Category Archives: #WorkRights

Uber drivers are contractors, not employees, U.S. labor agency says

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From today’s Reuters News Service:

Drivers for ride-hailing company Uber Technologies Inc are independent contractors and not employees, the general counsel of a U.S. labor agency has concluded, in an advisory memo that is likely to carry significant weight in a pending case against the company and could prevent drivers from joining a union.

The recommendation by the office of general counsel Peter Robb, who was appointed to the National Labor Relations Board by President Donald Trump, was made in a memo dated April 16 and released on Tuesday.

The general counsel said in the memo that Uber drivers set their hours, own their cars and are free to work for the company’s competitors, so they cannot be considered employees under federal labor law.

A ruling on the case is to be made by an NLRB regional director. Advisory memos from the general counsel’s office are generally upheld in rulings. Any decision could be appealed to the NLRB’s five-member board, which is also led by Trump appointees but is independent of the general counsel.

Read the complete article here.

Workers, Should You Tell the World How Much Money You Make?

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From today’s New York Times:

There are many questions Alison Green is asked as a columnist who writes about workplace issues. There was the woman who wanted to know if she should attend couple’s therapy with her boss and the boss’s boyfriend. (The boyfriend happened to be her father.) Another time she heard complaints about a janitor who cast a hex on her colleagues.

But Ms. Green was taken aback recently when asked about her salary, a topic so fraught even she couldn’t come up with a good answer. “No one has ever asked me that,” she said. “I don’t want to say.”

Many employees are loath to discuss their salaries, she said, worried it would cause resentment, or worse, among peers. “We are all so weird about telling people how much money we make, even me.”

Perhaps it is why, too, Ms. Green recently asked readers of her “Ask A Manager” website to share their job title, where they live and how much they make each year. Answers were anonymous; the data was compiled in a spreadsheet on Ms. Green’s website so people could sort through the data.

Within a half-hour, she had 1,000 responses. A day later, so many people posted their salaries her website froze. So far, three weeks later, she has more than 26,000 responses, everything from an accountant in Chicago who makes $90,000 to a librarian in Austin who earns $39,000. She was surprised by the overwhelming response: Previous surveys in 2014 and 2017 garnered a fraction of interest, fewer than 2,700 comments apiece.

Why the interest now? Attitudes about workers disclosing pay are shifting, for one, as unemployment has reached a five-decade low. And the gig economy has made salary comparing a near necessity for many. (How else does a person know what to charge if they are a freelancer?)

Read the complete article here.


Google workers want to end mandatory arbitration—Here’s why this matters

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From today’s Washington Post:

Employees at Google recently organized a phone drive to lobby Congress to end the practice of mandatory or forced arbitration, in which an arbitrator — typically designated by the company — resolves a legal dispute, rather than a judge.

Over the last three decades, more and more corporations have forced their employees or customers to sign these contracts, agreeing to take their disputes to private arbitration instead of to court. A recent studyestimates that currently more than 60 million U.S. workers signed these mandatory arbitration agreements when they were hired. Anotherfound that, last year, consumers signed almost three times as many consumer arbitration agreements as there are people living in the U.S.

Arbitration’s spread has become controversial. Many on the left criticize it, while many conservatives support it. So it may be surprising that liberal reformers were the first to make arbitration popular. Here’s how the Supreme Court and Congress helped change arbitration from a liberal cause to conservative rallying cry.ADVERTISING

Businesses win — and employees lose — more often in arbitration than in court

Arbitration produces clear winners and losers. Employees win less frequently and receive lower damages in arbitration than in litigation. Employers win more frequently, especially if they use the same arbitrators repeatedly. That’s hardly surprising, given that the employers typically choose the arbitrators. Given recent public criticism, many prominent companies have discontinued mandatory arbitration requirements for sexual harassment claims.

The Supreme Court has helped expand private arbitration. Just last week, in Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, conservatives decided that workers cannot join to bring similar complaints against a company through class arbitration unless their contracts specifically allow it. The 5-4 majority opinion relied heavily upon a controversial case from last term, Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis.

These cases are just the latest in a three decades-long trajectory toward disallowing anything that discourages private arbitration, as part of a larger political strategy employed by business-friendly conservatives in Congress, the courts, and the private sector to constrict both access to courts and class-action lawsuits.

Read the complete article here..

Labor Dept. Says Workers at a Gig Company Are Contractors

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From today’s New York Times:

The Labor Department weighed in Monday on a question whose answer could be worth billions of dollars to gig-economy companies, deciding that one company’s workers were contractors, not employees.

As a result, the unidentified company — whose workers, it appears, clean residences — will not have to offer the federal minimum wage or overtime, or pay a share of Social Security taxes. And while the decision officially applies only to that company, legal experts said it was likely to affect a much larger portion of the industry.

The move signals the Trump administration’s approach to the way gig companies, a growing share of the economy, must treat their work force. As companies like Uber and Lyft begin to sell shares to the public, industry officials estimate that requiring them to classify their workers as employees would raise their labor costs by 20 to 30 percent.

“Today, the U.S. Department of Labor offers further insight into the nexus of current labor law and innovations in the job market,” Keith Sonderling, an official in the division that oversees such issues, said in a statement. It is a longstanding policy for the department not to disclose the names of companies receiving such letters.

Read the complete article here.

SCOTUS To Hear Cases On Title VII Protections For LGBTQ Employees

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From today’s NPR News Online:

The Supreme Court has accepted three cases that ask whether federal anti-discrimination laws should apply to sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, putting the court on track to consider high-profile LGBTQ issues after its next term begins this fall.

Two of the cases — Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, and Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda — were consolidated because both include claims that employers discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. A third — R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC — involves the question of whether existing discrimination laws apply to transgender workers.

The Supreme Court granted petitions for writs of certiorari for the three cases Monday morning, adding them to their workload for the term that will start in October — meaning any decisions and opinions will emerge in the runup to the national election in 2020.

But the court also set limits as it accepted the cases. As the court’s order list states, the scope of the court’s review of the Harris Funeral Homes case is limited to only question “whether Title VII prohibits discrimination against transgender people based on (1) their status as transgender or (2) sex stereotyping” under the 1989 decision in the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins case.

The Supreme Court’s order refers to Title VII, the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. In recent years, lower federal courts have disagreed on whether the same protections should apply to people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. That divide can be seen in the trio of cases now up for review.

“In two of the cases, lower courts sided with the plaintiffs,” NPR’s Leila Fadel reports for our Newscast unit, “one in Michigan where a transgender woman was fired from her job at a funeral home based on her gender identity; another, out of New York where a skydiving instructor was allegedly fired because he’s gay. But in a third case in Georgia, a gay man who was fired from his job as a child welfare services coordinator lost.”

In that third case, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit turned away an appeal from Gerald Lynn Bostock last summer. Even before Bostock’s appeal request was declined by the full panel, his attorneys already had asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Read the complete article here.

Employee Wellness Programs Yield Little Benefit, JAMA Study Shows

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From today’s New York Times:

Companies have long embraced workplace wellness programs as a way to improve workers’ health and reduce overall medical spending, but a new study may prompt employers to rethink those efforts.

The study, published on Tuesday in JAMA, a medical journal, looked at the experience of 33,000 workers at BJ’s Wholesale Club, a retailer, over a year and a half.

While workers who enrolled in the wellness program reported that they learned to exercise more and watch their weight, the research found no significant differences in outcomes like lower blood pressure or sugar levels and other health measures. And it found no significant reduction in workers’ health care costs.

“These findings may temper expectations about the financial return on investment that wellness programs can deliver in the short term,” conclude the study’s authors, Dr. Zirui Song, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School, and Katherine Baicker, dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Most employers — 82 percent of companies with more than 200 workers — offer some sort of wellness program like smoking cessation or weight management, according to the latest survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Companies often encourage participation in these programs by dangling some sort of financial carrot, ranging from a gift card if you track your steps to a significant discount off what you pay toward your health insurance.

Read the complete article here.

In Sacramento, CA teachers fight for “what’s right” with strike

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From today’s CBS Evening News:

Teachers in Sacramento went on strike Thursday for the first time in 30 years. They’re accusing the school district of backtracking on promises of better pay and smaller classes.

In the past year, more than 400,000 teachers in nine states have gone on strike, affecting more than 5 million children.

Raising three boys on her own in costly California is a daily struggle for Victoria Carr, who has been teaching for 12 years.  

“It’s hard. It really is. Am I making a difference? Is it impacting people,” she said.

With teachers on the brink of a strike, Carr went to a school board meeting to confront the district superintendent.  
 
“I want them to see me fight for what’s right. I want my students to know that they’re important enough to me that I’ll fight for them and I’ll say what needs to be said as best I can,” said the seventh-grade teacher.

Nationwide, the average teacher salary has decreased by 4 percent in the past decade, when accounting for inflation. Eighteen months ago, the Sacramento School District avoided a strike by giving their teachers a raise. Thursday’s strike is solely about the students. The teachers say the district did not hold up the rest of that deal, which included smaller classroom sizes, more nurses, psychologists and after school programs.

Read the complete article here.

He Has Driven for Uber Since 2012 and He Makes About $40,000 a Year

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From today’s New York Times:

Uber’s public stock offering next month will make a bunch of people remarkably rich. Peter Ashlock is not one of them, although he has toiled for the ride-hailing company almost since the beginning.

Mr. Ashlock, who will be 71 next week, has racked up more than 25,000 trips as an Uber driver since 2012. His Nissan Altima has 218,000 miles on it — nearly the distance to the moon. His passengers rate him 4.93 out of five stars. His favorite review: “Dude drove like a cabdriver.”

While he is an integral part of Uber’s success, Mr. Ashlock is barely getting by. His 2018 tax return will show an adjusted gross income in the neighborhood of $40,000, better than 2016 and 2017. But he has maxed out his $3,200 credit limit at the local Midas car-repair shop and needs to come up with $5,000 to pay his taxes. He has Social Security but no savings to buy a new car that will let him keep working.

Silicon Valley has always been a lottery where immense wealth is secured by a few while everyone else must hope for better luck some other time. Rarely, however, has the disparity been on such stark display as with Uber. Its stock market value is expected to be about $100 billion, which would make it one of the richest Silicon Valley public offerings of all time.

Among those with something to celebrate: Uber’s founders, the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, the elite venture capitalists Benchmark and Google’s GV, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the mutual fund giant Fidelity. Some have already cashed in. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive until he was forced out after a series of scandals, reaped $1.4 billion by selling fewer than a third of his shares to private investors in 2017.

As independent contractors, drivers are not eligible for employee benefits like paid vacations or stock options. Uber said Thursday that it would offer bonuses of $100 to $10,000 to long-serving drivers. Its chief competitor, Lyft, did the same when it went public in March.

Read the complete article here.

Lawmaker in Congressional hearing on bank CEOs’ pay: “It doesn’t look good”

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From today’s CBS News Online:

Making their first appearance before Congress since the financial crisis a decade ago, the CEOs of America’s biggest banks told lawmakers their financial institutions are now smaller and are taking on less risk.

With Democrats in control of the U.S. House, banks and the men that lead them are facing renewed scrutiny over their practices and record profits.

Since the massive taxpayer-funded bank bailout in 2009, large U.S. banks have raked in $780 billion in profits — nearly five times the amount they paid in fines. “[N]o one has made out better than the CEOs,” Maxine Waters, D.-California, chair of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, said in starting the hearing. 

The financial giants represented at the gathering include seven of eight global “systemically important” banks, which paid a total of nearly $164 billion in fines during the last 10 years, according to a committee memorandum. Because their profits greatly exceed the penalties, Waters questioned whether banks view regulatory fines as simply the cost of doing business.

New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed to a litany of what she described as bank misdeeds, from JPMorgan’s failure to oversee its trading practices in 2013 to last month’s $25 million fine against Citibank for violating the Fair Housing Act. “I have concerns about how much things have changed,” she told the bankers. 

Ocasio-Cortez also questioned the fairness of a legal system that fines banks for legal violations but imprisons low-income people for relatively minor offenses. Mentioning that Riker’s Island is part of her congressional district, the lawmaker said: “I represent kids who go to jail for jumping a turnstile because they couldn’t afford a metro card.” 

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon responded by saying he did not support prison for turnstile jumping. He drew praise from the freshman lawmaker for JPMorgan’s decision last month to halt financing of private operators of prisons and detention centers.

The last time the panel convened such a hearing, the country was in recession and the CEOs had to explain taking billions in taxpayer bailouts. Banks have since by-and-large repaid taxpayers and bounced back to record profits.

Read the complete article here.

The Gig 101: The Con of the Side Hustle

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From today’s New York Times:

An attractive woman behind the wheel of a gray car says to the camera, “These days anyone can have a side hustle.” She then whisks off to the gym, for her other job as a personal trainer, beaming as she goes from one gig to another. This ad for the ride-share company Uber seeks to entice new drivers to join their ranks by using the “side hustle” come-on. The company isn’t alone.

Similarly laborious “side hustles” are celebrated in popular media and advertising, from self-help articles and other web content that exhort us to, say, work for a design studio part-time or sell CBD oil (great as a side hustle for moms, supposedly). Even pastors can use a side hustle, according to one evangelical blogger.

During tax season, you will also find filing suggestions for side hustlers. (Report all of your income! Deduct expenses!)

The truth is, working multiple gigs creates complications when you do your taxes. Compared with those with salaried jobs, who pay their taxes seamlessly through withholding, for side hustlers “the process will be a lot messier,” according to Steven Dean, the faculty director of the Graduate Tax Program at New York University Law School. You have to estimate and pay taxes on your own, he notes, and your expenses may not be reimbursed by your employer. In other words, paying quarterly tax estimates gives workers with side hustles yet another side hustle — being their own accountant, although this gig doesn’t even pay.

Nevertheless, this nouveau moonlighting continues to be exalted ­as cool, empowering or freeing. This mantra is false: Side hustles are not simply a new version of working as a “wage slave” so that we can do what we love in our off hours. Instead, far more often, people take on second or third side hustles because of wage stagnation or low pay at their full-time jobs.

Read the complete article here.