BossFeed Briefing for August 14, 2023
Summer is starting to wind down, but a devastating wildfire on Maui last week demonstrated that climate injustice isn’t. Zoom is ironically requiring its workers to return to office. Twitter is now a suspicious looking X on your phone. The USWNT lost their World Cup bid to Sweden in a dramatic penalty kick shoot-out. The Social Security Act turns 88 years old today.
THREE THINGS TO KNOW THIS WEEK:
Mrs. Doubtfire voice: Help is [not] on the way, dear. A severe lack of childcare in Seattle is a barrier to work, and the worker turnover and missed work it causes costs Washington employers more than $2 billion annually.
Surely this has nothing to do with the previous thing: Washington state is the 8th most expensive state to live in based on average living expenses. Hawaii and California top the list, but at an average of $2,468 per month in bills, living in the Evergreen State clearly comes at a price.
“I declare bankruptcyyy!”: Yellow, a major trucking company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the way it got there followed a familiar pattern: company struggles, workers concede billions in wages to help it stay afloat, company stops paying into pensions, workers keep working in hopes company will pay soon, and then company goes under and blames workers. Now 30,000 workers are out of a job.
TWO THINGS TO ASK:
What’s a flexible work location worth to you? Bosses are seeing slower hiring rates when they demand in-person work, and by an economist professor’s measure, employees value working from home the same as an 8% pay increase.
Bueller? Bueller? August 24th is apparently the sickest day of the year for American workers. Bosses question if we’re using the day for actual sickness or one last summer hurrah. Stay safe, and use your hard earned sick leave however you please *cough cough*.
AND ONE THING THAT'S WORTH A CLOSER LOOK:
The University of Washington released a study confirming what gig workers already knew: workers of color are being disproportionately deactivated. For a quick crash course on the problem, deactivation is how app companies like DoorDash, Instacart, and GrubHub fire an app-based gig worker, primarily via algorithm. Across apps, workers can be deactivated for no reason at all, often due to inaccurate data. Workers have no right to a process to challenge our deactivations, which means we can suddenly lose our income with no warning and no recourse. Mass algorithmic deactivations create a sudden loss of income for workers sector-wide, many of whom rely on the flexibility of gig work to take care of our bodies and our families. And the study found (just like we’ve been saying) that this is an economic and racial justice issue. These deactivations disproportionately affect workers of color, immigrant workers, and workers with disabilities who make up a huge proportion of the gig economy.
The good news is, last week Seattle gig workers won a major first-in-the-nation policy reform that protects workers from unjust deactivations, and showed the rest of the country what happens when we organize for what we need and deserve.
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!