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Tag: Laura Clawson

When three days sick means losing a month’s grocery budget

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Nearly two-thirds of private-sector workers in the U.S. have access to paid sick leave, but as with so many labor and economic statistics, that masks serious inequality: 87 percent of the top 10 percent of earners have paid sick leave, while just 27 percent of the bottom 10 percent do. And what that means is that the people who can least afford to take a day off without pay are the ones who are forced to do so if they’re too sick to go to work. A new Economic Policy Institute analysis shows how devastating that choice can be:

Without the ability to earn paid sick days, workers must choose between going to work sick (or sending a child to school sick) and losing much-needed pay. For the average worker who does not have access to paid sick days, the costs of taking unpaid sick time can make a painful dent in the monthly budget for the worker’s household:

  • If the worker needs to take off even a half day due to illness, the lost wages are equivalent to the household’s monthly spending for fruits and vegetables; lost wages from taking off nearly three days equal their entire grocery budget for the month.
  • Two days of unpaid sick time are roughly the equivalent of a month’s worth of gas, making it difficult to get to work.
  • Three days of unpaid sick time translate into a household’s monthly utilities budget, preventing the worker from paying for electricity and heat.
  • In the event of a lengthier illness—say, seven and a half days of unpaid sick time—the worker would lose income equivalent to a monthly rent or mortgage payment.

State-level paid sick leave laws are starting to make a difference—in 2012, when the first such law was passed, in Connecticut, just 18 percent of low-wage private-sector workers had paid sick days. But workers outside of the five states with such laws need the federal government to act, and that’s not going to happen under Republican control.

This blog was originally published at DailyKos on July 1, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.


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Seattle’s $15 minimum wage raised pay with zero effect on restaurant jobs, new study shows

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Raising the minimum wage does not kill jobs, no matter what Republicans tell you—and a new study of the Seattle restaurant industry, where some businesses are already paying a $15 minimum wage, provides another data point showing just that. According to the University of California, Berkeley, study, the increased minimum wage had employment effects that were “not statistically distinguishable from zero,” which is a fancy way of saying “we looked and we could not find a damn thing.” The Seattle Times reports:

Indeed, employment in food service from 2015 to 2016 was not affected, “even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding,” according to the study, led by Berkeley economics professor Michael Reich. […]

It can be hard to separate what impact the wage law had on employment in Seattle versus the effect of the city’s white-hot economy and tight labor market, but “we do our best,” Reich said.

The study compares the wage and employment growth rates in Seattle to a control group of counties, in Washington state and across the U.S., that had similar growth rates as Seattle in the years shortly before the minimum-wage law took effect.

A report issued last year found indications that the increased minimum wage did slightly restrict job growth, but we don’t know if the difference comes from differing methodologies or from the studies covering different time frames. Both studies have to contend with Seattle’s booming economy, which could conceivably mask lowered growth of the job rate for low-wage workers … but which itself refutes the Republican talking points against raising the minimum wage. Because “it’s hard to tell if even more low-wage workers would otherwise be employed because the economy is so darn good” does not exactly back up claims that having the minimum wage be a living wage will destroy the economy.


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Public transportation is a jobs and equality issue

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Public transportation is a jobs issue. If you don’t believe that, take a look at Philadelphia, where lack of efficient mass transit from the city to the suburbs is keeping a lot of people out of work—and a coalition of progressive and religious groups is pushing the city to offer improved options:

The coalition says SEPTA’s system centers on an outdated reality: suburban dweller commuting to city job. In 1970, about half of the region’s jobs were based in Philadelphia, the coalition said in a letter to Council. By 2013, only one in four jobs were in Philadelphia, as urban employment declined and suburban jobs increased. Meanwhile, the city has a higher unemployment rate, 6 percent in March, compared to suburban rates of 3.5 percent to 4.4 percent.

Workers trying to get from the city to the suburbs for jobs face long commutes. Looooong. Just 24 percent of jobs in the area are accessible within 90 minutes on public transit. That’s a major obstacle:

Another survey, by Temple University’s Institute of Survey Research, found that lack of transportation was the biggest barrier to employment, with 39 percent of respondents below the poverty line saying that not being able to get to work was more of an obstacle than a criminal history, child care problems or language barriers.

That’s just one more way infrastructure investment—the kind Donald Trump isn’t interested in making—boosts employment.

This blog was originally published at DailyKos on June 10, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. and Labor editor since 2011.


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Bosses are stealing billions from their workers’ paychecks, but it’s not treated like a crime

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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 Here’s a kind of theft almost no one goes to prison for. When an employer doesn’t pay workers the money they’ve earned, it has the same effect as if they got paid and then walked out on the street and had their pockets picked. But somehow wage theft—not paying workers the minimum wage for the hours they’ve worked, stealing tips, not paying overtime, and other ways of not paying workers what they’ve earned—doesn’t get treated as the crime it truly is. It has a huge impact, though, as a new study from the Economic Policy Institute shows. The EPI looked at just one form of wage theft: paying below minimum wage. Just that one type of violation steals billions of dollars out of workers’ paychecks:
  • In the 10 most populous states in the country, each year 2.4 million workers covered by state or federal minimum wage laws report being paid less than the applicable minimum wage in their state—approximately 17 percent of the eligible low-wage workforce.
  • The total underpayment of wages to these workers amounts to over $8 billion annually. If the findings for these states are representative for the rest of the country, they suggest that the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year.
  • Workers suffering minimum wage violations are underpaid an average of $64 per week, nearly one-quarter of their weekly earnings. This means that a victim who works year-round is losing, on average, $3,300 per year and receiving only $10,500 in annual wages. […]
  • In the 10 most populous states, workers are most likely to be paid less than the minimum wage in Florida (7.3 percent), Ohio (5.5 percent), and New York (5.0 percent). However, the severity of underpayment is the worst in Pennsylvania and Texas, where the average victim of a minimum wage violation is cheated out of over 30 percent of earned pay.

Young workers, women, immigrants, and people of color are disproportionately affected because they’re overrepresented in low-wage jobs to begin with. This wage theft is keeping people in poverty—the poverty rate among workers paid less than the minimum wage in this study was 21 percent, and would have dropped to 15 percent if they’d been paid minimum wage. If their bosses had followed the law, in other words.

The wage thieves rarely face penalties for stealing, and when they do:

Employers found to have illegally underpaid an employee are usually required only to pay back a portion of the stolen wages—not even the full amount owed, much less a penalty for violating the law.

The law basically gives employers permission to steal from workers, in other words. And it sure won’t be getting better under Donald Trump.

This blog originally appeared at DailyKos.com on May 12, 2017. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006 and labor editor since 2011.


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This week in the war on workers: Teacher pay is falling behind

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Laura ClawsonOh, those overpaid teachers:

  • Average weekly wages (inflation adjusted) of public-sector teachers decreased $30 per week from 1996 to 2015, from $1,122 to $1,092 (in 2015 dollars). In contrast, weekly wages of all college graduates rose from $1,292 to $1,416 over this period.
  • For all public-sector teachers, the relative wage gap (regression adjusted for education, experience, and other factors) has grown substantially since the mid-1990s: It was ?1.8 percent in 1994 and grew to a record ?17.0 percent in 2015.

Pay is just one symptom of a broader problem in how teachers are valued, though. Increasingly—promoted by standardized testing-driven education and the corporate education policy movement—teachers aren’t respected as professionals, as experts on what goes on in their classrooms. That shows up in pay levels but it also shows up in anti-teacher rhetoric and in curricula that force them to paint by numbers rather than exercising independent judgment.

  • Richard Trumka has done a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson. There’s lots there, including this on how to see union density rise again:

We went from being totally embedded in the community to being isolated and hunkering down and trying to hold on to what we had. Now we’re back, embedded in the community. And when we’re embedded in the community, unionism starts to flourish and grow, and you can’t be assailed, because you can’t assail the entire community and still survive. Scott Walker, who gives Wisconsin’s surplus away to corporations, now has a deficit and says, “See these workers? It’s their fault.” He won’t be able to get away with that, because we’re so ingrained in the community.

Pablo worked in the fields of Virginia for 18 years. Then in 2009, he was sent to work in North Carolina, an experience he will never forget. “The grower was violent,” he recalls, “he screamed at us, and everyone was afraid of him.” It was common knowledge that the grower kept a gun in his truck, and while he never openly threatened anyone with it, the message was clear: do your work and don’t complain.

This article originally appeared at DailyKOS.com on August 13, 2016. Reprinted with permission.

Laura Clawson is a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Labor editor since 2011. Laura at Daily Kos


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Thanks, Obama. Millions More Workers To Get Overtime Pay.

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LauraClawsonIt’s been in the works for months, but on Wednesday it becomes official: The Obama administration is making millions of workers eligible for overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week. Currently, only workers making salaries of less than $23,660 a year—$455 a week—automatically get overtime pay when they work extra hours. Effective December 1, that number will double to $47,476, which is less than the “about $50,400” the president announced last summer, but still enough to directly cover an additional 4.2 million workers.

On a call with reporters Tuesday, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the reform was meant to address “both underpay and overwork.”

“The overtime rule is about making sure middle-class jobs pay middle-class wages,” Perez said. “Some will see more money in their pockets … Some will get more time with their family … and everybody will receive clarity on where they stand, so that they can stand up for their rights.”

In addition to the 4.2 million workers who will automatically become eligible for overtime pay, more than eight million more are expected to get overtime because their employers will no longer be able to dodge the rules by calling them managers even though little of their work is managerial.

That includes workers like one cited in Obama’s email announcing the change:

As an assistant manager at a sandwich shop, Elizabeth sometimes worked as many as 70 hours a week, without a dime of overtime pay. So Elizabeth wrote to me to say how hard it is to build a bright future for her son.

It’s a shame the Obama administration didn’t stick with a new threshold of more than $50,000, but doubling the existing, pitifully low threshold and updating it every three years, as is included in the new rule, is a major advance for millions of workers. And as always, it’s a reminder that a Democratic president who’s prepared to use every aspect of government can do a lot, even with a Republican Congress blocking so much.

This blog originally appeared at DailyKOS.com on May 18, 2016. Reprinted with permission. 

Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Labor editor since 2011.


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Seattle City Council Votes That Uber and Lyft Drivers Can Unionize

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LauraClawsonCompanies like Uber and Lyft consider their drivers to be “independent contractors,” which is all about freedom—specifically, the company’s freedom to not pay for things like workers comp, unemployment, or even the minimum wage. That’s a system facing significant court challenges in some places, and now another form of challenge in Seattle. The Seattle City Council on Monday night passed a bill giving drivers union rights.

Under the bill passed Monday, “for-hire drivers” would be legally entitled to seek out “exclusive driver representatives” for the purpose of collective bargaining — i.e., labor unions. If a majority of drivers at a particular company designate a union as their representative, then by law the company will have to bargain with the union within the city of Seattle.

The law has implications well beyond Uber and Lyft. Many traditional taxi drivers are classified as independent contractors as well, and would have new rights under the law.

At least, they would if the law ever goes into effect. Uber and others in the industry are expected to challenge the law in two possible ways: by claiming that it conflicts with federal labor law, and by arguing that it runs afoul of antitrust law.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said he won’t sign the law, but he can’t block it. Despite the delays the law will face thanks to legal challenges, the pressure is growing—on multiple fronts—for Uber and Lyft and other gig economy companies to quit using the weakness of American labor law to exploit their workers.

This blog originally appeared in DailyKOS.com on December 15, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006  and Labor editor since 2011.


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Democrats push to limit abusive work scheduling practices like split shifts

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Laura ClawsonLow hourly wages aren’t the only thing that keep workers in the fast food and retail industries struggling. Scheduling matters, too. These days it’s common for workers to not know their schedules more than a week ahead; to be on call, ready to go to work with no notice, but not guaranteed any pay; for their hours (and therefore their paychecks) to vary enormously month to month; or to be forced to work split shifts, with a few hours of work in the morning and a few hours at the end of the day. All of this doesn’t just affect paychecks, it makes it difficult for workers to raise their incomes by getting a second job, and it costs them as they try to line up child care for unpredictable schedules. Democrats, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Patty Murray, and Chris Murphy and Reps. Rosa DeLauro and Bobby Scott, have a bill to fix that, or at least start to fix it: the Schedules That Work Act.

The bill:

Protects Workers who Ask for Schedule Changes
All employees of companies with more than 15 workers will have the right to request changes in their schedules without fear of retaliation. Employers would be required to consider and respond to all schedule requests, and, when a worker’s request is made because of a health condition, child or elder care, a second job, continued education, or job training, the employer would be required to grant the request unless a legitimate business reason precludes it.Incentivizes Predictable and Stable Schedules in Occupations with Known Scheduling Abuses
Employees in food service, cleaning, and retail occupations—as well as additional occupations with documented scheduling abuses designated by the Secretary of Labor—will now get their work schedules two weeks in advance and will receive additional pay when they are put “on-call” without any guarantee that work will be available; report to work only to be sent home early; are scheduled for a “split shift;” or receive changes to their schedule with less than 24 hours notice.

There are two things to note about this: First, it’s the kind of bill Democrats wouldn’t be proposing without worker activism drawing attention to the problem. Second, it’s the kind of bill Republicans will never pass, so for workers to have these protections, we need to elect Democrats.

This blog was originally posted on Daily Kos on July 16, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: The author’s name is Laura Clawson. Laura has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006  and Labor editor since 2011.


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This week in the war on workers: New Balance presses the Pentagon to move on US-made sneakers

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Laura ClawsonBuying American-made products is a good way to support jobs. If you’re looking for American-made shoes, New Balance is one of your major options. And the shoe company is pushing the U.S. military on that:

Massachusetts-based shoe company New Balance says that the military is dragging its feet on a promise it made to outfit soldiers with American-made shoes.  The promise came in April of 2014 when the military announced it would honor the Berry Amendment, a 1941 law requiring the Department of Defense (DoD) to give priority to American goods.  The Department of Defense had previously argued that sneakers were not part of the official uniform and therefore not subject to the Berry amendment.More than a year later it seems little progress has been made. New Balance claims retaliation while the military claims the transition is moving at an acceptable speed. Other apparel companies who have done business with the DoD have come to the military’s defense using the backhanded compliment that they really do move that slow.

(That second paragraph seems like it belongs in a “this week in weak defenses” round up.) Sneakers by New Balance are undergoing an extensive testing process now; Saucony says it’s working on a sneaker that might ultimately be used by the military.

This blog was originally posted on Daily Kos on July 11, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: The author’s name is Laura Clawson. Laura has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006 and Labor editor since 2011.


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This week in the war on workers: Massachusetts home care workers win $15 pay

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Laura ClawsonThe Fight for 15 has another win. Home healthcare workers, who are represented by SEIU, will get a raise to $15 by July 2018, up from a current pay rate of $13.38, with a raise of 30 cents an hour effective next week. The more than 35,000 workers care for elderly and disabled people on Medicaid, helping them bathe, running errands for them, and other tasks that help people live in their homes.

Personal care attendant Rosario Cabrera, 31, of New Bedford, said the raise means she will be able to pay her bills on time, provide for her two children, and maybe even take a vacation. Cabrera works seven days a week caring for two elderly women in their homes, and even with the money her husband makes as a machine operator, her family struggles to get by.“I’m proud of what I do because I’m helping another human being life their life,” she said. “But it’s not fair if I can’t live my life.”

Home care work is one of the fastest-growing and lowest-paid industries in the country. But Massachusetts shows that doesn’t have to be the way it is.

The minimum wage in Massachusetts is on its way to $11 in 2017 (it is now $9 an hour) and a paid sick leave law kicks in next week. Obviously that hasn’t blunted the momentum in the state to do even better for workers in low-wage industries. And note that the governor with whose administration the home care workers deal was negotiated is a Republican.

This blog was originally posted on Daily Kos on June 27, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: The author’s name is Laura Clawson. Laura has been a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006 and a Labor editor since 2011.


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