An often difficult issue for employers is whether meal breaks for non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) count as compensable hours worked. Generally, the FLSA regulations state meal breaks do not count as hours worked when an employee is “completely relieved from duty for the purposes of eating regular meals.” 29 C.F.R. § 785.19. Further, an employee must generally be given 30 minutes or more and must be completely relieved of his or her duties for a period to qualify as a bona fide unpaid meal break.

However, issues arise when an employer puts various restrictions on non-exempt employees during unpaid meal breaks. For example, if an employer prohibits an employee during an unpaid meal break from leaving the employer’s premises without prior authorization, or if an employee must remain on call during a meal break to perform work at any moment, an employer could find itself in violation of the regulations and be required to pay compensable hours worked.

Recently, the Third Circuit, which covers the jurisdictions of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands, clarified the test to be used to determine whether restrictions placed on employees during meal periods make the periods compensable hours worked, regardless of whether the employee actually performed any work during the meal period. In the case of Babcock v. Butler County, correction officers alleged the Prison’s policy for meal breaks constituted an FLSA violation and resulted in unpaid overtime compensation. The officers claimed certain restrictions were placed on them during meal breaks; for example, not being able to leave the prison without prior authorization, and being required to remain in uniform and be on call and in close proximity to emergency response equipment in the event of an emergency. The Prison filed a motion to dismiss alleging the meal periods were not hours worked because the “predominate benefit” of the meal period was received by the officers.

On appeal, the Third Circuit agreed with the Prison’s assertion and affirmed the dismissal. The “predominate benefit” test was adopted, which asks whether the employee is primarily engaged in work-related duties during the meal period. Therefore, the Third Circuit expressly rejected the more restrictive “relieved from all duties” test. In arriving at their conclusion, the Third Circuit acknowledged the “predominate benefits” test is a “fact-intensive inquiry” that assesses the “totality of the circumstances to determine, on a case-by-case basis, to whom the benefit of the meal period inures.” Based on the facts, the Court found despite the restrictions, the officers received the predominate benefit of the unpaid meal break. The Court also looked at the parties’ collective bargaining agreement, noting that the officers were required to be paid the entire meal break period if it was “interrupted” by work. Therefore, the Court found the agreement’s protections on overtime compensation supported the overall conclusion.

Employers and employees within the Third Circuit, as well as in other Circuits, should take note of the recent decision. Specifically, attention to following is required:

1. Restrictions on non-exempt employees during meal break periods do not necessarily make the meal break time compensable hours worked for FLSA purposes.
2. Under the “predominate benefit” test, the analysis is whether the restrictions are so significant and expansive that the employer predominately benefits from the meal time, not the employee.
3. Employers should treat meal breaks as compensable hours worked if the employee is interrupted by work duties at any point during the meal break.
4. If an employer wants meal breaks for non-exempt employees to remain unpaid, the employer should institute clear policies and procedures to educate employees to (1) not perform any work during a meal break unless expressly instructed by management, and (2) to report any interrupted meal breaks immediately so compensation may be received.

Due to the significant liability concerns that meal break issues present to employers, employers would be wise to ensure they have adequate and lawful meal break policies in place.

Source: Adam Long, When Must Meal Breaks Be Paid? Third Circuit Clarifies FLSA Test (December 2, 2015), See more at: http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/when-must-meal-breaks-be-paid-third-39704/.

(Advertising Material:  This Notice is for informational purposes and should not be construed as legal advice).

Tags: FLSA, Meal Break, Meal Break Compensation
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In a suit brought against Major League Baseball (MLB) by a group of former minor league players, a California federal court has granted a conditional class certification. The group of former players alleges they were not paid the requisite minimum wage in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). As a result, the ruling allows both current and former minor league players the opportunity to join the lawsuit and potentially recover minimum wage and overtime payments.
The California court, under U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero, granted the players motion to certify a class of all minor league players who worked for the MLB or any MLB franchise since February 7, 2011, and who, at the time, had not spent time in the major leagues. The lawsuit alleges the MLB franchises paid the players less than minimum wage, denied overtime pay, and required the players to train without pay during the off-season.
Along with the alleged FLSA violations, the players assert the MLB violated similar state wage and hour laws in eight states. Specifically, the MLB violated the laws by paying the players only $3,000 to $7,000 during the five-month season, while the players worked 50 hours to 70 hours per week.
The recent California court decision is just the most recent victory for the former minor league players. In July, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California denied a motion by MLB franchises to dismiss the lawsuit. Instead, the court allowed the case to proceed to pre-trial discovery in order to determine if class certification was appropriate and whether the proposed class representatives have standing to represent the proposed classes. In opposition to the minor league players, the MLB argued the class should not be certified since minor league players are required to perform different tasks in the off-season as they are required during the season.

The minor league players’ compensation falls below the minimum wage as a result of the long hours they work during the season, and the fact that all current minor league players are bound by the same standard contract, which demands they work for a fixed salary despite the actual number of hours worked. The Court determined conditional certification was justified in this claim because the players’ allegations that they were subject to a uniform policy resulting in a failure to meet minimum wage requirements of the FLSA were significant.
Just weeks before this decision, U.S. District Judge Haywood S. Gilliam of California dismissed a separate lawsuit brought by minor league players against Commissioner Bud Selig and the MLB alleging federal antitrust laws were violated by Bud Selig and MLB in conspiring to restrict minor league players’ salaries.
Source: Gregg E. Clifton, Minor League Players Granted Conditional Class Certification in Wage Suit (October 29, 2015), See more at: http://www.natlawreview.com/article/minor-league-players-granted-conditional-class-certification-wage-suit.

Tags: Major League, Minor League, Wage & Hour
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News Release
SOCIAL SECURITY

Law Does Not Provide for a Social Security Cost-of-Living

Adjustment for 2016
With consumer prices down over the past year, monthly Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits for nearly 65 million Americans will not automatically increase in 2016.
The Social Security Act provides for an automatic increase in Social Security and SSI benefits if there is an increase in inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). The period of consideration includes the third quarter of the last year a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) was made to the third quarter of the current year. As determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was no increase in the CPI-W from the third quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2015. Therefore, under existing law, there can be no COLA in 2016.
Other adjustments that would normally take effect based on changes in the national average wage index also will not take effect in January 2016. Since there is no COLA, the statute also prohibits a change in the maximum amount of earnings subject to the Social Security tax, as well as the retirement earnings test exempt amounts. These amounts will remain unchanged in 2016. The attached fact sheet provides more information on 2016 Social Security and SSI changes.
The Department of Health and Human Services has not yet announced Medicare premium changes for 2016. Should there be an increase in the Medicare Part B premium, the law contains a “hold harmless” provision that protects approximately 70 percent of Social Security beneficiaries from paying a higher Part B premium, in order to avoid reducing their net Social Security benefit. Those not protected include higher income beneficiaries subject to an income-adjusted Part B premium and beneficiaries newly entitled to Part B in 2016. In addition, beneficiaries who have their Medicare Part B premiums paid by state medical assistance programs will see no change in their Social Security benefit. The state will be required to pay any Medicare Part B premium increase.
Information about Medicare changes for 2016, when available, will be found at www.medicare.gov.
For additional information, please go to www.socialsecurity.gov/cola.
Social Security 80 Years – Celebrating the Past and Building the Future
Join the Millions! Create your own my Social Security account at www.socialsecurity.gov/myaccount.

Tags: Social Security
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Companies often seek to limit their risks in business, as well as limit their overall payroll expenditures. What simpler way to limit payroll risks than by implementing an “eat what you kill” compensation system that provides an employee the opportunity to work on a pure commission basis? However, employers should beware of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state wage hour laws as there are very real and potentially expensive consequences.
Generally, the FLSA requires employers to pay an overtime premium to employees of one and a half times the employee’s regular rate of pay for all hours worked in excess of 40 within a workweek and to also pay at least the minimum wage for all hours worked. However, there are certain exceptions to these requirements under the FLSA. One particular area of confusion is when an employee is a commission paid employee as the FLSA has carved out several exceptions.

• White Collar Exemption:
The “White Collar” exemption generally includes executives, administrators, and professionals. In order to qualify for this exemption, certain thresholds need to be met. First, the employee must be paid a salary of at least $455 per week (this is expected to substantially increase with new federal regulations that are anticipated to become effective in 2016). Once the salary level test is met, the employee must satisfy the duties test for their respective position. For example, a salesperson advising a client on the proper product to purchase might be an administrative employee. A sales manager, paid by commission, who supervises two or more employees, might qualify under the executive exception. Lastly, a lawyer who is paid a percentage of the fees that he collects likely falls under the professional employee exemption.
Regardless of the position, an employee must receive a salary, or guaranteed draw, of at least the required weekly amount. Therefore, a pure commission paid employee cannot be exempt under the “White Collar” exemption within the FLSA.

• Outside Sales Exemption
In order to qualify for this exemption, the employee’s primary duty must be the sale of goods or services or the rental of facilities and the employee must be customarily and regularly engaged away from the employer’s place of business. The second prong of this inquiry is where most commission paid employees are disqualified. For example, a general salesperson that maintains an office at the company’s facility, but is required or expected to meet with customers, generally does not fit under the outside sales exemption and would be protected by the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the FLSA. Conversely, if an employee is an outside salesperson, the company does not have to pay him/her a salary or minimum wage.

• Employees Paid Commissions by Retail Establishments
This exemption requires that the employee must be employed by a retail or service establishment, defined as establishments 75 percent of whose annual dollar volume of sales of goods or services (or of both) is not for resale and is recognized as retail sales or services in the particular industry. An employee at a retail establishment requires the employer to demonstrate the employee’s regular rate of pay exceeds one and one-half times the applicable minimum wage for every hour worked in a workweek in which overtime hours are worked. Further, the employer must show that more than half the employee’s total earnings in a representative period (at least one month and no more than one year) must consist of commissions. Once these requirements are met, the employer may compensate the employee on pure commission without overtime premiums.
While the FLSA has many exceptions and requirements, states generally have wage hour laws that are more restrictive than the FLSA. The various requirements pose challenges to employers as they can face immense liability for violating the FLSA or state laws. Therefore, it is imperative for employers, and employees, to verify the company is satisfying the FLSA’s and state’s minimum wage and overtime requirements for commission paid employees.

Source: Bennett L. Epstein, Do You Need to Pay Minimum Wage or Overtime to Your Commission-Paid Employees? (September 21, 2015), http://www.natlawreview.com/article/do-you-need-to-pay-minimum-wage-or-overtime-to-your-commission-paid-employees.

Tags: Minimum Wage, Wage & Hour
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A McDonald’s worker speaks on a bullhorn outside O’Hare Airport yesterday. (Airport Workers United / Facebook)

Encouraged by an energetic rally of more than 100 janitors and other members of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 1, a group of low-wage security, cleaning and passenger service workers at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Tuesday launched a campaign to organize 5,000 airport workers to win higher wages and the right to form a union without intimidation.

The O’Hare organizing drive hopes, first, to bring the non-union workers at the airport into the Fight for $15 movement, initiated three years ago among fast food workers and, according to SEIU, already responsible for raising wages of 11 million workers. Then SEIU organizers hope to use the energy of that campaign for higher pay—and whatever success they have—to help create a union that can continue to defend and bargain for better working conditions.

The anticipated strategy is different from most union organizing. Organizers typically sign up a majority of workers, go through an election (or a “card check”) to win recognition, then negotiate a contract (and each step is hard to accomplish). But even SEIU’s initial airport worker organizing about 15 years ago was somewhat unorthodox: in both Los Angeles and San Francisco labor-community coalitions eventually won for the airports both living wage ordinances and labor peace agreements (legal provisions that favored giving contracts for work at the airports to companies that were not blatantly anti-union).

Over the years, SEIU has won contracts for such airport workers as janitors, aircraft cabin cleaners, skycaps, security officers, passenger transporters (pushing wheelchairs for passengers who need help getting around), and security screeners at some airports. Recently, the Fight for $15 has won referenda, local government votes, or—in New York City—a decision by a governor-appointed wage board setting the city minimum wage at their targeted $15. These victories have raised wages of both non-union and even some union workers (in cases with contracts setting wages at less than $15). In many cases, UNITE HERE (or other unions) have joined in such airport campaigns and also won contracts, for example, for workers in airport concessions.

Such campaigns depend on winning support not only from the workers involved but also from the general public.

In the campaign launch, Local 1 president Tom Balanoff emphasized the hardship of the airport workers and their families, and their need for $15 as a minimum income for a decent life. “There are thousands of workers here,” he said, “most of them working below the poverty line.”

Some workers, such as the passenger transporters, said that they often earn less than the state or federal minimum wage as a result of being classified as tipped workers and suffering management deductions of some of their tip income. Transporter Jackie Chako, a recent college graduate with $40,000 in debt and family pressures to help her younger siblings financially, said that she makes $5 to $8 an hour. Airplane cabin cleaner Jason Davis said he gets no health insurance through his job: he couldn’t visit a doctor for his injured knee, and he had to pay out of pocket for health and dental care for his children.

Beyond the needs of the workers themselves, however, Balanoff also stressed the public interest in raising their wages. At around $15 an hour, he said, workers would no longer need to rely on the public safety net programs, which in such situations amount to a public subsidy to big corporations that can pay more and save taxpayers the expense.

Also, he argued that higher pay offered an alternative, community-oriented strategy for economic development. Raising wages complements whatever development generated by the big projects that politicians often like, even when they are not very productive—such as airport expansion, downtown construction, stadiums and new tourist and entertainment destinations on the lakefront.

“O’Hare airport is an economic engine for the city,” he said. “It should be an economic engine for the workers, too. The best thing for this airport and the city is for these workers to be paid a living wage and to have a right to organize. Then our communities will have the resources to come back.”

Before deregulation started in the late 1970s, most of these airport support service jobs paid decently, said Silvia Ruiz, national director of the SEIU’s airports campaign, but as airlines entered a more competitive environment, they subcontracted many activities, typically driving down wages as firms fought to win the contracts.

But SEIU organizing at 16 airports, including seven of the biggest origins and destinations of international flights, has raised wages and won some union recognition across the country, but have also pushed contractors to compete on quality more than on wages. O’Hare, now the third busiest airport, is an important link in the organizing. Despite years of turmoil in the now-consolidating industry, United and American pay executives hefty salaries, benefit from major public subsidies, and can pay more for airport service workers, as they have elsewhere.

But organizing at O’Hare, where SEIU many years ago tried to organize transporters, may be a challenge because it is they major hub of two big airlines, United and American. Those airlines have as much or more power to determine worker standards in most cases than the subcontractors they retain, and could make a big difference in how difficult organizing at O’Hare might be.

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18463/chicago-ohare-fight-for-15

Tags: Labor Law
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Silicon Valley entrepreneurs keep telling us their way of doing business will “change the world.” And in many ways it already has, but it’s changed your world differently than it’s changed theirs.

The “sharing” or “gig” economy—think Airbnb, Uber, and Taskrabbit—has made massive fortunes reducing labor to disassembled microtasks; unfortunately, it’s shrunk workers’ rights too. But as our jobs are redefined by labor-brokering platforms, some advocates are trying to redefine labor rights for a digital economy.

Currently, the gig economy trades labor fluidly across online platforms, digital hiring halls where workers typically farm out their short-term gofer services: a ride offered through your private car, fishing someone’s keys out of a gutter, hand-delivering a package across town. For these nominally independent contractors, labor protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act generally don’t apply. Yet these contract jobs are at least as hierarchical as an assembly line; “independence” means you get assigned where to drive but pay your own traffic tickets, you fund your own social insurance, and if you’re sexually harassed or hurt on the job, may be left completely on your own.

That’s why the National Employment Law Project (NELP) has come up with a new policy blueprint, focused on regulating the so-called “on-demand economy” of tech-driven gig employment, to put forward concrete policy models that can help restructure the “1099” contractor relationship to offer workers greater protection. One potential model is the statutory employee framework, under which contractors are for certain regulatory purposes considered workers, generally for tax laws. NELP notes that local and state policymakers can expand this structure to provide “portable” benefits by “directly requir[ing] that companies that use IRS-Form-1099 workers abide by labor standards such as the minimum wage and others, and pay into Social Security and state workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance funds.”

Many gig workers aren’t really thinking about retirement yet; they’re struggling to get paid today.

At the media conference announcing NELP’s report, Takele Gobena of Seattle said he used to make $9.40 at the SeaTac airport complex, but sought more entrepreneurial pastures driving for Uber and Lyft while studying and raising a young family. Then came the car expenses and other requisite investments needed for ride-sharing, plus the 15-hour shifts his “flexible” job platform demanded—which left him earning the equivalent of less than $3 an hour.

“We are not earning a living wage, we don’t have job security even though we bought a car to work for them,” Gobena said. The pressure intensified after he spoke out publicly about his labor conditions to the media, he claims. Although Uber has denied any misconduct, Gobena argued, “When drivers speak about their driving experience [and] working conditions for Uber and Lyft, they automatically investigate” drivers to try to penalize them. “I want that to be changed so that drivers like me and many others can have fair treatment.”

What if these “on demand” workers could make demands of their parent companies? In addition to policy changes, NELP says establishing an avenue for contractors to organize and collectively bargain on labor conditions might empower workers to respond directly to ever-changing market and labor conditions. This provides a platform for labor action that doesn’t rely on bureaucracy to catch up with Uber and Lyft, and it may hit the industry in its Achilles’ heel: publicity. These companies have managed to wrangle local governments into bending regulatory rules to fit the gig business model, but face a rougher challenge shielding their brand image from public criticism from disillusioned drivers like Gobena.

One potential model is Seattle’s plan to just provide rideshare workers the legal right to collectively bargain. This complements the ongoing Teamsters-led campaign to organize drivers under the App-based Drivers Association.

Organizing could in fact be an ideal countervailing force against gigification, if a collective-bargaining unit were able to—like their parent company—expand freely across states and sectors. For example, the home-office analogue to ridesharing, the so-called crowdwork industry, has created a vast global network of telecommuting clerical jobbers; the leading companies, Crowdflower, Crowdsource, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, collectively manage the services of more than 13 million workers worldwide. Although no full-fledged labor organization has crystallized from this workforce yet, some recent labor litigation has sought to bring claims on behalf of a broad class of workers.

Regulatory reforms could provide immediate relief for exploited workers while the legal system works through numerous labor cases charging on-demand service companies with abusing independent contractors. According to NELP Deputy Director Rebecca Smith, in those cases, “Courts may well deem them employers, but in the interim, we can adopt policies that bind them in these contexts.”

New legislation in Maryland will give the state’s Public Service Commission authority to regulate so-called “Transportation Network Services,” with a governing body representing drivers, the riding public, and business, to develop regulatory standards and negotiate corporate obligations like taxes, insurance, and fair business practices. The commission would also run a dispute mediation system for drivers, and even authorize the creation of a taxi-worker co-operative.

The two forces pushing back against gigification, labor action from below and regulation from above, might collide in the next great Uber turf war in New York. Across this city—both a union town and a financial capital—an Uber traffic flood has run into a mass opposition campaign led by militant taxi drivers and community groups. Uber has deftly resisted regulatory pressures from local officials and the Taxi and Limousine Commission over taxes and other car-service industry standards. But rising street-level activism against Uber’s corporate heavy-handedness and tax dodging might help curb its breakneck expansion.

Rocio Valerio of New York Communities for Change, a grassroots group campaigning for drivers and the riding public, says via email that NELP’s analysis helps activists break down “how the ‘sharing economy’ is wiping away baseline labor standards that took workers decades to win. From misclassification of workers to meager wages below the minimum wage, the ‘gig economy’ is getting away with murder, and it needs to stop.”

So far, traditional regulations haven’t effectively checked the rise of gigdom. But if the wave of tech-fueled disruption can’t be stopped, the public can erect enough speed bumps to ensure that the kings of the sharing economy must share the consequences of their disruption, too.

http://www.thenation.com/article/this-is-how-bad-the-sharing-economy-is-for-workers/

Tags: Labor Law
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Despite the inch of rain dumped on the city, last Thursday was a busy day in private aviation for New York. Vice President Joe Biden touched down in Air Force Two a stone’s throw away from Donald Trump’s jet, and just across the river, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, 85 NetJets pilots walked in circles for three hours as part of a nationwide picket.

At six other airports—Columbus, Dallas, Scottsdale, Seattle-Tacoma, Van Nuys, and Palm Beach International—700 of their colleagues did the same. The pilots, who all work for the fractional jet-ownership company, picketed as part of a more than two-year-long labor dispute. The roughly 3,000 pilots who fly for the company have been working without a contract since 2013. Their union, the NetJets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots, and NetJets blew past their self-imposed September 3 deadline for a tentative agreement.

The bristle, of course, has been over pay and benefits. The pilots’ union said salaries are not high enough and the company’s proposed changes to benefits would put them on the hook for more health-care costs. NetJets said in a statement that on economic issues, the two sides are still a long way apart.

”Much of this difference is due to the parties’ views about the economics of this business­ . . . as well as different expectations concerning the demand for the services we provide,” the statement read. The company then noted that the pilots’ interests have to be balanced with the commitments to other staff members and stakeholders. NetJets is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Captain Brian Ward, who’s been a NetJets pilot since 2002, joined the group picketing in Seattle. He’s based out of Denver, flying the eight-seat, midsize Cessna Citation X jet, working the same 14-hour days every other pilot is capped at. Like most NetJets pilots, he works seven days on, seven days off, maxing out at 98 hours on the job during the “on” weeks.

Unlike most commercial-airline pilots, Ward said, NetJets pilots have a whole other set of jobs to worry about, since the smaller private planes typically don’t have a crew. They also land in small, private-use airports that don’t always have ground support. That means NetJets pilots are not only in charge of flying passengers safely to and from a destination, but they’re also loading luggage, working with catering, making sure the plane is fueled and serviced once they land, and complying with client requests for pets to be taken care of and blankets arranged in a certain way. Add to that the fact that since NetJets customers often fly to small or private-use airports in small towns for businesses or remote resorts and vacation homes, pilots are constantly flying routes and landing at airports they’ve never flown to or landed at before. And since customers can book and change flights at the last minutes, Ward said pilots rarely know where they’re going, when they’re going, and how many places they’ll be going until right before they’re actually taking off.

“It’s a very high level of service and we’re trying to provide that experience, and because we don’t have support personnel, that work comes from the pilot. That’s stuff normal pilots wouldn’t be doing,” he said.

Yet Ward, who’s been involved with the union for years, and other union members feel like they’re not being fairly compensated for all of the extra responsibilities, which has been a huge sticking point in the contract negotiations. Ward said he makes a base salary of $132,000, though on average, makes an additional 10 percent of that in overtime and holiday pay.

Ward has been at the company for 13 years, and falls into the captain salary band. Those starting at the company, in the first-officer level, take home $57,000 in their first year, according to the union. NetJets did not respond to requests for information on pay.

The union said NetJets pilots are paid 60 percent of what commercial pilots are paid, though the company told The Wall Street Journal its pilots are some of the “best paid in the industry,” in January. At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in May, Buffett said NetJets pilots make an average of $145,000 per year, according to The New York Times.

The negotiation comes down to more than just pay. A major hold-up has been proposed changes to health-care coverage. NetJets told the Journal that its proposal called for a “few reasonable changes,” including “a modified health-care plan that will require union employees to contribute to premiums that they currently don’t pay.”

But those changes, however reasonable, are putting pressure on pilots like Captain Coley George, who drove five hours from Providence, Rhode Island, with a few other pilots on his week off to picket in Teterboro last week. He has been a captain with NetJets for 14 years and is also the union’s vice president of Industry Affairs. For the last two, the worry about whether his health-care costs will change, and by how much, has seeped into the home he shares with his wife and two children.

“Not knowing what my costs are going to be, you bring uncertainty into the household,” he said. “You start to think about whether [you’ll] be cutting back on your kids’ activities, putting away for college or retirement. That’s why I picketed.”

Last week’s show at airports weren’t the first. In fact, hundreds of members turned up at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting earlier this year. Before that, they picketed at the Masters Golf Tournament, the Super Bowl, and the NetJets Poker Invitational in Las Vegas, which was hosted by Buffett.

This is not a showing NetJets customers, who are typically wealthy clients looking to avoid the hassles and security headaches that go along with commercial air travel, would want to keep seeing out of their private-plane window for the unforeseeable future. One NetJets client, who did not want his name printed, said that the last thing he wants to know is that his pilot is unhappy.

Perhaps that is why NetJets continues to state its eagerness to come to a resolution. Its statement said they will again meet with the union once their mediator directs them to, and reiterated that the pilots are the “best at what [they] do” and they’re “proud to call them colleagues.”

Captain Ward doesn’t always feel that appreciation. “We’re not going to accept a contract that is subpar, that doesn’t adequately reflect our work and experience,” he said. He understands that seeing a picket line full of pilots may be disconcerting, but he hopes that will knead NetJets closer to a deal. No need to worry, however, since he said pilots are very good at compartmentalizing and trained to put emotions aside, and NetJets pilots are deeply committed to operating safely even in the midst of negotiations.

So sit back, kick your feet up on those specially arranged blankets, and enjoy the view of a hundred soaking-wet pilots earning all year what you paid in landscaping for the summer. You’ll arrive safely at your destination in just a few short hours.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/09/netjets-pilots-picket

Tags: Labor Law, NetJets
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This is no plea for pity for corporate kingpins like Walmart and McDonald’s inundated by workers’ demands for living wages.

Raises would, of course, cost these billion-dollar corporations something. More costly, though, is the price paid by minimum-wage workers who have not received a raise in six years. Even more dear is what these workers have paid for their campaign to get raises. Managers have harassed, threatened and fired them.

Despite all that, low-wage workers will return to picket lines and demonstrations Wednesday in a National Day of Action in the fight for $15 an hour.

The date is 4/15. These are workers who live paycheck to paycheck, barely able to pay their bills, and certainly unable to cope with an emergency. They know the risk they’re taking by participating in strikes for pay hikes. They’ve seen bosses punish co-workers for demonstrating for raises. To lose a job, even one that pays poverty wages, during a time of high unemployment is terrifying. Still, thousands will participate Wednesday. That is valor.

Kip Hedges exhibited that courage. He’s a 61-year-old with 26 years of service as a baggage handler for Delta at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. He wanted better wages for young workers and a union. He said so in a video, noting that “probably close to half make under $15 an hour.”

Delta fired him. The airline said he’d disparaged the company. Apparently Delta believes it has been disparaged if the flying public learns the truth about the way Delta treats workers.

Clearly, Delta planned to shut Hedges up and intimidate other workers. The message to his co-workers was clear: “You wanna talk about the paltry wages you get? Well, let’s talk about this pink slip.”

But when Delta messed with Hedges, it messed up big time. The firing failed to silence him. He continued to protest low wages. His co-workers rallied round him. The media covered his firing and his appeal. He looked like a low-wage worker hero. Delta looked like a vindictive heel.

Unlike Hedges, Shanna Tippen was no activist before she got fired from her minimum-wage job in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She was just trying to get by, and falling short by about $200 a month. Her boss at the Days Inn where she worked as a night shift jack-of-all-trades asked her to talk to a Washington Post reporter who had dropped by the hotel to discuss the state’s newly instituted 25-cent increase to the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Tippen told the reporter, Chico Harlan, that she hoped the little bit of extra money would help her pay for her grandson’s diapers.

After the Post published the story, the manager of the Days Inn, Herry Patel, telephoned Harlan to complain about being quoted in it. Then he fired Tippen. She recounted it to Harlan:

“He said I was stupid and dumb for talking to [The Post].” Even though, of course, Patel had told Tippen to talk to the reporter. Tippen continued: “He cussed me and asked me why you wrote the article. I said, ‘Because he’s a reporter; that’s what he does.’”

Patel told Harlan that Arkansas voters, who approved the pay increase in a referendum by 66 percent, should not have done it. “Everybody wants free money in Pine Bluff,” Harlan quoted him as saying.

Patel apparently did not understand that Tippen performed work that kept the hotel running every night, which means she earned the money. The truth is that Patel, like so many other employers, believes that employees should work for free.

The Post and other papers wrote about Tippen’s firing, making her an icon for ill-treated, low-wage workers and Patel the personification of miserly bosses.

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17841/the_courage_of_low_wage_workers_on_strike

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August 17, 2015

BY CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

The opening lyric from that old civil-rights song—“Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom”—may not have been written with Julian Bond in mind, but he personified it. As a member of the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate, as a leader of the N.A.A.C.P. and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as an activist and a professor and a friend, he answered the call of justice every day. Julian passed away over the weekend, at the age of seventy-five. I will miss him terribly. He and I were children of the civil-rights movement and, in a way, grew up in it together.

I first met Julian in the summer of 1960, at one of the informal gatherings of the burgeoning Atlanta Student Movement. (Well, it might have been a party, which was one of the ways that the demonstrators de-stressed.) I was home in Atlanta, waiting for my desegregation lawsuit against the University of Georgia to work its way through the courts, and Julian was a rising senior at Morehouse College. Even then, his style of writing and thinking was evident in his work. In March of that year, he had helped draft an article called “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which ran as a full-page advertisement in several Atlanta-area newspapers. The document was forthright, elegant, powerful. “Today’s youth will not sit by submissively while being denied all the rights and privileges and joys of life,” it read. “We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time.” Segregation, it concluded, was “robbing not only the segregated but the segregator of his human dignity.” (As Julian made clear in 1967, when I interviewed him for Talk of the Town, he didn’t have much patience for embellishment. One of the hardest things about serving in the Georgia legislature, he told me then, “was getting used to the flowery language.”)
Although Julian’s main brief was as a theoretician and tactician, he also spent time on the front lines. He took to heart the teachings of Ella Baker, a leader from the older generation of black activists, who, in 1960, convened the meeting from which the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee (SNCC) emerged, with Julian as a co-founder. Baker’s invocation address, called “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” set the tone for the organization: its task was “to rid America of the scourge of racial segregation and discrimination—not only at lunch counters but in every aspect of life.” The group was more militant, more in-your-face than the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the N.A.A.C.P.; Julian and his fellow-activists became known as the movement’s shock troops.

Julian left Morehouse halfway through his senior year to devote himself more fully to SNCC. (He was the son of a college president and came from a long line of educated black folks, and eventually he went back and got his degree.) That year, he became the managing editor of the Atlanta Inquirer, an upstart protest weekly, which was created to do what none of the white-owned papers or the more conservative black-owned ones would—tell the story of the Atlanta Student Movement in all its manifestations. By that point, I and my fellow-plaintiff in the University of Georgia case, Hamilton Holmes, had won, becoming the first African-American students to enroll there. I began working with Julian at the Inquirer on otherwise relaxing weekends home from the still tense UGA campus.

We settled into a predictable rhythm: the student protesters would stage their demonstrations in the morning, get arrested, make bail, and then come tell their stories to Julian, me, and the editor-in-chief, M. Carl Holman, a professor of English at Clark College. We took turns writing up the narratives as news stories, although I sometimes did my own reporting. I spent one Saturday, for instance, at Atlanta’s public hospital, Grady Memorial—where Hamilton later became the chairman of the orthopedic unit—chronicling the chaos in the emergency room. At one point, one of the young doctors showed me the path of a bullet that had gone through a man’s head by sliding an instrument into it. Julian loved that story. He was a patient mentor, just as Ella Baker had been to him, and he had a quiet sense of humor. He wasn’t the most energetic dancer, but at one of our parties, getting into the spirit of things, he wrote a poem:

See that girl
Shake that thing.
We can’t all be
Martin Luther King.
(He remembered it when I mentioned it to him during a visit, almost fifty years later.)
In 1965, Julian was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. His colleagues, however, refused to seat him, because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, and he didn’t assume office until 1967. He was twenty-eight years old. He continued to campaign around the country, not only for civil rights but also for human rights, not only at home but also in the global community. When Julian came to New York to give a talk to the Southern Conference Educational Fund, one of the oldest interracial civil-rights organizations in the country, I went to cover it for The New Yorker. In his address, Julian discussed the trajectory of the movement and how the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, had changed its tenor, making people complacent, making them think that the victory had been won. In his soft-spoken but firm and confident way, he went on to suggest that this apparent victory had sapped the movement’s support. “Lack of interest is more killing than lack of money,” he said. “Negroes must not forget race consciousness as long as they are victims of racism.”

Up until the day he left us, Julian never forgot that consciousness. He served as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center when it was founded and, in 1998, was elected chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., a post that he never could have imagined occupying during his years with SNCC. And his consciousness went beyond race—he also became a climate-change activist and an advocate for marriage equality. Julian Bond’s legacy surely lies in the fact that he steadfastly followed the movement’s dictum: keep on keepin’ on.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/postscript-julian-bond-1940-2015-2

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Dear Jon,
Google has the answer for almost every question under the sun, except one: why don’t all of the company’s workers make living wages?
Gabriel Cardenas works at a California warehouse for Google Express. And even though Google is a multibillion-dollar corporation, Gabriel and his colleagues employees work in unsafe conditions on short-term contracts and aren’t paid enough to make ends meet. That’s why they’re coming together for a better workplace.
Will you support Gabriel and his co-workers? Send a message to Google and demand that the company doesn’t interfere in their upcoming union election.
Working for Google’s next-day delivery service, Gabriel and his co-workers make sure products ship out within mere hours of when they’re ordered. But they’re employed through a contractor, Adecco, and have no job security to speak of. Worse, they report being pressured to work at unsafe speeds in dangerous conditions with damaged equipment and failing electrical systems that have resulted in fires.
Lazslo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for “people operations,” is on record saying that Google employees and contractors “have a legal right to organize without fear of retaliation.” But without pressure from people like you, we can’t count on Google to live up to those words.
Make sure Google respects everyone’s ability to have a say at work! Send an email to the company today!
Many profitable Silicon Valley companies rely on poorly paid bus drivers, security guards, warehouse workers, janitors and groundskeepers to keep their operations running smoothly. Google is no different. But Gabriel and his co-workers are joining the Teamsters to stand up to this profitable tech giant, and they are not alone. A broad coalition of unions, faith leaders and community groups have come together as Silicon Valley Rising to make sure the tech sector works for everyone, not just well-paid executives. We must speak in one strong clear voice together — join us by standing with Gabriel and his fellow

Google Express workers.

Thanks for all that you do,
Ethan Miller
Jobs With Justice

Tags: jobs with justice, labor
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