Tag Archives: labor

Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

by DaneLabynm Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last month, football players at Northwestern University took formal steps to organize a labor union and bargain for benefits like guaranteed multiyear scholarships and medical coverage for concussions and other long-term health issues. The first of what will likely be many battles for the unionization effort came this week, with an hearing before the Chicago regional National Labor Relations Board.

The proceeding, which will continue at least through the end of the week, has pitted the proposed College Athletes Players Association and former Northwestern quarterback (and NFL hopeful) Kain Colter against Northwestern. While the university reacted much less strongly than the NCAA when the unionization efforts were unveiled—the official university statement made sure to say that Northwestern is “proud” of its students for being “leaders and independent thinkers”—it is still the theoretical employer of Colter and the other players and thus must face off against them before the labor board. (Head coach Pat Fitzgerald is expected to testify Friday.) Here’s what you need to know about the hearings and what they mean for college football:

What does the union need to prove to win? The College Athletes Players Association, with the help of star witness Colter, is arguing that football players are employees of the university. The group has some strong arguments in its favor, according to University of Illinois law professor and sports labor expert Michael LeRoy. For one, the players work long hours equivalent to a full-time job. Colter testified that football-related activities take up 40 to 50 hours a week during the season and 50 to 60 hours a week during training camp in the summer. The players’ efforts also benefit the university—an economics professor who testified on the union’s behalf said that Northwestern’s football revenue totaled $235 million between 2003 and 2012, while its expenses added up to just $159 million during that time. “It’s a financial benefit, and that’s putting it mildly,” LeRoy said.

What does Northwestern need to prove? The university’s argument is that the players are student-athletes and nothing more. The players receive scholarships worth about $60,000 a year, a university athletics official testified, and a lawyer for the school noted that players also get “a world-class education, free tutoring services, core academic advice, and personal and career development opportunity.” While some of Northwestern’s other counterpoints lacked substance—school lawyers grilled Colter on whether leadership and other skills learned from the football team helped him get a prior internship at Goldman Sachs, a line of thinking LeRoy called “fairly irrelevant” to whether or not college football counts as labor—perhaps its strongest point is that players signed a scholarship contract, agreeing to their amateur status and therefore waiving their collective bargaining power.

What happens now? No matter which side the Chicago labor board takes, the loser will probably appeal that decision to the national board in Washington, DC. That ruling will likely head to a federal appeals court. The entire process could take years, LeRoy said, which presents a unique challenge for union organizers: There’s a chance all the players who signed union cards will have graduated and moved on by the time a final decision comes down. One big question is how other schools and teams will react—while teams at private schools like Northwestern can try to unionize, teams at public schools must adhere to their states’ collective bargaining laws. If players at some schools are able to negotiate benefits that players at other schools are not, LeRoy said, it could fundamentally change recruiting, realign conferences, and lead to swaths of state legislation addressing the matter. “It’s a huge can of worms,” he said. “It’s a showstopper.”

Who’s going to win? LeRoy said he thinks the regional and national labor boards will rule in favor of the players due to the boards’ liberal slant, but that the courts will rule against Colter & Co. That won’t mean the movement was pointless, though—LeRoy expects the NCAA to compromise on many of the union’s core issues by that point. Vitally, the Northwestern players aren’t asking for pay for play, meaning the university and the NCAA could provide them with the scholarship and medical benefits they’re calling for and still maintain its structure and concept of amateurism. Even a formal union doesn’t hold up legally, LeRoy said, we may see a “union substitute” in which the threat is credible enough that the NCAA provides players with more voice and benefits. “I don’t think we’re going to have collective bargaining,” he said. “But I think this is a necessary step.”

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Can These College Football Players Actually Unionize?

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"I Don’t Want to Create a Paper Trail": Inside the Secret Apple-Google Pact

by CarinDavisson Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Whether waxing poetic about net neutrality or defending the merits of outsourcing, Silicon Valley execs love to talk about how a free market breeds innovation. So it might come as a surprise that some of those execs were engaged in a secret pact not to recruit one another’s employees—in other words, to game the labor market. The potentially illegal deals suppressed salaries across the sector by a whopping $3 billion, claims a class-action lawsuit scheduled for a May trial in San Jose, and were done to juice the bottom lines of some of the nation’s most profitable companies.

Documents filed in conjunction with the litigation, first reported last month by PandoDaily’s Mark Ames, offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of interactions among the likes of Apple’s Steve Jobs, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell. In early 2005, the documents show, Campbell brokered an anti-recruitment pact between Jobs and Schmidt, confirming to Jobs in an email that “Schmidt got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.” On the day of that email, Apple’s head of human resources ordered her staff to “please add Google to your ‘hands off’ list.'” Likewise, Google’s recruiting director was asked to create a formal “Do Not Cold Call List” of companies with which it had “special agreements” not to compete for employees.

A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

Eric Schmidt Google

Good luck with that. The “no poaching policies,” as they were known among senior-level executives at companies such as Adobe, Intuit, Intel, and Pixar, were first exposed by a 2010 anti-trust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice. The DOJ complaint is the basis for the current class action, which was filed in 2011 by the San Francisco law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, alleging that some 64,000 tech workers were harmed.

The case, interestingly, has garnered little attention outside of the tech world. Sure, the average middle-class worker probably won’t shed a tear for the most likely victim here: Silicon Valley code jockeys and junior execs banking six-figure salaries and perhaps million-dollar stock options. The Bay Area, after all, is recently ablaze with animosity over tech-fueled gentrification and income inequality. And yet the collusion of CEOs to artificially suppress high-end salaries speaks to an economic malaise that affects every working stiff: The widening gap between the rich and poor isn’t some accident of free-market capitalism, but the product of a system that puts corporate leaders and their shareholders ahead of everyone else.

The lawsuit describes the rapid spread of anti-recruitment pacts between 2004 and 2007—arrangements perhaps facilitated by the overlap on Silicon Valley’s corporate boards: Jobs, who became Disney’s largest shareholder after it bought Pixar, served on Disney’s board until his death in 2011. Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board until 2009, and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell (a former Schmidt advisor) still does. Intel CEO Paul Otellini has held a seat on Google’s board since 2004. Such close ties have long been seen as a problem for shareholders, but the non-recruitment pacts suggest that such cozy relationships could harm workers, too.

Steve Jobs, according to unsealed court documents obtained by Mother Jones, was a leading advocate and enforcer of the non-recruitment pacts. Two months after entering into the agreement with Google, he emailed Bruce Chizen, then Adobe’s CEO, complaining that Adobe was poaching Apple employees. Chizen’s reply, that he thought they’d agreed only to avoid “senior level employees,” didn’t satisfy Jobs. “OK, I’ll tell our recruiters that they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not Sr. Director or VP,” he shot back. “Am I understanding your position correctly?”

Steve Jobs Acaben

Chizen responded that he would rather the arrangement apply to all employees:

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Adobe Apple Emails (PDF)

Adobe Apple Emails (Text)

The next day, Adobe’s vice president of human resources announced to her recruiting team that “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we not solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”

In one instance not yet reported, Jobs allegedly played hardball with a reluctant CEO. In mid-2007, he called Edward Colligan, then president and CEO of Palm, to propose “an arrangement between Palm and Apple by which neither company would hire the other’s employees,” Colligan testified in a sworn deposition. When he refused, citing the deal’s possible illegality, Jobs threatened to sue Palm for patent infringement. “I’m sure you realize the asymmetry in financial resources of our respective companies…,” he wrote Colligan in a followup email. “My advice is to take a look at your patent portfolio before you make a final decision here.”

The Valley’s hush-hush wage-control policies have been in play at least since the 1980s, soon after Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s “computer graphics division” and renamed it Pixar. As George Lucas later put it in a deposition, firms in the digital-filmmaking realm “could not get into a bidding war with other companies because we don’t have the margins for that sort of thing.” Lucas and Pixar’s then-president, Edward Catmull, made the following agreement, according to the lawsuit:

(1) not to cold call each other’s employees; (2) to notify each other when making an offer to an employee of the other company even if that employee applied for a job on his or her own initiative; and (3) that any offer would be “final” and would not be improved in response to a counter-offer by the employee’s current employer (whether Lucasfilm or Pixar).

George Lucas redtouchmedia/flickr

After its purchase by Disney in 2006, Pixar made the same “gentleman’s agreement” with Apple, according to unsealed emails from the lawsuit. (Last year, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Intuit settled their part of the class-action lawsuit for an undisclosed sum in a deal that allows the affected employees to file anonymous claims.)

In its earlier anti-trust suit, the DOJ argued that the Valley’s no-poaching agreements were patently illegal—clear violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act’s ban on restraining interstate commerce. In 2011, without admitting fault or paying fines, Google, Apple, and four other tech firms settled with the DOJ and agreed to discontinue their anti-competitive behavior.

Representatives for Apple and Google declined to comment for this story, but Google argued at the time that its pacts hadn’t hurt workers. There’s “no evidence that our policy hindered hiring or affected wages,” a Google attorney wrote on the company’s public policy blog. But “we abandoned our ‘no cold calling’ policy in late 2009 once the Justice Department raised concerns, and are happy to continue with this approach as part of the settlement.”

Whether and how the pacts truly affected wages is at the heart of the ongoing suit, which is slated for trial May 27. The defendant firms insist that their employees’ salaries weren’t widely suppressed because they were based on a “pay for performance” model. That is, workers got raises based on their accomplishments, not on what their co-workers earned.

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"I Don’t Want to Create a Paper Trail": Inside the Secret Apple-Google Pact

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WATCH: San Francisco Gentrification, Explained Fiore Cartoon

by kdneyo Posted on February 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: San Francisco Gentrification, Explained Fiore Cartoon

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Green Jobs Event Challenges Companies to ‘Repair America’

by Justina74L Posted on February 2, 2014

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who spoke at the 2013 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference, said, “The formula of good jobs, green jobs not only protects the environment, it grows the economy.” Photo: Keith Mellnick/Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference

With our constant demand for instantaneous delivery of digital communications through smartphones, tablets, high-tech watches, Google Glass and, coming soon, The Internet of Things,  it’s not surprising that the United States is second only to China in the world’s electricity consumption.

Global energy use will increase by 35 percent in the next 25 years, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Clean Energy program. Unmitigated, worldwide energy use contributes to roughly 70 percent of global carbon emissions.

In light of these concerns, a growing number of organizations and industries have taken interest in the “clean economy”: a sector of the economy that produces goods and services with the goal of bettering the environment.

The annual Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference, now in its seventh year, has become a leading forum for growing a clean economy with jobs that preserve America’s economic and environmental integrity. The 2014 conference will take place Feb. 10 and 11 in Washington, D.C. This year’s conference theme is “Repair America,” with a focus on fixing what conference director Samantha Sewell calls “the backbone of our country” — the infrastructure and systems we rely on for energy, water, emergency assistance, public education and more.

Repairing these systems can ensure the health and safety of workplaces and reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy, in turn creating jobs and helping America remain competitive in the global economy.

Panel discussions on the conference schedule include America’s infrastructure deficit, how trade agreements can undermine our communities and our environment, and understanding the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act of 2013. Featured keynote speakers include Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, and Richard L. Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

Ninety-minute workshops will cover topics such as building green schools, sustainability and the bottom line, making a living in a sustainable economy, advanced fossil fuels and their role in a lower-carbon future, and much more.

Perhaps most importantly, the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference offers the chance to rub elbows with like-minded movers and shakers.

“Every year, I come away from the conference having met people that inspired me with the work they are doing in their home states and cities to build a better future for all of us,” wrote Sewell in a recent post for the Talking Union blog. “The networking reception — and the many other breaks, workshops and events — [offers] opportunities to meet new people and become inspired, or just catch up with old friends.”

earth911

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Green Jobs Event Challenges Companies to ‘Repair America’

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We Already Have a Lower Minimum Wage for Teenagers

by Katherined5a Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Responding to yesterday’s set of posts about the effect of the minimum wage on teen employment, Matt Yglesias is puzzled. Do we even want higher teen employment? It doesn’t really seem like it:

After all, policymakers from both parties are pushing longer school days and shorter summer vacations. We’ve done a lot to encourage more people to go to college. We seem to be pushing more extracurricular activities on high schoolers….Now perhaps this is a huge mistake. But if it’s a huge mistake, it’s much bigger than the minimum wage. And actually the minimum-wage angle could be patched pretty quickly. Jordan Weissmann recently wrote about Australia where the minimum wage is higher than in the United States, but there’s a special low teenage minimum wage.

That reminds me. A few days ago I ran across the following footnote on a Labor Department web page:

5A subminimum wage — $4.25 an hour — is established for employees under 20 years of age during their first 90 consecutive calendar days of employment with an employer.

Am I the only person in America who didn’t know this? Sure, it’s only for 90 days, but it still makes a difference. Summer jobs could certainly all be offered to teens at $4.25. And it significantly reduces the risk of hiring a teen, since they don’t cost very much during the period when you’re still deciding whether they’re any good.

In any case, this went into effect in 1997 and it hasn’t changed since. Surely this is germane to any discussion of the minimum wage and teen employment?

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We Already Have a Lower Minimum Wage for Teenagers

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Economy Adds 74,000 Jobs—Economists Predicted 200,000-plus

by WendellHJJ Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The economy added just 74,000 jobs in December, which was fewer than expected, according to new numbers released by the Labor Department on Friday. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent. But as has been the case in previous months, this drop is due largely to the fact that many Americans left the labor force, and thus were not officially counted as unemployed by the government.

The number of jobs added in December was the smallest monthly gain in three years. Gains of over 200,000 jobs had been expected.

The unemployment rate for adult men and whites declined last month to 6.3 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, the jobless rate for blacks and Hispanics remained disproportionately high at 11.9 percent and 8.3 percent. The unemployment rate for Asians remained at 4 percent. The rate for women held at 6 percent.

In December (as in November), 7.8 million Americans were employed in part-time work because they could not find full-time jobs.

As in previous months, employment increased in low-wage service jobs. Jobs in retail, including in restaurants, bars, and clothing stores, rose by 55,000 in December. Temp work gained 40,000 jobs.

Manufacturing added 9,000 jobs. Employment numbers in the healthcare industry held steady.

The number of long-term unemployed—those without a job for 27 weeks or more—remained at a whopping 37.7 percent of the unemployed last month. Federal unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless expired at the end of the year. The Senate recently voted to consider a bill renewing these benefits, but it is unclear if Republicans in the Senate and House will approve a final bill.

If Congress does not renew the benefits, we may see an even greater shrinkage in the labor force, as the long-term unemployed, who are some of the least employable Americans, no longer have the means to continue searching for jobs.

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Economy Adds 74,000 Jobs—Economists Predicted 200,000-plus

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

by Lubao2pzs Posted on January 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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The American economy added 74,000 new jobs in December, but about 90,000 of those jobs were needed just to keep up with population growth, so net job growth clocked in at minus 16,000. There’s no way to sugar coat this: it’s pretty dismal news. Last night was obviously a bad time to predict that the economy might be getting back on track.

The headline unemployment rate dropped to 6.7 percent, but that’s mainly because a huge number of people dropped out of the labor force, causing the labor force participation rate to decline from 63.0 percent to 62.8 percent. At the same time, the number of discouraged workers dropped. This suggests that in addition to the usual exodus of workers due to retirement, a fair number of people simply gave up and quit looking for work, dropping out of the official numbers entirely.

It’s only one month, and it might not mean much. Maybe it was just bad weather. Maybe. But it’s a lousy start to the year.

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs for December

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Raw Data: Inflation Is Going Down, Down, Down

by ElvinVerpmtaxda Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Via the Wall Street Journal, here’s how inflation has been doing over the past year. Long story short, it’s been declining steadily since the end of 2012 and is now running at about a 1 percent annual rate. Bottom line: we should be worried about unemployment, not inflation. Until the labor market gets tighter, inflation just isn’t likely to be any kind of serious problem.

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Raw Data: Inflation Is Going Down, Down, Down

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Teachers Striking in the Town Where Mother Jones Is Buried

by lqr8rg5rr Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, after whom Mother Jones is named, was a prominent labor leader in the late 1800s and early 1900s. When her long life came to an end, Mother Jones—”grandmother of all agitators”—was buried in Mt. Olive, Illinois, alongside miners whose rights she fought for. This week, teachers in Mt. Olive are striking, too. Tuesday marked the second day of their strike for higher salaries and better benefits.

The Mt. Olive board of education offered the 39 teachers in the district a 2 percent increase in their salaries this year, as well as an increase of 2 percent per year during their last four years to help them prepare for retirement, according to the local Fox news station, KTVI. The teachers want a 4.5 percent pay hike now, and a 6 percent annual increase for their final four years. Teachers told KTVI that they agreed to forgo raises in their last contract in exchange for larger salary increases this time around, but the town didn’t keep its promise. “We feel that when you make a promise you need to keep it,” Marcia Schulte, a kindergarten teacher who runs the teachers’ union, told KTVI Monday. “That’s what we need to teach the kids.” She added that last year, the administration and support staff got a six percent raise, while teachers haven’t gotten a salary bump since 2009.

The teachers are also upset that the board wants to subject new hires to a different pay raise scale that would make their salaries increase more slowly. The teachers’ last contract expired in August, and ongoing union contract negotiations since then have left issues unresolved.

The school district superintendant Patrick Murphy told KTVI that reduced aid from the state and lower school enrollment means that the district has to shrink its budget.

All 39 teachers went on strike Monday morning. On Monday night, union members and administrators negotiated until 1:00 a.m., but no progress was made.

The teachers will not meet again with the administration until next week, and they’ll likely continue striking until then. Meanwhile, they have Mother Jones‘ words to keep them company. “Pray for the dead,” she was known to say, “and fight like hell for the living.”

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Teachers Striking in the Town Where Mother Jones Is Buried

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7 Simple Tips for Guilt-Free Holiday Shopping

by LouveniaMark Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last month, I reported on the “sumangali girls” in India, workers who are lured to textile factories on the promise that they will earn enough money for a dowry or higher education—but instead end up working long hours for little pay in exploitative conditions.

Since the story came out, many readers have asked how they can support fair labor with their purchases. Unfortunately, there’s not one easy answer. As NPR’s new Planet Money series illustrates, tracing a T-shirt from cotton field to store shelf is complicated business. But consumers can help. Here are seven tips to keep in your pocket during your holiday shopping:

1. Check the label.

For clothing that is not made in the United States, check out Fair Trade USA, a certification group that evaluates all parts of companies’ supply chains. Between March 2010 and June 2012, only four out of 55 factories in 23 countries it considered were immediately certified. Today, the group certifies certain products made by these five companies. Social Accountability International is another good resource for which factories have undergone auditing. Some individual companies (like H&M) post some information about the factories they buy from online.

Another approach: Buy only clothes made in the United States, where labor laws are comparatively strong. As Mac McClelland reports, building an entire wardrobe out of made-in the-USA labels can be tough. But don’t give up: Here is a list of stores to get you started.

And if you do decide to go the made-in the USA route, here’s something to keep in mind: In order to earn a USA label, “all or virtually all” of a product must be produced here, according to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requirements. However, garments made of fabric sewn in the United States are allowed to have a USA label “regardless of where materials earlier in the manufacturing process (for example, the yarn and fiber) came from.” So it’s possible that cotton production and spinning for your skinny jeans’ denim, for example, could take place in India, but the jeans would still earn a USA label.

2. Buy used clothes.

Cheon Fong Liew/Flickr

At $15 a pair, your leopard-print pumps can fall apart after you wear them once—and you’ll still be able to replace them without breaking the bank. As Elizabeth Cline noted in her book, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Americans are “buying and hoarding roughly 20 billion garments per year.” Keeping prices low encourages suppliers to drive their costs down abroad, so one way to beat the cycle is to reuse what’s already out there by shopping at thrift stores, consignment shops, and online resale sites. Buffalo Exchange, eBay, and Bib+Tuck are good options. (Goodwill has been criticized in Forbes and NBC News for paying disabled workers below minimum wage, so check with your local store.)

3. Support small clothing companies that don’t allow exploitation in their factories.

Look for companies that build fair labor into their business models. Alta Gracia, for example, makes its clothes in the Dominican Republic, but pays three times the local minimum wage and allows workers to unionize. San Francisco-based Everlane publishes information about its factories, providing full reports on each one with photos and owners’ names. Its prices are comparable to those of chains like Urban Outfitters and the GAP.

For other fair labor options, check out Prana, Maggie’s Organics, Good & Fair, Honest by, Modavanti, and Zady.

4. Support big clothing companies making progress.

Wikimedia

Sometimes, US companies respond to consumer boycotts by pulling out of a region entirely, leaving local workers without any jobs at all. So instead of boycotting, consider buying from companies whose social responsibility initiatives you believe in. H&M, for example, offers discounts to shoppers who recycle their clothing at its stores. Levi Strauss & Co. gives money to Social Awareness and Voluntary Education,â&#128;&#139; which provides rehabilitation for sumangali workers in India. Eileen Fisher manufactures 10-20 percent of its products domestically and conducts mandatory anti-trafficking trainings for managers and workers at its Chinese factories.

5. Support companies that are making their factories safer.

Shariful Islam/Xinhua/Zuma

Last April, Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza collapsed, killing more than 1,000 garments workers, many of whom were reportedly making clothing for US companies. Following that incident, more than 100 garment companies signed a legally binding agreement requiring the signatories to share the costs of safety upgrades in more than 1000 factories over the next five years. To see a list of which companies have signed, click here.

Since 2011, more than 100 companies have pledged not to source cotton from Uzbekistan, where child labor and slavery are widespread in the industry.

6. Read independent apparel industry reports.

Free2Work

In 2012, the anti-trafficking organization Free2Work released a comprehensive report comparing US clothing companies’ labor practices. The Fair Labor Association regularly publishes reports on garment factory conditions around the world, as does Anti-Slavery International and the Clean Clothes Campaign. These organizations send researchers to conduct independent interviewers with workers on the ground, providing a more complete picture of the industry.

7. Ask yourself: Do I really need this?

BuzzFeed/YouTube

Because a lot of the time, that new T-shirt simply isn’t worth it.

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7 Simple Tips for Guilt-Free Holiday Shopping

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