Labour General Thread

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/heaven-hill-kentucky-bourbon-workers-stri...

Workers at One of the Country’s Biggest Bourbon Producers Have Been on Strike for a Month

BY

ALEX N. PRESS

Around 420 workers at the Kentucky-based Heaven Hill Distillery have been on strike for a month. They say the company is pushing to radically change scheduling and remove a cap on health insurance premiums.

Roughly 420 workers at Heaven Hill Distillery have now been on strike for a month at the company’s bottling and warehouse operation in Bardstown, Kentucky. (Shannon Tompkins / Flickr)

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/heaven-hill-kentucky-bourbon-workers-stri...

That's correct, less than $5 an hour, so Trump Corp's paying foreign workers $4 fits right in. 

Gig Companies Are Taking Their War on Workers Beyond California

BY

LUKE SAVAGE

Just as it did in its campaign for California’s Prop 22, Big Tech is claiming rideshare drivers in Massachusetts will earn as much as $18 an hour if a new pro–gig company law is passed. But new analysis finds a majority will actually make less than $5 an hour.

A new report finds that a majority of Massachusetts rideshare drivers would likely earn as little as $4.82 an hour under a proposed law backed by Uber and Lyft. (Dan Gold / Unsplash)

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/prop-22-uber-lyft-gig-economy-workers-pay...

Great news indeed jerrym!

Here’s How We Beat Amazon

AN INTERVIEW WITH

ANGELIKA MALDONADO

Amazon workers in Staten Island have achieved the most important labor victory in the United States since the 1930s. Here’s an inside account of how they did it.

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/amazon-labor-union-alu-staten-island-orga...

The most difficult job of all working for a union is being an organizer so congratulations to them

Howard Schultz can't stop Starbucks' Workers Momentum

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/starbucks-reserve-roastery-nyc-union-schultz

The only way to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor is through unionization. 

Starbucks unionization effort explodes as 200 stores seek elections despite company's scorched-earth strategy

https://www.rawstory.com/200-starbucks-counting-barista-jaz-brisack-says...

Budget signals shift to soon let labour groups launch trade challenges

https://www.nationalnewswatch.com/2022/04/16/liberals-budget-signals-shi...

No, Raising the Minimum Wage Won’t Spur Inflation

BY

DANNY WARDLE

With inflation on the rise, Australian unions are calling for a modest pay increase for minimum-wage workers. The government, backed by bosses and bankers, says such a move will increase inflation, but the truth is they just don’t want to pay.

A substantial wage rise would provide a much-needed solution to increasingly pressing economic problems. (Michael Macor / the San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/minimum-wage-rise-inflation-australia-act...

This is what we should be talking about here at a progressive board, and not some right-wing war mongering propaganda and utter nonsense. WTF has happened to babble!!!

A ‘Quiet Fleecing’

September 13, 2022

The Economic Policy Institute responds to talk of “quiet quitting” by U.S. workers. 

Essential Worker. (Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

By Kenny Stancil
Common Dreams

“Quiet quitting” — an allegedly new trend characterized by workers performing only their required job duties and no more — has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks, but the defining trend of the past 40 years of U.S. economic history is “quiet fleecing,” and we should be talking much more about it.

That’s the argument put forth by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank with a long track record of popularizing research on wage suppression and runaway inequality.

“Everyone’s obsessed with a post-pandemic phenomenon called ‘quiet quitting,'” EPI wrote in an email on Friday. “It’s basically defined as workers just doing the basic requirements of their jobs and not going ‘above and beyond.'”

“But the reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and not getting paid for it,” EPI continued. “We’re calling this phenomenon ‘quiet fleecing.'” [Otherwise known as work to rule.]

To illustrate what is meant by “quiet fleecing,” EPI pointed to an animated chart showing that between 1948 and 1979, the nation’s economy and working-class wages grew largely in tandem. Although wages began to flatline during the 1970s crisis of stagflation, a 118 percent increase in productivity during this 31-year period — when Keynesianism was still dominant — was mirrored by a 107 percent increase in typical worker pay.

But ever since former President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal counterrevolution against unions, public goods provided by the welfare state, and other fixtures of the New Deal era — a pro-corporate and anti-labor agenda that became bipartisan and has only recently lost some of its hegemony — the gap between productivity and typical worker pay has widened dramatically.

According to EPI, net productivity rose 61.8 percent from 1979 to 2020. Hourly pay, meanwhile, increased by just 17.5 percent during those 41 years, meaning that productivity grew 3.5 times as much as wages over the past four decades, after adjusting for inflation.

“Workers are more productive than ever,” EPI noted, “but employers haven’t been sharing the wealth. In fact, they’ve been fleecing workers for 40 years when it comes to having pay rise with productivity.”

“Who’s reaping the benefits if workers are getting quietly fleeced?” the think tank asked.

At the same time that typical worker pay has remained largely flat despite climbing productivity, the share of income captured by the top 1 percent has soared. From 1948 to 2019, the top 1 percent enjoyed a 407 percent increase in compensation, with the bulk of those gains coming after 1979.

Walmart employee baling cardboard. (SchuminWeb, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

In a more detailed analysis on the topic, EPI noted that the growing gulf between productivity and typical worker pay represents “income going everywhere but the paychecks of the bottom 80% of workers.”

That wedge of income “went into the salaries of highly paid corporate and professional employees,” EPI pointed out, “and it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners).”

“This concentration of wage income at the top (growing wage inequality) and the shift of income from labor overall and toward capital owners (the loss in labor’s share of income) are two of the key drivers of economic inequality overall since the late 1970s,” the think tank added.

The link between productivity and typical worker pay was deliberately broken by neoliberal policies. As EPI tells it:

“Starting in the late 1970s policymakers began dismantling all the policy bulwarks helping to ensure that typical workers’ wages grew with productivity. Excess unemployment was tolerated to keep any chance of inflation in check. Raises in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer. Labor law failed to keep pace with growing employer hostility toward unions. Tax rates on top incomes were lowered. And anti-worker deregulatory pushes — from the deregulation of the trucking and airline industries to the retreat of antitrust policy to the dismantling of financial regulations and more — succeeded again and again.

In essence, policy choices made to suppress wage growth prevented potential pay growth fueled by rising productivity from translating into actual pay growth for most workers. The result of this policy shift was the sharp divergence between productivity and typical workers’ pay shown in the graph.”

“There is something fundamentally wrong with the way our current economy distributes wealth and rewards work,” the think tank concluded. So-called quiet quitting “is a symptom of a much bigger and deeper problem.”

According to EPI’s latest research on the subject, top CEOs in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as typical workers in 2020.

EPI found that the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. Between 1978 and 2020, researchers noted, CEO pay soared by 1,322 percent while typical worker pay grew by just 18 percent.

“For future productivity gains to lead to robust wage growth and widely shared prosperity, we need to institute policies that firmly connect pay and productivity and build worker power,” the think tank has argued. “Without policy interventions, economic growth will continue to sputter, and the growth we do see will largely fail to lift typical workers’ wages.”

Last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) unveiled the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, a proposal to raise taxes on corporations that pay their CEOs over 50 times more than the median worker.

The legislation “would incentivize corporations to both rein in pay at the top and lift up wages — all while generating an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be invested in ways that reduce inequality,” explained the Institute for Policy Studies’ Sarah Anderson, one of many economists who attribute the worsening pay gap to the decades’ long assault on the labor movement and the rise of stock-based compensation for CEOs.

The U.S., Sanders warned when introducing his legislation, is “moving toward an oligarchic form of society where the very rich are doing phenomenally well, and working families are struggling in a way that we have not seen since the Great Depression.”

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” he added, “the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

This article is from  Common Dreams.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/13/a-quiet-fleecing/