BossFeed Briefing for July 26, 2021. Last Thursday was National Rat Catcher’s Day, a day honoring professional exterminators and maybe cats, too. Yesterday, tens of thousands of dairy workers in WA became eligible for overtime pay under a new state law (all other agricultural workers will be eligible in January 2022 under the same law). Today is the 31st anniversary of the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Tomorrow marks one week until WA’s August 3rd primary election. And this Sunday is Emancipation Day, which commemorates the official end of slavery (sort of) across (some of) the British Empire.
Three things to know this week:
President Biden signed an executive order raising the minimum wage to $15/hr for nearly 400,000 federal contractors, including tipped workers. The raise will take effect by March of next year.
Workers at a Kansas Frito-Lay plant have ended their strike after 20 days and reached an agreement with the company. The new contract bans so-called “suicide shifts", which required employees to work back-to-back 12 hour shifts with only an 8-hour break in between.
In a recent interview with Marketplace, a gig worker describes how her old job as a paramedic paid $17/hr, while childcare cost $15/hour. She switched to driving for Uber Eats, with her kid in the back seat, for which work she squeezes out just a bit more than $2/hour in pay after expenses.
Two things to ask:
Does literally anybody else have a different plan? In a recent interview, Jeff Bezos proposed sending all of Earth’s heavy manufacturing into space to save the world from climate catastrophe. Bezos emphasized that saving earth is important because it is “by far” the most beautiful planet.
They know he’s the bad guy, right? “JOKR” is the latest grocery app promising ultra-rapid delivery. The company just got $170 million to invest in their plan to deliver food to customers within 15 minutes.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
As many economists and politicians celebrate the overall decline in national unemployment rates, William E. Spriggs warns in an op-ed for the New York Times that unemployment rates for Black workers are returning to the double-digit levels they've remained at for years — nearly twice the rate for white workers. For decades, unemployment for Black workers has been persistently high, which Spriggs attributes to widespread discrimination and racism across the economy. Still, despite plenty of evidence of racism in the labor market, some economists accept high unemployment for Black people as part of a supposedly normal and healthy economy, sometimes explaining away the disparity by claiming Black people have fewer skills or less education; Spriggs thouroughly debunks both ideas, noting how unemployment among Black people with Associate’s degrees has long been worse than among white people with high school diplomas. All of which begs the question: What would it look like if policymakers treated double-digit unemployment for Black workers with the urgency it deserves?
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!