Tag Archives: labor

Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

by RubyeMcCants Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Hibbs, a Mother Jones reader and owner of Comix Experience, wrote in to object to San Francisco’s plan to raise its minimum wage. Conservatives who argue against the minimum wage often point to jobs lost and heavy burdens on small businesses, and progressives largely brush off those arguments as so much Chamber of Commerce propaganda. And then you have guys like Hibbs. Read what he has to say, and then we’ll discuss.

I own two comic book stores in SF, and while we’re a profitable business and have been for 26 years, we’re only modestly profitable, y’know? When you calculate my own salary on a per-hour basis, given that 70-hour weeks are not at all uncommon for me, I don’t make much more than the high-end of SF’s new minimum wage law.

Raising the minimum wage by 43 percent (from $11.05 today to $15 in 2018) means that we need to generate at least another 80 grand in revenue. Eighty grand. I don’t personally make eighty grand in a year. I’m not some kind of fat cat getting rich off the exploitation of my workers or something. And look, if I did manage to increase sales by that amount, I’d sure be hoping that I got to keep a tiny little percentage of it myself.

Just so we’re clear: The hole I find myself soon facing isn’t one created by escalating San Francisco rents (my landlord is awesome!), or because of competition from the internet (in fact, our sales consistently grow year-over-year, and sales growth has accelerated since the introduction of digital comics), but one solely and entirely created by the increase of the minimum wage.

I’m a progressive; I support fair labor practices, and I try, above all else, to give the folks who work for me absolute agency in their jobs. I have multiple employees who quit higher paying jobs for corporate owners to come work for me, because I actively valued their passions. I don’t own a comic book store to make money as my primary goal, right? The primary goal is to wake up the morning and be excited by what you do, to feel like you’re spreading your passion, that you’re promoting art, and creators and joy—and my staff feels much the same way.

I have staff who are supported by a spouse and are working for me to essentially make pocket money; I have staff who want to be full-time artists, and this helps them get closer to their goal by exposing them to the form and helping them make contacts. I have staff who are actively working toward having their own stores, and I’m basically paying them to get a master’s class (though I am fine with that!). I have staff who are full-time students living at home.

I’m not exploiting any of them, I don’t think. They all have options, and they all work for me because they want to.

If I can’t increase sales by $80,000—which is not something that seems likely, given historical year-over-year gains—then I have to start firing people, or trimming hours of operation. We don’t run extravagant overlaps—nearly 60 percent of the hours the stores are open we only have one person on deck; nor do we have a lot of waste or absurd inventory or anything like that. I’ve survived in a kind of marginal business for 26 years by being a savvy businessperson, and a relatively nimble and predictive one. But firing people, cutting hours…how does that help the employees? How does that help the business expand so I can eventually hire more people?

I have the largest staff of any SF comics business (because I have two locations), and, in point of fact, my two closest competitors have zero employees. Not being impacted by this mandate, they’d have no reason to raise prices in tandem…and really, every reason to not do so. If I raised prices by, let’s say, 10 percent to meet this mandate, I’m absolutely positive we’d lose at least 20 percent of our business to stores that didn’t raise their prices—thereby putting us at a net negative.

We’re trying to solve this problem by growing our way out of it with a new national, curated Graphic-Novel-of-the-Month Club, but I think that if we’re able to succeed from that (and I am not at all sure we will) it will be because of years of building our exceptional reputation. As a result, I do not at all think that this type of solution is scalable for the average small business. The City of San Francisco’s own Office of Economic Analysis believes the minimum wage hike will cost 15,270 jobs, or 2 percent of the private workforce!

Honestly, if San Francisco had voted for “Minimum Wage must be at least equal to X percent of your net profit” or “Every person in America gets a guaranteed income of $20,000/year paid for by progressive taxes” or some other scheme where you know that people being asked to contribute more can afford it, then maybe we’d be on sounder ideological ground…But I think that the higher minimum wage, the higher you’re making the barriers for low-income people and marginal-but-promising businesses to even have a chance to enter the marketplace and to survive in the first place, let alone legacy businesses like ours.

Here’s my personal take: It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Hibbs, yet it would be a mistake to take his situation as a case for abolishing or making exceptions to the city’s minimum wage law. As I’ve noted elsewhere, raising the minimum wage doesn’t tend to decrease overall employment; in general, businesses find new efficiencies and their workers find themselves with more disposable income to spend on things like comics.

Of course, that’s probably little comfort to Hibbs, who faces competition from smaller comics stores whose sole proprietors are the ones manning the cash registers. Hibbs may well be able to keep his doors open by downsizing, bringing in volunteers, or drumming up donations from devoted customers (as one local bookstore has done), but when it comes down to it, there simply may not be much of a future for bricks-and-mortar comics stores in a city with astronomical real estate prices.

“I super commiserate with him because we are in almost the identical situation,” says Lew Prince, a member of the group Business for a Fair Minimum Wage and the owner of Vintage Vinyl, a record store in St. Louis. Dwindling sales and rising labor costs forced Prince to consolidate his two Vintage Vinyl locations into one. He nonetheless supports increasing Missouri’s minimum wage from $7.65 to $12 an hour because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. “The job of the business owner is to prepare for the future,” he told me. “I have great empathy and sympathy for Hibbs, but you have to do the job every day, and sometimes the marketplace defeats you.”

But maybe that point of view is too harsh. I’d love to hear, in the comments, what Kevin’s readers think about all of this.

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

by UnitedCashLoans Posted on April 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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A recent paper suggests that over the past two decades there’s been a decline in the desire of people outside the labor force to ever get jobs. Why?

We conjecture that two mechanisms could explain these results. First, the EITC expansion raised family income and reduced secondary earners’s (typically women) incentives to work. Second, the strong work requirements introduced by the AFDC/TANF reform would have, through a kind of “sink or swim” experience, left the “weaker” welfare recipients without welfare and pushed them away from the labor force and possibly into disability insurance.

This comes via Tyler Cowen, who attended an NBER session this morning conducted by the authors of this study. He came away thinking they probably hadn’t made a strong case. Still, an interesting hypothesis that probably deserves followup.

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Welfare Reform and the Decline of Work

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These Popular Clothing Brands Are Cleaning Up Their Chinese Factories

by AveryReasoner Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s well known that the outsourcing of clothing manufacturing to countries with low wages and weak regulations has led to exploitative labor conditions. But many foreign apparel factories also create environmental problems. The industrial processes used to make our jeans and sweatshirts require loads of water, dirty energy, and chemicals, which often get dumped into the rivers and air surrounding factories in developing countries. Almost 20 percent of the world’s industrial water pollution comes from the textile industry, and China’s textile factories, which produce half of the clothes bought in the United States, emit 3 billion tons of soot a year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

But a few basic (and often profitable) changes in a factory’s manufacturing process can go a long way in cutting down pollution. That’s the takeaway from Clean by Design, a new alliance between NRDC, major clothing brands—including Target, Levi’s, Gap, and H&M—and Chinese textile manufacturing experts.

Starting in 2013, 33 mills in the cities of Guangzhou and Shaoxing participated in a pilot program that focused on improving efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of producing textiles. The results, released in a report today, are impressive.

NRDC

The 33 mills reduced coal consumption by 61,000 tons and chemical consumption by 400 tons. They saved 36 million kilowatts of electricity and 3 million tons of water (the production of one tee shirt takes about 700 gallons, or 90 pounds, of water). While mills often needed to invest in capital up front, they saw an average of $440,000 in savings per mill—a total of $14.7 million—mostly returned to them within a year.

How did they accomplish all this? Below are some of the measures that were implemented:

Upgrading metering systems to monitor water, steam, and electricity use (and identify waste)

Implementing condensation collection during the steam-heavy dying process

Increasing water reuse after cooling and rinsing (some clothes get rinsed as many as 8 times; the final rinses often leave behind clean water)

Investing in equipment for recovering heat from hot water used for dying and rinsing, and from machines

Stopping up steam and compressed air leakage to increase energy efficiency

Improving insulation on pipes, boilers, drying cylinders, dye vats, and steam valves to prevent wasted energy

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These Popular Clothing Brands Are Cleaning Up Their Chinese Factories

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

by DennisTPWeivsg Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to accept deposits, cash checks, and dispense basic financial advice. But now that job hardly exists anymore—at least not as we once knew it. Today’s front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered “bankers” in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don’t need.

Rank-and-file bank workers are both causes and symptoms of America’s widening economic divide, says Aditi Sen, the author of Big Banks and the Dismantling of the Middle Class, a report released today by the Center for Popular Democracy. Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. “We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers,” she says.

Banks are, of course, notorious for squeezing profits from their employees and customers. In 2011, the Federal Reserve Board fined Wells Fargo $85 million for forcing workers to sell expensive subprime mortgages to prime borrowers. And in late 2013, a judge slapped Bank of America with a $1.27 billion penalty for its “Hustle Program,” which rewarded employees for producing more loans and eliminating controls on the loans’ quality.

Yet, by some accounts, these sorts of practices are getting worse. In a 2013 study by the union-backed Committee for Better Banks, 35 percent of low-level bank workers surveyed reported increased sales pressure since 2008, and nearly 38 percent stated that there was no real avenue in the workplace to oppose such practices. One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks.

The increasing sales pressure comes at a time when the fortunes of the banks and their low-level workers have diverged widely. Bank profits and CEO pay have rebounded to near record levels while wages for front-line workers are stuck in the gutter.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

And that’s not all. Nearly a quarter of bank workers surveyed in 2013 reported that their benefits had been cut since 2008, and 44 percent reported that their medical and life insurance was inadequate. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers’ families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers.

There are several factors in all of these woes. Mergers and consolidation have led some retail banks to shutter branches and lay people off. Many banks have outsourced customer-service jobs to overseas call centers, and the rise of internet and smartphone banking has further slashed demand for flesh-and-blood tellers. In other words, it’s basically the same mix of foreign and technological competition that has concentrated wealth and depressed middle-class wages throughout the economy. And it means that banks can get away with paying people less, and demanding more in return.

But now the Committee for Better Banks is trying to cultivate common cause between low-level bank workers and the customers they’re forced to target. The interviews featured in the new report show that many bank workers strongly oppose the sales quotas as unfair and exploitive. For instance:

A teller at a top-five bank reports that she is subject to stringent individual goals on a daily basis: If she does not make three sales-points (selling someone a new checking, savings, or debit card account) each day in a month, she gets written up.

Customer service representatives at a call center for another major bank report that each individual has to make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up. Selling credit cards counts more towards sales goals than helping someone open up a checking account or savings account, thereby crafting skewed incentives based on the profitability of a product sold, not on how well it matched the needs of a customer.

“A lot of time people would call and already have one, two, or three credit cards with us,” says Liz, a member of the Committee for Better Banks who worked in a Bank of America call center for five years and did not want to give her last name. “They might have a situation where they are low on funds and we end up pushing another credit card on them. There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him; he would just be in more debt. But if didn’t, I would end up being put in a reprimand.”

On Monday, members of the Committee for Better Banks will converge in Minnesota’s Twin Cities to deliver a petition to bank offices demanding better pay and more stable work hours for rank-and-file workers, and an end to sales goals that “push unnecessary products on our customers.”

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

by KimberlyHollins Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen major corporations, including Walmart, Nordstrom, and Safeway, are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care—the benefits collectively known as workers’ compensation.

The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (ARAWC), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee. Richard Evans, the group’s executive director, told an insurance journal in November that the corporations ultimately want to change workers’ comp laws in all 50 states. Lowe’s, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sysco Food Services, and several insurance companies are also part of the year-old effort.

Laws mandating workers’ comp arose at the turn of the 20th century as a bargain between employees and employers: If a worker suffered an injury on the job, the employer would pay his medical bills and part of his wages while he recovered. In exchange, the worker gave up his right to sue for negligence.

ARAWC’s mission is to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers’ compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. Employers that opt out would still be compelled to purchase workers’ comp plans. But they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.

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Walmart, Lowe’s, Safeway, and Nordstrom Are Bankrolling a Nationwide Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

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Yes, Education Matters. But It’s Not the Answer to Growing Income Inequality.

by GloriaSeeley Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

David Brooks has a bit of an odd column today:

For many years, Democratic efforts to reduce inequality and lift middle-class wages were based on the theory that the key is to improve the skills of workers. Expand early education. Make college cheaper. Invest in worker training. Above all, increase the productivity of workers so they can compete.

But a growing number of populist progressives have been arguing that inequality is not mainly about education levels. They argue that trying to lift wages by improving skills is an “evasion.” It’s “whistling past the graveyard.”

….Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard. Worker productivity is the main arena. No redistributionist measure will have the same long-term effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.

I don’t quite get who Brooks is arguing against here. Larry Summers is the obvious target, but Summers has been clear that he thinks education is important, both individually and for the economy as a whole. He just doesn’t think that improved education is likely to have much impact on growing income inequality, which is driven by other factors.

But Brooks never even pretends to address this. I don’t think there are any prominent Democrats arguing that education isn’t important. Pretty much all of them are on board with good early-childhood education and better community colleges, among other things. That will help individuals and make the American economy stronger.

But will it rein in growing income inequality? As long as inequality is driven primarily by the gains of the top 1 percent—which it is—then it won’t. To address that particular problem, we have to look elsewhere.

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Yes, Education Matters. But It’s Not the Answer to Growing Income Inequality.

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Why “You Drive a Car” Is Not a Good Rebuttal to Calls For Climate Action

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2015

Conservatives’ favorite climate comeback is pretty silly. chungking/Shutterstock Many conservatives claim combatting climate change would require extreme sacrifice. We all use energy to heat and cool our homes, power our computers, and get around. So conservatives try to scare voters away from limiting greenhouse gas emissions by telling them it will mean shivering in the dark and wrecking the economy. Whatever the merits of this argument (and, according to the World Bank, the merits are not strong), their favorite way of making this point is a silly “gotcha” that often falls flat on its face. Case in point: On Tuesday, I tweeted out a link to Mother Jones’ report that Democratic presidential hopeful Jim Webb criticized President Obama for vetoing the pro-Keystone bill passed by Congress: Jim Webb still wants the planet to fry http://t.co/G2FOZiCVSh via @motherjones @patcaldwell — Ben Adler (@badler) March 3, 2015 Here’s what a random conservative troll tweeted in response: @badler @MotherJones @patcaldwell Bet Ben drove his petroleum powered car to work today, Earth fryer. — TPA-I (@maptampa) March 3, 2015 For what seems like the umpteenth time, a conservative thought he had me hoisted by my own petard. Well, actually, no, I didn’t drive to work on Tuesday, and not just because I currently work from home. I’ve never owned a car or used one to commute. Read the rest at Grist. View article:  Why “You Drive a Car” Is Not a Good Rebuttal to Calls For Climate Action ; ; ;

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Why “You Drive a Car” Is Not a Good Rebuttal to Calls For Climate Action

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China’s Surprise Viral Hit: An Environmental Documentary

by Myrna Posted on March 6, 2015

A film criticizing Beijing’s pollution record has logged millions of views, and the government now appears to be acknowledging its failures to implement reforms. Screenshot: Under the Dome/YouTube On Saturday, Chai Jing, a former television journalist from China, released a feature-length documentary film that, unusually for China, took the government to task. Titled Under the Dome, the video featured Chai giving a presentation on stage, using both photographs and slides to examine how China’s notorious air pollution got so extreme—and why the Communist Party has failed to fix it. Jing’s interest was personal: Her daughter underwent surgery soon after her birth to remove a tumor that, Chai claims, was caused by pollution. Under ordinary circumstances, the Chinese government might have swiftly removed the video from Youku, China’s YouTube, before it could gain much traction. But the film has been left untouched, amassing tens of millions of views and touching off a spirited discussion online. Under the Dome, which is embedded below, has even received praise from senior government officials. Read the rest at The Atlantic. This article is from: China’s Surprise Viral Hit: An Environmental Documentary

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China’s Surprise Viral Hit: An Environmental Documentary

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How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

by Myrna Posted on March 6, 2015

The fight over petcoke on Chicago’s southeast side. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP It’s not easy to take on a wealthy, multi-national corporation and win. Especially for residents of Chicago’s struggling southeast side. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the banks of the Calumet River, where the steel plants that used to give residents of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood access to a middle-class lifestyle were replaced, nearly two years ago, with black dust called petroleum coke (“petcoke”) piled five or six stories tall. The piles of petcoke—a byproduct of the oil refining process—belong to KCBX Terminals, owned by the conservative billionaire Koch Brothers. The piles have been roiling area residents ever since the black dust of mostly carbon and sulfur began blowing into the backyards, playgrounds and neighborhood parks. It blackens skies and leaves behind a sticky residue, raising concerns about aggravated asthma and other health issues. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Link: How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

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How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

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Quote of the Day: The Surveys Will Continue Until Morale Improves

by Lenore38Gawtf Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

From a study of low morale in the Department of Homeland Security, explaining why the authors hadn’t made much progress in figuring out why morale was low:

“Other entities had already engaged employees in efforts to assess morale,” and as a result, DHS employees were developing “interview/survey fatigue.”

Survey fatigue! Otherwise known as stop screwing around with your endless damn assessments and just do something, OK?

But apparently more studies are in the works anyway. Will they improve morale? Stay tuned for next week’s exciting episode!

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Quote of the Day: The Surveys Will Continue Until Morale Improves

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