BossFeed Briefing for March 29, 2021. Last Monday, Instacart worker Lynn Murray was among the 10 people killed in a mass shooting at a grocery store in Boulder. Last Tuesday marked one year since Governor Inslee issued the first stay-at-home-order in WA state. Also last Tuesday, a container ship captain had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day while navigating the Suez Canal. Tomorrow, the WA Senate Ways and Means Committee holds a hearing on the Worker Protection Act (HB 1076), which would allow whistleblower enforcement of workers’ rights laws — click here to sign in "PRO" and show legislators your support for the bill. This Thursday is April Fool's Day, but if you hear that gig workers are paid as little as $2/delivery, that is alas not a joke.
Three things to know this week:
A growing list of workers’ rights, immigrant rights, and community organizations have signed on in support of our campaign to make the gig economy Pay Up. Workers on apps like DoorDash, Instacart, and TaskRabbit are calling for new laws that guarantee a minimum pay floor with tips on top, protect flexibility, and ensure transparency—and you can click here to add your name in support.
Amazon asked on Twitter last week if people really believed the whole “peeing in bottles thing”. In response, numerous delivery workers clarified that yes, they are sometimes left with no choice but to pee into bottles during shifts to keep up with the rapid pace and high volume of deliveries.
The top 1% of Americans go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes on an average 21% of their income, using “sophisticated strategies” like lying to the IRS about their income. Taxes aren’t generally considered an object of strategy for poor people.
Two things to ask:
Did they somehow need more words? A recent 4000 word essay in The New Yorker about reimagining the gig economy pretty much skipped over what gig workers are actually calling for: higher pay, meaningful flexibility, and real transparency. While the piece discussed various British professors, swallowed the use of the word "POEM" as an acronym, referenced London's Dickens-era water supply system, and "imagined" a worker in East LA, it featured a grand total of zero actual workers discussing their experiences and needs.
So those didn’t come from heaven, then? A man in Georgia demanded an overdue final paycheck from his former boss—and he got it, albeit in the form of 91,515 oiled-up pennies dumped on his driveway. The man says he quit his auto shop job last November because of a toxic work environment.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
The murder of Asian massage workers in Atlanta this month has sparked a national conversation about anti-Asian violence, but as Elena Shih writes in the New York Times, that conversation ought to include the longstanding violence experienced by migrant massage workers in the form of overpolicing, surveillance, and the criminalization of sex work. Many Asian massage workers in the US are not sex workers or victims of sex trafficking, even though police and civilian vigilante groups profile them as such. Regardless, all massage parlor workers are endangered by the ongoing criminalization of the industry, which can mean violent police raids and arrests, biased enforcement of harsh anti-prostitution laws, and increased policing of low-income migrant Asian neighborhoods. To truly ensure massage worker safety, Shih urges us to follow the lead of grassroots groups like Red Canary Song, a migrant, labor, and sex worker rights organization with a vision of worker safety that responds directly to workers’ needs: affordable housing, safe working conditions, a living wage, and safe ways for workers to enforce their rights.
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!