Wages

Grocery Companies Denied Us Hazard Pay—So We Went Over Their Heads

April 6, 2021 Sam Dancy and Chandra Messer, Labor Notes. Resist! COVID-19, Essential workers, Wages, Worker Rights

We’d like to tell you a story of our struggles with Covid and our safety concerns—and how we ended up getting two city councils to enact hazard pay by law. As grocery store workers, we were called heroes early in the pandemic—but over time, we felt less and less valued. Expendable. Yet we are not victims; we rose up to demand better. To paraphrase Fredrick Douglass, we certainly did not get everything we fought for, but we certainly fought for everything we got. The two of us work at different companies—one at a Kroger-owned store in Seattle and the other at a suburban store run by PCC Markets, a small independent grocery chain.

When Rank And File Postal Workers Whipped Bosses, Union Leaders, And Richard Nixon

March 24, 2021 Patrick Murfin, Heretic, Rebel, A Thing to Flout. Resist! Strike, US Postal Service, Wages, Worker Rights

The day after St. Patrick’s Day in New York City was often little more than an intense, city-wide hangover. But on March 18, 1970 residents of the Big Apple awoke to more than just a headache. Thousands of local Postal workers were on the picket line in defiance of both Federal Law which prohibited strikes by government employees and their own union leadership. Within days business in the commercial and financial center of the nation ground to a halt in those pre-electronic communications days and the strike spread to more than 30 cities with 200,000 off the job. It was a big deal. A very big deal.

Garment Workers Have Won Billions In Stolen Wages

March 24, 2021 Loretta Graceffo, Waging Nonviolence. Resist! Fashion Industry, Wages, Worker Rights

In March 2020, Amanda Lee McCarty was laid off from her job. For years, she had been working in the fashion industry as a buyer and product developer. But as COVID-19 cases surged and lockdown orders were implemented across the world, retailers were faced with a dramatic plummet in consumer demand for clothing. McCarty, who had been the sole breadwinner in her family for most of her life, was left without a steady income or health insurance. McCarty wasn’t the only one in the global apparel industry whose future was thrust into uncertainty. Thousands of miles away, in countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Cambodia, apparel factories had just received catastrophic news from retailers in the West. In order to offset the financial losses of the pandemic, executives had made a swift and nearly universal decision: They were going to steal $40 billion from their most vulnerable workers.

Amazon Will Pay $61.7 Million To Delivery Drivers After Withholding Tips

February 3, 2021 Johana Bhuiyan, Los Angeles Times. Educate! Amazon, Gig Workers, Wage Theft, Wages

Amazon will pay more than $61.7 million to Flex drivers from whom it withheld the full amount of customer tips to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation. The settlement comes nearly two years after the Los Angeles Times first exposed that Amazon was dipping into customer tips to cover the base pay guaranteed to Flex drivers, who deliver Amazon Fresh, Prime Now and other orders. The money will reimburse Flex drivers whose tips Amazon withheld over the last 2½ years, according to the FTC. Until August 2019, Amazon promised Flex drivers a guaranteed minimum base pay for each order, which the e-commerce company said included 100% of customer tips.

Days After Election, Trump Freezes Wages Of Farm Laborers

November 11, 2020 Jake Johnson, Commondreams. Educate! Department of Labor, Farm Workers, Trump, Wages

Just days after U.S. voters went to the polls to help deny President Donald Trump another four years in the White House, the Trump administration issued a little-noticed rule freezing the wages of farm laborers working under H-2A visas, a move that could severely harm low-wage guest workers who have already been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. The rule (pdf), published in the Federal Register by the Department of Labor on November 5, will "help corporate interests deny pay hikes to frontline farmworkers who help maintain America's food supply," The Daily Poster's Julia Rock reported Monday.

How Much Would It Cost Consumers To Give Farmworkers A Significant Raise?

October 27, 2020 Daniel Costa and Philip Martin, Economic Policy Institute. Create! Farmworkers, Food and Agriculture, Household spending, Wages

The increased media coverage of the plight of the more than 2 million farmworkers who pick and help produce our food—and whom the Trump administration has deemed to be “essential” workers for the U.S. economy and infrastructure during the coronavirus pandemic—has highlighted the difficult and often dangerous conditions farmworkers face on the job, as well as their central importance to U.S. food supply chains. For example, photographs and videos of farmworkers picking crops under the smoke- and fire-filled skies of California have been widely shared across the internet, and some data suggest that the number of farmworkers who have tested positive for COVID-19 is rivaled only by meat-processing workers.

Twenty Days Of Underground Protests

September 23, 2020 Olesya Orlenko, Struggle La Lucha. Resist! Miners, Ukraine, Wages, Worker Rights

Ukraine - “This is not a strike, but a protest action.” Yuriy Samoilov, chairperson of the Krivoy Rog (Kryvyi Rih) organization of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine, prefers to clarify this point when talking about the underground protest of local miners. Workers of the privatized Krivoy Rog Iron Ore Plant (KZhRK) are afraid to officially call their actions a “strike” because of pressure from the Ukrainian authorities. Protesters remember the sad experience of striking uranium miners when the leaders of the movement were put on trial.

Become A Socialist With This CEO Pay Calculator

August 11, 2020 By Joel Cunningham, Life Hacker. Educate! CEO Pay, Socialism, Wages, wealth inequality

You’ve probably heard, anecdotally, that Jeff Bezos earns your salary in some absurdly short amount of time—but do you know exactly how short? Well, now there’s a tech CEO salary calculator from SimpleTexting that can give you the infuriatingly precise answer. You can also use it to figure out how quickly Elon Musk could pay off your mortgage, or that Mark Zuckerberg could pay off the average American’s $35,359 in student debt in 8 1/2 minutes. Does Jeff Bezos make enough to cover your living expenses in more or less time than it would take you to pledge yourself to the fight to burn capitalism to the ground?

Corporations Now Love ‘Black Lives’—But What About Their Own Black Workers?

June 16, 2020 Toni Gilpin, Labor Notes. Resist! Black Working Class, Strikes, Wages, Workers Rights and Jobs

Never underestimate US business community's capacity for hypocrisy. That’s one of the lessons to be drawn from the explosive reaction to George Floyd’s murder. As demonstrators began flooding streets, corporate PR departments flew into rapid response mode, issuing a flurry of agonized, apologetic pledges to do more to combat racism and inequality. Such statements may, on a personal level, be sincere: the depth of righteous pain and anger expressed by African Americans has induced widespread soul-searching, even in executive suites. Yet this high-profile hand-wringing is used to uncouple the outpouring of outrage from capitalist practices that are now, and always have been, at the intertwined roots of racial and economic injustice.

Essential Sanitary Workers Strike For Hazard Pay And PPE

May 17, 2020 Mike Ludwig, Truthout. Resist! COVID-19, Essential worker, PPE, Wages

The severe outbreak of COVID-19 in southern Louisiana was the last straw for a group of sanitation workers who pick up trash in eastern New Orleans. Last week, they walked off the job and went on strike, demanding hazard pay and a $15 living wage. Without “hoppers,” as the workers are known, garbage would pile up on the streets and contribute to the spread of disease and other public health problems. However, the group of hoppers in New Orleans say their employers did not provide them with hazard pay or sufficient personal protection equipment as COVID-19 shut down the city. Technically employed by a subcontractor and working for a private disposal firm, the hoppers say were paid as little as $10.25 an hour, with no benefits such as paid sick leave, for lifting 250,000 pounds of waste per week — an essential public service.

Peru: Unions Protest Against Government’s Economic Measures

April 23, 2020 Telesur English. Resist! COVID-19, Peru, Wages, Worker Rights

Labor Unions in Peru are protesting against a new economic measure from the government that seeks to cease work until the COVID-19 pandemic dissipates. Peruvian President, Martin Vizcarra, announced on April 12 the implementation of the measure as his administration faces the COVID-19 impact. The “perfect suspension” states that those who are unable to work because of the virus can stop working for up to 90 days, but their employers are not required to pay them for the time they are unemployed. Despite the economic issues, workers remain under contract with consequent obligations. According to Geronimo Lopez, General Chief of Peruvian Unions, "This government does not respect the space of social dialogue; we the workers are taking on and carrying this crisis of the COVID-19. In the face of this, we are going to take action to fight, a nationwide demonstration".

“Everyone Deserves A Cost-Of-Living Adjustment”: Interview With UCSC Striker Yulia Gilich

March 30, 2020 Jenn Schreiter, Unicorn Riot Resist! California, Class Struggle, Cost of living, Higher Education, Student Activism, Wages

Santa Cruz, CA – Graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) at the University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC) are fighting for a livable wage. A year of unsuccessful attempts to encourage their employer to re-negotiate a fairer contract, including a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to their pay, has escalated into a full labor strike. In turn, dozens of workers have been fired by the university in retaliation for the Pay Us More UCSC campaign.

CEOs Make More In First Week Of January Than Average Salary – Pay Ratios Are The Solution

January 14, 2020 Tobore Okah-Avae, Theconversation.com Educate! Bosses, CEO, Wages, Workers

The typical FTSE 100 CEO will have earned as much as the average UK worker earns in a year by 5pm on January 6 2020 – £29,559 for 33 hours of work, according to data compiled by the High Pay Centre think tank. By the close of the year, the same CEO would have earned £3.46 million – roughly 117 times the average wage in the UK. This is a staggering differential. If you believe that excessive executive pay is a problem, this statistic illustrates the point perfectly.

Raising The Minimum Wage By $1 May Prevent Thousands Of Suicides, Study Shows

January 13, 2020 Graison Dangor, Npr.org Create! New Economy, suicide, Wages

A new study suggests that raising the minimum wage might lower the suicide rate — especially when unemployment is high — and that doing so might have saved tens of thousands of people from dying by suicide in the last quarter century. The minimum federal minimum wage is $7.25, though many states have set it higher. Between 1990 and 2015, raising the minimum wage by $1 in each state might have saved more than 27,000 lives, according to a report published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

On Those Questionable US Wage Stats…Again

January 3, 2020 By Jack Rasmus, Counterpunch.org Educate! Wages, Workers Rights and Jobs

In recent months, various independent business and research sources have been raising questions about the accuracy of US official job and wage statistics. Several more sources have joined the discussion, questioning the oft-cited official—and widespread mainstream press reported–3.1% annual rise in US wages the past year. As many have indicated, the 3.1% grossly over-estimates recent wage increases in the US for several important reasons.

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