The Educational-Entertainment Complex exposed, under fire

The Educational-Entertainment Complex exposed, under fire

By Guest Blogger:  Matthew A. Kaufman

The National Labor Relations Board recently publicized the NCAA’s playbook.  For sports fans, the NLRB revealed all the things that we kind of knew (or should have known) were true, but now we know: it is all true.

Here’s what happened: on March 26, the NLRB ruled that Northwestern University football players were employees under the National Labor Relations Act and ordered that an election take place on collective bargaining.   The Board found that the Northwestern football team made overwhelming demands on the football players’ time.   During the season, players devoted 40 to 50 hours per week to the team, sometimes as much as 60 hours per week.  During the spring, the team required 12 to 20 hours per week of player time.  That does not leave a lot of time for a first-class education.   In that regard, scholarship football players received $61,000 a year in tuition, room, board and books.  Walk-on players – zero.  The NLRB found that playing football at Northwestern was pretty much a full-time job, hence collective bargaining.

In the big picture, college football seems ripe for unionization.  Last year, the Northwestern football team made a $7 million profit.  Northwestern isn’t even close to being in the league of the NCAA’s top earners.  In 2012, the University of Texas cleared $75 million in profit from football, and in 2014, UT will pay its coach $9.4 million.  Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum are the rank and file college players.  NCAA rules prohibit compensating them for their services.  The reality is that the chances of making the NFL are tiny.  The NFL Players Association advises hopeful professional football players to “come up with alternative plans for the future.”  Imagine if a trade school put that on its website.

The NCAA’s president, Mark Emmert, who himself earns over $1.7 million per year, denounced the NLRB’s decision as “grossly inappropriate.”  According to Emmert,

“To convert to a unionized employee model is essentially to throw away the entire collegiate model for athletics.  You can’t split that in two.  You’re either a student playing sports or you’re an employee of a university.  It would blow up everything about the collegiate model of athletics.”

Emmert almost got it right.  The collegiate model cannot coexist with a business model of college athletics.  But it was the NCAA and its member schools who long ago blew up the notion of bona fide amateur college athletics and turned their students into unpaid football players. The current model of collegiate football makes big money for colleges on the backs of an undercompensated workforce that, by rule, has no negotiating power.  Let’s let the players negotiate so that change can come to this fundamentally unfair system.

Equal Pay Day and the elusive gender pay gap

Equal Pay Day and the elusive gender pay gap

equal-pay-day-gender-gapBy Elizabeth Kristen

April 8, 2014, is “Equal Pay Day” in the United States. On average, women earn less than men. In fact, in 2012, full-time working women earned only 77% of what men made. That means the average woman must work four additional months—until April 8—to earn the same amount of money as a man. Equal Pay Day is yearly event meant to raise awareness of the gender pay gap.

Data shows that the gender pay gap is real. According to the AAUW, women just out of college earn 7% less than their male peers. As women get older, the pay gap gets worse: women over 35 earn 75-80% of what men make. And there’s nowhere to hide. The pay gap exists in all 50 states.

Although several US laws protect women from pay discrimination, the gender pay gap persists and improvement has recently come to a halt. Observers offer different solutions based on what they see as the root cause. For example, some agitate for legislation to address modern discriminatory employer practices. Some want to raise the minimum wage because women make up a whopping two-thirds of minimum-wage earners. Others train women to “lean in” to fight stereotypes and gendered roles. All of these seem to be viable contributors to this injustice.

Critics say that the gender pay gap is a fallacy. The argument is that women’s “life choices,” nothing more sinister, account for the gap: women tend to choose lower-compensated professions, decline to move for better opportunities, want more flexible schedules, and etc. Scholars dubbed this phenomenon the Mommy Penalty. Because women devote part of their lives to caring for their families, women work less and earn less.  The critics argue that such choices would hinder the progress of anyone’s career, male or female.

But the real fallacy is the “life choices” argument.  First of all, so-called life choices cannot fully explain the gender gap. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, 41.1% of the pay gap “cannot be explained by characteristics of women or their jobs.” “Life choices,” to use the questionable term, cannot account for the disparity.

Second, if workers who have care-giving responsibilities have to make compromises that burden their careers, then that’s an unacceptable contribution to the gender pay gap. And with women accounting for two-thirds of all caregivers, the penalties disproportionately impact women. With better leave laws and more flexible standards, valuable workers would not have to sacrifice their careers if family life calls them home. One day, I hope we reframe this issue and push for a more family friendly workplace notwithstanding sex, gender, or conventionality.

Although the laws are not perfect, California is at the forefront on family leave law, providing several strong statutes with worker-friendly presumptions. In total, California’s work and family laws, including the Pregnancy Disability law, the California Family Rights Act, Paid Family Leave, Kin Care, and the Family-School Partnership Act, mark a strong public policy in support of working families.

Strong family leave laws, however, are only part of the picture. California still has a way to go before it closes its gender pay gap. The Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center is part of the Equal Pay Today! campaign. The campaign has a 5-point platform to end unequal pay practices. Check out the website for details and for ways to get involved.

About Elizabeth Kristen

Elizabeth Kristen is the Director of the Gender Equity & LGBT Rights Program and a senior staff attorney at Legal Aid at Work.  Ms. Kristen began her public interest career as a Skadden Fellow at Legal Aid.  Ms. Kristen graduated from University of California at Berkeley School of Law in 2001 and served as a law clerk to the Honorable James R. Browning on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.  In 2012-13, she served as a Harvard law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow.  She has been a lecturer at Berkeley Law School since 2008. Legal Aid at Work together with the California Women’s Law Center and Equal Rights Advocates make up the California Fair Pay Collaborative dedicated to engaging and informing Californians about fair pay issues.

Pillage in private: Raiders try to punt cheerleader wage claims into arbitration

Pillage in private: Raiders try to punt cheerleader wage claims into arbitration
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Oakland Raiderettes Lacy T. and Sarah G. filed suit against the Oakland Raiders for various labor law violations.

Employee and consumer advocates have been screaming for years about the harsh realities of arbitration clauses.  We’ve decried them for being secret; for being unfair; and unconscionable and unconstitutional.  Like the frog in the slowly heated pot of water, the public has remained idle in the face of an unprecedented erosion of their rights.  Traction in the media has been hard to come by, and it has been worse among Congressional leaders.

Turns out all we needed was a little pom-pom pizazz.  The media has latched onto the allegations being made by Lacy T., a former Oakland Raider cheerleader and member of the team’s Raiderettes.  Lacy T. has filed a class action lawsuit (check another example of class action trials – Xarelto lawsuits) against the Raiders for wholesale violations of the California Labor Code – failing to pay minimum wage for all required hours worked, failing to pay overtime, failing to provide mandated meal and rest breaks, making illegal deductions from wages for a laundry list of “infractions,” as well as for costs the employer is required to cover, and failing to pay wages on time.

The case has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention, considering the abuses alleged are endemic to low wage positions in many industries.  Undoubtedly, the intense media interest is fueled by  the NFL’s high profile, the fact that every story provides an opportunity to display pictures of the Raiderettes in uniform, and the prospect that this wage dispute may provide titillating details of the Raiders’ demeaning treatment of its cheerleaders.  As the NFL knows, sex sells. Even if it doesn’t pay enough to buy gruel.

The latest Dickensian twist in Lacy T.’s case occurred last month when the NFL moved to have the minimum wage claims taken out of a public courtroom and put into a secret arbitration to be presided over by its $44 million man, NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell.  The claims in the case, and the Raiders’ response, show just how much the team’s management has turned its back on a proud history at the cutting edge of employment civil rights.  Al Davis was the first NFL owner to hire an African-American head coach (Art Shell), a Latino head coach (Tom Flores) and a female CEO (Amy Trask).  But by invoking an arbitration clause unilaterally imposed on its Raiderettes, and pushing Lacy T.’s case into a secret arbitral forum, the Raiders have perverted another of the late Mr. Davis’ ends-means mottos:  Just Win, Baby.

Arbitration was originally conceived by Congress in the 1920s as an alternative mechanism to resolve business disputes.  In the years since, it has steadily been perverted into a means for businesses to steal from and cause injury to individuals without any real threat of liability or significant financial consequence.

It is no small irony that secret arbitration has been championed at the highest level by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  Twenty three years ago, during Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Anita Hill publicly accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Her testimony (and the appalling questioning by the Senate committee) riveted the country.  Through her courageous actions, the entire country awoke to the existence of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Today, Professor Hill has been making the rounds publicizing “Anita,” a new documentary about the experience.  Two decades after exposing an insidious workplace problem on the national stage, she is asking a new generation of workers – women and men – to consider the lessons of those hearings.

Which brings us back to Lacy T.   Yes, the media is just as itchy today to publish salacious details about the Raiderettes as it was to report on Clarence Thomas’ crude statements in 1991.  The difference today is that the media may not be given any such opportunity to cover the details of a modern scourge for low-wage workers: wage theft.  And as long as workplace problems – of any kind – are denied public scrutiny and forced into secret star chambers, progress will be elusive. “Anita” reminds us that public testimony can be painful.  But it’s often how change is made.

About Christian Schreiber

Christian Schreiber is a partner at Chavez & Gertler, where he works primarily on class actions involving employment and consumer rights, civil rights, and financial services matters.

Did Apple, Google and other tech giants really steal $9 billion from their own employees? 1

Did Apple, Google and other tech giants really steal $9 billion from their own employees?

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The luminaries of Silicon Valley are idolized like sports stars. They are adored for the revolutions they have launched and praised for the fortunes they have amassed. They are revered for their business savvy and shrewdness. But it turns out there is another darker side to the Silicon Valley success story.

It was early 2005. Silicon Valley had finally shaken off the hangover from the Dot Com Bubble and things were back in full swing. Steve Jobs had just introduced the iPod Shuffle to the world, the latest in a long line of tech hit wonders that were about to send Apple share prices into the stratosphere. Google Maps had just gone live, destined to send paper maps the way of the dodo bird. And the demand for high-tech engineers was about to go into overdrive. Google’s human resources department had recommended that the company “dramatically increase the engineering hiring rate”, which would involve “drain[ing] competitors to accomplish this rate of hiring.” In other words, Silicon Valley appeared to be on the brink of a bidding war for high-tech talent, threatening to stifle growth, profit margins and share prices.

Cue the quick-thinking CEOs of Silicon Valley, who got together and formed a pact not to recruit or hire each other’s employees and stave off the bidding war. The day was saved! Capitalism had prevailed!

Or had it?

Not according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in 2010 and a civil class action lawsuit filed against Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm in 2011. According to the lawsuits, what Steve Jobs, Eric Reid and company had done was nothing less than an anti-competitive conspiracy to violate federal and state antitrust laws. The lawsuits estimated that the wages of over 100,000 tech employees were unlawfully reduced as a result of the illegal pact, leading to an estimated $9 billion in wages effectively stolen from them to pad the tech giant’s profit margins.

As one publication noted, there is a certain irony in the fact that spiraling demand for high-tech engineers may actually have lead to a reduction of their wages.

David Pando of Pando Daily has constructed an authoritative account of how the tech giants formed and maintained the pact to keep high tech wages down. He quotes from numerous emails that clearly weren’t vetted by any lawyers before they were sent. Based on the emails, it is clear Steve Jobs wasn’t exactly shy about bullying and goading other CEOs into line.

When Google began recruiting Apple’s Safari team, Jobs shot off this email to Google CEO Sergey Brin: “If you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.” Brin immediately ordered a freeze on all recruiting of Apple employees.

Likewise, when Adobe began recruiting junior-level Apple employees, Jobs emailed Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen asking for an explanation. Chizen replied that he had thought the pact was limited to non-recruitment of senior level employees. Jobs then threatened: “OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?” Chizen immediately backed down and agreed to stop all efforts to recruit any Apple employees. Chizen told his staff: “if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent…and he will do it in a way in which they will be enticed to come (extraordinary packages and Steve wooing).”

For all its glitz and glamour, Silicon Valley is becoming a tale of two cities, of haves and have-nots. John Plender of the Financial Times has calculated that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Oracle, Qualcomm and Facebook have amassed a cash pile amounting to a staggering $340 billion in the form of cash and liquid investments. Awash in cash, these tech giants had no good reason to break the law in order to steal $9 billion from its own employees.

Unfortunately, civic responsibility is in exceedingly short supply in Silicon Valley nowadays. According to one study, the gap between the privileged and the rest in Silicon Valley has only grown more vast over time. The average house in Palo Alto sold for more than two million dollars in 2013. There are fifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, poverty levels have also hit record levels accompanied by a 20% rise in homelessness due to soaring housing prices. Emmett Carson, chief executive of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation put it thus: “Rising tides do not lift all boats. . . We have to be intentional as a community about addressing inequality.”

George Packer of the New Yorker suggests tech titans have turned a blind eye toward the plight of their lesser brethren in part because they have constructed and lived in their own virtual worlds, physically and mentally aloof from their surrounding communities: “At Facebook, employees can eat sushi or burritos, lift weights, get a haircut, have their clothes dry-cleaned, and see a dentist, all without leaving work. Apple, meanwhile, plans to spend nearly five billion dollars to build a giant, impenetrable ringed headquarters in the middle of a park that is technically part of Cupertino. These inward-looking places keep tech workers from having even accidental contact with the surrounding community.”

This epidemic of moral aloofness has not infected all. Palm CEO Edward Collagan was one of the few willing to stand up to Jobs and fight for his workers. He emailed Jobs: “[Y]our proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.…I can’t deny people who elect to pursue their livelihood at Palm the right to do so simply because they now work for Apple, and I wouldn’t want you to do that to current Palm employees.”

Fast forward to 2014. Palm is no longer around. Apple continues to dominate the tech world. And that class action? It settled for $20 million, a fraction of the $9 billion estimated to have been stolen from high-tech workers. What’s that saying about good guys finishing last?

About Eugene Lee

Eugene D. Lee represents employees throughout California who seek to protect their legal rights in the workplace. Mr. Lee has obtained numerous six- and seven-figure settlements and judgments for employees throughout California. Mr. Lee received a B.A. with honors from Harvard University, and a J.D. with honors from the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to starting his own firm, Mr. Lee was a lawyer in the New York offices of Shearman & Sterling and Sullivan & Cromwell.

It’s time to clean up the Los Angeles garment industry’s dirty secret 3

It’s time to clean up the Los Angeles garment industry’s dirty secret

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On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan. Today, we know our clothes are still often sewn in lethal conditions in foreign factories.  Last year’s disastrous Rana Plaza collapse and a series of deadly factory fires resulted in much hand-wringing over how to improve safety in Bangladesh’s garment industry. But 103 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, we still have our own dirty garment secret, much closer to home.

There are some 5,000 garment manufacturers registered in Los Angeles County where an estimated 50,000 workers make clothes. The true numbers are almost certainly higher since many businesses do not report their employees, pay taxes, or carry insurance. Some L.A. garment factories are safe and decent workplaces where skilled employees make high-end denim, swimwear, and other products for elite brands. But in many others, where clothes are sewn for the “fast fashion” industry, the conditions are similar to those in New York sweatshops over a century ago or to those in Bangladesh today.

Bet Tzedek, the public-interest law firm where I practice, has represented hundreds of L.A. garment workers over the past decade, and their stories are sobering. Workers earn as little as two cents per completed garment. The pay, predictably, falls far below minimum wage, sometimes less than $200 for workweeks of 65 hours or more. Even in factories where breaks are permitted, piece-rate pay encourages workers to stay at their sewing machines for unbroken stretches. Musculoskeletal pain and related health problems are common. Over 100 years after workers were unable to escape the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory because the doors were locked, some of our clients have worked in factories without access to fresh water or functioning bathrooms, where bales of fabric block fire exits, and where owners lock workers in the building during overnight shifts.

Statistics bear out our clients’ testimony. According to research conducted by UCLA, over 90% of garment workers in L.A. experience overtime violations, and more than 60% are not paid minimum wage. The federal Department of Labor (DOL) found violations in 93% of the 1,500 inspections of garment factories it has conducted since 2008.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In January 2000, a landmark law went into effect in California with the intention of eradicating garment sweatshop labor. Before passage of the law, known as AB633, factories that often had no assets other than a few sewing machines would close, move, or reorganize under a different name in response to legal claims, leaving workers empty handed. AB633 established an administrative process in which companies that contract with sweatshops can also be liable for a share of workers’ unpaid wages.

In response, the industry reorganized. Over the past decade, thousands of middleman companies sprang into existence to funnel orders from retailers to factories. These subcontractors create a buffer between workers and the fashion houses that profit from sweatshop conditions. Not coincidentally, this is the same subcontracting structure that now prevails in the garment industry around the world, surprising brands like Walmart and Sears when their production documents are recovered from places like the rubble of Rana Plaza or the ashes of the Tazreen factory.

While we assume that U.S. garment factories are well-regulated, my clients know better: their bosses simply lock the doors to workrooms when potential inspectors are seen approaching. And paying citations is a relatively minor cost of doing business in an industry where the vast majority of workers, many of whom are Asian or Latina immigrant women, are too afraid to file a complaint.

In response to the tragedies in Bangladesh, some companies have entered agreements to inspect and monitor the factories there. Here at home, there is no such movement. When the DOL found garments allegedly destined for Forever 21 stores being sewn by workers in L.A. making less than minimum wage, Forever 21 fought the agency’s subpoena in federal court, arguing that it shouldn’t be forced to disclose sensitive information such as where it makes clothes or what systems it has in place to monitor compliance with the law.

There is little incentive for the law-abiding sector of the industry to get involved. Fashion houses paying fair wages for domestic labor are not competing for the same customers as the companies using sweatshop labor. And organizing a low-wage, immigrant workforce on an industry-wide scale requires investments of time and money that have not been forthcoming.

What else can be done? Paying workers less than minimum wage is theft, and criminal prosecutions of factory owners could cause many to rethink their business models. Aggressive investigations by government agencies could begin to unpeel the layers of subcontracting that protect the reputations of retailers and keep the sweatshop system humming.

The simplest solution would be a law clarifying that retailers are liable to workers who prove they sewed garments sold in stores, regardless of who signed the contract with the factory or how many subcontractors were involved. Such a law would swiftly clean up supply chains. But it would also likely mean fewer inexpensive clothes for shoppers and could send more garment jobs overseas if we aren’t willing to pay more.

The question is whether we want sweatshops in our backyard. It took more than 1200 dead bodies for the Bangladesh agreements to be proposed. What will it take here?

 

About Kevin Kish

Kevin Kish is the Director of the Employment Rights Project at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles. He leads Bet Tzedek’s employment litigation, policy and outreach initiatives, focusing on combating illegal retaliation against low-wage workers and litigating cases involving human trafficking for forced labor.

Three point lines and coal mines 1

Three point lines and coal mines

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By Christian Schreiber

New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony is one of the NBA’s biggest stars, playing in the country’s biggest market.  This summer, he will likely be a free agent – available to sign with another team for a contract that will almost certainly be worth in excess of $100 million.  At last month’s NBA All-Star game in New Orleans, Anthony made news for agreeing to consider re-signing with the woeful Knicks for a contract that will pay him less than the maximum available under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement signed between the NBA Players Association and the NBA.

It has become a familiar PR move for superstars in every major sport when free agency approaches.  If they don’t publicly embrace a willingness to be paid less as part of some single-minded pursuit of winning a championship, they are assailed as me-first losers and forced to justify their “selfish” desire to be paid what the market will bear for their skills.

You do not need to be a sports fan to recognize this trope.  It is familiar to anyone who cares about employees, working conditions, and fair pay because it is made of the same stuff shoveled onto “ordinary workers” whose labor doesn’t make a Top 10 list.  Whether it’s low-wage workers on the front lines of the minimum wage debate, or well-paid tech workers fighting wage collusion in the Silicon Valley, workers are often asked to embrace one short-changing or another.  (Sometimes, it is even offered in the metaphor of sport.  But just when exactly did “being a team player” and “taking one for the team” come to mean “work off the clock” or “don’t mind those sexual advances”?)

This is what drives me crazy when I hear athletes decried as overpaid.  We should all recognize athletes for what they really are: workers. In fact, most of them are workers who are regularly exploited for profits passed upward into the pockets of the absurdly rich; workers with little to no job security; and workers who risk their bodies for little pay.  Sure, Anthony has made millions playing a game.  But his billionaire bosses – the Dolan family, who own Madison Square Garden and rank 151st on Forbes’ list of the richest Americans – make tens of millions more from the brand fostered by Anthony and his co-workers.

More importantly, we cannot forget that Anthony and other “superstars” are the rare exception.  Athletes remain among the least prepared to deal with their earnings (NB: not “wealth”), and many high profile athletes wind up broke after short careers.  The vast majority of athletes, in fact, toil for low wages, risk their long-term health, and even death in order for their employers to enjoy a fatter bottom line.  Sound familiar?  While the NFL’s Commissioner, Roger Goddell, made $44.2 million in 2012 (which we know because…the NFL is…you guessed it…a non-profit organization), players in the NBA’s developmental “minor league” (called the D-League) are placed into one of three classifications, and paid $25,500, $19,000 and $13,000.  Even ESPN acknowledges rather Cavalierly that this “means D-League players are virtually playing for free.”

Why is this acceptable? And why doesn’t this cause more concern among worker advocates? Is it because it’s too difficult to see similarities between your skills, and say, LeBron James’? Is it because we believe that athletes have waived their rights and assumed the risk?  Or is it because scrutinizing our escapist institutions is kind of a buzzkill?  It’s a lot easier thinking about Messi’s unparalleled ball skills than about the children who made the ball.  (For years it has been easier to think about anything other than the Raiders. But recent allegations of wage theft against the Raiderettes affirmed what most fans already knew about their quality of the organization.)  Every now and then we get a peek into the caste system that props up our sports industrial complex, and it’s usually unsavory.

Back on the pedestal, athletes are starting to fight back.  Minor league baseball players have filed a wage and hour lawsuit against major league baseball for paying them less than minimum wage.  The Northwestern men’s football team appeared last week at the NLRB in support of their effort to unionize as University employees.  The team’s former quarterback, Kain Colter, testified, “We are first and foremost an athlete.  Everything we do is scheduled around football….It’s truly a job.”  Another group of former college athletes filed an antitrust action against the NCAA for depressing the value of their scholarships. And 25 other former NCAA athletes, led by 1990’s UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, are heading to trial on June 9 against the NCAA in a case in which they claim the NCAA licensed their likenesses without payment.

I give a high five to all these efforts.  Athletes have a unique power to drive public debate on workplace issues.  Whether it’s new frontiers like workplace bullying and political speech or transformational moments that snarkily signal a culture of non-discrimination in the workplace, we ought to be latching onto these moments to relate them to “ordinary workers” and “ordinary workplaces.”  The sports workplace can offer entrenched backwardness just like any other. But it can also be a laboratory for progress.  The next time an athlete is challenged as a spoiled crybaby, it would behoove us to remember he or she is a worker, and to recognize “the power of the uniform” – whether it is worn by a San Francisco janitor or a San Francisco Giant.

About Christian Schreiber

Christian Schreiber is a partner at Chavez & Gertler, where he works primarily on class actions involving employment and consumer rights, civil rights, and financial services matters.

Robert Reich: The Real Job Killers 1

Robert Reich: The Real Job Killers

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By Robert Reich

House Speaker John Boehner says raising the minimum wage is “bad policy” because it will cause job losses.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says a minimum wage increase would be a job killer. Republicans and the Chamber also say unions are job killers, workplace safety regulations are job killers, environmental regulations are job killers, and the Affordable Care Act is a job killer. The California Chamber of Commerce even publishes an annual list of “job killers,” including almost any measures that lift wages or protect workers and the environment.

Most of this is bunk.

When in 1996 I recommended the minimum wage be raised, Republicans and the Chamber screamed it would “kill jobs.” In fact, in the four years after it was raised, the U.S. economy created more jobs than were ever created in any four-year period.

For one thing, a higher minimum wage doesn’t necessarily increase business costs. It draws more job applicants into the labor market, giving employers more choice of whom to hire. As a result, employers often get more reliable workers who remain longer – thereby saving employers at least as much money as they spend on higher wages.

A higher wage can also help build employee morale, resulting in better performance. Gap, America’s largest clothing retailer, recently announced it would boost its hourly wage to $10. Wall Street approved. “You treat people well, they’ll treat your customers well,” said Dorothy Lakner, a Wall Street analyst. “Gap had a strong year last year compared to a lot of their peers. That sends a pretty strong message to employees that, ‘we had a good year, but you’re going to be rewarded too.’”

Even when raising the minimum wage — or bargaining for higher wages and better working conditions, or requiring businesses to provide safer workplaces or a cleaner environment — increases  the cost of business, this doesn’t necessarily kill jobs.

Most companies today can easily absorb such costs without reducing payrolls. Corporate profits now account for the largest percentage of the economy on record.  Large companies are sitting on more than $1.5 trillion in cash they don’t even know what to do with. Many are using their cash to buy back their own shares of stock – artificially increasing share value by reducing the number of shares traded on the market.

Walmart spent $7.6 billion last year buying back shares of its own stock — a move that papered over its falling profits. Had it used that money on wages instead, it could have given its workers a raise from around $9 an hour to almost $15. Arguably, that would have been a better use of the money over the long-term – not only improving worker loyalty and morale but also giving workers enough to buy more goods from Walmart (reminiscent of Henry Ford’s pay strategy a century ago).

There’s also a deeper issue here.  Even assuming some of these measures might cause some job losses, does that mean we shouldn’t proceed with them?

Americans need jobs, but we also need minimally decent jobs. The nation could create millions of jobs tomorrow if we eliminated the minimum wage altogether and allowed employers to pay workers $1 an hour or less. But do we really want to do that?

Likewise, America could create lots of jobs if all health and safety regulations were repealed, but that would subject millions of workers to severe illness and injury.

Lots of jobs could be added if all environmental rules were eliminated, but that would result in the kind of air and water pollution that many people in poor nations have to contend with daily.

If the Affordable Care Act were repealed, hundreds of thousands of Americans would have to go back to working at jobs they don’t want but feel compelled to do in order to get health insurance.

We’d create jobs, but not progress. Progress requires creating more jobs that pay well, are safe, sustain the environment, and provide a modicum of security. If seeking to achieve a minimum level of decency ends up “killing” some jobs, then maybe those aren’t the kind of jobs we ought to try to preserve in the first place.

Finally, it’s important to remember the real source of job creation. Businesses hire more workers only when they have more customers. When they have fewer customers, they lay off workers. So the real job creators are consumers with enough money to buy.

Even Walmart may be starting to understand this. The company is “looking at” whether to support a minimum wage increase. David Tovar, a Walmart spokesman, noted that such a move would increase the company’s payroll costs but would also put more money in the pockets of some of Walmart’s customers.

In other words, forget what you’re hearing from the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce. The real job killers in America are lousy jobs at lousy wages.

A special thank you to Robert Reich for letting us repost this compelling piece, which originally appeared on his blog, www.robertreich.org

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest, “Beyond Outrage,” is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, “Inequality for All,” is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD, and On Demand.

International Women’s Day now means progress without equity

International Women’s Day now means progress without equity

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By Elizabeth Kristen

International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide this past weekend, started out as  “International Working Women’s Day” in 1911. One week later, the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911 broke out, killing over 140 workers – mostly women – who were trapped inside the factory. The horror of that fire and the working conditions imposed on the women locked inside the factory galvanized the labor movement and the women’s rights movement. Even though the name may have changed, this annual day honoring women is the perfect time to take account of the barriers working women still face today.

Working women in the United States confront challenges ranging from workplace discrimination and harassment to unequal pay and inadequate leaves of absences.  The 2014 Shriver Report:  A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink collects essays that detail how these barriers impact not only working women, but their families, the economy and society as a whole.

Discrimination and harassment – Women continue to face unlawful discrimination and harassment on the job based on sex, pregnancy, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, national origin, disability, and many other characteristics.  The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency that enforces our federal civil rights laws published its statistics for charges filed in Fiscal Year 2013.  Charges of sex discrimination constituted approximately 30% of the charges filed with the EEOC.  The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the state agency that enforces our state civil rights laws published its statistics for 2012. This data showed that sexual harassment charges were approximately 60% of the charges filed regarding sex discrimination and harassment.  These statistics demonstrate that employment discrimination and harassment continue as serious problems for working women.

On the legislative front of women’s rights issues at the federal level, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would strengthen the protections for working pregnant women.  We also need the protections of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity across the country.  But these laws must also be enforced, which means vigilant leadership and restoration of the funding cuts that have undermined the California and federal agencies charged with civil rights enforcement.

Gender-Based Wage Gap – Despite the fact that gender-based pay discrimination has been against the law for over 50 years, women in the United States still face a significant wage gap.  Recently, there has been little progress in closing the gap in wages between women and men.  As of 2012, women’s median earnings were 81% of men’s.  And the wage gap is worse for women of color.  Because women are breadwinners for their families, the impact of wage discrimination is felt across the board.  The Paycheck Fairness Act, pending in Congress, would help fight gender-based pay discrimination

Leaves of Absence – Women are still the primary caregivers in the U.S. and they also often must take time off work for pregnancy and childbirth.  Yet the U.S. lags behind nearly every other country in the industrialized world in terms of how much leave it provides for caregiving, pregnancy and childbirth.  The federal Family and Medical Leave Act provides for job-protected leaves of absence for caregiving as well as for pregnancy and bonding leave.  However, the FMLA is unpaid leave and many workers cannot afford to take unpaid leave.  The FMLA also provides no protection for those workers at companies with fewer than 50 employees at or near their worksite, those who have worked for the employer for less than a year, and many who work part-time. Additionally FMLA takes a narrow view of what it means to be a family member, drawing a tight boundary around the nuclear family– parent, child, and spouse.   Grandparents, siblings and other extended family are not included.

The California Paid Family Leave Law, the first of its kind in the country, provides partial wage replacement to workers who take time off to care for family members or bond with a new child.  As of July 2014, California workers will be able to take  paid family leave for a broader group of family members that will include grandparents and grandchildren, siblings, and parents-in-law.

Some federal legislators are already taking the cue from California with a pending bill in Congress to provide paid leave nationally.  They should keep up the momentum and improve the FMLA to extend coverage to more workers and to widen the circle of who is considered “family.”

The United Nations’ theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Equality for Women is Progress for All.”  The global gender gap index shows a strong correlation between a country’s gender gap and its economic competitiveness. Given the fact that women are at least half of the potential workforce, a nation’s economic competitiveness depends on how it treats women. Improving the lives of working women will enhance progress for all working families and our national economy.  When that happens, we will all be able to proclaim “Happy International Women’s Day”!

About Elizabeth Kristen

Elizabeth Kristen is the Director of the Gender Equity & LGBT Rights Program and a senior staff attorney at Legal Aid at Work.  Ms. Kristen began her public interest career as a Skadden Fellow at Legal Aid.  Ms. Kristen graduated from University of California at Berkeley School of Law in 2001 and served as a law clerk to the Honorable James R. Browning on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.  In 2012-13, she served as a Harvard law School Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow.  She has been a lecturer at Berkeley Law School since 2008. Legal Aid at Work together with the California Women’s Law Center and Equal Rights Advocates make up the California Fair Pay Collaborative dedicated to engaging and informing Californians about fair pay issues.

Sweat, blood, tears and stock options: the labor laws that protect all of us, even startup entrepreneurs

Sweat, blood, tears and stock options: the labor laws that protect all of us, even startup entrepreneurs

By Daniel Velton

If you live in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to miss news about deals like the recent $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a young instant messaging company with a mere 55 employees. Or the $1 billion purchase of Instagram, a photo-sharing startup employing only about a dozen folks. Or the blockbuster deal for Waze, a small smartphone navigation company.

The lore of startup culture is by now well known. These often casual workplaces boast features like ping pong tables, 3D printer vending machines, skeeball, rock climbing walls, motorcycles, video games, draught beer taps, yoga mats and arcades. (Now television viewers can tune in to the startup world through a new HBO series.)

As hard as startuppers play, they work even harder. In their blur of 60-80 hour workweeks and caffeinated coding, dreams of being part of The Next Big Deal feed their dedication. They give up a lot of themselves and their personal lives in exchange for the elusive prospect of an early retirement. Many, though, often lose sight of the fact that there’s at least one thing they don’t give up — their rights.

California’s labor laws protect all of us, whether we work in shorts and flip-flops (or bunny slippers) in a fast and loose startup culture, or in slacks and dress shirts in a more traditional corporate environment.   More than one startup has learned this lesson the hard way.  The free-wheeling culture at Square Inc. has been cited by some as leading to a sexual harassment claim against the company’s chief operating officer.  Then there were claims of intimidation, violence and gunplay at the heart of a retaliation lawsuit against Color Labs’ co-founder.  And then there is the seminal Silicon Valley age discrimination case – Reid v. Google, Inc. – involving a 52-year-old manager allegedly referred to by managers as a “fuddy-duddy” with ideas “too old to matter.”   Eventually, his termination lawsuit went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled that comments like those could establish age discrimination.   Finally, though well past its start-up phase, even tech giant Oracle Corporation was recently hit with a claim for retaliation by a sales manager who objected to what he says was national origin discrimination against Indian employees.

Silicon Valley interests may have successfully pushed through an 11th hour budget trailer in 2008 to end overtime pay for many computer professionals, but even in the wild world of startups, there are still laws protecting workers.  The bottom line is that laws that prohibit discrimination, retaliation and harassment, statutes that require employers to accommodate disabled employees, rules that mandate overtime pay for most hourly workers — these and many other protections cover all of us, regardless of where we work.

Startup employees may sell their souls, but they should be mindful that their legal rights don’t go away as part of the bargain.

 

About Daniel Velton

Daniel Velton began his career with the largest labor and employment law firm in the world. Using that experience, he brings valuable knowledge and perspective to his current practice, in which he exclusively represents employees in individual and class action discrimination, wrongful termination, harassment, wage and hour, and other employment cases.

PayPal, Dog Food and California’s Anti-Forced Patronage Law: Did PayPal Chief David Marcus cross a line by threatening the jobs of employees who don’t use PayPal products?

PayPal, Dog Food and California’s Anti-Forced Patronage Law:  Did PayPal Chief David Marcus cross a line by threatening the jobs of employees who don’t use PayPal products?

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In what passes for celebrity gossip in Silicon Valley, the technology press is abuzz and atwitter over a leaked e-mail from PayPal President David Marcus to the company’s San Jose employees.  In the memo, Marcus bemoans the San Jose staff’s allegedly tepid personal enthusiasm for PayPal products.  At other offices, Marcus noted, the staff is willing to “hack into Coke machines to make them accept PayPal because they feel passionately about using PayPal everywhere.”  Marcus also expressed irritation with employees who can’t “even remember their PayPal password.”

As if password amnesia and a preference for using coins in Coke machines weren’t bad enough, Marcus was especially incensed by those San Jose employees who did not personally use PayPal products.  “Some of you,” Marcus lamented, “refused to install the PayPal app,” a point he underscored in the memo with flamboyant punctuation (“!!?!?!!”).

After urging the “San Jose PayPals” to use the company’s products, he closed with a vague threat, recommending that employees who refuse to install the PayPal app can go find another job.

In the tech word, the internal use of a company’s own software to demonstrate the quality and capabilities of the product is known informally as “eating your own dog food” or “dog-fooding.”  For example, Hewlett-Packard staff once referred to a project using only HP’s own products as “Project Alpo.”  But did Marcus take the “dog food” concept too far by threatening the jobs of employees who refuse to patronize PayPal?

The answer lies in California’s Depression-era Forced Patronage Law.  What is forced patronage, you may ask?  Let me illustrate the concept with a tale from my youth.

Long ago, in a downscale mall in a mid-sized Midwestern city, I got my first and only retail job at a now-defunct rural-themed clothing chain called the “County Seat.”

It is difficult for young people today to appreciate the sartorial horror that was the County Seat.  The clothing seemed targeted at rodeo clowns or the more fashion-forward Amish.  Nevertheless, County Seat staff were forced to buy County Seat clothing at a small discount and wear it on the job – in public!! – as a condition of employment.  The delusional thinking was that turning the sales clerks into human mannequins would stimulate sales. This was classic “forced patronage.”

But that was the Midwest.  Here in California, Labor Code section 450 prohibits an employer from compelling or coercing an employee to purchase goods or services from his or her employer or any other person.  The law was originally aimed at the proverbial “company store” of the coal mine of the remote farm labor camp.  But in modern times, it has been used in class action litigation against employers such as Abercrombie & Fitch (the County Seat of our time) and other clothing chains which require employees to purchase and wear the company’s fashions on the job.

So back to David Marcus and the PayPal e-mail.  Was there a violation of Labor Code section 450?  No one at PayPal, as far as I know, has been fired for refusing to use PayPal products.  And, because the statute prohibits the “purchase of anything of value,” Pay Pal could argue that requiring the download of a free PayPal app is not a violation of section 450.  On the other hand, if PayPal employees are terminated for refusing to purchase PayPal products, that would be a different bowl of dog food.

The evolution of the application of Labor Code section 450 from the coal mine to Silicon Valley shows how old statues are reinterpreted and updated for the cyber age. There is, alas, no specific statute that protects an employee from termination for forgetting a password.  Therefore, we are all very, very vulnerable.

About Curt Surls

Curt Surls has been practicing in Los Angeles, specializing in employment law, for almost 25 years. Mr. Surls is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a non-profit professional association honoring lawyers whose careers have demonstrated dedication to the welfare of the community and the traditions of the profession. Prior to opening the Law Office of Curt Surls in July 2012, he was a partner with Bornn & Surls for over 15 years. Mr. Surls was also an attorney with the Oakland civil rights firm then known as Saperstein, Seligman & Mayeda, specializing in employment and civil rights class actions. Mr. Surls also worked for the Department of Industrial Relations and the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.