BossFeed Briefing for May 2, 2022. Last Tuesday, the Seattle City Council held a second committee hearing on our PayUp policy to end subminimum wages for 40K+ gig workers on apps like DoorDash, Instacart, and TaskRabbit. Yesterday was May Day, aka International Workers’ Day. Today, the Yakima Herald highlighted the Know Your Rights outreach work of our sibling organization Fair Work Center. This Thursday, the Seattle City Council will hold yet another committee hearing on our PayUp policy. This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a good day for moms and a great day for the Hallmark corporation.
Three things to know this week:
Trader Joe’s is paying $44,000 to 129 workers for violating Seattle’s secure scheduling law. The Seattle Office of Labor Standards found that Trader Joe’s failed to post schedules at least two weeks in advance, as required by the law.
COVID was the cause of 26 work-related deaths in 2021, making it the leading cause of workplace death last year, according to the state. The actual number is certainly much higher, because the state only counts cases where there’s formal documentation someone was exposed to COVID at work, leaving out retail, food, and other service workers who may have been exposed due to extensive contact with the public.
Just fifteen WA billionaires collectively got $186.4 billion richer over the past two years, a 58% increase in wealth. While most people pay around 18% of their income in state and local taxes, billionaires pay just 3% of their overall wealth.
Two things to ask:
What if they used that money to pay workers more? DoorDash took out a big ad on The Seattle Times homepage to fear-monger about having to pay workers more under our PayUp policy. We took the opportunity to fix their ad.
What’s next, bathroom access? Amazon will allow warehouse workers to keep their cell phones with them during shifts, reversing a previous ban. Workers pushed for the rule change, saying that cell phone access is key to ensuring their safety, especially during weather emergencies like the December tornado in Illinois, during which a warehouse collapsed and killed six people.
And one thing that's worth a closer look:
In this conversation with NPR, public health writer Ed Yong lays out how toxic individualism has led to an ineffective and inequitable response to the pandemic. He argues that the ideology of rugged American individualism—that “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps'' mentality the rich and powerful love so much—has seeped into our national COVID response, with policymakers focusing on individual choice while largely ignoring how poverty, inequality, and hazardous working conditions mean low-wage workers and communities of color get hit especially hard. A pandemic is a collective problem which requires collective solutions that proactively take into account how health relates to inequality: for instance, strong public health rules to prioritize the safety of low-wage frontline workers of color, who are more likely to be exposed to the virus at work and more likely to suffer serious consequences from COVID due to a lifetime of inequitable access to healthcare, would protect the most vulnerable people and also improve everyone's safety. Instead, Yong writes, leaders have failed to recognize that people’s health is “profoundly influenced…by everyone else around them” and urged individualized public health measures, like leaving it up to individuals whether they mask or not — the wrong kind of solution to this pandemic, and to any future problem that requires we respond as an interconnected community rather than a bunch of atomized individuals who happen to live in the same place.
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!