Copyright
Monday, November 24, 2014
When An Employer Should Not Deny Medical Care
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Turmoil Over Immigration Status? California Has Lived It for Decades
LOS ANGELES — There may be no better place than California to measure the contradictions, crosswinds and confusion that come with trying to change immigration law.
For 30 years, California has been the epicenter of the churn of immigration — legal and not — in the nation. It was California where Pete Wilson, the Republican governor, championed in 1994 a voter initiative known as Proposition 187, which severely restricted services to immigrants here illegally. And it was California where just last year, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, held a celebratory, dignitary-filled signing of legislation permitting unauthorized workers to obtain driver’s licenses.One-third of the immigrants in the country illegally live in California, which has a 125-mile border with Mexico, much of it guarded by long stretches of border fence. They work on farms in the Central Valley, in manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles, and as housekeepers and gardeners in Silicon Valley, alongside a steady stream of young legal immigrants who hold low-paying, high-skilled jobs in Northern California’s critical tech industry.
Yhey come mostly from Mexico but also from Central America, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan. Commercial boulevards in the heart of Los Angeles are a riot of Korean-language signs, and in many neighborhoods in San Francisco the talk on the street is as likely to be in Spanish or Chinese as it is English.
And while many undocumented immigrants take pains not to...
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Saturday, November 22, 2014
Workers' rights under the OSH Act
- Ask OSHA to inspect their workplace;
- Use their rights under the law without retaliation and discrimination;
- Receive information and training about hazards, methods to prevent harm, and the OSHA standards that apply to their workplace. The training must be in a language you can understand;
- Get copies of test results done to find hazards in the workplace;
- Review records of work-related injuries and illnesses;
- Get copies of their medical records;
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Falling Wages at Factories Squeeze the Middle Class
For nearly 20 years, Darrell Eberhardt worked in an Ohio factory putting together wheelchairs, earning $18.50 an hour, enough to gain a toehold in the middle class and feel respected at work. He is still working with his hands, assembling seats for Chevrolet Cruze cars at the Camaco auto parts factory in Lorain, Ohio, but now he makes $10.50 an hour and is barely hanging on. “I’d like to earn more,” said Mr. Eberhardt, who is 49 and went back to school a few years ago to earn an associate’s degree. “But the chances of finding something like I used to have are slim to none.” Even as the White House and leaders on Capitol Hill and in Fortune 500 boardrooms all agree that expanding the country’s manufacturing base is a key to prosperity, evidence is growing that the pay of many blue-collar jobs is shrinking to the point where they can no longer support a middle-class life. A new study by the National Employment Law Project, to be released on Friday, reveals that many factory jobs nowadays pay far less than what workers in almost identical positions earned in the past. Perhaps even more significant, while the typical production job in the manufacturing sector paid more than the private sector average in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, that relationship flipped in 2007, and line work in factories now pays less than the typical private sector job. That gap has been widening — in 2013, production jobs paid an average of $19.29 an... |
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Where near-minimum-wage workers work, and how much they make
Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.pewresearch.org
As Fact Tank noted earlier this month, about 20.6 million people — 30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers 18 and older — are what we call “near-minimum-wage workers,” meaning they earn more than the current minimum wage (either the federal $7.25-an-hour minimum or a higher state minimum) but less than the $10.10 hourly rate that emerged over the past year as a consensus goal of many Democrats and labor groups. We first explored the demographics of this group by workers’ age, sex and race. But we also wondered what jobs they held and how much they earned, so we took another run through the public-use microdata from the 2013 Current Population Survey. As you might have guessed, the restaurant and food service industry is the single biggest employer of near-minimum workers. Last year, according to our analysis, that industry employed 3.75 million near-minimum workers, about 18% of the total. Many of those workers, presumably, are tipped, so their actual gross pay may be above $10.10 an hour. (Federal law, as well as wage laws in many states, allow tipped employees to be paid less as long as “tip credits” bring their pay up to at least the applicable minimum.) Restaurant/food service is by far the leading employer of near-minimum workers aged 30 and younger: about 2.5 million, or nearly a quarter of all near-minimum workers in that age bracket. The industry, in fact, is... |
Kmart To Employee: ‘If You Do Not Come To Work On Thanksgiving, You Will Automatically Be Fired’
Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from thinkprogress.org
CREDIT: John Konstantaras/AP Kmart will open its doors at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day this year and remain open for 42 hours, meaning that many employees will have to come to work to staff shifts. While the company says it tries to fill the slots with volunteers or seasonal hires, workers are reporting that the reality on the ground is very different. Jillian Fisher, who started a petition on Coworker.org asking Kmart to give her mother and other employees the flexibility to take the holiday off, surveyed 56 self-identified employees from more than 13 states. Of those, just three said they had the option to ask to take the holiday off. In a press release from the petition organizer, one employee said human resources has told them, “if you do not come to work on Thanksgiving, you will automatically be fired… I made the request to work a split shift on Thanksgiving and was denied.” Another said, “Our manager stated at a staff meeting: ‘Everyone must work Thanksgiving and Black Friday. No time off.’” At one location, an employee says signs have been posted in the break room saying workers can’t request time off on Thanksgiving or Black Friday and that everyone has to put in at least some time on both, while at another signs have been posted saying no one can request time off between November 15 and January 1. “I am a lead at a Kmart and it is mandatory for me to work on Thanksgiving,” another employee... |
Friday, November 21, 2014
Genetic Testing and the Need for a Federal Regulation
Today's post is shared from jurist.com/ The one dream that will never fade is falling in love, marrying the love of your life and starting a family. Now, imagine John and Jane Doe, a couple who fell in love in high school and got happily married after years of dating. The only thing missing to complete their fairytale romance was a family. After many unsuccessful attempts, the couple soon learned that they were infertile. Seeking help from the medical profession, they learned about the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to enhance their chances of becoming parents. Pursuing the ART method, John and Jane found a donor whose sperm or eggs they wanted to use. They were assured from the sperm or egg bank that they chose a donor that had undergone careful screening and had been tested for health problems as required by law. Based on these assurances, the couple conceived using the donated reproductive tissue (DRT) that they procured from the bank and successfully gave birth to twins. Shortly after birth, both twins were diagnosed with a life threatening genetic disorder. This unfortunate outcome is the sad reality that arises from inadequate federal regulation of DRT in ART fertility treatments. ART treatments entail surgically removing eggs from a woman's ovaries, combining them with sperm in the laboratory and returning them to the woman's body or implanting them in another woman's body. In the US alone, 20,000-30,000 babies a year are conceived (PDF) using... |
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