Use of Employee Scheduling Software Raises Union Concerns About Seniority, Work Hours
Reproduced with permission from Daily Labor Report, 97 DLR C-1 (May 20, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National...
Reproduced with permission from Daily Labor Report, 97 DLR C-1 (May 20, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <https://www.bna.com/>
Bloomberg BNA - May 19, 2014, by Rhonda Smith — Although employee scheduling software is helping employers control labor costs and boost productivity, its impact on retail and restaurant workers is far more bleak, advocates for employees told Bloomberg BNA May 8-19.
“In New York, we're interviewing workers at all big retail chains—Gap, Banana Republic and others,” said Stephanie Luce, an associate professor of labor studies at City University of New York. The interviews are part of an ongoing research project focused on scheduling challenges facing retail workers in New York City.
“What is prevalent in our interviews is just huge frustration with scheduling,” she said. “It's arbitrary. It feels like it's unpredictable. And it can change from week to week or season to season. So this concern about who gets to set the schedule, and do employees have any voice or protections in that, is very prevalent.”
‘On Call' Scheduling Has Drawbacks
The Retail Action Project, a New York-based campaign sponsored by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, released a video May 1 highlighting the conundrum retail employees face daily over their work schedules. RWDSU is an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
“Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict,” Carrie Gleason at the Center for Popular Democracy said.
“Workers are unable to get sufficient hours, and are forced to endure ‘on call' scheduling, where they must wait by the phone to see if they'll be called upon to work,” RAP organizers said on the union's website. “They can't take other jobs, or do anything else that would interfere with their unstable, unpredictable work hours.”
The video is part of an effort to educate workers and policy makers about the need for “fair, stable and predictable schedules for millions of underemployed low wage workers in one of America's biggest job creating industries,” RAP said.
Employment of retail sales workers is projected to grow 10 percent from 2012 to 2022, according to the Labor Department. That growth is about as fast as the average for all occupations, the agency said, but because many workers leave retail there will be a large number of job openings in that sector.
There were 4.6 million retail jobs in 2012, the agency said. It projected that 450,200 will be added in that sector by 2022.
Wanted: ‘Family-Sustaining' Practices
Carrie Gleason, director of a new initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy that focuses on work scheduling issues, told Bloomberg BNA May 16 that new policy protections are needed to ensure “family-sustaining practices” in low-wage sectors.
The technology currently available could be used to actually improve scheduling practices for workers, she said.
“Burgeoning low-wage industries are now relying heavily on a part-time workforce and increasingly using scheduling technology according to fluctuating market demand,” she said. The ultimate result for workers is “very little say in how they work and when they work.”
Gleason also said, “Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict.”
Giving workers more access to the technology would allow them to self-schedule, she said, adding that this would really elevate the quality of workers' jobs. “But, unfortunately, companies like Macy's are not using the technology to the workers' potential,” she said.
Unions have criticized Macy's for not considering employee seniority when using scheduling software to decide who works and when.
Some Retailers Address Scheduling Concerns
Retailers and restaurants in some cities have taken steps to address workers' scheduling concerns, either because they made a business decision to do so or union members pushed for changes during negotiations over collective bargaining agreements.
Employers cited as trailblazers include United Parcel Service of North America Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., Lord & Taylor, In-N-Out Burgers Inc., and, after new contracts were negotiated, Macy's and Bloomingdale's Inc. in New York City.
All part-time workers at Costco receive their schedules at least two weeks in advance and are guaranteed a minimum of 24 core hours each week, according to a policy brief the Center for Law and Social Policy and two other groups released in March (49 DLR A-6, 3/13/14).
“We want people to work for us who consider us a career,” Mike Brosius, the company's assistant vice president of human resources, said in the brief. “Long-term employees are more productive and serve the needs of our customers better. So we give our employees what's fair and what they need to make a living.”
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Why ‘Good Jobs' Are Good for Retailers,” Zeynep Ton, an adjunct associate professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, highlighted Costco, Trader Joe's, QuikTrip and Mercadona, a supermarket chain in Spain. She said these retailers invest in their employees and, in return, reap healthy profits.
“Not surprisingly, I found that unpredictable schedules, short shifts, and dead-end jobs take a toll on employees' morale,” Ton wrote. “When morale is low, absenteeism, tardiness, and turnover rise, increasing the variability of the labor supply, which, of course, makes matching labor with customer traffic more difficult.”
Unions have pushed to shape employers' scheduling policies in collective bargaining agreements.
Union Turns to NLRB for Help
UFCW Local 888, in East Rutherford, N.J., filed an unfair labor practices charge April 28 with the National Labor Relations Board against Century 21 Department Stores LLC. The family-owned, discount retail clothing company operates eight stores in New York and New Jersey and plans to open another one in Philadelphia, a company spokeswoman said May 20.
In its charge, the union alleged that Century 21 refused to bargain “over the implementation and effects of a change in the work schedule system at its Manhattan facility, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”
“Until two years ago, we had no issue with scheduling,” Max Bruny, president of UFCW Local 888, told Bloomberg BNA May 16. “Everyone had a fixed schedule. The model was full-time employment. We had members there for 40 years. They had a good schedule [and] good predictability.”
Now, workers are being assigned fewer hours or shifts that require them to work later than they traditionally have—regardless of seniority.
The new scheduling system is “hard on the workers' life—a nightmare,” Bruny said.
Employees who have worked for Century 21 for decades are now being scheduled to work erratic hours, sometimes at night, he said.
“Grievances we're filing relate to workers not being able to schedule for school or take care of sick family members,” Bruny said.
ACA Could Lead to Drop in Workers' Hours
Neil Trautwein, vice president and employee benefits counsel at the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA May 19 that the Affordable Care Act could be a factor in employer decisions about how many hours employees are scheduled to work. The NRF represents retailers, chain restaurants and grocery stores.
ACA rules mandate that employers with 50 or more full-time workers provide health care coverage. Anyone who works at least 30 hours a week is considered a full-time employee. A tax penalty of as much as $3,000 per employee is levied for noncompliance.
“The 30-hour definition under the ACA is unnecessary and distorts how we manage employees,” Trautwein said.
The NRF supports the Save American Workers Act (H.R. 2575), proposed legislation that calls for raising the threshold from 30 hours per week to 40 hours per week. The bill's backers say this would preserve employee wages and working hours.
“There will be an [employer] incentive, particularly for less well-performing employees, to be held below 30 hours,” Trautwein said. “That's a natural consequence of the ACA structure.”
He added that employee scheduling software also helps employers move high-performing workers into certain positions at certain times.
“Broadly speaking, part-time jobs have been valued in retail and chain restaurants, particularly over the years because of flexibility they allow to wrap work around school or other family responsibilities,” Trautwein said. “A lot of part-time workers aren't interested in working a large number of hours.”
Union Wants More Input About Schedules
UFCW Local 888, which represents more than 2,500 workers at Century 21, would like more input about the new scheduling system and its impact on workers, Bruny said.
“[Century 21] says we should negotiate for all the stores at one time in two years,” when the union's five-year contract with the stores expires, he said.
“Our argument is, ‘This is a drastic change in the workers' lives,' ” Bruny said. “Workers are becoming part-timers overnight. I think that should trigger negotiations. That has to be bargained collectively before a change can be made.”
Bruny also would like to negotiate with Century 21 over whether hourly employees can be cross-trained so they are prepared to work in different store departments should they agree to do so based on the scheduling system. “That would make it easier on the workers,” he said.
Without negotiating over such matters, Bruny added, “we are losing quite a few longtime, full-time workers.”
A Century 21 spokeswoman declined to discuss the NLRB charge, but said to ask “Kronos directly for a statement.”
Kronos Inc. is a workforce management company in Chelmsford, Mass., that sells electronic scheduling systems to organizations. The company did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment on the NLRB charge UFCW filed against Century 21.
Macy's West Scheduling Proposal
During recent contract negotiations in California, leaders of UFCW Local 5 in San Jose described as “problematic” a Macy's West proposal to implement an electronic scheduling system the company calls “My Schedule Plus.”
“While the computer-based program would create greater scheduling flexibility and an opportunity for more hours for those that want them,” the union said May 5 in an online post, “without modification it would eliminate base schedules and ignore seniority around shift selection.”
Mike Henneberry, a spokesman for UFCW Local 5, told Bloomberg BNA May 8: “At first the company said, ‘We can't change it.' But it turned out they could.”
Macy's did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment.
Henneberry said Kronos created the Macy's scheduling system.
Charles DeWitt, vice president of business development for Kronos, said such software can be adapted to suit employers' unique needs.
“If the employer wants to maintain a base schedule or respect seniority, it can,” he told Bloomberg BNA May 12. “Various employers have different policies. With the Kronos system, we've tried to capture all that in a system and let retailers, hospitals, and manufacturers put their policies in place.”
Respecting Employee Seniority
Members of RWDSU Local 3 in New York in 2012 ratified a five-year collective bargaining agreement with Bloomingdale's that gave some 2,000 employees at the company's flagship store in New York City more control over hours and scheduling, the union said (86 DLR A-8, 5/3/12).
RWDSU said at the time that scheduling flexibility in the Bloomingdale's contract went further than any other union contract with a large retail company. Under the contract, senior employees have first choice of their preferred hours, and all workers are able to choose one weekend off a month and the late nights they want to work.
A 2011 contract settlement covering some 4,000 workers at Macy's in New York City also improved employees' control over their scheduling, the union said (121 DLR A-13, 6/23/11).
Allen Mayne, RWDSU's director of collective bargaining, told Bloomberg BNA May 9: “The main problem with the Macy's system is it did not recognize an employee's seniority. It lumps all employees together in the same pool and hours are divided up depending on your availability.”
This has a detrimental impact on long-term employees, especially in retail, Mayne said. “In a union environment, where benefits are even better, many employees have many years of seniority,” he said.
RWDSU was able to negotiate in the contract a work rule that allows employees with seniority to have priority access to the scheduling system, Mayne said.
“But there's not enough oversight,” he said. “This is done kind of on the honor system, but people can get in there and input out of seniority order.”
Luce at CUNY said there's a “disconnect” between how sophisticated and helpful to employers the scheduling software has become in the past 15 years and how rudimentary it remains for most retail employees.
“Employees are still submitting their scheduling requests on paper or going into the store to look at their schedules,” she said. “Clearly, the software could allow for employees to be at home and swap shifts. But they are not given access to those systems.”
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Elevated Level of Part-Time Employment: Post-Recession Norm?
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that...
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that they don’t want.
The unemployment rate has fallen sharply over the past year, but that improvement is masking a still-bleak picture for millions of workers who say they can’t find full-time jobs.
Martina Morgan is deciding which bills to skip after her hours fell at Ikea in Renton, Wash. Sandra Sok says she’s been unable to consistently get full-time hours after she transferred to a Wal-Mart in Arizona from one in Colorado.
In Chicago, Jessica Davis is frustrated by her schedule dwindling to 23 hours a week at a McDonald’s even though her location has been hiring. “How can you not get people more hours but you hire more employees?” the 26-year-old Ms. Davis said.
The situation of these so-called involuntary part-time workers—those who would prefer to work more than 34 hours a week—has economists puzzling over whether a higher level of part-time employment might be a permanent legacy of the great recession. If so, it could force more workers to choose between underemployment or working multiple jobs to make ends meet, leading to less income growth and weaker discretionary spending.
Employers added some 3.3 million full-time workers over the past year, but the number of full-time workers in the U.S. is still around 2 million shy of the level before the recession began in 2007. Meanwhile, the ranks of workers who are part time for economic reasons has fallen by 740,000 this year to around 4.5% of the civilian workforce. That is down from a high of 5.9% in 2010 but remains well above the 2.7% average in the decade preceding the recession.
“There’s just less full-time jobs available than there used to be,” said Michelle Girard, chief economist at RBS Securities Inc.
The slow decline in part-time work is particularly acute when broken out by industries. For the retail and hospitality sectors, the number of involuntary part-time workers in October was nearly double its prerecession level. For construction, mining and manufacturing work, by contrast, the share of such part-time labor was just 9% above its pre-recession level.
Other data show that the ability of part-time service workers to find full-time work has been much slower during the current recovery. In goods-producing industries, around two-thirds of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time employment by July 2014, up from 60% in 2009, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. But for service-sector workers, the rate has seen little improvement. Around 48% of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time work one year later, up from around 46% in 2009.
An important question for policy makers now is whether the elevated level of involuntary part-time work is due to cyclical factors, meaning it will fall as the economy heals, or to structural changes that have made employers more inclined to rely on a larger contingent workforce and avoid converting part-time workers to full-time positions.
On one side are economists like Ms. Girard, who say greater economic uncertainty and rising labor costs—from increases in the minimum wage, regulations or health-care expenses stemming from the Affordable Care Act—explain higher levels of part-time work. “There is a structural element to this at the very least,” she said.
The health-care law requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. “Companies are just more inclined to hire part-time workers, not necessarily because of the health-care law, but for business reasons that make it a more attractive option,” Ms. Girard said.
Anecdotal reports have suggested employers have cut hours to prepare for the implementation of the health-care law, but that hasn’t been borne out by economic data.
An analysis by Bowen Garrett of the Urban Institute and Robert Kaestner at the University of Illinois at Chicago found a small increase in part-time work this year, but the increase occurred for part-time jobs with between 30 and 34 hours—above the 30-hour threshold that would be affected by the health-care law.
Other economists say higher levels of involuntary part-time work are mostly cyclical. Businesses don’t appear to be paying part-time workers more than full-time workers; that would be one clear sign of a shift in hiring preferences.
Elevated levels of involuntary part-time work in service jobs may reflect how low-wage employers ramped up hiring earlier in the recovery. More recently, the sector has absorbed those returning to work after long unemployment spells.
Part-time work in service jobs is “a stepping stone for the unemployed and for people out of the labor force,” said Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. Labor markets are “improving in just the way you would expect.”
Labor advocates, meanwhile, say technological changes in how businesses schedule employees are at fault. Software allows employers to schedule and cancel shifts rapidly based on business conditions.
Carrie Gleason, the director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group, said that could explain why more part-time workers say they want full-time work. “There’s now this persistent uncertainty in the jobs that hourly workers have today,” she said.
“I need to spend some time with my kids,” said Ms. Morgan, 32. “Two jobs? It’s too much.”
Ikea employees are guaranteed a minimum amount of hours every week. Those that can work “during peak times when our customers are in our stores have the opportunity to obtain more hours,” said Mona Liss, a company spokeswoman. The company in June also announced it would raise the average minimum hourly wage in its U.S. stores next year by 17%.
Meanwhile, the structural-cyclical debate has important implications for the Federal Reserve. If the changes are structural, wages might begin to rise sooner than expected, putting more pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates. If they’re cyclical, it would suggest that Fed policy can remain accommodative.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen routinely highlights the elevated level of part-time work as a key measure of labor slack. “There are still ... too many who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work,” she said at a press conference in September.
Business surveys conducted by the Atlanta Fed have shown there are more part-time workers because “business conditions don’t justify converting them to full time,” said John Robertson, senior economist at the bank. But other businesses have said their reliance on a larger part-time workforce stemmed from the higher costs of hiring full-time workers.
“It would be wrong to say it’s all cyclical, and it would be wrong to say it’s all structural,” Mr. Robertson said. “We’re somewhere in the middle.”
Ulyses Coatl illustrates how any improvement might unfold. He worked for two years as a stylist at a Levi’s apparel store in lower Manhattan but quit his job in September because the hours had become too unpredictable. His schedule varied from as many as 34 hours a week to four hours, but had averaged around 18 hours in recent weeks, he said.
A Levi’s spokeswoman said the company is “always looking at ways to improve retail productivity, including store labor models and processes” that conform to “industry best practices.”
Wal-Mart says the majority of its workforce is full time, and the share of part-time workers has stayed about the same over the past decade. A spokeswoman said store employees can view all of the open shifts in their store, and that there are full-time positions available in the store at which Ms. Sok works.
Source
ACORN-linked Center for Popular Democracy aims for big GOTV operation
ACORN-linked Center for Popular Democracy aims for big GOTV operation
A left-wing nonprofit called the Center for Popular Democracy is working with the ACORN-tainted Working Families...
A left-wing nonprofit called the Center for Popular Democracy is working with the ACORN-tainted Working Families Organization in a more than $7 million get-out-the-vote operation in battleground states in the upcoming presidential and U.S. Senate elections, reports Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon.
The WFB reports:
Documents detailing those efforts shed new light on how the left’s organizing apparatus is collaborating with prominent progressive groups such as MoveOn.org, labor unions, and foundations to build a campaign apparatus that can win short-term policy victories and translate those victories into a lasting political operation.
The nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and its 501(c)(4) dark money arm, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, work with 42 partner organizations—including labor unions, community organizing groups, and other left-wing nonprofits—in 30 states to advance its goals.
The group’s $14 million budget supports a staff of more than 60 employees. In 2015, it sub-granted more than $7 million to its partner organizations. Those partners boast more than 400,000 members, 800 state-based staffers, and combined budgets of roughly $85 million.
That organizing power is diffused throughout the states, but a document obtained by the Free Beacon reveals that efforts have been underway since December to centralize decision-making in committees that represent both CPD and its local and state partners. […]
By MATTHEW VADUM
Source
Workers’ groups show candidates that supporting higher wages wins votes
Workers’ groups show candidates that supporting higher wages wins votes
Several worker advocacy groups in swing states are showing senatorial candidates that according to polls, voters...
Several worker advocacy groups in swing states are showing senatorial candidates that according to polls, voters support raising the minimum wage and expanding eligibility for overtime pay.
The groups include the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund and the Working Families Party. They report that when voters learn that GOP incumbent senators oppose raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay eligibility, they often switch their support to Democratic challengers.
This might greatly influence the outcome of close U.S. Senate races in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and Arizona.
Forty four Senate Republicans have signed a resolution opposing the overtime pay expansion the U.S. Labor Department plans to implement December 1.
“Voters are fed up with lack of action in Washington on raising wages for working people, and what we’re seeing is that just letting voters know where the candidates stand on these issues can have a significant impact,” Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, says.
He cited polls that found:
▪ Nationally, voters support expanding overtime pay eligibility by a three-to-one ratio. Just over half of voters say they would oppose a candidate who opposes the expansion.
▪ In Pennsylvania, three-fourths of voters say they support raising the minimum wage. Also, by an 81 to 15 percent margin, they say they approve of expanding eligibility for overtime pay. Fifty seven percent of voters say they will oppose candidates who do not support these goals. (Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Katie McGinty has made raising the minimum wage a key plank in her race against GOP Sen. Pat Toomey.)
▪ In Missouri, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by a 76 to 16 percent margin. If a candidate opposes the idea, 53 percent of voters say it would lessen their support.
▪ In Ohio, voters approve expanding overtime pay eligibility by an 80 to14 percent margin. And if a candidate opposes the idea, 51 percent of voters say they would lessen their support.
“Working women and men should be paid for the time they work, period. The Obama administration’s decision to increase the overtime threshold is an enormous, in many cases life-changing, win for working people, from fast-food, retail and healthcare managers to post-doctoral associates and counselors,” Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry has said.
She continued: “This action will put more money in people’s pockets and boost the economy. It will boost women, African Americans, Latinos, people who are early in their careers and people who have modest education levels – the very people hardest hit by the 40-year assault on working people built on phony trickle-down economics.”
“Raising wages includes lifting national wages, but it’s far broader than that,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said. “We want earned sick leave and paid family leave. We want full employment, fair overtime rules and fair scheduling so people won’t have to guess whether they’ll get enough hours to pay the rent.”
The Working Families Party, the NELP Action Fund and their allies are working to inform workers about where candidates for office from president down to city councilperson stand on raising wages,” said NELP fund spokesman Paul Sonn.
By Mark Gruenberg
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Report: Women unduly harmed by unpredictable scheduling
Al Jazeera - 05-12-2015 - Irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling are pervasive throughout the low-wage...
Al Jazeera - 05-12-2015 - Irregular hours and just-in-time scheduling are pervasive throughout the low-wage economy, but they do particular harm to working women, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy.
Women still disproportionately shoulder responsibility for child care and other family obligations, and more than 6 million women have cited those constraints as the primary reasons they are not employed full time, according to the report.
The Center for Popular Democracy argues that juggling family responsibilities with the unsteady work hours that often come with part-time employment leads to additional challenges for women.
“Women working more hours are likely to experience the stressful effects of overwork and may often have no choice but to work overtime hours or lose their job,” the report says. “However, the over 12 million women working part time in hourly jobs are at greatest risk of both highly erratic schedules and of extreme income fluctuation."
Women were found to be slightly more likely to work jobs paid on an hourly basis: 61 percent compared with 56 percent of men. As a result, their income is more likely to fluctuate based on how many hours they are assigned to work per week or month. Additionally, their off time can be difficult to control or predict because of last-minute scheduling.
Erratic hours can be particularly hard on women, who tend to spend more time than men performing household chores and caring for children. A 2014 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found women in households with children under the age of 6 spent roughly an hour a day attending to their physical needs, whereas men spent roughly half an hour.
On a conference call with reporters to discuss the report, Albuquerque, New Mexico, activist Kris Buchmann said she has been “treated like my life outside of work didn’t matter” while working hourly jobs in retail.
“I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to close and then turn around and come back in after five or six hours off,” she said. “It’s not enough for a full night’s sleep or showering or anything else I have to do."
Other times, “they would call me into work, I would show up, and they would say, ‘Oh, never mind. We don’t need you,’” she said. Such unpredictability made it difficult for her to know when she would need to find child care for her son.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Naomi Gerstel, who wrote the book “Unequal Time: Gender, Class and Family in Employment Schedules” with Dan Clawson, said erratic scheduling exists “across the entire class spectrum” but falls especially hard on low-wage workers.
If you’re in a stable, full-time position, “you’re more likely to be able to say no or find substitutes” such as baby sitters and other care workers, she said. Additionally, some higher-paying workplaces are “changing occupations to make it possible for especially women workers to take on what’s defined as flexibility."
But perks such as maternity leave have not filtered down the income ladder. And long-term changes in family structure have created a “double-edged sword” for some workers, said Gerstel. Births to unmarried women have risen steadily since the 1940s, according the U.S. Census Bureau, so more single mothers have been forced to negotiate child care on top of their work schedules.
That’s beginning to change in some parts of the country. Carrie Gleason, the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fair Workweek Initiative director, told reporters on a conference call that 11 states “have introduced some form of work hours legislation, and this is an issue that was basically not on the map last year.”
Buchmann is part of a campaign to get predictable scheduling legislation passed in New Mexico. In November, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved a legislative package known as the Retail Worker Bill of Rights, which is, in part, intended to enforce more predictable scheduling for retail workers.
Source: Al Jazeera
How Hillary Clinton can win in November
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a...
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a sizable delegate lead that looks likely to hold going into the Democratic convention — particularly if she wins the big prize of New York in April.
However, even after the convention, she will need to woo her opponent's supporters — many of whom claim they won't vote for her — to prevail in an unpredictable general election against an unconventional candidate like Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders has been buoyed consistently by supporters disgusted with a political system awash in big money — and dismayed by Clinton's uncomfortably close relationship to Wall Street. There is a simple move Clinton can make to prove she is willing to take bold action against Wall Street: She can bring back the Glass-Steagall Act that put up a firewall between commercial and investment banking.
Over the course of recent Democratic debates, Clinton has remained opposed to reinstating Glass-Steagall even as Sanders used the rallying cry of breaking up the banks to help lock up several Midwest and Northeastern primaries.
The division between commercial and investment banking imposed by Glass-Steagall, enacted in 1933 amid the Great Depression, prevented banks from using customer deposits to take high-octane gambles in the market that could bring on another financial cataclysm.
Then, in 1999, under heavy pressure from the financial industry, Glass-Steagall was repealed by President Bill Clinton, unleashing the rise of a number of behemoth banks with combined commercial and investment arms. Less than a decade later, most of them nearly combusted in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, requiring billions in taxpayer bailout funds to stay afloat.
Today, Wall Street continues to be riddled with systemic risks. The Dodd-Frank financial reforms enacted in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis helped reduce some of the risk, but as the new president of the Minneapolis Fed recently acknowledged, they didn't go far enough. "I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy," Neel Kashkari — a Republican – told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. last month.
An even more unlikely proponent of reining in big banks is Asher Edelman, the inspiration for Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street." In a recent interview with CNBC, Edelman called for banks to return to lending, which stimulates middle class spending and the overall economy, rather than speculation, which pads the balance sheets of the big banks, not to mention the pockets of the top 1 percent.
While the Volcker Rule — the set piece of the Dodd-Frank reforms — bans commercial banks from using customer deposits for speculative trading on the bank's own accounts, numerous exceptions permit commercial banks to engage in risky investment banking activities they would be unable to carry out under Glass-Steagall. It's not difficult to conjure a scenario in which using customer deposits to bolster market bets causes a global financial contagion on the order of — or greater than — what we witnessed in 2008.
Some argue that Glass-Steagall is unnecessary because many of the financial institutions that triggered the financial crisis, such as Bear Stearns, were purely focused on trading and didn't have commercial banking arms. But those failed investment banks were able to take their risky gambles because they could easily borrow from hybrid entities such as Citigroup. And we should not forget that commercial-investment bank hybrids like Citigroup and Bank of America were ultimately some of the biggest recipients of bailout money.
The solution must be a stronger wall between commercial and investment banking. Senators Elizabeth Warren andJohn McCain have already proposed bipartisan legislation to bring back an updated, stronger version of the Glass-Steagall legislation specifically focused on banning publicly supported banks from engaging in the type of practices that created the financial crisis.
Afraid of Congressional gridlock? A President Clinton could even avoid a dysfunctional Congress altogether by working with bank regulators to create many of the same activity limitations through executive action — but only if she appoints strong regulators dedicated to reining in Wall Street.
With an increasingly likely path to the general election ahead of her, Hillary Clinton in the next few months must strive to shed her image of being beholden to wealthy, Wall Street interests. Reinstating Glass-Steagall is a good way to start.
By Anita Jain
Source
These Wall Street Companies Are Ready To Call In On Trump’s Border Wall
These Wall Street Companies Are Ready To Call In On Trump’s Border Wall
Much of the discussion on President Donald Trump’s border wall has focused on its cost and impracticality, as well as...
Much of the discussion on President Donald Trump’s border wall has focused on its cost and impracticality, as well as the anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric it embodies. Little attention, however, has been paid to who specifically might profit from building the structure.
Read the full article here.
Monday's MLK50 live blog
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor...
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance; Tracey Corder, director of the Racial Justice Campaign at the Center for Popular Democracy; and Jeremiah Edmond, president of G.A.M.E. Local 101.
Read the full article here.
Car wash activists release report on John Lage
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the...
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the owner of several car washes with labor law violations is still paid by the city to clean city-owned cars.
Created and distributed by Make the Road New York, Center for Popular Democracy, New York Communities for Change and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the report includes public documents that they believe show that city taxpayers have “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting” John Lage and his associate Fernando Magalhaes.
According to the report, between 2007 and 2013, Lage Car Wash Inc. had contracts with the New York City Police Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) worth over $300,000 combined. Also, the city paid Lage Car Wash at least $135,924 for the past three years for car wash services and almost $38,000 to other entities that are controlled by Lage or Magalhaes. Last year, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation in Lage’s business practices.
Currently, car wash employees of Lage’s report that they work over 50 hours a week for an hourly wage of $6 without tips or about $7.30 including tips and including overtime. Back in 2005, the U.S. Labor Department sued Lage on charges he and 15 of his companies “willfully and repeatedly” violated wage laws. The suit ended with Lage paying $4.7 million in wages and fines.
None of this was of much surprise to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union President Stuart Appelbaum.
“This report is proof that Lage Car Wash Inc. and its treatment of workers is not fair to the workers, nor do these conditions uplift and sustain our communities,” said Appelbaum. “New York City should quickly take action and truly reconsider doing business with a company who operates in this manner.”
Last week, car wash workers and supporters attended the Car Wash Workers General Assembly, where they discussed their experiences working for Lage-owned companies.
“We learned from the strike at Sunny Day [in the Bronx] and the struggle at Soho [in Manhattan] that we can defend our rights and win, and we are no longer going to accept mistreatment and poverty wages,” said Hector Gómez, a car wash worker who worked at the recently closed Lage Car Wash in Soho and currently works at Sutphin Car Wash. “Just think how much more we can win when all the car washes in New York City are organized and united.”
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Report: Starbucks falls short on vow to make workers' schedules more fair
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its...
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its commitment on a number of fronts, according to a new report released Wednesday based on interviews with the coffee chain’s workers across the country.
The report, titled “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks” (PDF), said Starbucks baristas across the country were still complaining that they often don’t receive their work schedules soon enough before shifts and that they are under pressure to avoid taking sick days.
The New York-based advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy produced the report, which cited survey data collected from more than 200 Starbucks baristas in 37 states and compiled by Coworker.org, an online platform that supports workplace rights.
“More than six months after Starbucks publicly recommitted to scheduling policies and mandated ten days’ notice, the scheduling issues they sought to address still persist in their frontline stores,” the report said.
After a New York Times investigation in August 2014 highlighted the scheduling travails of a Starbucks worker and single mother named Janette Navarro, the company announced that it would strive to improve work schedules for its employees, whom the company calls “partners.” The workers’ survey cited in Wednesday’s report was conducted in March this year.
“Taking care of our partners is a responsibility I take very personally,” Cliff Burrows, a high-level Starbucks executive, said in an internal company email at the time, according to the New York Times and other news outlets. Burrows was quoted as saying the company would work to aid “stability and consistency” in the schedules of its more than 130,000 baristas.
Burrows pledged then that the company would improve its scheduling software to make it easier on employees to plan their lives.
But the directive has only partially trickled down to the company's more than 12,000 U.S. locations, Wednesday's report says.
“They’ve made some improvements, but they’ve been minor,” said Carrie Gleason, co-author of the report. “A fair workweek at Starbucks exists in some stores,” she said, but “the issue is inconsistency.”
Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on the report's findings before the time of publication.
The report said many baristas noted a high incidence of so-called “clopening” shifts, in which a person closes and opens in consecutive shifts, often leaving a span of only a few hours in which to return home before working again.
Last year Starbucks' Burrows pledged an end to the dreaded clopening shifts, saying “district managers must help store managers problem-solve issues specific to individual stores to make this happen.”
But the report indicated that such shifts were still widespread, with nearly a quarter of workers regularly getting them.
“I feel that baristas should have a minimum of 10 hours in between shifts. Everyone should have a fair chance to get home, settled, and be able to sleep for eight hours before having to get up for another shift," the survey report quoted an Illinois Starbucks worker as saying.
But the majority of workers who do clopening shifts are able to get fewer than seven hours of sleep, the report said.
“Because I was frequently scheduled for clopening shifts, I got just four or five hours of sleep a night. I was doing all I could to get ahead, but Starbucks’ scheduling practices made me question whether that was possible,” said Ciara Moran, a former Starbucks barista wrote in a petition she launched with Coworker.org, asking for further scheduling reforms.
The report released Wednesday said that 48 percent of surveyed Starbucks workers said they received their work schedules a week or less in advance, and that 40 percent reported they had experienced pressure to avoid taking sick days.
"Employees say that it can be extremely difficult to take sick days because they face pressure to work while sick, fear negative consequences or are forced to find their own replacement," the report said.
The report suggested that the experiences of individual workers varied considerably, depending on store locations and personnel.
“Many of us have different experiences at Starbucks, depending on our manager,” Moran said, asking others to support the cause “for consistent protections across the company, starting with healthy schedules across the board.”
“On a corporate level there isn’t that level of accountability. They’re not looking whether their polices are going far enough,” Gleason said. “For Starbucks, it can be a model for the industry for how to deliver a sustainable workweek.”
“I think they need to engage their workforce in a different way,” she said.
Source: Al Jazeera America
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