October 19th 2021
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As the words “remote work,” “quarantine,” and “social distancing” were fixed into the public lexicon in the last year, millions of frontline workers, in grocery stores, warehouses, hospitals, retail shops, restaurants, and factories, have been forced to continue...
Record numbers of holiday shoppers are doing their gift buying online this year. This is placing enormous stress on warehouse workers employed by online retailers like Amazon and Target, who report unsafe conditions as they pack into indoor warehouses and struggle...
This week, Eater published the account of Miriam Wojtas, a bartender working in Seattle during the covid-19 pandemic. Grounded in the bartender’s experience, the piece contextualizes and reifies some of the most pressing concerns about the pandemic. Miriam took the...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the monthly jobs report this morning, showing a nonfarm payroll increase of 1.8 million jobs, as well as a slight decrease in the unemployment rate to 10.2% for the month of July. The industry with the largest...
The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred multiple crises in our country including a public health crisis and an economic one. The need to protect the health of Americans and the need to protect their livelihoods might seem to require disparate approaches. But,...
Yesterday, the Supreme Court released two landmark decisions striking at the heart of federal employment law. In Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, No. 19–431, the Court ruled 7-2 to uphold two Trump administration rules expanding existing religious...
Since the pandemic began, declines in workforce participation have proven particularly stark among women. Experts attribute this phenomenon in part to women’s disproportionate representation in service-sector businesses, which have been especially affected by the...
Clean Slate for Worker Power released a report today outlining recommendations for empowering worker voices and building a more equitable economy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. The report focuses on various threats COVID poses to working people: not just...
The U.S. meatpacking industry is providing some unfortunate lessons in how not to deal with a pandemic. For example, to address the emerging crisis in the industry, the White House and the state of Iowa ignored the voices of workers and instead consulted only with...
For many of us, our main contribution to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic is staying home. Many governors have issued orders to “shelter in place,” borrowing the term from natural disaster response. That is, stay where you are, leave only if absolutely...
Working conditions at Amazon and Whole Foods, which Amazon owns, are coming under the spotlight as the companies continue to operate amid the pandemic. The tech behemoth is apparently acutely concerned that worker unrest may be leading to unionization. Business...
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, some of our most essential workers are temp workers. The warehouse workers who fulfill and package online orders often don’t work for Amazon but for temporary staffing agencies that contract with Amazon. The nurses brought in to...