Workers in low-wage industries like retail and food service don't just need better pay. They need stable schedules—to know ahead of time when they're going to work, how many hours they'll be paid for in a week, when they'll need child care. So it's big news that Gap Inc. will be
ending on-call scheduling. Bryce Covert reports:
All five of its brands will phase out on-call scheduling, in which employees are required to be available to work on a given day but not guaranteed that they will actually be asked to come in, by the end of September. They will also all provide workers with at least 10 to 14 days notice of when they’ll be working by early 2016.
The company says the changes come from an evaluation it’s conducted over the last year to improve its scheduling practices along with a pilot it launched in July of last year with the help of Professor Joan Williams of UC Hastings’ College of Worklife Law. But it also comes after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began an investigation into the scheduling practices of 13 large retailers and whether they violated a New York state law and sent them all a letter. The investigation had already produced results: earlier this month, Abercrombie & Fitch announced it would end on-call scheduling in New York stores by the end of the year. Those employees will also get their schedules at least a week in advance. Victoria’s Secret, which also received a letter from Schneiderman’s office, has also ended on-call shifts.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
- Company seeks scabs to work 84 hours a week in Steelworkers lockout.
- Jeff Bezos said he didn't recognize the New York Times portrait of Amazon's hellish workplace culture, but this woman did. She had a baby and cancer while she worked at Amazon, and then:
After a five-month leave, I was nervous and excited to return to work, and I showed up that first day back with a big smile and a phone full of baby pictures to share. I figured I’d catch up with folks and get a high-level update on how the business was doing, since the strategy had evolved from the time I was hired. Here’s what happened instead: I was taken to lunch by a woman I barely knew. Over Cobb salad she calmly explained that all but one of my direct reports — the people I had hired — were now reporting to her. In the months that followed, I was placed on a dubious performance improvement plan, or PIP, a signal at Amazon that your employment is at risk. Not long after that I resigned.
- Raising the minimum wage: very popular in New Hampshire.
- It's great that more restaurants are moving away from tips and replacing them with higher prices or service charges, while paying more of their workers a living wage, but I do wish they'd agree on a standard model. It's a little confusing when practically every no-tip restaurant handles charges differently.
- Paid parental leave is fueling Sweden's start-up boom.
- Yelp, but for manufacturing things in America.
- Union-busting, "sharing economy"-style.
Education
- Underlining strikers' point, court fines Washington for underfunding schools:
Lawmakers in Washington state are scrambling to get ready for a special session after the state’s highest court announced it will start charging a penalty of $100,000 per day while legislators continue illegally underfunding the public schools.
The court’s move comes on the heels of one-day strikes that rolled across the state this spring. Half the members of the Washington Education Association (WEA), in some 65 school districts covering 40,000 teachers, walked out—including on the state’s conservative side, east of the mountains.
- Executive salaries at cyber charter chain K12 are one clue about why financial industry types love education privatization so very much.
- The LA Times is launching "an ongoing, wide-ranging report card on K-12 education in Los Angeles, California, and the nation." It's a major investment in education reporting ... and it's being bankrolled by some of the same "philanthropists" who have invested millions in promoting education privatization and high-stakes overtesting. So that's confidence-inspiring.