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Wages

Glasgow: Thousands Of Women To Strike Over Pay Discrimination

October 17, 2018 LibBrooks, Theguardian.com , , , , , ,
Thousands of women council workers across Glasgow plan to bring the city to a standstill this week in what is believed to be the biggest equal pay strike seen in the UK. More than 8,000 workers, mostly women who have never been on a picket line, will take part in the two-day action that starts next Tuesday and will affect homecare, schools and nurseries, cleaning and catering services across the city. While Glasgow city council insists there is no justification for the planned disruption, which it says will jeopardise the care of its most vulnerable residents, unions say that a failure of negotiations has left the women with no choice but to strike and make visible the decades-long pay discrimination that has affected this largely unseen workforce.

Amazon Concedes $15 Floor Wage, Bernie Sanders Plays Minor Role In Significant Victory

October 6, 2018 Bruce A. Dixon, Blackagendareport.com , , , ,
Amazon’s announcement last week that it would boost the wages of its lowest paid workers to $15 an hour in time for this year’s holiday rush, was not a generous gift from its owner Jeff Bezos, reportedly the wealthiest man on earth. It was also not, as some would like us to believe, a miracle wrought by the intervention of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. It was a strategic concession on the part of Amazon in the face of its own public relations needs, competitive pressures from its near-peers, pressure from transnational cooperation among its unionized European workforce, and to a minor degree the STOP BEZOS bill introduced by Sanders which proposes to tax large corporations for the amount their employees use in federal aid programs.

Why Labor Day Matters

September 2, 2018 Ralph Nader, www.blog.nader.org , , ,
By Ralph Nader for The Nader Page, Labor Day is a time to celebrate America’s tradespeople―the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, tailors, retail clerks and home health assistants. Celebrate the meat and poultry inspectors, building code inspectors, OSHA and Customs inspectors, sanitation inspectors of supermarkets and restaurants, nuclear, chemical and aircraft inspectors, inspectors of laboratories, hospitals and clinics. Celebrate the bus drivers, miners, and nurses. Celebrate the janitors who often thanklessly clean our office buildings, schools, airports, and more. The list goes on. In addition, Labor Day should be used to reflect on the historic victories of American workers such as establishing the minimum wage and overtime pay, the five-day work week and banning of the use of child labor.

Real US Wages Are Essentially Back At 1974 Levels, Pew Reports

August 26, 2018 Drew Desilver, Pew Research Center. , , ,
On the face of it, these should be heady times for American workers. U.S. unemployment is as low as it’s been in nearly two decades (3.9% as of July) and the nation’s private-sector employers have been adding jobs for 101 straight months – 19.5 million since the Great Recession-related cuts finally abated in early 2010, and 1.5 million just since the beginning of the year. But despite the strong labor market, wage growth has lagged economists’ expectations. In fact, despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago.

CEO Compensation Surged In 2017

August 19, 2018 Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Scheider, Economic Policy Institute. , ,
This report looks at trends in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation, using two different measures. The first measure includes stock options realized (in addition to salary, bonuses, restricted stock grants, and long-term incentive payouts). By this measure, in 2017 the average CEO of the 350 largest firms in the U.S. received $18.9 million in compensation, a 17.6 percent increase over 2016. The typical worker’s compensation remained flat, rising a mere 0.3 percent. The 2017 CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 312-to-1 was far greater than the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965 and more than five times greater than the 58-to-1 ratio in 1989

You’ve Heard Of The Gender Pay Gap, But There’s More

August 11, 2018 By Jessicah Pierre, Otherwords.org , , ,
The gender wage gap continues to harm women, their families, and the economy, despite women being in the workforce for decades. But not all women are marginalized by this disparity in the same way. In 1996, the National Committee on Pay Equity decided to bring awareness to the wage gap by creating National Equal Pay Day. The day signifies how long it takes for a woman to make the same amount of money a man makes for the year prior. Each year Equal Pay Day for All is held in April — meaning it will take an average woman about 16 months to make what a typical man makes in a year. But when we look at the wage gap for women of color, this day of “catching up” falls way later in the year — all the way into August.

Best Satire Of The Unjust Absurdity Of Wage Slavery?

August 2, 2018 By Harel B., EconomicDemocracy.org , , ,
One century, one decade, and a year ago — that's going back 111 years, to 1907 — a lovely little gem of a playful yet brilliantly provocative rabble-rousing pamphlet was published about economic exploitation. It focused more specifically on what's come to be called wage slavery, the economic dynamic whereby in order to have a roof over our heads and not to starve, we're compelled to allow certain people and artificial legal creations (employers and corporation) to not so much outright own us (that's illegal) as to "rent" us, so we're essentially temporarily owned via wage slavery.

Chicago May Become Largest City In U.S. To Try Universal Basic Income

July 28, 2018 Zaid Jilani, Theintercept.com , , ,
He is concerned that a coming wave of automation could put millions of people out of work and result in more extreme politics. Pointing to investments in autonomous vehicles by companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Uber, Pawar observed that long-haul trucking jobs, historically a source of middle-class employment, may become obsolete. More people out of work means more political polarization, says Pawar.”We have to start talking about race and class and geography, but also start talking about the future of work as it relates to automation. All of this stuff is intertwined.” Before leaving the race after being outspent by two billionaire candidates, Pawar campaigned for the Illinois Democratic Party’s nomination for governor. One of the themes of his candidacy was that politicians were scapegoating various racial or ethnic groups for their constituents’ material problems.

As Prevailing Wage Laws Are Being Threatened, New Research Explains Their Importance

July 27, 2018 By Filiberto Nolasco Gomez, Workdayminnesota.org , , , ,
The repeal was originated and pushed by Associated Builders and Contractors  (ABC) through the ballot committee Protecting Michigan Taxpayers. ABC represents mostly non-union contractors. Opponents of Michigan’s repeal(link is external) say that it will erode safety and training standards and hurt the construction industry’s ability to attract and retain skilled workers. Proponents of repeal claim it will save the state hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The savings are expected to come directly from the wages of the construction workers who currently earn Michigan’s prevailing wages. Interviewed in the website Crain’s Detroit Business(link is external), Michigan State University economist, Charles Ballard, is skeptical of the claim that repealing prevailing wage saves money.

Grand Theft Paycheck

June 26, 2018 Phil Mattera, Dirtdiggersdigest.org , , ,
For the past two decades, Walmart has repeatedly been accused of compelling workers to perform certain tasks off the clock and has paid numerous fines for those practices. It is often suggested that the retailer is an anomaly, acting more like a fly-by-night sweatshop than a corporate giant. I recently completed a research project showing that, on the contrary, off-the-clock work, denial of overtime pay through misclassification and other forms of wage theft are pervasive in American big business. After digging through court records for much of the past year, I found more than 1,200 successful wage and hour lawsuits against hundreds of the country’s largest employers. These collective action suits have yielded some $8.8 billion in settlements and verdicts in the period since 2000. The same group of corporations have paid around $400 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Grand Theft Paycheck

June 13, 2018 By Phil Mattera, Inequality.org , , ,
For the past two decades, Walmart has repeatedly been accused of compelling workers to perform certain tasks off the clock and has paid numerous fines for those practices. It is often suggested that the retailer is an anomaly, acting more like a fly-by-night sweatshop than a corporate giant. I recently completed a research project showing that, on the contrary, off-the-clock work, denial of overtime pay through misclassification and other forms of wage theft are pervasive in American big business. After digging through court records for much of the past year, I found more than 1,200 successful wage and hour lawsuits against hundreds of the country’s largest employers. These collective action suits have yielded some $8.8 billion in settlements and verdicts in the period since 2000.

UM Lecturers Fight For Higher, Equal Pay

May 19, 2018 Nicquel Terry, Detroitnews.com , , ,
Dearborn — Lecturers at the University of Michigan are calling on school officials to raise their wages, saying they have been underpaid for years and threaten to go on strike if the school rejects their request. The Lecturers’ Employee Organization — which represents 1,700 non-tenure lecturers at the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses — says it has been bargaining for a new contract with the university since October, and its contract expires May 29. The union members gathered at the Dearborn campus on Thursday to display unity before going to the University of Michigan Board of Regents’ meeting to speak out. Union leaders say many lecturers on all three campuses are not making enough to support a family and have to work additional jobs for more income. They also want equal pay rates at all three campuses. Ann Arbor lecturers are paid higher salaries.

The Real Driver Of Rising Inequality

May 8, 2018 Lance Taylor, Ineteconomics.org , , , ,
Income distribution and employment are crucial macroeconomic indicators. Profits are key to distribution. Ther share in the value of output has risen steadily since around 1980. Households near the top of the size distribution of income receive business profits through various channels including interest, dividends, capital gains, proprietors’ incomes, and even labor compensation—which in US statistics includes profit-related items such as bonuses and stock options. Rising household inequality can be traced directly to higher profits fed by slower growth of real wages than of productivity (Taylor and Ömer, 2018).

Hundreds Of Bus Drivers Stage Massive Sick-Out

April 28, 2018 Casey Williams, In These Times. , ,
Georgia - Robbie Brown loved her students. For 18 years, she drove them in her yellow bus to and from schools in DeKalb County, Georgia. And then, last Friday, two police officers showed up at Brown’s house with a letter. She’d been fired. Brown is one of at least seven drivers sacked after staging a “sickout” to demand better pay and benefits. Last Thursday, nearly 400 school bus drivers and monitors in DeKalb County called in sick, aiming to pressure school district officials to boost driver pay, improve retirement packages and reclassify drivers from part-time to full-time employees.

Bold Increases In The Minimum Wage Should Be Evaluated For The Benefits Of Raising Low-Wage Workers’ Total Earnings

April 23, 2018 By David Cooper, Lawrence Mishel, and Ben Zipperer, Epi.org , ,
Workers today paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour are making 25 percent less than their counterparts made in 1968, despite the fact that the nation’s productivity has roughly doubled since then. Concern that low-wage workers are being deprived of the wage increases their increased productivity should deliver has led local, state, and federal policymakers to propose minimum wage increases that exceed the minimum wage increases that took effect in the 1990s and 2000s. Among the bolder proposals is a 2017 bill introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024, which would raise the minimum wage above its inflation-adjusted peak value in 1968. California, Washington, D.C.,...
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