Senator Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign announced on Friday that it will have a unionized workforce. A majority of staffers signed union cards authorizing United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 to represent them, and the campaign volu... More »
Employee pay and benefits comprise a declining percentage (52.7%) of the gross domestic income, even as unemployment rates remain low and demand for workers high. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the percentage figure for labor income fell again ... More »
Yesterday New York City Council Members Brad Lander and Adrienne Adams introduced two bills that together would require fast-food corporations to demonstrate “just cause” for discharging employees. The legislation has a broad definition of discharge, encompas... More »
As the government shutdown lumbers into its 28th day, federal workers are beginning to file for unemployment en masse, reports the New York Times. About 380,000 furloughed federal employees are eligible for unemployment, and the longest government shutdown on ... More »
Yesterday Representatives Bobby Scott, Stephanie Murphy, and Mark Pocan and Senators Patty Murray and Bernie Sanders announced their introduction of the Raise the Wage Act of 2019. The bill would gradually increase the federal minimum wage from its present ra... More »
The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission voted this week to create a minimum pay standard for the approximately 80,000 drivers in the city working for transportation network companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, and Via. The standard establishes a per-minut... More »
In its first opinion of the term, the Supreme Court unanimously (8-0) ruled in favor of the employees in Mount Lemmon Fire District v. Guido, holding that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) applies to all public employers regardless of employee he... More »
The employment status of Uber drivers has, to date, been considered in two Australian cases. In both cases, the Fair Work Commission (Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal), concluded that the drivers were independent contractors and thereby ineli... More »
The prison strike enters day nine, as the estimated 900,000 incarcerated laborers (out of a population of 2.4 million) demand “an immediate end to prison slavery.” Sarah Holder of City Lab, quoting ACLU National Prison Project’s David Fathi, breaks down the c... More »
In today’s Sunday Review for The New York Times, economic historian Louis Hyman argues that new technology companies like Uber and TaskRabbit did not create the gig economy but only took advantage of a decades-long shift to temporary work arrangements. He ana... More »
In the forthcoming September issue of Vanity Fair, Uber engineer-turned-Silicon Valley watchdog Susan Fowler examines the future of the gig economy. In her piece entitled, “What Have We Done?: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They’ve Created a Monster... More »
Gig-economy-giants like Uber, Lyft, and Instacart are quietly lobbying California Democrats to reverse a groundbreaking court ruling protecting gig workers’ rights. In the LA Times, law professor Veena Dubal explains the stakes. In Dynamex, the California Supr... More »
March 17th, 2019