BossFeed Briefing for April 8, 2019. Last Tuesday was Equal Pay Day, marking how far into the year women must work in order to earn what men earned in the previous year. Last Thursday Donald Trump announced he was recommending Herman Cain, a former head of the National Restaurant Association, to serve on the Federal Reserve. Last Friday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain. Tomorrow is National Library Workers’ Day. And all this week our stripper safety & security bill will be awaiting a vote on the floor of the State Senate.
Three things to know this week:
Patagonia has said they will stop selling logo merchandise to companies in high finance, oil, mining, and other industries they believe to be incompatible with their mission. Co-branded logoed versions of the outdoor gear corporation’s vests have become a standard corporate uniform in tech and finance.
Americans borrowed $88 billion last year to pay for health care, and 65 million people say they didn’t seek treatment for a health issue because of the cost. Also last year, big Wall Street firms handed out $27.5 billion in bonuses to just 181,300 people.
A San Francisco startup has joined forces with mega-software company SAP to develop a headset intended for sale to employers that tracks employees’ brain activity in real time. The headset is intended to maximize productivity by measuring mental “performance metrics” like “engagement” and “interest” on a live 0 - 100 scale.
Two things to ask:
What if we’re not alone? The affordable housing crisis isn’t just a problem in Seattle, or Washington state, or the West Coast — it’s global. Home prices have risen 24% over the last five years across more than two dozen cities around the world.
What would happen if every workplace worked this way? The 180 employees of Molly Moon ice cream shops now have total pay transparency — everyone who works there has access to information about how much money everyone else makes. Transparency is believed to be a key way to help people identify and address gender, racial, and other pay inequities.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
The videogame industry takes in more money than Hollywood — but even though making games can be a job people dream about doing, the working conditions can be rough, as a recent New York Times op-ed details. “Crunching” is a common practice in the industry, where people are required to put in ultra-long hours in the weeks surrounding a game release. And it’s not just highly-paid engineers either — game testers and customer support staff are also expected to work in these intense bursts, with little money to show for it. Meanwhile CEO salaries in the tens of million dollars, which is why videogame workers have begun to come together in groups like Game Workers Unite to find another way forward where workers can pursue their creative passions, live their dream of working in the gaming industry — and get paid for it.
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!