Showing posts sorted by date for query wal-mart. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Why so many injury claims from L.A. public safety workers?

Los Angeles' police and firefighters take paid injury leave at significantly higher rates than public safety employees elsewhere in California. Why? Is it more strenuous or stressful to work in the city of Los Angeles, compared with L.A. County or Long Beach? Does the city have an older workforce more prone to injury? Or is it just so easy to game the system in L.A. that filing an injury claim has become a routine matter in the police and fire departments?
A Times investigation on Sunday revealed that 1 in 5 Los Angeles police officers and firefighters took paid injury leave at least once last year, and that not only are the number of leaves going up, but they are getting longer too. While on leave for a work-related injury, a police officer or firefighter earns 100% of his or her salary — but is exempt from federal or state taxes for a year. So it is actually more lucrative not to work than it is to work.

L.A. pays millions as police and firefighter injury claims rise

Meanwhile, the fire department has had to spend more money on overtime to ensure that fire stations are fully staffed, and the LAPD, which cut paid overtime, has had fewer cops on the streets. Taxpayers spent $328 million over the last five years on salary, medical care and related expenses for employees on injury leave. Oh, and the state Legislature has repeatedly expanded the kinds of work-related "injuries" covered by the policy. They include Lyme Disease and HIV and stress.
Certainly, paid...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Working ‘Off the Clock’ is Not OK

Working ‘Off the Clock’ is Not OK.

Today's post was shared by Trucker Lawyers and comes from www.facebook.com

Pilot Travel Center employees in #‎Mississippi "were working through lunch, without pay" ... The employees ended up receiving "$141,096 in back wages and liquidated damages." This award made a difference in the lives of the employees and their loved ones, according to the article below. #‎workers
Here's the intro from the U.S. Department of Labor:
"Not paying workers for all of the hours they worked not only harms the workers, but also their families by depriving them of the wages they need to get by. Because of a Wage and Hour Division investigation, the employees at Pilot Travel Center received $141,096 in back wages and liquidated damages.
More information about workers’ rights and employers’ responsibilities also is available at www.dol.gov/whd."

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Friday, September 19, 2014

Subcommittee to Examines Legislation to Provide Greater EEOC Transparency and Accountability

On Wednesday, September 17 at 10:00 a.m., the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, chaired by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), held a legislative hearing on the EEOC Transparency and Accountability Act (H.R. 4959), the Litigation Oversight Act of 2014 (H.R 5422), and the Certainty in Enforcement Act of 2014 (H.R. 5423).

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. At a recent oversight hearing, witnesses shared growing concerns with various EEOC regulatory and enforcement actions. For example, “guidance” finalized in 2012 limits employers’ use of criminal background checks during the hiring process. The subcommittee also examined EEOC’s increasing reliance on systemic discrimination cases and the commission’s delegation of its litigation authority to the Office of General Counsel. In response to these concerns, a number of legislative proposals have been introduced:

H.R. 4959, introduced by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), would increase EEOC transparency by, among other provisions, requiring the commission to post on its website and in its annual report any case in which the commission was required to pay court sanctioned fees or costs.
H.R. 5422, introduced by Rep. Walberg, would require EEOC commissioners to approve by majority vote all EEOC-initiated litigation involving multiple plaintiffs or allegations of systemic discrimination.
H.R. 5423, also introduced by Rep. Walberg, would provide a safe harbor to employers complying with federal or state mandates, such as a law requiring criminal background checks.

See: TESTIMONY OF PROFESSOR MICHAEL FOREMAN, DIRECTOR, CIVIL RIGHTS APPELLATE CLINIC, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, DICKINSON SCHOOL OF LAW

"Chairman Walberg, Ranking Member Courtney and members of the Subcommittee, I thank you for the opportunity to express my views on the proposed legislation. Unfortunately, however well intended, these proposed changes to the federal employment discrimination statutes are unnecessary, premature and in practical effect, would thwart the effective law enforcement function of the EEOC."

To learn more about the hearing, visit http://edworkforce.house.gov/hearings.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Worker Compensation Stalls in Second Quarter

Today's post is shared from blogs.wsj.com.
Growth in worker compensation nearly stalled this spring as wages stagnated and health benefits fell.
Private employers in the U.S. spent an average of $30.11 per hour worked for total compensation in June, the Labor Department said in a report Wednesday. That was up just 0.4% from March, a sharp slowdown from its 1.2% gain in the first three months of the year. Total compensation rose by 1.4% in the final three months of 2013, the fastest rate of the recovery.
Growth of private-sector wages slowed to 0.3% between March and June, down from a 1% rate in the prior three months. Wages account for 70% of total compensation.
Expenditure on health benefits fell 0.4% between March and June after jumping 2.6% in the first three months of the year. Health benefits are the second largest element of employee compensation behind wages, accounting for 7.8% of total expenditure.
Economists are closely following measures of employee compensation for clues on labor market health and on the strength of price pressures throughout the economy. Stagnant wage growth during the economic recovery has signaled a high level of unemployment and tame inflation.
Employer costs for employee compensation is one of two gauges that capture both wages and benefits. Several narrower gauges focus on wages. The most closely followed of these is the Labor Department’s measure of average hourly earnings, part of the agency’s monthly Employment Situation report.
Similarly, economists and policy...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Monday, September 1, 2014

More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’

Today's post is shared from Steven Greenhouse at nytimes.com

Week after week, Guadalupe Rangel worked seven days straight, sometimes 11 hours a day, unloading dining room sets, trampolines, television stands and other imports from Asia that would soon be shipped to Walmart stores.
Even though he often clocked 70 hours a week at the Schneider warehouse here, he was never paid time-and-a-half overtime, he said. And now, having joined a lawsuit involving hundreds of warehouse workers, Mr. Rangel stands to receive more than $20,000 in back pay as part of a recent $21 million legal settlement with Schneider, a national trucking company.
“Sometimes I’d work 60, even 90 days in a row,” said Mr. Rangel, a soft-spoken immigrant from Mexico. “They never paid overtime.”
The lawsuit is part of a flood of recent cases — brought in California and across the nation — that accuse employers of violating minimum wage and overtime laws, erasing work hours and wrongfully taking employees’ tips. Worker advocates call these practices “wage theft,” insisting it has become far too prevalent.
Some federal and state officials agree. They assert that more companies are violating wage laws than ever before, pointing to the record number of enforcement actions they have pursued. They complain that more employers — perhaps motivated by fierce competition or a desire for higher profits — are flouting wage laws.
Many business groups counter that government officials have...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Labor Day: Wages and Salaries Still Lag as Corporate Profits Surge

Today's post is shared from the nytimes.com
In the months before Labor Day last year, job growth was so slow that economists said it would take until 2021 to replace the jobs that were lost or never created in the recession and its aftermath.
The pace has picked up since then; at the current rate, missing jobs will be recovered by 2018. Still, five years into an economic recovery that has been notable for resurging corporate profits, the number and quality of jobs are still lagging badly, as are wages and salaries.
In 2013, after-tax corporate profits as a share of the economy tied with their highest level on record (in 1965), while labor compensation as a share of the economy hit its lowest point since 1948. Wage growth since 1979 has not kept pace with productivity growth, resulting in falling or flat wages for most workers and big gains for corporate coffers, shareholders, executives and others at the top of the income ladder.
Worse, the recent upturn in growth, even if sustained, will not necessarily lead to markedly improved living standards for most workers.
That’s because the economy’s lopsidedness is not mainly the result of market forces, but of the lack of policies to ensure broader prosperity. The imbalance will not change without labor and economic reforms.
For instance, new research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, fell for nearly everyone. An exception was a small gain for the bottom 10...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Sunday, August 24, 2014

This is why wages have risen so slowly. (But the Fed can help!)

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

It’s no coincidence that there’s been an outpouring of research on wage trends of late, just in time for the annual meeting of the world’s central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyo. But one noted monetary expert who should but won’t be there is Elsa, the ice queen from “Frozen,” whose policy of “Let it Go” is critically important when it comes to allowing for non-inflationary wage growth (so perhaps “let ‘em grow” is a bit more precise).
This new spate of analysis, which I’ll describe in a moment, generates two important findings. First, considerable lingering labor market slack is still a drag on wage growth. Second, the linkages between wage growth and price inflation are not very tight at all. Both findings should lead those poised to snuff out wage growth — in the case of the Fed, by raising interest rates — to stand down.
A key challenge for the Fed in recent years has been figuring out just how tight or slack the job market is, a question that’s been harder than usual because the unemployment rate isn’t as revealing a signal as usual. The reasons for the weaker signal are weak labor force participation and unprecedented shares of long-term unemployment, both of which dampen the jobless rate’s traditional dominance as a measure of labor market tautness. Simply put, the job market...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Friday, August 22, 2014

How a Part-Time Pay Penalty Hits Working Mothers

Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com

Women get paid less than men in almost all jobs, but when women in low-wage jobs need to take time off work to care for children, they are at an even greater disadvantage.
If all employees got paid the same hourly amount (assuming they’re equally productive on the job), it would go a long way toward closing the gender pay gap, according to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist who has analyzed income data across occupations, including a new set of unpublished data on hourly workers that she prepared for the White House Summit on Working Families in June.
Instead, she has found, people in professions like law and finance get paid disproportionately more when they work extra-long hours. At the other end of the spectrum, people in low-wage jobs do not benefit much from working more, but get paid disproportionately less per hour when they work fewer than 40 hours a week. The penalty is similar for men and women — but ends up hurting women more, because they are far more likely to take breaks during their careers or need shorter or predictable hours to handle child care.

Working fewer hours in low-paying jobs, Ms. Goldin said, “can get even nastier, because of the problem that flexibility here is not just the number of hours but whether you even know which hours you’re going to be working.”
While the challenges are different at high-income and low-income jobs, the bottom line is the same: Employees, particularly parents, need some measure of...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Female Goldman Sachs employees seek class action alleging 'boys club'

Today's post is shared from fortune.com

The ongoing gender discrimination lawsuit claims female Goldman employees had their intelligence mocked and were referred to as “bimbos.”

An ongoing gender discrimination lawsuit against Goldman Sachs filed four years ago by three former female employees now has the support of several additional former employees who allege the financial giant has a “boy’s club” atmosphere where women are mocked and excluded by their male colleagues.

The group is seeking class action status from a federal judge in Manhattan in a suit that looks to sue Goldman GS -1.71% on behalf of current and former employees at the bank whose tenures stretch as far back as July 2002. Several former employees filed documents on Tuesday supporting class certification of the lawsuit, which accuses Goldman of hosting an environment that is “hostile to women.”

In a statement sent to multiple news outlets, a Goldman spokesman said the filings Tuesday were not a surprise and that they “lack merit.”

One former vice president in the bank’s securities division, Denise Shelley, wrote in her letter to the court that female employees at Goldman were often hired based on their attractiveness and then asked to pitch sales to clients only to later have their intelligence mocked by male colleagues. Shelley says such women were referred to as “bimbos” by male colleagues, and she remembers one time when a new...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Related articles

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Recycling Firm Accused of Wage Violations, Threats Against Workers Agrees to Settlement

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.fairwarning.org

A Los Angeles recycling business accused of violating federal minimum wage and overtime rules, and pressuring workers to lie to government investigators, has agreed to pay more than $74,000 in back wages and damages to 13 employees in a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor.

In a consent agreement filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles, Alkanan, Inc., and an owner of the firm, Karim Ameri, neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing. Ameri declined to comment on the settlement.

As reported by FairWarning, federal authorities in December obtained a restraining order to bar the firm from pressuring workers to mislead investigators, or threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they coooperated with the probe. According to a court document, Ameri “threatened to break an employee’s arm”, though an accountant for the business later told labor officials that Ameri got tripped up by language barriers and didn’t mean it as a threat of violence. Under the names Recycling Innovations and Valley Recycling, Alkanan operates seven bottle-and-can redemption centers in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles.

“We are pleased to have reached a resolution in this case that will provide employees with the wages they worked hard to earn,” said Ruben Rosalez, regional administrator for the Wage and Hour Division’s western region, in a prepared statement. “We will use all available tools, including litigation,…to...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Monday, May 26, 2014

McDonald’s Indigestible Excuse for Low Pay

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com

When Henry Ford realized it was good business to pay employees enough to buy the products they built, it was a breakthrough, not only because the idea challenged the reflex to pay as little as possible, but because the product was a car. He was talking real bucks.
In response to escalating protests by McDonald’s employees calling for higher wages and the right to form a union without retaliation, McDonald’s chief executive, Don Thompson, defended the company at the annual meeting on Thursday, saying that McDonald’s pays a competitive wage.
But what constitutes “competitive” in the fast-food industry is precisely the problem. Hourly pay averages about $9. The low pay is possible in party because employers rely on taxpayers to subsidize it through public assistance and on non-unionized workforces to swallow it. The competitive fast food wage, in short, is not enough to live on.
Mr. Thompson presumably knows that. But he is paid not to understand what the protestors are demanding because his own pay is based on profits that are derived in part by keeping worker pay low.
Of course, if the political economy were functioning as it is supposed to – with Congress imposing reasonable boundaries on businesses, markets and the economy – workers wouldn’t have to get their bosses to understand what it’s like to live on $9 an hour, because Congress would make sure that no one had to.
The McDonald’s workers are asking for $15 an...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Ship Breaking - Unsafe Working Conditions on the Beaches of Bangladesh

Today's post comes from guest author Kit Case, from Causey Law Firm.

Today's post was shared by Kit Case and comes from www.gCaptain.com.

Cargo Ships on Beaches…Really?

By Jacob Sterling On August 30, 2013

A perspective on ship recycling and how to end beaching
Like most other things, ships don’t last forever. After 25-30 years they are no longer commercially usable and therefore taken out of service to be dismantled. The materials are recycled to a lesser or greater extent – since a large cargo vessel may consist of 20-40,000 tons of steel, they clearly have a market value as steel scrap.
The vast majority of ships are taken to India, Pakistan or Bangladesh to be scrapped on the beach. There is something quite wrong with that. People in flip flops on beaches are OK. But people on beaches wearing flip flops and no safety gear while taking apart massive cargo ships with hand tools is simply wrong.
Unsurprisingly, ship breaking is one of the most dangerous industries. According to the EU Commission, it is six times more likely to die at work in the Indian shipbreaking industry than in the Indian mining industry, and according to a recent report from Sustainalyitics, 1,000 people died in the Bangladesh ship breaking industry over a 10 year period.
[Read the rest of the article...]
Photo: Shipbreaking at Alang. Photo: IMO, via www.gCaptain.com

Found on

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Subway leads fast food industry in underpaying workers

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from money.cnn.com

McDonald's gets a lot of bad press for its low pay. But there's an even bigger offender when it comes to fast food companies underpaying their employees: Subway.

Individual Subway franchisees have been found in violation of pay and hour rules in more than 1,100 investigations spanning from 2000 to 2013, according to a CNNMoney analysis of data collected by the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division.

Each investigation can lead to multiple violations and fines. Combined, these cases found about 17,000 Fair Labor Standards Act violations and resulted in franchisees having to reimburse Subway workers more than $3.8 million over the years.

It's a significant sum considering many Subway "sandwich artists" earn at or just above the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The next most frequent wage violators in the industry are McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts stores.

The numbers only reflect unlawful acts that have been caught. To be fair, Subway has more than 26,000 locations throughout the country -- the most of any fast food chain -- so it might not be surprising that it also tops the list of offenders.

That said, Subway's problems were considered serious enough to prompt the Department of Labor (DOL) to partner with the company's headquarters to boost compliance efforts last year.

"It's no coincidence that we approached Subway because we saw a significant number of violations," a Department of Labor spokesperson said.

The franchise model impact

In...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Saturday, May 3, 2014

States fear losing power to regulate chemicals

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from bigstory.ap.org

WASHINGTON (AP) — Legislation to create national standards for regulating chemicals has generated opposition from some states, who fear the bill would curtail their authority to take action against chemicals they deem harmful.
The GOP-authored draft legislation, which aims to reform regulation of chemicals, would pre-empt some state and local regulations.
At a House hearing Tuesday, Massachusetts state Sen. Michael Moore, a Democrat, said the legislation would impose a "one-size-fits-all approach to toxic chemicals regulation."
"To strip states' residents of protections enacted by their elected officials would be a serious breach of state sovereignty and would leave everyone more susceptible to increased harm from toxic chemicals," said Moore, speaking on behalf of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Earlier this month, attorneys general from 13 states, led by New York's Eric T. Schneiderman, made a similar argument in a letter to leaders of the House Energy and Commerce environment and economy subcommittee, which held the hearing.
Subcommittee chairman John Shimkus, R-Ill., who wrote the bill, argued it's necessary to create a standard where chemicals are regulated under one set of rules, rather than a "patchwork" of different state regulations. A committee fact sheet calls the measure "a commerce bill, not just a chemical safety bill. The U.S. economy is heavily reliant on chemicals, and a strong regulatory system is needed...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Black Friday dawns and so does violence in the workplace

Violence in the workplace, despite OSHA warnings, occurred as "Black Friday" store sales began. Today's post is shared from the washingtonpost.com

Shoppers look at televisions at a Best Buy store late in the evening on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, Nov. 28, 2013, in Dunwoody, Ga. Instead of waiting for Black Friday, which is typically the year's biggest shopping day, more than a dozen major retailers opened on Thanksgiving this year. (AP Photo/David Tulis)

A Chicago-area police officer and a suspect he shot in a shoplifting incident outside a Kohl's department store were in the hospital on Friday — a worst-case example of how Black Friday opened with madness, mayhem and violence.
The incident began shortly past 10 p.m. on Thursday, when security officers with one Kohl's department store in Romeoville, outside Chicago, called police to report two men who were suspected of shoplifting. Police arrived on scene and tried to apprehend the men in the parking lot, Fox News reported. But the suspects ran to their car and tried to drive off — and one officer followed on foot, grabbing hold of the vehicle.

Fox News reported that the officer and the driver were recovering in a nearby hospital on Friday. Meanwhile, both of those suspected shoplifters — as well as a third suspect who was apprehended in the store — were arrested.The driver continued to accelerate, dragging the officer, Fox News reported. Police then fired into the vehicle’s...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

How foodies can become champions for workers' rights

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from america.aljazeera.com

The FCWA estimates that almost 8 million workers throughout the food system would benefit from a national minimum wage boost, and that 29 million workers over all industries would get a raise. In a Thanksgiving-themed "menu" of ways to help improve the lives of food workers, the FCWA asks foodies to sign its petition to raise the wage to $10.10, to spread the word via social media, and to write their members of Congress to urge passage of the raise.
Food workers are also mobilizing to win on three more fronts: they want nationally guaranteed paid sick days, so that they are not forced to show up to work while sick, thus contributing to the spread of infectious disease. They are demanding the right to safe workplaces: Many agricultural employers could easily provide better protections from harmful pesticides for harvest workers. Finally, the workers are demanding their right to a voice on the job, protesting against the abuse and intimidation that frequently occur in the restaurant industry when workers try to unionize.
To push for these rights, the FCWA's member groups are reaching out to consumers with messages about specific bad-actor employers in each of these areas. These employers include Wal-Mart, which has allegedly stolen wages from workers and routinely quashed unionization drives at its stores; and the Darden restaurant group, which owns Red Lobster, Olive Garden and other family-style chains. Workers at Darden establishments are still denied any paid...

[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Found on

Copyright

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Why so many injury claims from L.A. public safety workers?

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Working ‘Off the Clock’ is Not OK

Friday, September 19, 2014

Subcommittee to Examines Legislation to Provide Greater EEOC Transparency and Accountability

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Worker Compensation Stalls in Second Quarter

Monday, September 1, 2014

More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’

Labor Day: Wages and Salaries Still Lag as Corporate Profits Surge

Sunday, August 24, 2014

This is why wages have risen so slowly. (But the Fed can help!)

Friday, August 22, 2014

How a Part-Time Pay Penalty Hits Working Mothers

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Female Goldman Sachs employees seek class action alleging 'boys club'

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Recycling Firm Accused of Wage Violations, Threats Against Workers Agrees to Settlement

Monday, May 26, 2014

McDonald’s Indigestible Excuse for Low Pay

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Ship Breaking - Unsafe Working Conditions on the Beaches of Bangladesh

Cargo Ships on Beaches…Really?

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Subway leads fast food industry in underpaying workers

Saturday, May 3, 2014

States fear losing power to regulate chemicals

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Black Friday dawns and so does violence in the workplace

How foodies can become champions for workers' rights

Get new posts by email: