Deanna Krokos is a student at Harvard Law School
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 job after being laid off from another food-service position at the height of Seattle’s outbreak, in response to the unpredictable, unresponsive, and unbelievably slow unemployment insurance process. The bar’s owner, after facing months of lock-down and a major disruption in cash-flow, sought less-experienced workers less likely to ask for fair wages or point out health and safety risks. Wojtas describes working in a packed bar without the necessary gloves, soap, and sanitizer necessary to even pretend the infection risk was abated. Though she issued an anonymous report to the county health department, after being discouraged by OSHA’s less-than-clear website, Wojtas ultimately quit the job to protect herself.
The piece highlights the issue of worker voice during a pandemic, and how front-line workers most likely to notice safety risks are the least empowered to remedy them. For more on this, see the Clean Slate Project’s recent report, “Worker Power and Voice in the Pandemic Response.”
This week, Google’s parent company Alphabet entered into a settlement committing $310 million to diversity and equity initiatives, ending forced arbitration of discrimination and harassment claims, limiting the company’s use of non-disclosure agreements, and promising other changes demanded by workers and labor unions. In 2018, 20,000 workers walked out to protest a toxic workplace culture and management’s mishandling of employee complaints laid bare by executive Andy Rubin’s $90 million exit package, awarded although he faced serious sexual harassment claims. Importantly, these worker concerns were taken up and represented by Alphabet shareholders, Northern California Pipe Trades Pension Plan and Teamsters Local 272 Labor Management Pension Fund, who brought Alphabet to court for breaching a fiduciary duty by tolerating this “culture of concealment.” Alphabet announced that some key reforms, including the authority granted to an independent audit board, will extend beyond Google to 11 subsidiary companies like Verily and Waymo.
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August 26
Park employees at Yosemite vote to unionize; Philadelphia teachers reach tentative three-year agreement; a new report finds California’s union coverage remains steady even as national union density declines.
August 25
Consequences of SpaceX decision, AI may undermine white-collar overtime exemptions, Sixth Circuit heightens standard for client harassment.
August 24
HHS cancels union contracts, the California Supreme Court rules on minimum wage violations, and jobless claims rise
August 22
Musk and X move to settle a $500 million severance case; the Ninth Circuit stays an order postponing Temporary Protection Status terminations for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal; the Sixth Circuit clarifies that an FMLA “estimate” doesn’t hard-cap unforeseeable intermittent leave.
August 21
FLRA eliminates ALJs; OPM axes gender-affirming care; H-2A farmworkers lose wage suit.
August 20
5th Circuit upholds injunctions based on challenges to NLRB constitutionality; Illinois to counteract federal changes to wage and hour, health and safety laws.