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Welcome to The Labor Prospect, our weekly round-up highlighting the best reporting and latest developments in the labor movement.
Over the past few decades, the vaunted "summer job" (the thing that would keep all these lazy college students from burying themselves in loan debt) has lost most of its purchasing power. For those with at least one foot in reality, this is not news. However, it may be surprising just how bad it has become.
As NPR reports, in 1982 a college student with the maximum Pell Grant could pay for tuition by working 16 hours a week year-round (or a full-time job in the summer). Today, Pell Grant and wage levels lag behind the exorbitant cost of tuition-the same college student would have to work 35 hours a week year-round or more than 20 hours a day(!) at a low-wage summer job. So much for students paying their way through college without relying on loans (and so much the worse for those many potential students just priced out of higher education).
Looking Locally
Minimum wage campaigns in Missouri are facing resistance. Last month, the Kansas City Council passed a minimum wage hike that will bring up the bottom pay from the state minimum of $7.65 an hour to $8.50 an hour later this month, with annual increases to $13 an hour by 2020. The move has raised the ire of a small group of local business boosters who are now working to gather 3,400 signatures for a referendum election. "We feel it is an experiment that is too risky," a spokesman for the Orwellian-named group, Missourians for Fair Wages, told the Kansas City Star.
In St. Louis, the mayor and many aldermen have voiced support for a proposal to increase wages to $15 an hour by 2020, though no wage hike has yet been passed. Getting a county-wide ordinance, however, may prove even more challenging. Late last month, County Councilwoman Hazel Erby introduced a bill to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, a move that would impact the county's 90 municipalities. The motion failed to get even one voice of support, not even from the two union officials on the council. According to St. Louis Public Radio, the Democrats on the council support a minimum wage increase but don't believe the County has the authority to mandate wage hikes for individual cities. That was the case in Los Angeles, where the $15 standard set earlier this month by the County Board of Supervisors didn't apply to any of the county's 88 cities-just its unincorporated areas.
The Dallas City Council is reportedly considering a measure that would require city contractors to pay workers a "living wage" of $10.37 an hour. While the minimum wage for city employees is $10.62, there is currently no requirement for contracted workers. As the Dallas Morning News reports, the city currently doles out more than $100 million in contracted work a year, with the largest share going to sanitation services. That the living-wage movement has spread to Dallas is one more indication of the changing (in a good way) politics of American cities.
Michigan's Republican-controlled legislature is considering ditching its prevailing wage law, which requires government bodies to pay union-level wages for construction work. Opponents of the law say prevailing wage contracts are a burden on taxpayers: "Michigan already pays its construction workforce higher than most other industries. We're doing the right thing," one such opponent told Michigan Radio. Anti-union crusader/Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is nonetheless opposed to repealing the state's prevailing wage law, ostensibly because he supports the law's apprenticeship and training aspects. It's also the case that any number of white construction workers has been known to vote Republican, and repealing prevailing wage could be a sure-fire way to lose those votes.
Banking on Banks
As the Fight for 15 continues its ascendance, it is setting sights on the banking industry. Activists are now calling for bank tellers at big banks to earn $15 an hour-and they've already got their first (albeit not surprising) victory. As the Amalgamated Bank CEO told Buzzfeed's Cora Lewis, the union-owned bank's latest contract with its employees will ensure that tellers and all other workers will make at least $15 an hour as a starting wage. "If any industry in this country can afford to set a new minimum for its workers, it's the banking industry," CEO Keith Mestrich said.
Even as wage hikes spread across the country (the blue parts, anyway), enforcement remains a glaring problem. There are nearly two million workers in the United States who are paid below the minimum wage. As the Associated Press notes, a new Department of Labor study shows wage theft remains rampant-in California and New York alone, there are 560,000 violations every week.
In a 3-2 vote last week, the SEC dropped a symbolic bombshell that will shine a bright light on income inequality: most public companies now must regularly disclose just how much more its CEO makes than the company's average worker. Advocates of the measure hope it will spark a conversation about the out-of-control executive compensation in comparison to stagnant worker wages. Fifty years ago, CEOs made roughly 20 times more than their workers. As of 2013, that ratio has exploded to nearly 300:1, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
A study looking at the impact of the Obama administration's move to speed up the process of unionization shows that votes are now taking place 11 days faster than the year before. Despite critics calling this an "ambush rule," unionization vote successes have actually gone down one percentage point from last year-from 64 to 63 percent-The Hill reports.
The political debate over the implications of the gig economy roars on. Presidential candidates continue to weigh in, with Democrats voicing concern over worker misclassification and lack of protections while Republicans contend that on-demand work is a boon for the economy and attempts to regulate it more will stifle innovation.
As the Department of Labor rolls out new guidelines that address misclassification, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez recently said that Republican criticism is misguided. "I am concerned that some observers have framed a false choice of protecting workers OR promoting innovation in today's economy," he said.
A number of Silicon Valley companies are taking heed and recognizing their workers as legal employees. Sprig, an on-demand meal company, is the latest to convert its contractor model to an employee model that offers benefits and stock options. Still, other companies like Uber, remain entrenched in their contractor policy despite growing legal problems.
Netflix is joining a growing trend of employers offering flexible parental leave policies. The video streaming giant will give its employees the option to choose how long a leave they would like to take. As Amy Joyce writes for The Washington Post, it's a bold and flashy move but will this ever become the new norm? "I'm looking forward to the day a company that has been behind on its leave policies rolls out its big announcement and it's greeted by crickets," she writes.
Tidbits
A Teamsters local and a Culinary Union local said in a statement that they are now working to organize UFC fighters into a union similar to other sports leagues. Rhonda Rousey, meet Mother Jones.
The latest in a growing trend in digital media, writers for VICE Media have voted to unionize with the Writers Guild. VICE executives have already voiced their support for such an effort. Upworthy, however, says a unionization drive in its workplace would hurt its ability to raise capital.
Verizon Wireless has released an app that allows non-unionized workers to record unionized workers on strike and "who are engaged in misconduct." It's a move calculated to intimidate its employees from striking, now that the company's workers have threatened to strike over stalled contract negotiations.
Bernie snagged his biggest union endorsement Monday from National Nurses United.
At The Prospect…
One year after the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement has grown into one of the most formidable and visible social justice movements in the country. But, as Amanda Teuscher writes, the movement finds its strength in its porous influence on numerous causes. For example, "the Fight-for-15 effort that has demanded better pay for low-wage workers across the country has been intertwined with the Black Lives Matter from the beginning." Read more…
In light of the SEC finally passing the CEO pay ratio rule, Justin Miller writes, executives are feeling victimized and want everyone to know just how bad an idea it is to show how many hundreds of time more they are valued than their average worker. Read more…
