BossFeed Briefing for May 24, 2021. Last Tuesday was the 41st anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Last Thursday, King County Health Officer Jeffrey Duchin issued an order recommending fully vaccinated people continue wearing masks in public spaces like grocery stores. Last Thursday, a group of WA’s wealthiest humans hired yet another group of fancy lawyers to file yet another lawsuit complaining about the state’s new capital gains tax on extraordinary profits. This Sunday is the 84th anniversary of the Memorial Day Massacre in South Chicago, during which police opened fire on striking steelworkers, killing ten people. Next Monday is Memorial Day, a day off for many people who don’t work in retail, food, healthcare, or other public-facing jobs.
Three things to know this week:
The WA Department of Labor & Industries is creating a new team dedicated to farmworker safety and outreach. In 2020, the agency conducted its highest-ever number of farm inspections and issued hundreds of citations for safety issues.
Private prison company GEO Group is suing WA state over its new law banning private prisons, which will close the company’s for-profit immigration detention center in Tacoma. Meanwhile, Attorney General Bob Ferguson is suing the company for paying just $1/day to people working while detained at the facility.
WA’s current eviction moratorium is set to expire on June 30th, and many renters are concerned rental assistance won’t reach them in time. Census data shows 166,712 adults across the state were unable to pay rent in April.
Two things to ask:
What do real estate agents, salespeople, vessel crews, and farmers all have in common? In an op-ed last week, State Senator Curtis King said the answer is that all those people work “long and unpredictable” hours, which he argued is why overtime protections for farmworkers are cumbersome and unnecessary. Another way to answer Sen. King’s question is that none of those people are farm*workers*, who know that “long and unpredictable” work hours are the exact thing overtime laws protect against.
What's the connection between workers’ rights and public health? A new study shows that a lack of paid sick leave is preventing many low-wage workers, especially workers of color, from getting vaccinated. It’s further evidence that passing and enforcing paid time off laws is a crucial way of protecting public health and advancing equity.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
The US unemployment system failed workers when they needed it most, writes Katherine Landergan in a new piece for Politico that examines the roots of the current system failure and looks at how the system could be fixed to better support workers through future crises. Landergan details the ways that unemployment systems around the country are fundamentally inaccessible: they’re built to reject claims rather than pay out benefits, have complicated and confusing applications, rely on outdated computer systems, and are chronically understaffed and underfunded (note that the article’s opening anecdote illustrating inaccessibility is from right here in WA, pre-pandemic). Experts often say that fixing unemployment insurance isn’t simple...but why is it that systemic complexity always seems to be an obstacle in supporting workers, but never comes up when making new systems to distribute billions of dollars to businesses? Ensuring economic security for people who lose work is pretty basic — the only thing that’s complicated is whether there’s the political will among politicians to make it happen.
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!