Vail Kohnert-Yount is a student at Harvard Law School.
Instacart workers are asking customers of the grocery delivery app to participate in a two-day nationwide boycott next week. Organizers of the boycott have one demand: that the company restores its default tip amount to 10%. Thousands of workers staged a three-day national strike in November, demanding the app restore the 10% default tip, which it abandoned in 2016. Instead, the company slashed bonus pay—which comprised up to 40% of shoppers’ earnings—just two days later. Many of the app’s 130,000 “shoppers” have reported that their pay dropped by more than half last year. Workers are now asking customers to tweet under the hashtag #DeleteInstacart on January 19, and to email Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta on January 20, asking him to restore the 10% default tip.
The top lawyer at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is resigning after multiple accounts surfaced regarding his inappropriate workplace relationships. David Drummond, recently the subject of a misconduct investigation by Alphabet’s board, said that his departure is unrelated. In 2018, the New York Times reported on Drummond’s extramarital affair with an employee in an investigation of Google’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims. “Drummond’s persistence at the top of the management chain was something of a running joke in the wake of the walkout,” Claire Stapleton, a former Google employee who co-organized the historic employee-led walkout to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims, told Recode. “It made it almost impossible to believe Google management was taking the issues seriously.”
This month, Illinois’s Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act went into effect, which requires employers to provide notice and get consent to use artificial intelligence in job interviews. Companies must notify applicants that artificial intelligence will be used to consider their “fitness” for a position and explain how their AI works and what “general types of characteristics” it considers when evaluating candidates. Besides requiring applicants’ consent to use AI, the law also seeks to protect job applicants’ privacy by limiting who can view an applicant’s recorded video interview and requiring that companies delete any video upon an applicant’s request. The law, among the first of its kind in the U.S., does not require that employers provide an alternative interview method.
Last week, Starbucks announced that it would offer employees free subscriptions to the mindfulness app Headspace. However, some employees are asking Starbucks to take more meaningful action to promote workers’ well-being, namely by increasing staffing and pay. In recent weeks, Starbucks workers have recirculated a petition demanding that Starbucks address understaffing and “sinking morale.”
Daily News & Commentary
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February 21
In today’s News & Commentary, Trump spending cuts continue to threaten federal workers, and Google AI workers allege violations of labor rights. Trump’s massive federal spending cuts have put millions of workers, both inside and outside the federal government, in jeopardy. Yesterday, thousands of workers at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs research office were […]
February 20
President Trump's labor secretary pick retreats from some of her pro-labor stances during Senate confirmation hearing and Lynn Rhinehart discusses implications of NLRB and other agency removals.
February 19
In today’s news and commentary, Lori Chavez-Deremer’s confirmation hearing, striking King Soopers workers return to the bargaining table, and UAW members at Rolls-Royce authorize a strike. Lori Chavez-Deremer, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, faces a Senate confirmation hearing today. Chavez-Deremer may face more No votes from Republicans than other Trump cabinet members. Rand […]
February 18
In today’s news and commentary, an air traffic union examines the impact of federal aviation worker firings, Southwest Airlines lays off 15% of its corporate workforce, and the NLRB’s General Counsel withdraws Biden-era memos Following the Trump Administration’s dismissal of hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), a […]
February 17
President Trump breaks campaign promise to support workers and Utah’s governor signs a law banning public sector collective bargaining
February 16
Unions fight unlawful federal workforce purges; Amazon union push suffers setback in North Carolina.