BossFeed Briefing for July 23, 2018. Last Monday, the owner of pet monkey who bit a Home Depot worker in Florida was arrested for failing to control the animal. Last Wednesday, we hosted a speak-out for workers in the gig economy, and workers’ voices where heard by KNKX, the Tacoma News Tribune, and other outlets. Last Thursday, a Seattle City Council committee voted to advance the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Today is the final vote. And this Wednesday is the 120th anniversary of the US invasion of Puerto Rico.
Three things to know this week:
Nannies and house cleaners are set to make history today when Seattle City Council votes on a groundbreaking Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. It will end the exclusion of nannies & house cleaners from basic workers rights laws and establish a Domestic Workers Standards Board where workers and employers can come together to establish industry-wide standards on wages, benefits, training, and other issues.
Amazon has received $130 million in public funds in just the past few months as “incentives” for building new distribution centers. Last week, striking Amazon warehouse workers in Spain were charged by police in riot gear after sharply reducing the throughput of a distribution center there.
Four former Delta employees have filed a lawsuit charging they were repeatedly subject to sexual harassment, disciplined for speaking too much Korean, and then fired. They worked out of Sea-Tac Airport, from which Delta files daily to South Korea.
Two things to ask:
Will they stop saying the sky is going to fall? June was the 19th consecutive month in Washington State with unemployment below 5%. June was also the 19th month since Washington voters cast their ballots to raise the statewide minimum wage.
How does this keep happening? The head of Uber’s HR department resigned after reports that she had used discriminatory language, made derogatory comments about other executives, and systematically dismissed claims of racial discrimination raised by employees. She had been brought into the job to help the company address widespread issues of discrimination and harassment.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Newly implemented federal regulations require publicly-traded corporations to disclose the ratio of what their CEOs are paid as compared to their median employee, and a survey of the results for Northwest area CEOs shows huge disparities. Coming in number one on the list is the CEO of Expedia, whose $31 million paycheck in 2017 was 431 times what the company’s median employee was paid; the CEO of temporary staffing agency TrueBlue also ranked high, with a pay rate 248 times that of his company’s average employee. While there are some issues around how the figures are calculated — for example, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s highest-ever-recorded wealth isn’t included in the figures because they only track annual compensation rather than ownership — the scale of the numbers is still astonishing. And it’s getting worse: CEO pay has increased 80% this decade — five times faster than average worker pay has increased.
Read this far?
Consider yourself briefed, boss.
Let us know what you think about this week's look at the world of work, wages, and inequality!