Tag Archives: worker productivity

Break down employment barriers with training, education programs

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From today’s CalMatters Online:

“You can’t have just one job in America,” says a gig worker in Los Angeles County, and “you could get replaced like this. ‘Say one wrong thing to me? You’re fired …There is a line outside the door who wants your job.’”

That is one of several perspectives from struggling workers in California captured in a new report by the Institute for the Future, which interviewed a cross-section of Californians paid less than $15 an hour last fall. The report, released March 24, explores troubling trends that preceded the pandemic but now are worsening. 

And it comes on the heels of another report by the state’s Future of Work Commission that calls for a new social compact for workers based on some staggering statistics. For example, nearly one-third of all  workers in California make less than $15 per hour, and a majority are over age 30. Women and people of color also are paid, disproportionately, the lowest wages in our state.

Beyond wages, fewer than half of workers in California report having a “quality job,” which the Future of Work Commission describes as “a living wage, stable and predictable pay, control over scheduling, access to benefits, a safe and dignified work environment, and opportunities for training and career advancement.”

The commission also notes how a decrease in worker power and organizing relates to job quality, inequality and violations of workers’ rights. The percentage of Californians in a labor union has dropped from 24% in 1980 to 15% in 2018, and membership in a union reduces the likelihood of low-wage employment more so than a college degree (39% versus 33%).

The futurists at the Institute for the Future outline how COVID-19 has accelerated instability and insecurity for workers. This is now an all-hands on deck moment, requiring consensus and collaboration across sectors – government, business, labor, education, workforce development, philanthropy and community organizations. This is difficult, complicated, and even expensive work, but it is essential if we are to make the California Dream real and attainable for all.

Despite collaborative efforts, we need more employers and labor organizations at the table. Industry has a critical role, and they must be closely involved every step of the way, not as an afterthought.     

The good news is that some promising efforts are underway. If passed, Assembly Bill 628, introduced by Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, will build upon the Breaking Barriers to Employment Initiative by assisting individuals in obtaining the skills necessary to prepare for jobs in high-demand industries. The program would support individuals who face systemic barriers to employment with training and education programs aligned with regional labor market needs.

Read the complete article here.

Instacart shoppers face unforgiving metrics: ‘It’s a very easy job to lose’

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From today’s Los Angeles Times:

Five days a week, Ryan Hartson scours the picked-over aisles of Mariano’s Fresh Market in Chicago to fill grocery delivery orders for Instacart. He clocks in for his shift exactly on the hour — if he’s even five minutes late, he’ll receive a “reliability incident.” Within four minutes he must accept any incoming orders. Any longer and he’ll be kicked off the shift and risk getting an incident. Three incidents in a week and he’s at risk of termination.

“It’s a very easy job to lose,” Hartson said.

To avoid missing orders, Hartson schedules his bathroom visits — after four hours of work, the app notifies him that he has earned a 10-minute paid break. Meanwhile, Instacart managers use the app to see if he’s running behind on his orders. The app also tracks Hartson’s customer communications, automatically searching for specific terms to ensure he’s using Instacart’s preferred script. If he doesn’t, his metrics will take another hit.

Metrics define the experience of Instacart’s part-time workforce. Measured weekly for employees such as Harston is the number of reliability incidents; the number of seconds it takes to pick each item; and the percentage of customers with whom they correspond. Some former and current employees say 5% to 20% of shoppers in a store can be fired weekly.

Even in the data-driven tech world, Instacart stands out for its metrics-oriented culture, interviews with more than 30 current and former employees as well as documents and recordings reviewed by The Times reveal. This drive toward productivity helps Instacart’s profit margins, a vital step for a start-up that recorded its first-ever monthly profit in April, as the coronavirus pandemic heightened demand for grocery delivery.

Instacart says it has eased enforcement of certain metrics during the pandemic, but shoppers say company policies often ignore the realities of the job, leaving them in constant fear of termination over things out of their control.

Instacart says it evaluates shoppers on more than just speed and efficiency. Natalia Montalvo, the company‘s director of shopper engagement and communications, said the in-store shopper role was built on the premise of “flexibility, efficiency, innovation and customer service.”

“Efficiency and fulfillment of customer orders in a timely manner is important,” Montalvo said, “but it’s just one of many factors we look at in our overall business health and growth relative to other contributors” such as revenue derived from advertising for and partnering with consumer brands.

Read the complete article here.

Why Work From Home When You Can Work From Barbados or Estonia?

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From today’s New York Times:

When Lamin Ngobeh, a high-school teacher at the Freire Charter School in Wilmington, Del., saw a social media post last month about working remotely in Barbados for 12 months, his interest was piqued.

Lamin Ngobeh, a high-school teacher in Delaware, plans to move temporarily to Barbados in September.
Mr. Ngobeh in his classroom in Delaware.

“My school probably won’t open for in-person classes at least until February 2021, and I want to be in a country that’s safer — health wise — and also enjoy the quality of life,” he said of the reasons for considering a temporary relocation. “I reached out to my school leaders and they were very supportive of my decision.”

When it announced its 12-month Welcome Stamp program in mid-July, Barbados became one of the first of several countries, in regions from the Caribbean to Eastern Europe, to create programs for remote workers. The programs employ either special visas or expand existing ones to entice workers to temporarily relocate. Other countries offering similar visas currently include Estonia, Georgia and Bermuda.

A substantial drop in these countries’ tourism numbers is a key reason for the new programs.

“Tourism is the lifeline of the country,” said Eusi Skeete, the U.S. director of tourism for Barbados. Tourism accounted for 14 percent of the country’s annual gross domestic product in 2019, according to data published by the Central Bank of Barbados, and had a record number of international arrivals of more than 712,000. But in 2020, the number of visitors during the months of April, May and June were near zero.

Mr. Skeete said that the country’s new remote worker visa program will help with those numbers. “A 12-month period will allow visitors to experience the country in a holistic way,” he said.

More than 1,000 applications from around the world were submitted within the first week, the country said, with the majority of responses from the United States, Canada, and Britain.

Read the complete article here.

5-Hour Workdays? 4-Day Workweeks? Yes, Please

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From today’s New York Times:

A German entrepreneur named Lasse Rheingans has become a subject of attention since The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a novel idea he has put in place at his 16-person technology start-up: a five-hour workday. Mr. Rheingans is not just reducing the time his employees spend in the office; he’s reducing the total time they spend working altogether. They arrive at 8 a.m. and leave at 1 p.m., at which point they’re not expected to work until the next morning.

This distinction between time in the office and time spent working is critical. In our current age of email and smartphones, work has pervaded more and more of our waking hours — evenings, mornings, weekends, vacations — rendering the idea of a fixed workday as quaint. We’re driven to these extremes by some vague sense that all of this frantic communicating will make us more productive.

Mr. Rheingans is betting that we have this wrong. His experiment is premised on the idea that once you remove time-wasting distractions and constrain inefficient conversation about your work, five hours should be sufficient to accomplish most of the core activities that actually move the needle.

To support this new approach, he has employees leave their phones in their bags at the office and blocks access to social media on the company network. Strict rules reduce time spent in meetings (most of which are now limited to 15 minutes or less). Perhaps most important, his employees now check work email only twice each day — no drawn out back-and-forth exchanges fragmenting their attention, no surreptitious inbox checks while at dinner or on the sidelines of their kids’ sporting events.

The Wall Street Journal described Mr. Rheingans’s approach as “radical.” But as someone who thinks and writes about the future of work in a high-tech age, I’ve come to believe that what’s really radical is the fact that many more organizations aren’t trying similar experiments.

Read the complete article here.

Machines May Not Take Your Job, but One Could Become Your Boss

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From today’s New York Times:

When Conor Sprouls, a customer service representative in the call center of the insurance giant MetLife talks to a customer over the phone, he keeps one eye on the bottom-right corner of his screen. There, in a little blue box, A.I. tells him how he’s doing.

Talking too fast? The program flashes an icon of a speedometer, indicating that he should slow down.

Sound sleepy? The software displays an “energy cue,” with a picture of a coffee cup.

Not empathetic enough? A heart icon pops up.

For decades, people have fearfully imagined armies of hyper-efficient robots invading offices and factories, gobbling up jobs once done by humans. But in all of the worry about the potential of artificial intelligence to replace rank-and-file workers, we may have overlooked the possibility it will replace the bosses, too.

Read the complete article here.

With 8 Years of Gains, Unemployment Is Lowest It Has Been Since 1969

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From today’s New York Times:

The unemployment rate fell to a nearly five-decade low in September, punctuating a remarkable rebound in the ten years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a global financial crisis.

The 134,000 jobs that employers added in September reflected the slowest pace of growth in a year, and the growth in wages cooled slightly from August.

But there is little evidence that those mildly disappointing figures suggest a broader slowdown. The report on Friday extended the current run of monthly job growth to eight straight years, double the previous record.

By nearly any measure, today’s labor market is the strongest since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Job growth has repeatedly defied economists’ predictions of a slowdown. African-Americans, Latinos and members of other groups that often face discrimination are experiencing some of their lowest rates of joblessness on record.

“I view this as the strongest labor market in a generation,” said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at the career site Glassdoor. “These really are the good times.”

The current economic expansion is already one of the longest on record, and there is no sign that it is losing steam. Economic output last quarter increased at its fastest pace in four years, and the current quarter looks strong as well. Yields on United States government bonds have risen sharply in recent days, an indication that investors expect faster growth, and more inflation, in coming years.

For months, the one knock on the economy has been that strong hiring has not yet translated into robust pay gains for many workers. There are signs that that could finally be changing.

The 2.8 percent increase in average hourly earnings last month compared with a year earlier was down slightly from the 2.9 rate in August. But earnings growth has drifted upward in recent months, and other measures show stronger growth.

Workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder are seeing particularly strong growth: Amazon announced this week that it would raise the minimum wage for all of its employees in the United States to at least $15 an hour.

Read the complete article here.

Work Productivity: Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting.

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From today’s New York Times by Susan Dynarski:

Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching.

Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.

That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.

But a growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures. They also tend to earn worse grades. The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.

Measuring the effect of laptops on learning is tough. One problem is that students don’t all use laptops the same way. It might be that dedicated students, who tend to earn high grades, use them more frequently in classes. It might be that the most distracted students turn to their laptops whenever they are bored. In any case, a simple comparison of performance may confuse the effect of laptops with the characteristics of the students who choose to use them. Researchers call this “selection bias.”

Read the entire article here.