BossFeed Briefing for November 15, 2021. Last Monday, the WA Immigrant Solidarity Network called on the Biden Administration and Congress to include a path to citizenship in the final Build Back Better bill. Last Thursday, billionaire Leon Cooperman said that he doesn’t think people making $400,000/year should be considered rich. Last Friday, the federal Dept. of Labor announced that a record 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September. Tomorrow is National Fast Food Day, a good day to remind yourself that the WA minimum wage jumps to $14.49 in 2022. This Saturday is Trans Day of Remembrance, which honors people killed by acts of anti-trans violence.
Three things to know this week:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports average hourly wages dropped 1.2% from October 2020 to October 2021, after adjusting for inflation. But workers might still have more money overall, because that figure doesn’t account for stimulus checks and other pandemic aid.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s department uses force on Black residents five times more frequently than it does on white residents. Black people make up 7% of the population in the sheriff’s department service area, but experienced 23% of all use-of-force incidents.
Under a new law in Portugal, employers are prohibited from contacting remote staff outside of work hours. The law also gives parents with young children the right to work from home without first seeking approval from their boss.
Two things to ask:
Has there been a time warp? Delivery drivers for Point Pickup— a delivery app that contracts with Walmart —are seeing dramatically lower pay after the company started lumping together customer tips and base pay. Back in 2019, Instacart, DoorDash, and Amazon Flex workers and customers revolted online over a similar tip theft policy, forcing the entire industry to shift to putting tips on top.
He couldn’t think of literally any other analogy? Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz spoke to workers in Buffalo, New York ahead of a key unionization vote. In his anti-union speech, Schultz referenced the way people in German concentration camps shared blankets with fellow prisoners during the Holocaust, noting that “what we have tried to do at Starbucks is share our blanket.”
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
In a patent application, Moderna is claiming that its employees were the sole inventors of coronavirus vaccine technology, despite the fact that three government scientists at the National Institutes of Health co-invented it. The federal government says its scientists directly helped develop the mRNA technology that’s been key to the vaccine’s success, and points out that Moderna received $1 billion in public funding to create the vaccine. The fight over who deserves credit has major stakes: an exclusive patent would give Moderna total control over development, manufacturing, and pricing of the vaccine, all of which would ensure massive profits for the company and insulate it from growing pressure to more equitably distribute the vaccine in poorer nations. No company should have a monopoly over life saving medicine during a global public health emergency — especially not when that medicine was financed and developed by the public.
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!