Category Archives: #WorkRights

Worker Centers Primed to Test “We’re-Not-Unions” Stance in Court

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From today’s Bloomberg Law Online:

An ongoing federal investigation in which regulators believe a Minneapolis nonprofit is a labor union rather than a worker center has created an existential crisis for similar groups across the country.

Some worker centers are changing their tactics to try to avoid government scrutiny. The broader worker center community is preparing for legal action if the Labor Department tries to force the targeted group to comply with federal laws for unions.

The DOL’s two-year probe into the status of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, known as CTUL, led the department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards to determine it “has reason to believe” the group is a labor organization under a 1959 law meant to curb organized labor corruption by ensuring union transparency and democracy.

CTUL and other organizations have grown in influence in recent decades as an alternative to unions in providing low-income, vulnerable workers with training and other tools to improve workplace conditions. CTUL has successfully pressured Target Corp. and other retailers to contract with unionized janitors, part of a trend of company-focused actions that prompted the business community and political conservatives to increase pressure on the Labor Department to review certain worker centers’ operations. Critics believe some worker centers are essentially union fronts.

The stakes are extremely high for CTUL—and, by extension, all worker centers—because federal enforcement of a final determination that the group is a union would subject CTUL to onerous financial reporting and internal governance requirements. Labor organizers and attorneys at worker centers contend the groups are exempt from union-specific disclosure law because they don’t bargain directly with employers. For the business community and Republican lawmakers, the DOL probe represents a breakthrough in a decades-long push for the department to classify certain worker centers as unions.

“I would absolutely say that if the DOL moves ahead with it, the worker center movement is going to push back,” said the National Employment Law Project’s Charlotte Noss, who coordinates legal strategy for worker centers nationwide. She noted that DOL and the National Labor Relations Board have previously held that worker centers aren’t unions. “Any attempts by the DOL to exert coverage would be challenged in court,” she added.

Read the complete article here.

The Gig Economy Is Coming for Jobs

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From today’s New York Times:

A few years ago, Adalberto Martín began to see some troubling changes at work. As a veteran member of the room service staff at Marriott’s W Hotel in downtown San Francisco, he was an expert in delivering carefully assembled trays of food and drink to hungry guests. But the number of orders had sharply decreased. What was once 50 glasses of orange juice every morning had dwindled to 10, and Mr. Martín’s tip income fell accordingly. At lunchtime, he seemed to make more deliveries of plates and silverware than actual food.

Room service, as we imagine it in the movies, with white tablecloths and silver cloches, has long been in decline, even at the fanciest hotels. But Mr. Martín attributes his loss of earnings to the proliferation of food delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash and Postmates, successors of online ordering services like Seamless. Now he wonders if soon he’ll be out of a job altogether. “We’re always worrying and concerned when we see other hotels nearby closing room service,” Mr. Martín told me. “It’s just a matter of time.”

His co-workers at the W and staff members at other hotels report similar trends: The doormen and bellmen who once summoned cabs for guests, and were tipped in return, now watch lines of Ubers and Lyfts coil in front of the lobby doors, while concierges have had their work outsourced to iPad consoles. Some hotels offer tablets in every room preloaded with food-delivery apps, and give guests vouchers for Uber and Lyft rides. In the microcosm of the hotel, the app economy has expanded choices for some (the guests) and shrunk options for others (the workers).

These currents in hospitality represent a subtle, sneaky form of technological displacement, care of the gig economy. They’re not robots stepping in for humans on a factory floor, but rather smartphone-based independent contractors and supplemental “cobots” (a portmanteau of “co-worker” and “robot”) chipping away at the careers of full-time and in some cases unionized employees.

In the beginning of the gig economy, people most feared one-to-one job loss: An Uber driver comes in, a taxi driver goes out. And taxi drivers have indeed lost their livelihoods — and taken their own lives. Yet many app workers are only part-time, driving or TaskRabbit-ing to supplement their wages in a traditional job. App companies, for their part, deny that even full-timers are employees, perpetuating the fantasy that gig workers are solo entrepreneurs. It’s a business model that reduces everything to a series of app-enabled transactions, and calls it work, leaving what’s left of the welfare state to fill in the rest.

Aaron Benanav, a labor historian at the University of Chicago, explains that this process of “de-skilling” and misclassification is happening all over the world. The gig economy “is being used to replace skilled workers with less skilled, or continuing a process that’s happening all over the world of ‘disguised employment,’ where you bring in independent contractors to replace employees,” he said. “There’s an app for that” means that there’s less steady, reliable work for traditional employees.

Read the complete article here.

Major union launches campaign to organize video game and tech workers

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From today’s Los Angeles Times:

The last two years have witnessed a wave of walkouts, petitions and other workplace actions at video game and tech companies.

But despite this swell in labor activism, employees at no major video game studios and only a handful of tech offices have formally voted to form or join a union.

A new campaign launched Tuesday by one of the nation’s largest labor unions — and spearheaded by one of the leading video game industry activists in Southern California — aims to change that.

The Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE for short) is a new project of the Communications Workers of America aimed specifically at unionizing video game and tech companies.

It grew out of conversations between the CWA and Game Workers Unite, a grass-roots organization that sprang up in 2018 to push for wall-to-wall unionization of the $43-billion video game industry, alongside conversations with organizers across the larger tech industry.

Separate from the new initiative, the Toronto chapter of GWU has also signed a formal partnership agreement with CWA to work on organizing in the area. (CWA is also the parent union of the NewsGuild, which represents workers at the L.A. Times and most major newspapers in the country.)

Read the complete article here.

Gag clauses for CA state workers, public employees violate free speech rights

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From today’s Sacramento Bee:

Employees at a California tax agency started to suspect something was up when a compliance officer emailed everyone a reminder not talk with the media one morning in March.

Later that day, CBS Sacramento aired a story on new “RIOT” buttons that had been installed in elevators in the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration building, alarming some employees. The story included interviews with a few workers outside the department’s building at 450 N Street, which has become notorious for maintenance problems.

“The general message of the policy is that when staff receives inquiries from reporters, they should refer them to their supervisor or manager as those inquiries are handled by CDTFA by what is now called our External Affairs Division,” said an email from Program and Compliance Bureau Chief James Dahlen.

Yet those types of blanket restrictions on government employees’ speech are unconstitutional, according to a recently published paper from the Florida-based Brechner Center for Freedom of Information.

“People don’t forfeit their constitutional rights, including the right of free expression, simply by accepting government employment,” the paper says, citing two Supreme Court decisions from 1967.

Such “gag” policies are nonetheless common, affecting public employees from local schools and police departments to state and federal agencies, according to the paper.

California state government is no exception. Many, while not all, state departments have policies instructing employees to refrain from talking to the media and to refer all questions to public information officers, even when the employees are experts on the topics they’re being asked about.

Read the complete article here.

Pay Is Rising Fastest for Low Earners. One Reason? Minimum Wages.

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From today’s New York Times:

These days, wages in the United States are doing something extraordinary: They’re growing faster at the bottom than at the top. In fact, recent growth for workers with low wages has outpaced that for high-wage workers by the widest margin in at least 20 years.

The main story here is the long economic recovery, now entering its 11th year. For much of the early phase of this recovery, wage growth for the bottom group was weaker than for others, but it began gradually accelerating in 2014 as unemployment continued to fall. This was around the same time the labor market started tapping into people some economists had all but given up on as work force participants, such asthose who had been citing health reasons or disability for not having a job.

But there has been another factor at play: the rise in state and local minimum wages.

For the last decade, the federal minimum wage has been unchanged at $7.25 an hour. But over that period, dozens of states and localities have enacted their own minimum wages or raised existing ones. As a result, the effective U.S. minimum wage is closer to $12 an hour, most likely the highest in U.S. history even after adjusting for inflation.

And with two dozen states and four dozen localities set to raise their minimums further in 2020, the effective minimum wage will keep rising this year.

These state and local actions are affecting wage data, especially for workers at the bottom. To get a sense of this impact, Ihaveused data in the Current Population Survey to look at minimum wage workers as a group and calculate the pressure their wage gains have put on aggregate wage growth over time, controlling for compositional changes in the share of minimum wage work.

Read the complete article here.

Fashion Nova’s Secret: Underpaid Workers in Los Angeles Factories

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From today’s New York Times:

Fashion Nova has perfected fast fashion for the Instagram era. The mostly online retailer leans on a vast network of celebrities, influencers, and random selfie takers who post about the brand relentlessly on social media. It is built to satisfy a very online clientele, mass-producing cheap clothes that look expensive.

“They need to buy a lot of different styles and probably only wear them a couple times so their Instagram feeds can stay fresh,” Richard Saghian, Fashion Nova’s founder, said in an interview last year.

To enable that habit, he gives them a constant stream of new options that are priced to sell. The days of $200 jeans are over, if you ask Mr. Saghian. Fashion Nova’s skintight denim goes for $24.99. And, he said, the company can get its clothes made “in less than two weeks,” often by manufacturers in Los Angeles, a short drive from the company’s headquarters.

That model hints at an ugly secret behind the brand’s runaway success: The federal Labor Department has found that many Fashion Nova garments are stitched together by a work force in the United States that is paid illegally low wages. Los Angeles is filled with factories that pay workers off the books and as little as possible, battling overseas competitors that can pay even less. Many of the people behind the sewing machines are undocumented, and unlikely to challenge their bosses.

“It has all the advantages of a sweatshop system,” said David Weil, who led the United States Labor Department’s wage and hour division from 2014 to 2017.

Every year, the department investigates allegations of wage violations at sewing contractors in Los Angeles, showing up unannounced to review payroll data, interview employees and question the owners.

In investigations conducted from 2016 through this year, the department discovered Fashion Nova clothing being made in dozens of factories that owed $3.8 million in back wages to hundreds of workers, according to internal federal documents that summarized the findings and were reviewed by The New York Times.

Read the complete article here.

NLRB Says McDonald’s Not Responsible For Franchise Treatment of Workers

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From NPR News Online:

McDonald’s should not be held responsible for the labor practices of its franchisees, the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday.

The federal agency, in charge of enforcing U.S. labor law, delivered the latest ruling in a years-long union case that sought to hold the fast food chain liable for the treatment of all workers at both corporate and franchise locations. The agency, also known as NLRB, directed a federal administrative law judge to approve a settlement that had earlier been reached between McDonald’s, its franchisees and the workers who had alleged labor-law violations.

The case was closely watched because it had potential implications for a vast array of companies that rely on franchising and contracting for work, such as janitorial services, trucking, construction and warehousing. The NLRB ruling is expected to face an appeal.

The long and bitter litigation began in 2015, when the Service Employees International Union accused McDonald’s and its franchisees of retaliating against hundreds of workers who supported the Fight For $15 labor movement. For example, workers alleged that they were assigned harder tasks or fewer hours after they attended union-backed protests demanding higher wages.

The government’s labor-law prosecutor at the time asked the judge, Lauren Esposito, to review the complaints and consider McDonald’s a “joint employer” of franchisees accused of violating labor laws.

But under a new administration, the NLRB lawyer last year abruptly proposed a settlement with the affected workers — days before the conclusion of the three-year trial. Esposito rejected the proposal, calling it “manifestly unreasonable” and “simply baffling.”

On Thursday, an NRLB panel overruled the judge and instructed her to approve the settlement deal.

Read the complete article here.

Airline catering workers plan protests at major US airports on Thanksgiving week

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From today’s CNBC News Online:

Hundreds of airline catering workers are protesting this week at some of the largest U.S. airports to demand higher wages and better benefits during what’s expected to be a record Thanksgiving travel period.

Some of those workers, who prepare and deliver meals to airlines and are represented by the Unite Here labor union, are planning to block airport roads or stage sit-ins around ticket counters and pre-security areas on Tuesday at airports including those serving New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Philadelphia.

Others plan to picket and hand out pamphlets about their demands, according to the union, which represents more than 20,000 airline catering workers. Airlines for America, a trade group, expects a record 31.6 million travelers to fly on U.S. airlines during the 12 days around Thanksgiving, up nearly 4% from last year.

The protests are the latest demonstrations by emboldened workers who are demanding a bigger share of corporate profits, which have surged since the last recession more than a decade ago. Airline workers have been particularly visible this year after airlines reported disruptions they said were due to workers trying to gain leverage in contract talks. President Donald Trump signed a bill ending the longest-ever government shutdown in January, hours after a shortage of air traffic controllers disrupted flights.

Read the complete article here.

Andrew Yang claims, “Yes, Robots Are Stealing Your Job.” So now what?

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From today’s New York Times:

During the last Democratic debate, in Ohio, there was a moment that stood out. Elizabeth Warren and I got into a debate over the impact of automation versus trade on the elimination of manufacturing jobs. Joe Biden also chimed in, agreeing that the fourth industrial revolution is costing jobs, so it’s important to deal with the root causes.

Immediately, fact checkers were quick to point to a study showing that 88 percent of factory job losses from 2000 to 2010 were caused by automation. Yet, in the days following that debate, some prominent media figures asserted that the threat of automation is not real. The Times columnist Paul Krugman even called it “a sort of escapist fantasy for centrists who don’t want to confront truly hard questions.”

It’s easy to cite incomplete statistics that ignore the full picture and the situation on the ground, but I’ve done the math while spending time in struggling communities. Venture for America, the nonprofit I founded, sent me across this country, to Detroit, St. Louis, Birmingham, Ala., and other communities, where we attempted to spur entrepreneurship and create jobs. It was during this time when I spoke with workers who had lost their jobs to automation and couldn’t find more work. My organization was helping to create jobs, but automation was displacing tens of thousands of workers in these states. We were pouring water into a bathtub with a giant hole ripped in the bottom.

On the campaign trail, I’ve spoken with workers in Michigan, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, workers who are worried about the inevitability of their jobs falling victim to automation.

Read the complete article here.

As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots

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From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him half an hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? He never knows.

Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots, which promise to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation’s imported goods.

“I’m for automation,” Diaz says. “One hundred percent. One hundred percent.”

But what about the thousands of International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers who have mounted massive protests, saying the robots will replace human jobs? The ILWU members, who transfer cargo from ships to trucks and direct terminal traffic, “don’t care about the drivers,” said Diaz, 41, who has serviced the ports for two decades. “Never. We sit in line while they take two-hour breaks. With automation, we don’t have that problem.”

The arrival of robots at the nation’s largest marine terminal, a 484-acre facility run by Danish conglomerate A.P. Moller-Maersk, is exposing a stark economic divide between two sets of Southern California workers.

Read the complete article here.