BossFeed Briefing for February 23, 2021. Last Tuesday, the New York Times reported Citibank lost a bid to take back nearly $1 billion, which they had mistakenly wired to the wrong investors. Last Saturday was the 126th anniversary of the death of Frederick Douglass at age 77. Yesterday, the WA House Appropriations Committee voted to advance the Worker Protection Act (HB 1076) out of committee. Tomorrow is the 108th anniversary of the silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey, during which 25,000 immigrant workers walked out to demand safer working conditions and an 8-hour workday. This Friday is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day, so we humbly suggest telling the little humans in your life the one about the Business Lobbyist Who Cried Taxes.
Three things to know this week:
A Tri-Cities berry company will pay workers $350,000 as part of a legal settlement over a former manager’s sexual assaults and sexual harassment of several female employees. According to one study of California farmworkers, 80% of female farmworkers reported having been sexually harassed or assaulted at work.
According to a new report, billionaires produce carbon footprints that are thousands of times greater than the typical non-billionaire. The extraordinarily high levels of pollution created by billionaires are linked to extraordinarily high levels of yacht, private plane, and mega-mansion ownership among billionaires.
Several years after Seattle retail and food service workers won Secure Scheduling, a new academic study confirms what workers already knew from experience: predictable schedules are good for workers. The study shows that in addition to more workers getting schedules at least two weeks in advance, more workers are seeing improved sleep quality and are reporting greater levels of overall happiness.
Two things to ask:
What would it look like if legislators voted for What Workers Want? A recent King 5 News poll shows 59% of WA voters in favor of a capital gains tax on the extraordinary profits made by WA’s wealthiest humans when they sell fancy financial assets like stocks and bonds. One such proposal—SB 5096—was passed out of the WA Senate Ways & Means Committee last week.
Will someone vote them off the island? Corporate executives are fleeing to luxury resorts in tropical climates, sometimes shelling out as much as $70,000/month for the remote working vacations. Several wealthy jetsetters gushed to Bloomberg about the joys of “escaping” the pandemic as they wait for vaccines to become available—though not one of them mentioned the low-wage workers who staff the resorts they’ve escaped to, or the fact that the countries where those resorts are located are in the midst of the same global pandemic these elite travelers are “fleeing.”
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
As talk heats up about what an eventual economic recovery from this crisis should look like, the New York Times reports on the policymakers, economists, and activists who are calling for a federal jobs guarantee, which they view as a way to ensure economic security for workers and combat ongoing unemployment. Proponents of the idea—modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal jobs programs during the Great Depression—say a large-scale federal jobs program would put millions of people back to work on critical infrastructure, public health, and green energy projects and raise workplace standards by setting a national minimum standard for livable jobs. The idea has broad public support, with a recent Gallup poll showing an overwhelming 93% of respondents in favor of a government-sponsored jobs program for people who’ve lost work during the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a growing sense that the depth of economic devastation for workers throughout this crisis might be expanding politicians’ willingness to experiment with bold ideas: even Michael Strain, right-leaning economist with the American Enterprise Institute, told the Times that “the bounds of policy discourse [have] widened quite a bit as a consequence of the pandemic.”
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!