BossFeed Briefing for December 13, 2021. Last Wednesday, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 4.2 million Americans quit their jobs in October. Last Thursday, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant appeared to fend off the campaign to remove her from office, surging to a narrow lead as late ballots were counted in the special recall election. Last Friday, at least 8 workers at a Kentucky candle factory and 6 workers at an Illinois Amazon warehouse died as tornadoes swept the South and Midwest. Tomorrow marks one week until the days start getting longer again. Wednesday is the 230th anniversary of the Bill of Rights becoming law.
Three things to know this week:
Michelle, a GoPuff driver in California, shared how she organized a successful strike at her warehouse. Hundreds of workers at dozens of GoPuff warehouses around the country went on strike last month to demand better pay, flexible shifts, and deactivation protections.
Baristas in Buffalo, New York voted to form the first Starbucks workers’ union anywhere in the country. Efforts by Starbucks to campaign against the union included finally sending an exterminator to deal with a beehive inside a store where bees had been stinging workers for months.
Reddit users clogged Kellogg’s online job application portal with fake applications after the company announced it would permanently replace striking workers. The effort succeeded in crashing the company’s website.
Two things to ask:
So he’s just a neutral observer? U.S. Representative Dan Newhouse (R - Yakima Valley) claimed that new overtime protections for WA farmworkers, which take effect in January, are “just going to make farmers’ jobs a lot harder”. In addition to his job in Congress, Newhouse owns a 600-acre farm in the Yakima area.
How is that even legal? Billionaire oil mogul Phyllis Taylor paid nothing in federal income tax for more than a decade. In 2008, Taylor’s company was forced to pay $666 million to clean up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — and under the current tax code, Taylor was able to write off the environmental cleanup as a “business expense”, resulting in a $30 million tax refund.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Wrenching new reporting from Will James of KNKX follows a group of Tacoma residents in the years after they were evicted from their building, highlighting the dangerous and often deadly consequences of evictions for those already living on the brink of homelessness. KNKX traced the paths of 12 former tenants of the Merkle Hotel in downtown Tacoma, who were displaced after a developer purchased the low-rent building in 2018: in the three years since eviction, half of former tenants have spent time unsheltered, and five people have died. For one woman, the sudden housing insecurity meant that she started missing rides to her dialysis appointments, which ultimately led to her death from kidney failure. And it's no wonder residents struggled to find new housing: the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood where the building was located had an average rent of $1,600/month in 2018, which was more than double the monthly income of most Merkle Hotel tenants.
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!