BossFeed Briefing for March 8, 2022. Last Tuesday, a Douglas County Superior Court judge ruled the capital gains tax unconstitutional and AG Ferguson announced his office will appeal the ruling. Last Thursday, farmworkers in Oregon won a law ending their exclusion from overtime protections, a year after WA farmworkers won OT protections. This Thursday is the final day of the 2022 WA legislative session. This Saturday marks two years since Louisville police murdered Breonna Taylor. This Sunday kicks off the final week of winter before the Spring Equinox.
Three things to know this week:
A new report shows that 3.7 million children fell back into poverty after Congress ended the expanded Child Tax Credit program—which provided monthly cash payments to most American families with kids—in December. The cuts have hit people of color especially hard: an estimated 1.3 million more Latino children and 700,000 more Black children are living in poverty compared to this time last year.
Carmen Figueroa, a gig worker and leader with our Pay Up campaign in Seattle, told the South Seattle Emerald why she needs City leaders to pass the PayUp policy to end subminimum wages on apps like DoorDash and Instacart. As Carmen puts it: “I would like things to change so I don’t have to rely on the generosity of strangers to pay my rent.”
WA state has so far failed to distribute any of the $340 million in relief for undocumented immigrants that the legislature approved last session. This year, WA lawmakers also failed to advance a bill to create an ongoing income support system for undocumented workers, who are excluded from unemployment insurance and federal stimulus programs.
Two things to ask:
Why does that name ring a bell? The Washington Food Industry Association, a grocery industry lobby group, is opposing a statewide bill to establish standards and reduce injuries for jobs that involve repetitive motion. The group previously sued to overturn hazard pay for gig food delivery workers and grocery workers in Seattle.
Guess they wanted to show you can’t spell “cringe” without R, E, and I? REI workers in Manhattan won their union election in a landslide vote last week, becoming the first of the company’s 170 US stores to unionize. The vote overcame an aggressive anti-union campaign, which included a podcast where the CEO began with a land acknowledgement before diving into a union-busting spiel.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
Uber is rolling out a new black box pay algorithm, making it extremely difficult for drivers to predict how much they’ll actually make before accepting a ride, reports Dara Kerr in The Markup. Black box algorithms aren’t new on gig apps: Uber Eats has used algorithmically-calculated, black box pay since September 2020, and algorithms are commonly used by other apps to make termination decisions. Now, Uber is expanding its use of algorithms to cover ridehail drivers, who were previously paid based on time and distance traveled, but whose pay going forward will be calculated based on an opaque set of “several factors”. Uber has also unveiled a “Trip Radar” feature, in which multiple drivers compete to be the first to click on and accept ride offers, a system one driver described as “like Hungry Hungry Hippos”.
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!