Progressive activists are calling on Ford, Target, Google, Bank of America and other major companies that have pledged to support voting rights to cut ties with the US Chamber of Commerce, CNN Business has learned.
The Chamber is one of the most powerful trade groups in the nation. In 2020 alone, the organization spent $81.9 million trying to influence government policy, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The only organization that spent more was the National Association of Realtors.
Accountable.US, a progressive watchdog group, sent letters Wednesday to 25 companies that have a relationship with the Chamber of Commerce even though they signed last week’s statement in the New York Times vowing to oppose discriminatory voting legislation.
The campaign from activists underscores the enormous pressure companies are under to follow up their verbal support for voting rights with concrete action.Enter your email to receive CNN’s nightcap newsletter.close dialog
“By ignoring the Chamber’s opposition to a bill that protects an essential right in our democracy, these executives are violating their commitment and siding against the millions of Americans — including many of their own employees — fighting racist voter suppression tactics,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, told CNN Business.
Last March, I sat in a lawyer’s conference room and watched as my corporate account at Pinterest was suddenly shut off. For almost two years, I had worked at the company as a public policy manager engaging with elected officials, civil rights groups and public health organizations. In an instant, I lost access to emails, documents and all internal systems. Months earlier, I filed complaints about wage discrimination and retaliation. Now the company was presenting me with no choice but to leave.
I thought about how I would explain to my colleagues, friends, family and prospective employers why I no longer had the high-profile job I loved. Worse, I had to find a way to have those conversations without violating the terms of a highly restrictive nondisclosure agreement (NDA), drawn up by Pinterest’s legal team, which was designed to keep me quiet.
Companies have long used NDAs to prevent competitors from poaching confidential information and good ideas. But they appear to increasingly be used to prevent workers from speaking out about instances of harassment, discrimination or assault they may face on the job.
During the #MeToo movement, those who came forward to report workplace abuses did so at great personal and legal risk. But it shouldn’t be this way. That is why I’mhelping lead the passage of a bill in California that, if signed into law, will allow victims of any kind of workplace discrimination to speak openly about the abuse they experience, regardless of the language in an NDA.
For a long time, I hesitated to speak about the issues I experienced at Pinterest. I didn’t want to be sued, and I hoped that the company would do the right thing and address the pay inequities and retaliation I faced. But it didn’t. When I eventually made the decision to come forward publicly, I, along with a courageous former colleague named Aerica Shimizu Banks, did so with the knowledge that we’d be covered, to some extent, under a 2019 law in California called CCP 1001.
Passed in the wake of the #MeToo movement, the law provides protections for those breaking NDAs if they disclose factual allegations related to only three types of misconduct: sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender discrimination. But those protections did not include the race discrimination that I also faced as a Black woman. As such, only one part of my identity was protected, leaving me in a sort of legal limbo.
Recognizing the need for intersectional protection in this law, I decided to work withCalifornia State Senator Connie Leyva (the author of CCP 1001) to help draft and sponsor the Silenced No More Act along with the California Employment Lawyers Association and Equal Rights Advocates. If passed, the measure will allow victims of any type of covered workplace discrimination — on the basis of such categories as race, religion, age, disability and sexual orientation — to speak honestly and openly about what they have faced, regardless of the language in a nondisclosure or nondisparagement agreement.
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?)
The number of female chief executives in Fortune 500 companies is 5 percent and has actually declined — by 25 percent — over the past year. In Britain, a study by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission found that a third of employers still think it’s O.K. to ask a woman during a job interview if she plans to have children. It’s not.
Women receive the majority of college degrees in the United States — and more advanced degrees — and yet they still must work four extra months to earn what their white male colleagues earned the year before, according to United States census data. When those numbers are segmented by race, it’s clear: Women of color must work even longer.
And then, of course, there is the rise of the #MeToo movement, which revealed as never before the sexual pressure many women face in the workplace. At least one study has found that 81 percent of women say they have experienced some form of sexual harassment.
Economists have long contended that there is a clear financial case for gender equality: Companies are more profitable, more collaborative and more inclusive when they hire women. True gender equality, research from McKinsey & Company has shown, would increase the gross national product in the United States by 26 percent.
What is it that seems to stand in the way of greater strides by women in the workplace?
Up until last week, none of the 170 employees working at Verve, a marketing company, knew what anyone else made. Now, everyone’s salary is listed on an internal document for everyone to see.
By 2019, all 1,100 employees at CareHere, a Nashville based health-care company, will know the pay ranges for all positions in the company. Fog Creek, a New York-based software company with about three dozen employees, did the same last year. As did Hired, an online job search network in San Francisco that employs 200 people.
Employers have long discouraged talking about money at work, in part because obscuring salary information keeps compensation costs down. But that attitude is starting to change. In a survey of almost 2,000 employers by the consulting firm Willis Towers Watson, more than half of the respondents said they plan to increase transparency around pay decisions in the next year.
Pay transparency can mean a lot of things. A minority of companies are taking the most extreme approach, where everyone knows what everyone else makes. A larger share of companies are letting employees in on the voodoo behind their pay practices and explaining what goes into compensation decisions. Others are revealing pay ranges for positions and posting that information alongside job listings.
“Many of us who entered the workforce a longer time ago entered into a culture where you didn’t talk about pay,” said Sandra McLellan, who heads Willis Towers Watson’s North America rewards practice. “Today, people are much more comfortable discussing what they earn.”
Employees now have more access to compensation data than ever before—just not necessarily from their employer. Sites such as Glassdoor and Fairygodboss aggregate and list pay information for thousands of jobs across industries, giving workers a clearer picture of how their pay stacks up against that of their co-workers. Even LinkedIn has a feature that breaks down pay by job title and location.
The proliferation of information is leading to some issues for employers. More than anything, people want to feel like they’re being paid fairly, surveys have found. Armed with this new information, many of them are going to their managers and complaining that they’re not.
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues.
The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority. The court’s decision could affect some 25 million employment contracts.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the court’s conclusion was dictated by a federal law favoring arbitration and the court’s precedents. If workers were allowed to band together to press their claims, he wrote, “the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement. In her written dissent, she called the majority opinion “egregiously wrong.” In her oral statement, she said the upshot of the decision “will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of vulnerable workers.”
Justice Ginsburg called on Congress to address the matter.
Brian T. Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who studies arbitrations and class actions, said the ruling was unsurprising in light of earlier Supreme Court decisions. Justice Gorsuch, he added, “appears to have put his cards on the table as firmly in favor of allowing class actions to be stamped out through arbitration agreements.”
As a result, Professor Fitzpatrick said “it is only a matter of time until the most powerful device to hold corporations accountable for their misdeeds is lost altogether.”
But Gregory F. Jacob, a lawyer with O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, said the decision would have a limited impact, as many employers already use the contested arbitration clauses. “This decision thus will not see a huge increase in the use of such provisions,” he said, “but it does protect employers’ settled expectations and avoids placing our nation’s job providers under the threat of additional burdensome litigation drain.”
I am ashamed to say that until recently I was part of the majority: I am the chief executive of a company that gave different benefits to different groups of employees.
Like so many companies before us, my company, Rent the Runway, had two tiers of workers. Our salaried employees — who typically came from relatively privileged, educated backgrounds — were given generous parental leave, paid sick leave and the flexibility to work from home, or even abroad. Our hourly employees, working in Rent the Runway’s warehouse, on the customer service team and in our retail stores, had to face life events like caring for a newborn, grieving after the death of a family member or taking care of a critically ill loved one without this same level of benefits.
I had inadvertently created classes of employees — and by doing so, had done my part to contribute to America’s inequality problem.
When you’re founding a business, you take your cues on corporate culture from larger, already successful organizations. In America, some of the biggest companies have decided to handle the dual pressures of keeping costs down while retaining “corporate talent” by ramping up benefits packages. Companies like Starbucks and Walgreens compete for top-tier candidates by offering cushy policies in areas like parental leave or vacation.
But the best benefits are reserved for corporate talent, for whom the competition is considered steepest; employees who work at hourly rates are an afterthought (and that doesn’t begin to factor in companies like Uber that opt to consider the people they work with “contractors”). When I started Rent the Runway, I simply followed suit.
But over the years, I began to reflect on how the system that I and others had constructed may have been perpetuating deep-seated social problems. Last month, I equalized benefits for all of our employees at Rent the Runway. Our warehouse, customer service and store employees now have the same bereavement, parental leave, family sick leave and sabbatical packages that corporate employees have.
Of course, chief executives and their leadership teams have outsize salaries as well as outsize benefits. C.E.O.s at the 350 largest companies make 271 times the earnings of the typical worker. The people with the most means have the most flexibility in their lives, not only because they have the ability to throw money at their problems but also because their companies grant them this flexibility to keep them happy.
Imagine a work culture in which team members can connect, regardless of where, when and how they work. The traditional workspace is rapidly changing, and today’s businesses need to modernize and evolve if they want to attract — and keep — the most talented among today’s workers.
At Dell Technologies, where I lead HR, we long ago recognized the need for a connected workforce. Dell’s vision for the future is founded in enabling its team members to be their best and do their best work, through a flexible approach to their work.
Results from early research we conducted show that more than 60% of employees work before or after standard business hours. Furthermore, roughly two-thirds of workers globally conduct at least some business from home on a regular basis, and the average employee spends at least two hours per week working from public places. In fact, research shows that more than 80% of millennials say workspace technology will influence the jobs they take. This aligns to research published by GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com, which shows that more than 80% of the U.S. workforce say they would like to telework at least part-time.
Additionally, the firm’s report shows that many Fortune 1000 companies around the globe are entirely revamping their spaces around the fact that employees are already mobile. The report’s findings share that studies have repeatedly shown that employees are not at their desk more than half of the time.
As leading organizations evolve to meet the new cultural requirements of today’s workforce, what exactly are business leaders to do?
From NYT “Business Day” August 31, 2014 by Steven Greenhouse:
Week after week, Guadalupe Rangel worked seven days straight, sometimes 11 hours a day, unloading dining room sets, trampolines, television stands and other imports from Asia that would soon be shipped to Walmart stores.
Even though he often clocked 70 hours a week at the Schneider warehouse here, he was never paid time-and-a-half overtime, he said. And now, having joined a lawsuit involving hundreds of warehouse workers, Mr. Rangel stands to receive more than $20,000 in back pay as part of a recent $21 million legal settlement with Schneider, a national trucking company.
“Sometimes I’d work 60, even 90 days in a row,” said Mr. Rangel, a soft-spoken immigrant from Mexico. “They never paid overtime.”
The lawsuit is part of a flood of recent cases — brought in California and across the nation — that accuse employers of violating minimum wage and overtime laws, erasing work hours and wrongfully taking employees’ tips. Worker advocates call these practices “wage theft,” insisting it has become far too prevalent.
Some federal and state officials agree. They assert that more companies are violating wage laws than ever before, pointing to the record number of enforcement actions they have pursued. They complain that more employers — perhaps motivated by fierce competition or a desire for higher profits — are flouting wage laws.
Many business groups counter that government officials have drummed up a flurry of wage enforcement actions, largely to score points with union allies. If anything, employers have become more scrupulous in complying with wage laws, the groups say, in response to the much publicized lawsuits about so-called off-the-clock work that were filed against Walmart and other large companies a decade ago.
Here in California, a federal appeals court ruled last week that FedEx had in effect committed wage theft by insisting that its drivers were independent contractors rather than employees. FedEx orders many drivers to work 10 hours a day, but does not pay them overtime, which is required only for employees. FedEx said it planned to appeal.
Julie Su, the state labor commissioner, recently ordered a janitorial company in Fremont to pay $332,675 in back pay and penalties to 41 workers who cleaned 17 supermarkets. She found that the company forced employees to sign blank time sheets, which it then used to record inaccurate, minimal hours of work.
David Weil, the director of the federal Labor Department’s wage and hour division, says wage theft is surging because of underlying changes in the nation’s business structure. The increased use of franchise operators, subcontractors and temp agencies leads to more employers being squeezed on costs and more cutting corners, he said. A result, he added, is that the companies on top can deny any knowledge of wage violations.
“We have a change in the structure of work that is then compounded by a falling level of what is viewed as acceptable in the workplace in terms of how you treat people and how you regard the law,” Mr. Weil said.
His agency has uncovered nearly $1 billion in illegally unpaid wages since 2010. He noted that the victimized workers were disproportionately immigrants.
Guadalupe Salazar, a cashier at a McDonald’s in Oakland, complained that her paychecks repeatedly missed a few hours of work time and overtime pay. Frustrated about this, she has joined one of seven lawsuits against McDonald’s and several of its franchise operators, asserting that workers were cheated out of overtime, had hours erased from timecards and had to work off the clock.
“Basically every time that I worked overtime, it didn’t show up in my paycheck,” Ms. Salazar said. “This is time that I would rather be with my family, and they just take it away.”
Business advocates see a hidden agenda in these lawsuits. For example, the lawsuit against Schneider — which owns a gigantic warehouse here that serves Walmart exclusively — coincides with unions pressuring Walmart to raise wages. The lawyers and labor groups behind the lawsuit have sought to hold Walmart jointly liable in the case.
Walmart says that it seeks to ensure that its contractors comply with all laws, and that it was not responsible for Schneider’s employment practices. Schneider said it “manages its operations with integrity,” noting that it had hired various subcontractors to oversee the loading and unloading crews.
Business groups note that the lawsuits against McDonald’s have been coordinated with the fast-food workers’ movement demanding a $15 wage. “This is a classic special-interest campaign by labor unions,” said Stephen J. Caldeira, president of the International Franchise Association. In legal papers, McDonald’s denied any liability in Ms. Salazar’s case, and the Oakland franchisee insisted that Ms. Salazar had failed to establish illegal actions by the restaurant.
Michael Rubin, one of the lawyers who sued Schneider, disagreed, saying there are many sound wage claims. “The reason there is so much wage theft is many employers think there is little chance of getting caught,” he said.
Commissioner Su of California said wage theft harmed not just low-wage workers. “My agency has found more wages being stolen from workers in California than any time in history,” she said. “This has spread to multiple industries across many sectors. It’s affected not just minimum-wage workers, but also middle-class workers.”
Many other states are seeing wage-theft cases. New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, has recovered $17 million in wage claims over the past three years. “I’m amazed at how petty and abusive some of these practices are,” he said. “Cutting corners is increasingly seen as a sign of libertarianism rather than the theft that it really is.”
In Nashville last February, nine housekeepers protested outside a DoubleTree hotel because the subcontractor that employed them had failed to pay a month’s wages. “The contractor said they didn’t have the money, that the hotel hadn’t paid them,” said Natalia Polvadera, a housekeeper. “We went to the hotel manager — he showed receipts that they had paid the contractor.”
Nonetheless, the protests persuaded DoubleTree to pay the $12,000 in wages owed.
Mr. Weil said some executives had urged him to increase enforcement because they dislike being underbid by unscrupulous employers.
His agency has begun cracking down on retaliation against workers who complain, suing a Texas company that fired a janitor when he refused to sign a statement that falsely said he had already received back wages due him from a Labor Department investigation.
“This is just not acceptable,” Mr. Weil said. “You can’t threaten people to lose their jobs because they are asserting rights that go back 75 years.”
This last year was a record one for fines and financial settlements levied against corporations for breaking laws and wreaking havoc on the economy, especially banks and other financial institutions primarily responsible for creating the Great Recession.
The question is whether forcing corporations to pay changes their bad behavior.
Watch this New York Times video that reviews three examples of businesses behaving badly because they view such fines and settlements as the cost of doing business.
The question is whether more severe penalties, including jail time for executives who are responsible for the behavior of their corporations, can incentivize them to follow the law.
After all, corporations are citizens, and when citizens commit felonies, they often lose their rights. Perhaps we need legislation so that corporations that break the law lose their rights as well.
