Minimum Wage & Inequality

[LFC]

Way to go, LinkedIn.

That glass ceiling is looking mighty sturdy over at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn finally settled a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor over allegations that it underpaid 686 women workers at its California offices from 2015 to 2017. That $1.8 million is equivalent to back wages for the employees plus interest over time, the DOL said in a release.

Of course, as per the conciliation agreement, the settlement maintains LinkedIn is not admitting to any wrongdoing. LinkedIn has agreed to analyze worker pay at its Cali offices and correct any pay discrepancies, as well institute a new training program for all managers involved in employee pay. Around $1.75 million is going to the affected employee’s back pay, while $50,000 is going to be paid in interest.

The DOL said that between those two years, review of LinkedIn’s pay records showed the company was regularly paying female workers less than male workers in the engineering and marketing sectors at its San Francisco office and headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

[AnBr]

Not just wages, but also working conditions.

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire

Amazon is facing a looming crisis: It could run out of people to hire in its US warehouses by 2024, according to leaked Amazon internal research from mid-2021 that Recode reviewed. If that happens, the online retailer’s service quality and growth plans could be at risk, and its e-commerce dominance along with it.

Raising wages and increasing warehouse automation are two of the six “levers” Amazon could pull to delay this labor crisis by a few years, but only a series of sweeping changes to how the company does business and manages its employees will significantly alter the timeline, Amazon staff predicted.

“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, which hasn’t previously been reported, says.

The report warned that Amazon’s labor crisis was especially imminent in a few locales, with internal models showing that the company was expected to exhaust its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of 2021, and in the Inland Empire region of California, roughly 60 miles east of Los Angeles, by the end of 2022. Amazon’s internal report calculated the available pool of workers based on characteristics like income levels and a household’s proximity to current or planned Amazon facilities; the pool does not include the entire US adult population.

[LFC]

Sean Hannity wants America to have a virtual slave class. Why am I not shocked?

Sean Hannity doesn’t think you’re spending enough of your life at work. In a recent discussion on his talk radio show, he suggested that Americans who are struggling financially just need to work more. A lot more. Like, practically every waking hour of their lives.

That’s insane. Americans already have to spend far more of their time at work than their counterparts in economically comparable countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation—and one of the only nations of any kind—whose citizens aren’t legally guaranteed any days of paid vacation.

Most Americans work in non-unionized jobs where they can be fired with no recourse. And in the U.S.—as opposed to comparable nations which have nationalized health insurance systems—losing your job means that you and your dependents lose health insurance.

All of that is a recipe for a lot of people staying in jobs they hate, day after day and month after month, without a single lousy week of paid time off. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to have one job with well-defined hours, rather than juggling two- or three-gig economy hustles.

Unsurprisingly, Americans are far more likely than citizens of other developed nations to report feelings of “high stress.” We’re all but working ourselves to death already. So why does Sean Hannity, who fancies himself a populist, think we need to work even more?

“It’s What I Do”

“Maybe instead of working a 40-hour week,” Hannity suggested, “join the rest of us—work 70, 80, 90 hours. And I know people don’t like to hear that advice but it’s what I do.”

I double-checked that assertion, to see just how many hours his talk radio show (The Sean Hannity Show) and his Fox News show (Hannity) actually run every week. The radio show goes for three hours in the late afternoon and the TV show airs for a whole hour in the evening. Oh, and both of these shows only run Monday through Thursday.

So that’s sixteen hours a week on air. Quite a bit of The Sean Hannity Show is spent taking calls rather than doing pre-prepared material, but that doesn’t mean both shows don’t involve quite a bit of prep time every week.

I expect that the overwhelming majority of the pre-production is done by his staff, but let’s pretend for the sake of argument that Hannity personally is doing a full hour of prep work for every hour that he’s on-air. Even that would only add up to a four-day week, with a total of 32 hours of work. That’s even better than the 35-hour week workers enjoy in France.

I doubt Hannity has done an honest day's work in his life. Certainly not in decades.

[Bact PhD]

Aug 8, 2022 21:02:50 GMT LFC said:

Sean Hannity wants America to have a virtual slave class. Why am I not shocked?

Sean Hannity doesn’t think you’re spending enough of your life at work. In a recent discussion on his talk radio show, he suggested that Americans who are struggling financially just need to work more. A lot more. Like, practically every waking hour of their lives.

That’s insane. Americans already have to spend far more of their time at work than their counterparts in economically comparable countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation—and one of the only nations of any kind—whose citizens aren’t legally guaranteed any days of paid vacation.

Most Americans work in non-unionized jobs where they can be fired with no recourse. And in the U.S.—as opposed to comparable nations which have nationalized health insurance systems—losing your job means that you and your dependents lose health insurance.

All of that is a recipe for a lot of people staying in jobs they hate, day after day and month after month, without a single lousy week of paid time off. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to have one job with well-defined hours, rather than juggling two- or three-gig economy hustles.

Unsurprisingly, Americans are far more likely than citizens of other developed nations to report feelings of “high stress.” We’re all but working ourselves to death already. So why does Sean Hannity, who fancies himself a populist, think we need to work even more?

“It’s What I Do”

“Maybe instead of working a 40-hour week,” Hannity suggested, “join the rest of us—work 70, 80, 90 hours. And I know people don’t like to hear that advice but it’s what I do.”

I double-checked that assertion, to see just how many hours his talk radio show (The Sean Hannity Show) and his Fox News show (Hannity) actually run every week. The radio show goes for three hours in the late afternoon and the TV show airs for a whole hour in the evening. Oh, and both of these shows only run Monday through Thursday.

So that’s sixteen hours a week on air. Quite a bit of The Sean Hannity Show is spent taking calls rather than doing pre-prepared material, but that doesn’t mean both shows don’t involve quite a bit of prep time every week.

I expect that the overwhelming majority of the pre-production is done by his staff, but let’s pretend for the sake of argument that Hannity personally is doing a full hour of prep work for every hour that he’s on-air. Even that would only add up to a four-day week, with a total of 32 hours of work. That’s even better than the 35-hour week workers enjoy in France.

I doubt Hannity has done an honest day's work in his life. Certainly not in decades.

I’ll *snort* at Hannity’s claim here. TBH, the author might be understating the prep a bit; however, even at a 2:1 prep:airtime ratio, that would be 32 hours prep plus sixteen on-air, making for a 48-hour week (nowhere near 70!!), well within (and sometimes below) the range that many professionals are expected to put in weekly [1]…for far less than Hannity makes, I’m sure.

Again, *snort*!

[1]FTR, in ChemPhD’s last hitch before he retired, SOP was somewhere in the 55-60 on-site (not counting reading at home) per week.

[LFC]

Corporations have figured out a new brand of wage theft.

When a Washington state beauty salon charged Simran Bal $1,900 for training after she quit, she was shocked.

Not only was Bal a licensed esthetician with no need for instruction, she argued that the trainings were specific to the shop and low quality.

Bal's story mirrors that of dozens of people and advocates in healthcare, trucking, retail and other industries who complained recently to U.S. regulators that some companies charge employees who quit large sums of money for training.

Nearly 10% of American workers surveyed in 2020 were covered by a training repayment agreement, said the Cornell Survey Research Institute.

The practice, which critics call Training Repayment Agreement Provisions, or TRAPs, is drawing scrutiny from U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

I understand if they pay for real training that is highly marketable and an employee leaves shortly (no more than a year) later but internal training that doesn't mean shit to them? That's just a way to pick an employee's pocket when they move to another job.

[AnBr]

[LFC]

The reality of the minimum wage. Roughly estimating on the graph, it looks like it's at or damn near its lowest point in about 75 years.