Labor & Economic News Blog

Monday, October 27, 2014

$20-an-Hour Fast Food Jobs, but No Minimum Wage

$20-an-Hour Fast Food Jobs, but No Minimum Wage


Burger King employees make a living wage in Denmark, where unions are strong. That’s not the case in the U.S., and some labor activists and liberal scholars are asking why.

 

Friday, October 24, 2014

California cracks down on wage theft by employers

California cracks down on wage theft by employers
State regulators are wielding a new tool to combat the intractable problem of employer wage theft, which costs workers an estimated $390 million a year. The California controller, working with the state labor commissioner, is demanding restitution from suspected violators — and filing lawsuits, if necessary — under California's Unclaimed Property Law.

 

Thursday, October 23, 2014

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed
So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook.

 

99 ways to boost pensions in California -- at public cost

99 ways to boost pensions in California -- at public cost
The California Public Employees' Retirement System made these higher pensions possible. The nation's biggest public pension fund voted in August to adopt a list of 99 bonuses, ensuring that newly hired California public workers would receive the same pension sweeteners as veteran employees.

 

America's middle class knows it faces a grim retirement

America's middle class knows it faces a grim retirement
Wells Fargo did as much as it could to soft-pedal the findings of its fifth-annual Middle Class Retirement Survey, released Wednesday, but the horrific numbers speak for themselves.

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Union demands driving railcar jobs out of California, Japanese firm says
Kinkisharyo International of Osaka said it is now looking at factory sites outside California, saying pressure from organized labor has made it difficult to do business in the state. Union officials and activists, however, argue they are simply trying to hold the company to environmental rules it should be following.

 

Monday, October 20, 2014

57,000 federal workers paid for long absences

57,000 federal workers paid for long absences
Over three years, federal workers cost taxpayers $775 million in salary while on extended paid leave of at least a month — waiting to be cleared or punished for misbehavior, records show.

 

Monday, October 13, 2014

Justices Will Decide Whether Workers Must Endure Unpaid Inconvenience

Some employees who worked for an Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Nevada had to wait nearly 25 minutes after each shift to be screened by security. They want to be compensated for that time.

 

‘I lost everything’: How airport workers struggle as the economy transforms

‘I lost everything’: How airport workers struggle as the economy transforms

The plight of workers at BWI airport is an object lesson in how our economy is transforming.

 

The economics of building a factory in Brooklyn — to be near the cool kids

The economics of building a factory in Brooklyn — to be near the cool kids

MakerBot could have built its factory in China, but opted for one of America's most expensive cities instead.

 

Job Center Gives a Voice, and Fair Wages, to an ‘Invisible’ Work Force

Job Center Gives a Voice, and Fair Wages, to an ‘Invisible’ Work Force
The Bay Parkway Community Job Center in Brooklyn, run by the Worker’s Justice Project, trains day laborers in workplace safety while setting fair wages with contractors and ensuring safe work conditions.

 

Calpers Isn’t Done With High-Fee Investment Gurus

Calpers Isn’t Done With High-Fee Investment Gurus
The pension system is getting out of hedge funds. But it is sticking with its favorite expensively managed asset class: private equity.

 

The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century

The Great Wage Slowdown of the 21st Century
The typical family makes less than the typical family did 15 years ago — which hadn’t been true since the Depression.

 

Living on the bare minimum

Living on the bare minimum
More than a third of private-sector workers in Los Angeles make less than $13.25 an hour — the new minimum wage proposed by Mayor Eric Garcetti last month. City Council members supporting the bill would like to further boost the floor to $15.25 an hour by 2019.

 

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