Category Archives: #WorkRights

Instacart and DoorDash’s Tip Policies Deliver Outrage to Workers, Customers

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times:

Delivery has always been a rough business. Since time immemorial, couriers have braved the elements, gotten by on meager wages and dealt with annoying customers, growling dogs and fifth-floor walk-ups, all for the chance of a big tip from a happy customer.

But thanks to two Silicon Valley upstarts, even those tips are in doubt.

This week, Instacart and DoorDash — two giants of the app-based delivery industry, collectively valued by investors at more than $11 billion — have come under fire from critics who have accused the companies of taking advantage of their workers with deceptive tipping policies. Both companies acknowledged putting customer tips toward workers’ minimum pay guarantees, in effect using them to subsidize their own payouts.

“It’s offensive, it’s unethical and in this climate, it’s a very dumb thing to do,” Matthew Telles, an Instacart courier based in Chicago, said this week.

Ashley Knudson, a Seattle-based Instacart worker, said she felt “cheated” by the company.

“I have gone from making $1,000 a week and providing for my family to now, if I’m lucky, making $600 a week,” she added.

Read the complete article here.

The fastest-growing job in each state

Posted on by

From today’s Yahoo Finance News:

The unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.0% in January 2019, while the labor force participation rate hit its highest mark since 2013. Overall, the report indicated that the U.S. labor market is still chugging along.

And some jobs are growing faster than others. Construction and extraction jobs are in high demand in the U.S., along with installation, maintenance, and repair services. Production jobs are also quickly developing, as are mathematical and technology-focused occupations.

Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and projections from the government-backed Projections Managing Partnership (PMP), we mapped out the top jobs by growth rate (as opposed to plentifulness).

Read the complete article here.

CBO estimates shutdown cost $11 billion, $3 billion won’t be recovered

Posted on by

From today’s ABC News Online:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the longest-running government shutdown in U.S. history came at a price. It cost the economy $11 billion, with $3 billion that will never be recovered, according to a report released Monday.

For the fourth quarter of 2018, the CBO estimated real gross domestic product was reduced by $3 billion compared to what it would have been. The level of real GDP for the first quarter of 2019 is estimated to be $8 billion lower, due to a combination of the partial government shutdown delaying approximately $18 billion in federal spending, suspending services for federal workers and a reduction in demand lowering output in the private sector.

“Risks to the economy were becoming increasingly significant as the shutdown continued,” the report read. “Although their precise effects on economic output are uncertain, the negative effects of such factors would have become increasingly important if the partial shutdown had extended beyond five weeks.”

While CBO anticipates a majority of the lost real GDP will be recovered, about $3 billion will not be. That’s about 0.02 percent of the projected annual GDP in 2019, according to the report.

“Among those who experienced the largest and most direct negative effects are federal workers who faced delayed compensation and private-sector entities that lost business,” the report said. “Some of those private-sector entities will never recoup that lost income.”

Read the complete article here.

Why does Congress allow contractors to exploit immigrants in detention?

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times:

There are more than 48,000 people being held in immigrant detentionin more than 200 facilities in the United States. More than two-thirds of them, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, are confined by private companies, working on contracts with the federal government. Those numbers have ballooned in the last two years under the Trump administration, drawing new attention to the terrible conditions detainees are living in.

One feature of privately run centers — the Voluntary Work Program — is the subject of six separate lawsuits, which say that privately run immigrant detention centers are coercing detainees into working for a dollar a day and punishing those who don’t. The lawsuits demand, among other things, that the practice stop and that detained workers be paid minimum wage.

Congress should not wait for these lawsuits to be decided. Democrats have won the House, so even if they can’t stop the president’s anti-immigrant push, they can push to raise the obsolete and exploitative $1-a-day wage. And, just as they have rejected Mr. Trump’s request for $5.7 billion for the border wall, they should reject the request for $2.8 billion to expand detentions to 52,000 beds.

Prison labor is nearly as old as the American prison system itself, and it is protected by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and indentured servitude except as punishment for a crime. This exception means that prisons can require their prisoners to work, even without compensation.

Read the complete article here.

This workplace perk could make it easier to save for emergencies

Posted on by

From today’s CNBC News:

If your car breaks down or you get sick, do you have enough money saved to cover the unexpected expense? If you’re like many Americans, the answer is probably no.

A recent survey from personal finance website Bankrate found that just 40 percent of Americans have enough saved to cover a $1,000 unexpected expense. Research from Prudential found that 60 percent of families have experienced some kind of financial emergency in the past year.

What’s more, the median American household’s liquid net worth is just about $813, according to Prudential. When faced with a cash crunch, individuals tend to turn to their retirement accounts through loans or hardship withdrawals, credit cards or payday loans.

“If you don’t have that buffer, it could be a time of enormous stress. And in that time of stress, often people will tap sources that are not ideal for them,” said Phil Waldeck, president of Prudential Retirement.

That has prompted Prudential to launch a new option for emergency savings that can be added alongside its retirement plans. The savings is an after-tax contribution that allows employees to automatically put money away in low-cost investments such as money market or so-called stable value funds.

Read the complete article here.

LAUSD teachers union and school district reach tentative deal to end strike

Posted on by

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Los Angeles teachers are poised to end their first strike in 30 years after union leaders reached a tentative deal Tuesday with the L.A. Unified School District.

The Board of Education is expected to move quickly to ratify the deal, which must be officially approved by United Teachers Los Angeles through a vote of its members.

Union leaders have said they will not end the strike until their members ratify a contract, but also said they have a system in place that could allow members to vote within a matter of hours. That means teachers are likely to be back at work on Wednesday.

Regardless, schools will be open on Tuesday, managed by skeleton staffs of administrators and employees who are not on strike, just as they were last week. More than two-thirds of students did not come to campuses during the first week of the strike.

Read the complete article here.

Thousands of Furloughed Federal Workers File for Unemployment Benefits

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times:

On the second day of the year, Danielle Miller gave up on the federal government.

Furloughed from her Internal Revenue Service job near Cincinnati and fearful of running out of money during the partial government shutdown, she filed for unemployment benefits: $414 a week, about $200 less than usual.

“Once Christmas came and went, after New Year’s, I was like, I can’t go on,” said Ms. Miller, a single mother who has worked for the I.R.S. for almost 14 years. She spent part of this week calculating when her first unemployment check would arrive. “It’s disappointing, and it’s frustrating,” she said. “I have a job.”

The shutdown, the longest on record, is prompting tens of thousands of federal employees to seek jobless benefits. As the impasse meanders through its fourth week and more bills come due, their numbers have been growing.

On Thursday, two days after the White House doubled its projections and warned that the shutdown was reducing quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points per week, the Labor Department reported 10,454 initial claims by federal workers for the week that ended Jan. 5, doubling the previous week’s figure. Thousands more have applied since, state officials said.

Read the complete article here.

First teachers’ strike in 30 years leaves half a million L.A. students in limbo

Posted on by

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

With umbrellas in one hand and picket signs in the other, Los Angeles teachers braved cold, drizzly weather Monday morning as they walked off the job in their first strike in 30 years to demand smaller class sizes, more support staff at schools and better pay.

L.A. teachers go on strike

“Let’s be clear, educators don’t want to strike,” United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl said to a crowd of supporters during a morning news conference at John Marshall High School in Los Feliz. “We don’t want to miss time with our students. We don’t want to have less money for the car payment or less money for the school supplies that we always end up buying ourselves.”

The strike became inevitable when negotiations broke off late Friday afternoon between the L.A. Unified School District and the teachers union after more than 20 months of bargaining.

Schools are open during the strike, but it’s not clear how many students will head to classes in the nation’s second-largest school system. Staffers at some schools said attendance appeared to be low Monday, but official numbers were not immediately available.

During the last teachers’ strike, about half of the district’s students went to school. The plan at many schools for this strike is to gather students into large groups so they can be supervised by fewer adults. It’s not clear how much learning will be going on outside of the real-time civics lessons happening on the sidewalks.

Read the complete article here.

Interactive Map: Government Shutdown Is Affecting Federal Workers in All States

Posted on by

From today’s New York Times:

About 800,000 federal workers are furloughed or working without pay across the country because of the government shutdown, many of them concentrated in the West.

Over all, federal workers account for about 1.5 percent of the country’s labor force, with a fifth of them in the Washington metro area. But the shutdown has hit some agencies — and states — harder than others.

Outside the capital, states with large numbers of workers for the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior are more likely to feel the shutdown’s effects. And nearly the entire staff of the Environmental Protection Agency is furloughed, including hundreds of workers in North Carolina and Illinois.

A budget agreement to end the shutdown remains the subject of a fierce partisan fight in Congress, with federal workers caught in the middle. Some senators who count these workers among their constituents are pushing for an end to the impasse, but federal employment does not appear to have a clear relationship to lawmakers’ positions on the shutdown.

Read the complete article here.

No agreement to avert L.A. teachers’ strike after a long day of bargaining

Posted on by

From today’s Los Angeles Times:

A last-ditch bargaining effort to avert a Los Angeles teachers’ strike fell short Monday, although the two sides have agreed to meet again on Wednesday morning, the day before a strike is scheduled to begin.

No agreement to avert L.A. teachers’ strike after a long day of bargaining

Whether the strike starts on schedule could depend more, however, on legal maneuvers that will play out on Tuesday.

In a twist, it is the union that is going to Los Angeles Superior Court over whether it followed the rules. The union’s goal is to preempt the district from going to court on the same issue after a strike begins. Were that to happen, a judge could shut down the strike for several days, killing its momentum and perhaps making union leaders look — to the public and their members — inept.

UTLA is expected to argue that it has provided ample notice of its intent to strike. The union publicly announced its Jan. 10 strike date on Dec. 19.

Read the complete article here.