onfocus

"The likelihood that Congress will impose a deal along the lines of the presidential panel’s recommendations, or the tentative agreements, means that management has little incentive to agree to union demands."

Pretty wild that congress can just force a labor contract for rail workers. Knowing that congress will side with management means negotiating was never meaningful.

"Not surprisingly, then, after Goldman Sachs demanded employees return full-time to the office, the company announced it would raise its starting pay for first-year analysts by nearly 30%. In this new era, if you want employees in the office full time, you have to pay for it."

This is a positive development in work life especially with covid variant uncertainty. Being more distributed can also make an organization more resilient.

"Based on her research on how many long COVID patients stop working or scale back their hours, Bach estimated that about 1.1 million workers have dropped out of full-time work due to long COVID at any given time, while about 2.1 million may have cut their hours due to their symptoms. All together, that equates to about 1.6 million full-time workers who are missing from the economy, according to Bach. "

Astonishing numbers.

"The main reason for the big increase in total wage and salary income is that 5,675,000 Americans who were unemployed when this year began had found new jobs by November. With support from the rounds of pandemic stimulus enacted in December 2000 and January 2021, the jobless rate fell from 6.3 percent last January to 4.2 percent in November, or by one-third over 11 months. Following the Great Recession, it took six years for the jobless rate to fall by one-third."

Democrats can't get a message out. Even if all mass media outlets are owned by Republicans (they are) there should be a way to interrupt the media cycle with this kind of news. Instead we just hear about how terrible the economy is over and over.

"Wirecutter continues to bring in record revenue for the Times, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash. Yet our members have seen next to no financial benefit from their vital contributions to this success. Times management has offered paltry guaranteed wage increases of only 0.5%, despite soaring inflation and cash flows."

I'm a big fan of Wirecutter and I'm sad that I won't be able to use the site this holiday season. It sounds like the people who produce it are not being fairly compensated for a stellar product.

"Under the contract, which would apply to all employees systemwide, workers receive wage increases that are 25 cents per hour higher than Oregon or Washington’s minimum wage requirement, until the starting wage is $15. Burgerville began implementing this policy two years ago and now offers $14.25 per hour as a minimum wage. The contract also calls for tipping to be allowed in restaurants, which results in an average increase of over $2 per hour for each employee. Burgerville instituted this policy in 2019, as well."

Happy to see labor negotiations moving things in a positive direction. Another reason to support Burgerville!

"Our CEO, from 2020 to 2021, has taken a twenty percent increase in his compensation, as well as the top executives, they've been taking increases. So this contract that expired on October 4th, we are currently on a two tier wage system. Thirty percent of employees are on a lower tier making eleven, twelve dollars an hour less, higher insurance premium, less vacation, lower vacation pay. So we're all about the equalization of wages, we want to bring those thirty percent up to the higher tier level of workers. The company's proposal was to eliminate that thirty percent cap and eventually get everybody on that lower tier while the company is making record profits."

Asking for a fair share of higher profits seems reasonable.

"Workers expect more in part because the company has been doing so well, boosted by high demand for farm equipment. The company reported a record $1.79 billion in profits for the second quarter of 2021, topping the record set the previous quarter with $1.22 billion."

Seems reasonable.

"They also began raising concerns about safety in Amazon’s warehouses at the start of the pandemic. Amazon fired Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham last April, not long after their group had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace conditions."

This is powerful. When employees speak to each other it can lead to realizing that they have common interests--even when they work in different parts of the organization that don't normally interact. Firing people advocating for safety during a pandemic is a bad look.

"The employees were scared and frustrated, and some came to the realization that the platform they had helped build and operate had contributed to the wave of fear, disinformation, and chaos that flooded Congress."

Facebook had to stop their employees from discussing the coup attempt today.

"“These were very clear examples that didn't just upset me, they upset Facebook’s employees, they upset the entire civil rights community, they upset Facebook’s advertisers. If you still refuse to listen to all those voices, then you're proving that your decision-making is being guided by some other voice,” she said."

They definitely aren’t guided by their own policies. Facebook just ignores or rewrites them to suit the administration.

"We ran these surveys and asked people what they want to do. Twenty percent of our existing employees said that they were extremely or very interested in working remotely full time. And another 20 percent on top of that said that they were somewhat interested. So I think what’s basically going to happen is that, because it’s going to take a while to get everyone back into the office, you have like 40 percent of employees already who were fairly willing to work remotely."

I always thought it was strange that these big silicon valley companies who make online tools were against remote work. Circumstances are forcing their adjustment but this could be lasting.