BossFeed Briefing for March 8, 2021. Last Tuesday, WA state expanded vaccine eligibility, but many workers considered essential enough to work in person are still not considered essential enough to get the vaccine. Last Friday, 7 U.S. Senate Democrats and every Senate Republican voted against raising the federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. Last Saturday, the WA state Senate passed a capital gains tax on extraordinary profits from the sale of stocks and bonds—all while an escaped emu was captured and returned to its home in Mukilteo. Tomorrow is AAPI Equal Pay Day, which draws attention to gender pay disparities for Asian American/Pacific Islander women, who are paid an average of $0.85 for each $1 paid to white men. This Thursday marks one year since the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic.
Three things to know this week:
In Washington D.C, Seth Harris was appointed to a new top labor policy position after working as a corporate consultant for Uber and helping write the legal blueprint for the anti-worker, gig company-funded Proposition 22 in California. In WA state, the House passed the Worker Protection Act (HB 1076), moving the state one step closer to allowing whistleblower enforcement of workers’ rights laws.
The penthouse apartment atop Seattle’s Smith Tower is available to rent for the first time ever, so long as you can afford to pay $17,000/month. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live in the historic building...or to wonder how it’s still true that the rich people who can afford to live there pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than workers earning minimum wage.
A federal judge in Spokane has thrown out a flawed Department of Labor wage survey that would have dramatically reduced harvest season wages for some migrant farmworkers. The judge found that the Dept. of Labor report ignored survey results from farmworkers and chose to rely only on wages reported by employers, who the judge noted “have an incentive to lie” in order to drive down pay in the industry.
Two things to ask:
Are they deducting it from the CEO's $16 million salary? Chipotle is paying $15 million in back overtime pay to thousands of workers as part of a legal settlement after workers sued the chain. Workers say they were illegally classified as salaried employees so the company could avoid paying overtime.
What will they not do next? Gig delivery company Postmates has released a new “cookbook” for people who don’t want to cook. In related news, the terms and conditions Postmates makes drivers agree to could be considered a workers’ rights compliance manual for companies that don’t want to comply with workers’ rights.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Medina billionaire Bill Gates has been investing a bunch of his nearly endless wealth in green energy projects and research—but as Kate Aronoff writes in The New Republic, when we rely on just a few super-wealthy entrepreneurs to save the climate, we risk deepening inequality and limiting the scope of government’s response to all kinds of global problems. Aronoff’s biggest concern is not with Gates investing in green technology: after all, further production of green energy alternatives is urgently needed (though she’s definitely skeptical of one of the initiatives funded by Gates, given that major fossil fuel lobby groups are lining up in support). What she’s more worried about is the way billionaires are making the case that they alone can harness the private sector to solve society's biggest problems—whether it’s climate change, COVID-19, or an unknown future disaster—and that government’s proper role is to get out of the way and make it as easy as possible for the private sector to do its private-sector-innovation-thing. That’s the same profit-obsessed private sector that’s made polluting oil companies so rich, that’s minted billionaire after billionaire while billions of people live in poverty, and that’s been a major roadblock to ambitious government climate initiatives, because those might require a major restructuring of the economy, so yeah...this author's got a fair point.
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!