hours,” said Schneiderman in a statement.
A study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that the lowest income workers receive the most irregular schedules, with unpredictability leading to increased stress.
“It’s heartening to see more and more policymakers and regulators take action,” said Carrie Gleason, Director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group.
On Tuesday, the offices of the Attorneys General in California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island sent a letter requesting employee handbooks, schedules, and payroll information.
In these states, the Attorneys General warn, the practice may be a violation of a law mandating a minimum of four hours of pay for employees who report for work.
The following retailers received the letter: Aéropostale, American Eagle, BCBG Max Azria, Carter’s Inc., Coach, DavidsTea Inc., Walt Disney Co., Forever 21 Inc., Ascena Retail Group Inc.’s Justice, Pacific Sunwear of California Inc., Payless ShoeSource, Tilly’s Inc., Uniqlo, VF Corp.’s Vans, and Zumiez Inc.
Spokespeople from Uniqlo and Coach told the Wall Street Journal that the companies don’t use the practice. BuzzFeed News has reached out to the companies listed for comment and will update the post with responses.
UPDATE
A spokesperson for American Eagle Outfitters said in a statement, ““American Eagle Outfitters is committed to providing our associates with a positive working environment. We decided in November 2015 to cease the use of ‘on-call shifts’ and advised our stores. We are taking steps to reinforce and assure adherence to this policy across our store fleet.”
A spokesperson for Forever 21 said, “Contrary to published reports, Forever 21 does not permit on-call scheduling nor do we have a company policy around doing so.”
A spokesperson for Vans said the company does not use on-call scheduling and will comply with the request for information.
A spokesperson for Uniqlo said that Uniqlo has received the letter and that on-call scheduling is not a Uniqlo practice or policy.
A spokesperson for Payless ShoeSource says the company does not engage in on-call scheduling, has received the inquiry and will respond accordingly.
A spokesperson for Zumiez said, “It is our practice to cooperate with any request from the attorney general or other state agencies and we will do so in this case as well.” Apr. 14, 2016, at 10:21 a.m.
By Cora Lewis
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Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office...
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office Monday.
Here’s what we learned from reading those reports.
1) Tobacco companies have deep pockets.
The No Blank Checks in the Constitution committee has raised about $5 million to keep the tobacco tax in Amendment 72 from passing.
That’s more money than any other campaign has raised so far this cycle, and it all comes from one source: Altria Client Services.
The company is a subsidiary of Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) -- one of the world’s largest tobacco companies.
2) ColoradoCareYES is struggling.
The group pushing universal health care through Amendment 69 raised just $10,000 during the last filing period.
That brings their total to about $320,000. In contrast, Coloradans for Coloradans, has raised nearly $4 million this cycle.
In addition to its fundraising woes, the campaign has also suffered from some surprising opposition. Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet both oppose the amendment. And so does the liberal group Progress Now.
3) Most of the minimum wage money is coming from out of state.
The group Colorado Families for a Fair Wage wants you to vote to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.
But the majority of the $2.3 million it's raised comes from groups in New York and California.
The campaigns biggest donors are Civic Participation Action Fund, The Fairness Project and The Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund.
The campaign against raising the minimum wage is called Keep Colorado Working.
Most of its money comes from industry groups like the Hospitality Issue PAC, which had a Denver address.
That might make you think it’s local money fighting the minimum wage campaign, but the PAC’s funded by national companies like McDonald’s and the National Restaurant Association.
4) The physician assisted suicide campaign is raising and spending some serious cash
Yes on Colorado End of Life Options has raised about $4.8 million to pass Proposition 106, which would let terminally ill patients purchase medications to end their lives.
The campaign’s biggest expenditure is $2.9 million to Blue West Media for advertising. That means we’re likely to see a lot of ads about the proposition between now and Nov. 8.
5) Democrats are outraising Republicans in three key Colorado Senate races.
The winners of Colorado Senate districts 19, 25 and 26 will determine whether Republicans retain control of the chamber.
If Republicans lose all three races, the Democrats will likely gain control of the entire legislature.
All the Democratic candidates are ahead of their opponents when it comes to dollars raised so far.
The biggest gap is in Senate District 19. Incumbent Republican Sen. Laura Woods is $70,000 behind her challenger, Rachel Zenzinger.
We will have to wait and see whether more money translates into more votes
By 2016 KUSA
Source
Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s...
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s helping a grandmother navigate the court system to gain guardianship.
Some of her days are spent searching Ashland’s hotels for a student who hasn’t come to school for several days, others are filled with calls to social service agencies to find a student’s family a place to stay.
No task is too big or too small for Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, which serves two Ashland Independent elementary schools.
“We’ve even gone so far as to buy alarm clocks,” she said. “You do what you can to help your students.”
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Kentucky’s system of school-based Family Resource and Youth Service Centers (FRYSCs), was created as part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 as a way to remove nonacademic barriers to learning. Now in its 25th year, there are 816 centers across the state serving 626,696 students and their families.
“When we first came on board, it was the whole selling of myself as a coordinator, just begging people to let us be involved,” said Mike Flynn, youth services center coordinator for Estill County Middle School. ”Parents didn’t know what we were, schools didn’t know what we were. We had to break those barriers down.”
But 25 years later the centers are an integral part of most schools, he said.
“It’s a complete cultural shift. People automatically expect us to be involved with things,” Flynn said. ”They bring issues and problems to us. We are now really ingrained into the schools as a whole.”
Though they are part of schools, FRYSCs are run by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
Schools in which 20 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch are eligible for a center. The center is then funded based on the number of students who qualify for free lunch, said Flynn, who is also past president of the Family Resource and Youth Services Coalition of Kentucky a statewide professional organization.
“Even though we are based on the free lunch numbers, we serve every student regardless of financial status,” he said.
Though centers are most known for helping students and their families in difficult situations or supplying food or clothing, that service isn’t required under state law.
Many people don’t realize all the other services the centers provide, which are required under state law– such as referring families and students to mental health and substance abuse counseling, offering career training, summer job placement for high school students and promoting family literacy. The centers also serve as a bridge between school, homes and the community.
In July, coordinators at attended the annual Victory over Violence conference where they received training on helping children from families of substance abuse, bullying prevention and how to involve families in students’ success.
Many centers also provide programs to bolster the learning going on in the classroom. Flynn has worked with teachers to plan math nights for parents. In the summer, many centers provide programing based around the free summer meals program.
“We provide workshops and activities for the kids, so you’re not just getting food but a little be extra instruction,” Flynn said.
Several national education groups have recently taken notice of Kentucky’s system of support centers. Doug Jones, manager of FRYSC Region 7 – which covers northeastern Kentucky led a group of 15 educators from six states last fall as they visited Kentucky to see how FRYSCs work.
The group, which included representatives from National Education Association, the Center for Popular Democracy and Communities in Schools, visited three centers in eastern Kentucky and two centers in Lexington.
“They are looking at Kentucky as a template for trying to legislate FRYSC-model programs across the United States,” Jones said.
The group brought more educators in December and conducted 35 videotaped interviews with students, teachers, legislators and coordinators.
“We are planning educational and motivational materials, legislative pushes and more,” Evie Frankl, organizer of education justice campaigns for the Center for Popular Democracy said in a release. “We are thankful for the Kentucky program for leading the way for so many years and for generously sharing their knowledge with us.”
The idea of resource centers in schools was new to Kentucky 26 years ago as KERA was being drafted. Some opposed their creation, but Harry J. Cowherd, the secretary of the Cabinet for Human Resources in 1990, championed the creation the FRSYC network.
The annual center of excellence award is now named for Cowherd. In November, Wilis and her center received the award for their work with homeless students.
Willis applied for and received a McKinney-Vento grant, which allowed the elementary schools to hire three home/school liaisons to help families get immunizations, physicals and other screenings and provided tutoring for 43 students living in a domestic violence shelter.
“A lot of our student population is from hotels, motels, shelters and public housing,” she said. ”We also have a lot of kids being raised by relatives.”
In addition to the McKinney-Vento grant, she received a $58,000 grant from BBT Bank for homeless students. Part of the money will pay for a nine-passenger van that will let Willis pick up parents who don’t have transportation so they can attend parent/teacher conferences. It also will be used take homeless high school students to co-op sites. Part of the money will pay those co-op students’ equipment for medical classes, she said.
Willis’ center serves Hager Elementary, where more than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Crabbe Elementary, where all students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch and a preschool/Headstart program. She works closely with administrators, teachers and staff to make sure she her students’ needs are being met and that teachers know what’s going on with their students.
“This staff is probably the most compassionate group of people I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “They know and understand the situations that our students come from.”
Crabbe Elementary Principal Jamie Campbell, estimates that about 60 percent of his students will go through some kind of change that requires the resource center’s assistance.
“I am firm believer in the fact we have to make sure that their basic needs are met,” he said. “Because if you’re hungry, if you’re freezing, if you’re worried about safety where you’re going to be at home, if you are worried about that, I cannot teach you reading, writing and math.
“Geri and her team take care of that need for the teachers, it translates into students being able to come here and learn.”
Brenna R. Kelly writes for Kentucky Teacher, a publication of the Kentucky Department of Education
By Brenna R. Kelly
Source
NYTimes Letter to the Editor: Deportations for Minor Offenses
New York Times - April 13, 2014 To the Editor: Re “...
New York Times - April 13, 2014
To the Editor:
Re “More Deportations Follow Minor Crimes, Data Shows” (front page, April 7):
It’s a mistake to focus the debate about immigration enforcement on the question of which immigrants are sufficiently “criminal” to deserve deportation. When the Obama administration talks about deporting people with convictions, they are talking about people who have already served their sentences for those convictions.
If you are a citizen who commits an offense, you pay the penalty issued by the criminal legal system, and then you are free to try to rebuild your life. If you are a noncitizen who commits that same offense and pays that same penalty, you can be subjected to the double punishment of permanent exile from your home and family.
This two-tiered system of justice is morally abhorrent regardless of how serious the underlying offense may have been. It’s an unfairness compounded by the well-documented unfairness of the criminal legal system itself, which disproportionately targets poor people and minorities.
Let’s not rely on our corrupt criminal justice system to justify the operations of our corrupt immigration system.
EMILY TUCKER Brooklyn, April 7, 2014
The writer is staff attorney for immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy.
Source
For Many Americans, the Great Recession Never Ended. Is the Fed About to Make It Worse?
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid,...
When the Federal Reserve considers raising interest rates on July 28—and then again every six weeks after—MyAsia Reid, of Philadelphia, will be paying close attention. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science, completing a series of related internships, and presenting original research across the country, Reid could not find a job in her field and, instead, pieces together a nine-hour-per-week tutoring job and a 20-hour-per-week cosmetology gig. The 25-year-old knows that an interest-rate hike will hurt her chances of finding the kinds of jobs for which she has trained, and earning the wage increase she so desperately needs.
A Fed decision to raise interest rates, expected sometime this year, amounts to a vote of confidence in the economy—a declaration that we have achieved the robust recovery we need. “We are close to where we want to be, and we now think that the economy cannot only tolerate but needs higher interest rates,” the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, told Congress during a July 15 policy briefing.
But for many millions of Americans, the recovery has yet to arrive, and for them, a rate hike will be disastrous. It will put the brakes on an economy still trudging toward stability; stall progress on unemployment, especially for African-Americans; and slow wage growth even more for the vast majority of American workers.
The general argument for raising interest rates is that it will prevent wage costs from pushing up inflation. However, there is no data suggesting price instability; nor is there any indication that wages have risen enough to spur such inflation. For the overwhelming majority of American workers, wages have stagnated or even dropped over the past 35 years, even as CEOs have seen their compensation grow 937 percent. During the same period, wage gaps between white workers and workers of color have increased, and black unemployment is at the level of white unemployment at the height of the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the labor-force participation rate is less than 63 percent, the lowest in nearly four decades, suggesting that many Americans have simply given up looking for work.
Yellen has herself often urged the Fed to look at the broadest possible employment picture. Yet, during her recent congressional testimony, shedownplayed the Fed’s ability to address racial disparities, saying that the central bank does not “have the tools to be able to address the structure of unemployment across groups” and that “there isn’t anything directly that the Federal Reserve can do” about it. She cited, rightly, a range of other factors, including disparate educational attainment and skill levels, that contribute to economic and social disparities between racial groups. But she also glossed over the importance of the economic environment in shaping workers’ unequal chances.
One defining metric in shaping workers’ chances is the unemployment rate. A high unemployment rate facilitates racial discrimination. When there are too many qualified job candidates for every job, employers can arbitrarily limit their labor pool based on unnecessary educational requirements, irrelevant credit or background checks, or straightforward bias. A tight labor market, by contrast, makes it much harder for employers to succumb to prejudices and overlook qualified workers simply because of bias. When the number of job seekers matches the number of job vacancies, African-Americans, Latinos, women, gays and lesbians, injured veterans, and formerly incarcerated workers finally get their due in the workforce.
The late 1990s, when unemployment was at about 4 percent, bear out this thesis. During that rosier era, black unemployment was 7.6 percent, and the ratio of black family income to white family income rose substantially.
As the guardian of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has a number of tools for encouraging a tight labor market, and one of those tools is to keep interest rates low. By keeping rates low, the Fed creates a hospitable environment for job growth by lowering the borrowing costs for consumer and business spending—including hiring new workers. By contrast, raising rates deliberately suppresses spending by consumers and businesses. In the process, it slows job growth, holds down wages, and unnecessarily maintains racial disparities.
With so many workers still struggling, there is no need to cut off this recovery prematurely. Inflation remains below the Fed’s already-low 2 percent target, unemployment and underemployment are too high, and wage growth and labor-force participation are too low. In fact, the Fed should be doing everything within its power to keep nudging the recovery forward for the workers still caught in the slipstream of the Great Recession.
The Federal Reserve should not raise interest rates this week, nor when it meets again six weeks after that. It should not raise rates at all in 2015. Doing so would cause tremendous harm to the aspirations and lives of tens of millions of working families, and would disproportionately hurt African-Americans.
MyAsia Reid knows the difference that a full-employment economy can make. She is ready to participate in the economic recovery. And she will be watching as the Fed decides whether to hold to a strategy of strengthening the recovery or pursue a new strategy that jeopardizes her chances and her community.
Source: The Nation
Slew Of Organizations Denounce Civil Right Violations of Puerto Ricans on May Day and Demand Gov. Roselló To Stop Austerity Measures
05.03.2018 New York, NY - In response to the violent reaction of the Puerto Rico Police Department to a peaceful...
05.03.2018
New York, NY - In response to the violent reaction of the Puerto Rico Police Department to a peaceful assembly of students, families and activists on May Day protesting against austerity measures and the national debt, the Center for Popular Democracy signed on to an open letter to Governor Roselló and released the following statement through its Co-Executive Director, Ana María Archila, who was present at the event and recorded the state violence response in a video:
“This week, as teachers, students, and retirees in Puerto Rico were exercising their First Amendment rights with a peaceful march to demand dignity for their families, the police came out in riot gear and unleashed tear gas on the crowd. Children, elderly people, entire families were fighting to catch their breath. It was a scene that doesn’t belong in a democratic society.
But this scene is not new in Puerto Rico. The police are used to controlling and enforcing colonial rule on the island. And they are enabled by our silence stateside. The crisis confronting Puerto Rico is enormous, and it’s as much a crisis of democracy as it is an economic and climate crisis.
Governor Roselló must condemn the violence perpetrated against his own people. And he must address the root causes of the march: the austerity measures that prioritize banks over people and are putting the brakes on the island’s recovery. We will continue to stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people as they continue to demand dignity and a better life for themselves and their families.”
Below, the Center for Popular Democracy join several organizations in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and sign on this open letter to Governor Ricardo Roselló demanding an investigation into the abuses perpetrated by the Police Department on May Day rally and demand a stop to austerity measures and cancellation of the debt:
Open Letter to the Governor of Puerto Rico Ricardo Roselló
Sign-On Letter Condemning the Actions of the Puerto Rican Government on May Day and Demanding Justice for the Puerto Rican People
We, the undersigned organizations, stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and organizations that came together on May 1, 2018 to march against inhumane austerity measures that continue to drive a massive exodus of families in search of a better life. We stand with the millions of Puerto Ricans who remain on the island and fight every day to sustain their families and improve their collective quality of life. We write today to condemn the inhumane and violent police actions of the government of Ricardo Rosselló.
On May 1, 2018, thousands of Puerto Rican people, including elderly adults and children, who were exercising their First Amendment right to protest were met with state violence through the use of tear gas and violence at the hands of the police. Images captured at the event, corroborated by first-hand accounts, show crowds of people fighting to catch their breath as they ran away from police in riot gear. This type of scene has no place in a democratic society. The right to assemble and express frustration at the government is essential to the practice of democracy. We are deeply disturbed by Governor Roselló’s defense of the police brutality and demand that the local government take the appropriate actions to prosecute those who gave and executed the orders for these actions to take place.
On May 1, 2018, thousands of Puerto Ricans came out to protest the measures that the governor and the fiscal control board have put forward over the last two years. These measures adversely affect working class Puerto Ricans, and include:
1. Privatizing of the public school system and the power company;
2. Doubling the tuition costs in Puerto Rico's public university;
3. Closing over 300 schools;
4. Slashing labor rights;
5. Raising taxes; and
6. Cutting pensions.
This dire situation is forcing families to flee the island en masse. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies estimates that Puerto Rico could lose 14% of its population, 470,000 people, by 2019.
On May Day, the people of Puerto Rico came out with clear demands for their government. Today we stand with them and echo their demands in solidarity, and we commit to advocate for them in the United States.
We further demand immediate accountability for the May Day violence. Our demands are as follows:
1. Stop austerity: The Government of Puerto Rico should stop all austerity measures and invest in the working people of Puerto Rico by strengthening labor rights, raising the minimum wage, and promoting other policies that allow families in the island to live with dignity. Living with dignity includes rebuilding Puerto Rico’s power grid with 100% clean and renewable energy and keeping the power grid and power generation in public hands under community control, so as to mitigate the climate crisis and adapt for future extreme weather.
2. Cancel the debt: The Government of Puerto Rico should not make, and the U.S. government should stop promoting, any more debt payments to billionaire bondholders. Instead, all government efforts should focus on securing payments to pension holders. The Puerto Rican government should also prosecute any individual that has profited from the debt crisis.
3. Prosecute: The Government of Puerto Rico should conduct a full, transparent and impartial investigation into the police violence during the May Day actions and prosecute every police officer and civil servant who instructed and executed these acts of violence against the Puerto Rican people. We also encourage human right organizations to conduct their own independent investigations and oversight to guarantee that this process is done with full transparency.
We, the undersigned organizations, stand in solidarity with the Puerto Rican people and their demands, condemn the actions of the Puerto Rican government, and demand that the local government take the appropriate actions to prosecute those who instructed and executed these actions.
Sincerely,
SPACEs United for a New Economy Maryland Communities United Black Voters Matter Fund CT PR Agenda Progressive Caucus Action Fund The Bully Project Center for Popular Democracy Make the Road PA Make the Road CT 215 People Alliance Alliance for Puerto Rico-Massachusetts Make the Road NJ United We DREAM NYCC Chicago Boricua Resistance! OLÉ in Albuquerque, NM Organize Florida Delaware Alliance for Community Advancement CASA Mi Familia Vota Make the Road NY VAMOS4PR 32BJ Matt Nelson Action Center for Race and the Economy Refund America Proyect Massachusets Jobs with Justice DiaspoRicans DiaspoRiqueños New Haven Association of Legal Services Attorneys United Action CT Womens March Alliance for Quality Education National Economic and Social Rights Initiative Courage Campaign Action NC Harry Potter Alliance Blue Future Youth Progressive Action Catalyst Pennsylvania Student Power Network Movement Voter Project Student Power Networks About Face: Veterans Against the War Americas for Conservation Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition- FLIC One America Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network (SIREN) Arkansas United Community Coalition Make the Road NV Sunrise Movement Lil Sis American Family Voices Resource Generation Climate Hawks Vote The Shalom Center National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) Massachusetts Education Justice Alliance Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts Institute for Policy Studies, New Internationalism Project Korean Resource Center (KRC) HANA Center NAKASEC - Virginia Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN)
Retailers Discover That Labor Isn't Just a Cost
For the past couple of decades, retailing in the U.S. has -- with some notable exceptions -- been a vast experiment in...
For the past couple of decades, retailing in the U.S. has -- with some notable exceptions -- been a vast experiment in minimizing labor costs.
At the 2009 annual convention of the National Retail Federation, though, Charles DeWitt noticed the beginnings of a shift. "Retailers started coming up to me and saying, 'We can't get any more out of this cost stone,'" recounted DeWitt, vice president of business development at workforce-management-software maker Kronos.
Since then, this change in attitude has become the stuff of business headlines. Most notably, Wal-Mart, the retailer that set the cost-cutting tone in the 1990s, has been raising wages and spending more on training. There's surely a cyclical element at work here -- as the unemployment rate drops, it's harder for retailers to find workers. There's also a political element -- bad press and minimum-wage campaigns must have some effect on corporate behavior.
But the really intriguing possibility is that retailers, in their technology-driven rush to optimize operations during the past two decades ("rocket science retailing," one Wharton School operations expert dubbed it) were actually failing to optimize labor. Their systems measured it only as a cost, and didn't track the impact of low wages, part-time work and unpredictable work schedules on sales and profits. Now some retailers are trying to fix that.
One big set of targets are the scheduling systems that have allowed retailers to ever-more-closely match staffing to customer traffic, but in the process wrought havoc with many workers' lives by making their schedules so unpredictable. Jodi Kantor gave a face to this last year with a compelling New York Times account of the chaotic life of a single-mom Starbucks barista.
Kronos supplies Starbucks' scheduling software, and DeWitt was quoted in the Times article describing its workings as "like magic." So it was a little surprising to see him on stage last week at O'Reilly Media's Next:Economy conference, nodding pleasantly and occasionally chiming in as a Starbucks barista, a labor activist and a journalist described the horrors inflicted by scheduling software.
When I told him afterward that I was surprised he wasn't more defensive, DeWitt said, "I'm more of a math guy, an optimization guy. This is a parameter to be optimized." It's also a business opportunity. "We are in early-stage investigations with very big customers," DeWitt went on. "The plan is to go in and suck all these things out of the database and work with them to customize metrics."
The idea is to figure out how dynamic scheduling and other labor practices affect metrics such as absenteeism, turnover and sales. Right now a lot of retailers just don't know. Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy and the labor activist who shared the stage with DeWitt, recalled a conversation she had with an executive at a big retailer at last year's National Retail Federation convention. "I said, 'These schedules cost you in terms of turnover.' She said, 'I’m in operations. That’s HR.'"
That's not true everywhere. Here's Stuart B. Burgdoerfer, chief financial officer of L Brands, the retailer that includes the Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works chains, speaking at the company'sannual investor day this month:
As we looked at the data, we just had too many people working too few hours per week. And the trouble with that or the opportunity with that is how well can they really know your business, how invested are they in us, or we in them, if they're only working a few hours per week and their turnover rate is very high?
And so we see the opportunity to have a more knowledgeable, more engaged, more effective and productive associate. When she's working, typically she is working more hours per week. So that's the opportunity. And we think it's a significant one. Really do.
Recent academic work backs this up, to a point. Researchers such as University of Chicago social psychologists Susan Lambert and Julia Henly and Pennsylvania State University labor economist Lonnie Golden have been documenting the extent and social costs of irregular scheduling. Meanwhile, operations experts at business schools have been trying to identify labor practices that maximize sales and profits.
The best known of these is probably the "good jobs strategy" outlined by Zeynep Ton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first in a2012 Harvard Business Review article and then in a 2014 book. Ton studied low-cost, high-wage retailers such as Costco, Trader Joe's, Oklahoma-based convenience-store chain QuikTrip and Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona and concluded that they operated in a virtuous cycle in which highly trained, autonomous, full-time employees working with a limited selection of products drove high performance.
There's a tendency, upon hearing accounts such as Ton's (she also spoke at the Next:Economy conference), to wonder why every retailer doesn’t do that. One reason is that the limited-selection approach can't work for everybody. Another is that, as my Bloomberg View colleague Megan McArdle wrote last year, if every retailer paid like Costco, many of Costco's labor advantages would disappear. And finally, while some retailers surely have hurt themselves in their zeal to optimize labor, the move away from full-time retail jobs and toward staffing that's closely matched to customer demand hasn't been totally irrational.
In one recent study, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley R. Staats and Wendell Gilland of the University of North Carolina looked at labor practices at a large (unidentified) retail chain. Their hypothesis was that the use of temporary and part-time workers would be linked with per-store sales in an inverted U-shaped curve -- with sales at first rising as the percentage of temps and part-timers rose, but eventually falling.
The data backed them up. To maximize sales, the optimal share of temp workers was 13 percent and part-timers 44 percent. But those percentages were both higher than the retailer's current averages of 7 percent and 32 percent. Overall, hiring more part-timers and more temps was likely to lead to higher sales.
The data-driven reexamination of labor practices by big retailers will surely lead to some improvements in how workers are treated and paid. I don't get the impression that, by itself, it will lead to all retail jobs becoming good jobs.
Source: Bloomberg
Amazon’s $15 an Hour Minimum Wage and the Federal Reserve Board
Amazon’s $15 an Hour Minimum Wage and the Federal Reserve Board
This is where Fed Up played an incredible role. They were a crucial voice on the other side, constantly reminding the...
This is where Fed Up played an incredible role. They were a crucial voice on the other side, constantly reminding the Fed of its legal mandate to promote full employment. Fed Up had important allies in this effort, most importantly former Fed chair Janet Yellen, but it is likely that Yellen and her allies on the FOMC would have been forced to raise rates sooner and faster if not for pressure from Fed Up.
Read the full article here.
Blow up the deficit!
As most working Americans could tell you, the economy is still not doing well. Right now, political pressure to fix...
As most working Americans could tell you, the economy is still not doing well.
Right now, political pressure to fix this tends to focus on the Federal Reserve. When the Fed hikes interest rates to curb inflation, it also risks squashing job growth. So activists like the Fed Up campaign are pushing Fed officials to lay off their recent interest rate increases. And a bevy of economists just released a letter urging the Fed to target inflation higher than 2 percent.
Read the full article here.
Fed Chair Candidate Kevin Warsh Draws Opposition From Left and Right
Fed Chair Candidate Kevin Warsh Draws Opposition From Left and Right
On a Wednesday in mid-September, a group of progressive activists concerned about the stewardship of the American...
On a Wednesday in mid-September, a group of progressive activists concerned about the stewardship of the American economy packed a meeting room on Capitol Hill with staff of Senate Democrats. Part strategy session and part pep talk, the gathering had a very specific aim.
“We’ll do whatever we can do to prevent Kevin Warsh from taking on the role of chair of the Federal Reserve,” Jennifer Epps-Addison, president of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the gathering.
Read the full article here.
1 month ago
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