BossFeed Briefing for November 1, 2021. Last Wednesday, Costco announced it will raise its minimum wage to $17/hour, and Starbucks said it already raised starting pay to $15/hour nationwide. Last Thursday, Amazon announced that it didn’t make as much money as it wanted to in the third quarter. Yesterday, the WA state eviction moratorium bridge expired. Today and tomorrow, many are celebrating Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Tomorrow is WA’s general election — ballots must be put in a dropbox by 8pm or postmarked by the end of the day.
Three things to know this week:
A federal jury ruled that immigrants working while detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma have the right to make the state minimum wage. GEO Group, the for-profit company that in 2018 made $18.6 million in profits while operating the immigrant detention facility, has been paying detainees just $1/day for their work.
The Biden Administration’s Build Back Better package includes a proposal to raise federal fines for labor law violations. In cases where child labor violations lead to death at work, the proposal would raise fines from $50,000 to $601,150.
Thousands of people who submitted rental assistance applications in South King County are still waiting to hear back from the county and receive funds. The WA state eviction moratorium bridge expired yesterday.
Two things to ask:
How much do you wanna bet? According to this piece from Vice News, boat life and van life are “the future of work.” People able to monetize that lifestyle through lucrative Instagram product partnerships say that more and more people are ditching offices to live off the grid.
Let’s try it here in WA? A guaranteed income pilot program in Mississippi gave 100 Black single mothers $1,000 per month for a year. One participant wrote that, “aside from being able to survive...it allowed me to—even at a very hard time—have moments of joy.”
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Many US companies—especially those paying low wages—force workers to bring complaints about labor law violations to arbitration instead of letting those workers make their case before a judge and jury. There’s a reason companies love the closed-door forced arbitration process: employees only won 1.6% percent of these arbitration cases last year, according to reporting by The Washington Post. And in the rare cases where an employee actually wins, median payouts are just $36,500, compared with $86,000 in state courts and $176,000 in federal court. That’s evidence enough for the top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the country's largest business lobby—to conclude that arbitration is “a fair, effective, and less expensive means of resolving disputes.”
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!