January
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News / labor
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1 min read
Half Your Paycheck and a Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tomorrow Spain shuts down. Every sector, every city. The first joint general strike in 14 years, and the demand is the most basic thing in the world: people who work full time should be able to afford a roof. Spaniards now spend half their gross salary on rent. In Barcelona it’s 76%. An 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen got evicted, sparked the biggest housing protests in a generation, and then died. The government looked at all of that and called a snap election instead of capping rents or building anything. Which is the perfect summary of every housing crisis everywhere: workers...
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1 min read
Sixty-Eight Billion and a Three Percent Raise
Read more . . . →Harvard sits on $68 billion. Sixty-eight. Their investments made 27% last year. And they’re in a standoff with 4,000 grad students over a 3% raise. These are the people who actually teach the classes and grade the papers. They want protections for noncitizen workers and an independent process for harassment complaints. Harvard’s counter-offer: no, and by the way, we don’t think your strike is legal. Eighty-eight percent of the union voted to walk out Monday. The endowment report dropped October 15 showing an $11 billion gain in a single year. The strike deadline is October 27. Harvard spent the days...
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1 min read
Handle It Yourself
Read more . . . →The Department of Labor announced, out loud, at a law conference, that it will stop enforcing wage-theft and safety laws at unionized workplaces. The logic: if you organized, that’s your problem now. Jonathan Berry, the department’s top lawyer, stood at an NYU podium Thursday and told the room it should “respect that choice” and spend its “scarce resources” elsewhere. The agency literally named after you just told you to sort it out yourself. Think about what that means. A hotel kitchen runs fifteen-year-olds past midnight. A warehouse docks overtime from every check. If the workers have a union, the federal...
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1 min read
Amazon Built a Suggestion Box and Then Deleted the Suggestions
Read more . . . →Amazon warehouse workers in Rock Tavern, New York walked off the job this week after months of reporting unsafe conditions to a company that responded by deleting their complaints. Literally deleting them. Amazon has an internal feedback system called “Voice of the Associate,” and when workers used it to flag dangerous conveyor belt speeds and falling packages, management scrubbed the posts. The injury rate at that facility hit 6.3 per 100 workers, with 97 percent of those injuries severe enough to require missed days or restricted duty. Amazon’s response to that number was not to slow the belts. It was...
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1 min read
Obsolete Since 1980
Read more . . . →The Labor Department just repealed protections for migrant farmworkers that have existed since 1980. Forty-six years of requiring OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division to actually coordinate on enforcing the rights of the people who pick your food. Gone. The official reason: the rules are “obsolete” and don’t reflect “modern, effective, and flexible coordination models.” Which is a beautiful way to say nobody’s watching anymore. This takes effect September 30. One week from now, the already threadbare safety net for seasonal farmworkers gets thinner. These are people who work in 100-degree heat for wages most Americans would reject on...
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1 min read
Your Frustration Has a Score
Read more . . . →Amazon built an internal system called “Atlas” that assigns every warehouse a score between 100 and 900. A hundred means workers are organizing. Nine hundred means they’re not. Machine learning models crunch daily sentiment data to predict which buildings will unionize next, sort them into tiers, and deploy what the company calls “empathetic listening” before anyone can get to a card signing. Your break room conversations are a signal. Your desire for a living wage is a risk metric on a dashboard in Seattle. Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility voted to form a union in April 2022. Four...
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1 min read
Performance Review
Read more . . . →Record profits. The ottoman has a mortgage. Every earnings call uses the word “growth” like it grew itself. Somebody drew that line, and in this picture he’s the one with the bruises and a back that doubles as a coffee table. The whiskey glass alone costs more than his shift. The red in the chart is the same red on his shirt, and nobody in the room is going to mention that. The stock price does not have feelings. The footstool does.
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1 min read
The Smallest Slice Since 1947
Read more . . . →Since 1947, the government has tracked how much of the economy goes to the people who actually do the work. This year it hit 52.8 percent, the lowest number in the entire dataset. Not during Reagan. Not during the 2008 crash. Not during COVID. Right now, with corporate pre-tax profits at $4.8 trillion in a single quarter. The economy is doing fine. Your cut of it isn’t. Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation last year came out to $158 billion, 2.5 million times what the median Tesla employee made. Two and a half million times. The S&P 500 has gained 600 percent...
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1 min read
Twenty-Four Million and a Straight Face
Read more . . . →Wynn Resorts pocketed $2.22 billion in profit last year. Their Encore casino in Boston cleared $237 million on its own. CEO Craig Billings collected $24 million in compensation. And last week, 1,350 housekeepers, cooks, valet drivers, and cashiers walked out because the company decided a $10-an-hour raise spread over three years was asking too much. Three dollars and thirty-three cents a year. Then the company offered to fund their healthcare coverage out of that raise, so the raise just pays for what they already had. A $24-million man looked at his $237-million casino and told the people who clean the...
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1 min read
Your Face Is a Performance Review
Read more . . . →There is a nine-billion-dollar industry being built around technology that reads your face at work and decides whether you’re happy enough to keep your job. Emotion AI (cameras and software that analyze your expressions and tone of voice, and in some cases the electrical activity of your actual nervous system) is already deployed in hiring, training, and performance reviews across the country. Your employer can run a sentiment check on your face during a meeting the way they run a spell check on an email. Independent research found the tech is about 50 percent accurate. A coin flip. They built...
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