Where I work, we get donuts on payday Friday. At one law office in Florida, workers go to happy hour after work. They all wear the same color shirt so they look like a group when they go out for happy hour.

A lot of places get crowded for happy hour on Friday nights, so it makes sense to me that they would wear a visible color so group members could find each other. On one recent Friday,

14 workers wearing orange shirts were called into a conference room, where an executive said he understood there was a protest involving orange, the employees were wearing orange, and they all were fired.

The executive said anyone wearing orange for an innocent reason should speak up. One employee immediately denied involvement with a protest and explained the happy-hour color.

The executives conferred outside the room, returned and upheld the decision: all fired, said Lou Erik Ambert, 31, of Coconut Creek, a litigation para-legal who said he was terminated.

Fourteen people fired because an executive was paranoid about some type of worker protest that wasn’t even happening. And people say we don’t need unions today because the “job creators” don’t do things like this? Seriously?

This is perfectly legal too as Florida, like most states, is an at-will state. With few exceptions at-will means the employer is free to discharge individuals for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all and the employee is equally free to quit, strike or otherwise cease work.

Some of the employees who were fired for wearing the same color shirt spoke to a local newspaper. “There is no office policy against wearing orange shirts. We had no warning. We got no severance, no package, no nothing, I feel so violated,” according to one. Another said “I’m a single mom with four kids, and I’m out of a job just because I wore orange today.” One wants us to know they weren’t protesting: “To my mind, protesting is where you put your foot down, and you’re not working. There was none of that today.” But that doesn’t matter—all that matters is that their boss thought they might be protesting.

Fired for wearing orange without warning and because of the paranoid delusions of a “job creator.” His assumption that his employees were protesting management just cost 14 people their livelihoods. This is so wrong on so many levels and is just one more reason why unions are necessary.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on March 21, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mark Anderson, a Daily Kos Labor contributor, describes himself as a 44 year-old veteran, lifelong Progressive Democrat, Rabid Packer fan, Single Dad, Part-time Grad Student, and Full-time IS worker. You can learn more about him on his Facebook, “Kodiak54 (Mark Andersen)”

One official measure of poverty around the world is surviving on $2 per day or less. It’s a condition many Americans could barely imagine living in. And yet the official data suggests that while politicians insist the U.S. is insulated from such deprivation, a large share of the country is feeling a cold draft from the “Third World.”

A set of new analyses from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), drawing from a study of income data by the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center, shows that for well over a million households, many of them with children, are besieged by hardship of an epic magnitude:

The number of U.S. households living on less than $2 per person per day — which the study terms “extreme poverty” — more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million, the study finds… The number of children in extremely poor households also doubled, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

The World Bank’s $2-per-day metric derives from widespread cliche in humanitarian circles, generally used to describe poor countries in the Global South. But while some question the usefulness of such simplistic measures, the phrase has a unique application in a country that’s historically represented the top of the human development scale. And one reason why the U.S. has so many people stuck at the bottom is because in many communities, this inequality is practically written into the law, with public assistance programs virtually enforcing the extreme poverty line.

Since bipartisan welfare “reform” under the Clinton administration, which precipitated the gutting of programs and erosion of benefit levels over time, the poorest households have become mired in outmoded welfare systems that don’t correspond to real social needs:

Benefits are below half of the poverty line in every state.  For a family of three, benefits are only about $2 per person per day in Mississippi and Tennessee and only slightly more than $2 per person per day in Alabama and South Carolina, for example.

It’s basic math: Add the recent recession to years of wealth-hoarding by the richest Americans, factor in endemic socioeconomic, racial and gender inequality, and you get polarization that’s global in scale and intensity. This is reflected in each individual whose daily standard of living is worth the cost of a Wall Street financier’s morning coffee.

Although the stimulus package enacted by the Obama administration gave a temporary boost to welfare programs, those dollars have dried up. The safety net is further unraveled, according to the CBPP, by a block-grant funding system in which the benefit “does not increase in response to increased need.” Meanwhile, recently proposed budget cuts to federal housing assistance (from both the White House and Congress) would raise the cost of rent for hundreds of thousands of struggling families. In other words, the “ownership society” is effectively disowning its neediest members.

Extreme poverty is acutely painful for already vulnerable demographics. The largest jump in $2-a-day poverty—a stunning three-fold increase since 1996—hit female-headed households. Children in poverty, who face long-term barriers to education and healthcare, and are disproportionately black and Latino(but including many whites as well), tend to carry these hardships into adulthood.

According to CBPP researcher Arloc Sherman, these trends affirm other research suggesting that “it has become harder to access welfare.” Since the reforms of the 1990s, which instituted onerous work requirements and other restrictions, the percentage of very poor families covered by TANF has tumbled.

On the other hand, what’s left of the safety net continues to play a critical role in preventing total devastation for many.  “I suspect for those who lost jobs in the recession, Unemployment Insurance—thanks in part to [The Recovery Act]—played a big role in keeping people’s cash incomes above $2 per person per day,” Sherman told In These Times.

While the presidential hopefuls race to outdo each other in gratuitously denigrating the poor (along with people of color, single women and other time-honored scapegoats), it’s important to keep in mind that these populations don’t fit the standard caricatures of welfare queens and freeloaders.

The CBPP’s research also reveals that the population that uses public assistance–those conservatives demonizeas the “entitlement society”--primarily consists of old folks, people with disabilities–oh, and people with jobs. In fact, “People who are neither elderly nor disabled — and do not live in a working household — received only 9 percent of the benefits.” So in a labor market offering about one slot for every four job-seekers, a good chunk of those  “entitlements” go to the very same “hardworking Americans” that right-wing rhetoric contrasts with the supposedly undeserving poor.

The right pushes a delusional narrative of country divided between “makers and takers”—the productive go-getters versus the welfare-hungry sloths.  But when you crunch the numbers, it becomes all too clear who the real takers are: the ones who make it harder for everyone else to make a living.

This blog originally appeared in Working in These Times on March 15, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times. She is a regular contributor to the labor rights blog Working In These Times, Colorlines.com, and Pacifica’s WBAI. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, Alternet, Ms. Magazine, Newsday, and her old zine, cain. Follow her on Twitter at @meeshellchen or reach her at michellechen @ inthesetimes,com.

It’s crazy, but it’s true: I could not afford to go to work today.

I have a 45-minute commute to and from work, which costs me about ten dollars in gas each day. I’m down to six whole dollars, after paying what bills I could with my last paycheck. There are still unpaid bills, but there’s nothing I can do about them right now. I’m mostly worried about how the hell I’m going to feed my daughter until my next check on Friday.

This is not a position I ever expected to find myself in. I have a full-time job at a distribution center for a well-known retailer. The company has weathered the Great Recession pretty well, all things considered: overall sales are off by only 1%, a variance which until recently would have been seen as a business hiccup. But I find that the recession itself has given the Powers That Be at my job an excuse to do whatever they damn well please to their full-time employees.

The infuriating details are below the squiggle.

What frustrates me the most is that I shouldn’t even be in this position. I’m employed full-time, and I’ve been with this company for over five years–yet I cannot get ahead, no matter what I do. The reason why has much to do with the company’s recently-adopted position that full-time employees aren’t really an essential part; that is, they’ve come to believe that only salaried employees really matter. They don’t even call us non-salaried workers “associates” any more. Now they refer to us as “unskilled labor.”

About a year ago, my company announced a pay freeze for all full-time employees. This was done, we were told, in response to the economic dowturn. The reasons made sense at the time, and we took the news in stride. But lately, it’s starting to seem like something else. It seems there is money to be had…but not by most of us.

The pay freeze occurred at about the same time that the outgoing CEO was receiving a million-dollar severance package. Salaried employees–supervisors, managers, and such–were ostensibly included in the pay freeze, although they would continue receiving their monthly bonuses, typically three to five hundred extra dollars per paycheck. The Director of Operations (enjoying a salaried position, of course) actually joked out loud, “Whew! I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to buy that new car!” Ha-fuckin’-ha, asshole. Turned out, it wasn’t just a joke: two months later, he was coming to work in a shiny new Lexus convertible.

The average worker on the floor makes $8 or $9 an hour, which is barely enough to support any size family. Supervisors, meanwhile, start out at the equivalent of $25 an hour (with bonuses and other perks on top of that); managers and up are pulling six-figure salaries, at least. Now, on the face of it, I don’t mind that they make more. It’s how they go out of their way to make sure they get most of what’s left as well, to hell with everybody else, that has me and my co-workers silently enraged and visibly demoralized.

Following the pay freeze, management has raised the productivity bar on us twice: that is, we must do more work in less time to avoid getting disciplined or fired. How much we produce beyond the 100% “standard” determines our “incentive” pay. Whenever they raise the productivity bar, our incentive payouts go down. Those who can’t keep up are let go; those who do keep up are bringing home chump change. And few of us want to work very much harder than necessary to keep our jobs, since working at 200% production yields a paltry $45 (not much of an “incentive” there). So they’ve fired several people and not hired replacements, leaving the rest of us to double-up–and in some cases, triple-up–on the workload and attendant responsibilities. From 150 people a year and a half ago, we’re now down to fifty; those of us left are still doing the work of 150. In the end, the reduced staff just further fills their pockets.

After that, they eliminated sick time for all non-salaried employees, telling us it was because the old sick-time policy was being “abused” (abused how–by people getting sick?!) It’s all to “save some money,” we’re told…even though the company, as I said, isn’t doing much worse than years past. And over the last couple of months, it’s become clear where all that “saved” money is going: directly into the pockets of the supervisors and managers.

We’re no strangers to this company’s cold calculations, and how little they care for anyone but the precious few who belong to the Salaried Class. They use this state’s “right to work” status to do whatever the hell they want and get away with it. For example: they fired an epileptic for being “unreliable.” They fired another woman for trying to get our insurance to cover infertility treatments. The company has been sued many times, but, unbelievably, has yet to lose a case.

And that’s not the half of it. But for now, let’s just say that management and HR routinely cover each others’ asses, so they can do whatever they want and get away with it. It’s a comfy little clique they’ve made for themselves, and apparently all that matters is their special little group.

So while most of us have spent the last year trying to keep up with inflation, our bills and the crazy cost of gasoline, supervisors and managers have continued receiving hefty monthly bonuses. The rest of us get to enter a raffle for a chance to win a $25 “in-house” gift card for all our hard work–just enough to get one piece of merchandise. Gee, thanks. Some of my coworkers could barely cover monthly expenses in December, much less afford Christmas gifts. At least a lucky few of us had gift cards, though. Now we can take home the same crap we push out the door all day. It’s nice to know they care.

But here comes the real smack in the face: just before the holidays, the supervisors and managers had themselves a big party at work. They tried to keep it secret by calling it a “closed-door, high-level meeting,” but we “nobodys” have eyes and ears everywhere and it wasn’t long before we learned the truth. It was a catered lunch, at which the holiday bonuses were handed out. These were thousand-dollar checks, mind you, and separate from their usual monthly bonuses. On top of that, they were given not-inexpensive gifts like fancy heated car-seat covers and custom-embroidered coats (which they now wear around like status symbols). And after that, they had an “everybody wins” raffle in which MORE monetary prizes were handed out, ranging from $500 to $2000.

Must be nice. Tell us again…why can’t we have annual cost-of-living raises? Oh, right: because the company’s strapped for cash, and reinstating our raises might drive down the stock value. Can’t have that, now, can we?

A week after the higher-ups had their big shindig, management announced that this year’s annual holiday party was cancelled…”Because the company can’t afford it.” Gee, I wonder where all that money went?

So here I sit, at home, with six bucks to my name and no way to afford both a Chef Boyardee dinner for my daughter and the commute to the job that used to support me. I’m left to wonder how I’m going to afford gasoline, power, the car payment and and the house payment while they can somehow afford new motorcycles and sportscars.

It’s the same old “Austerity for thee, but not for me” mentality. It’s twisted, and it’s wrong.

I see in this the 99% vs the 1% in microcosm: those who labor the least literally get almost everything there is to be had, while those who actually DO THE WORK get exactly jack-shit. Management can operate with complete impunity, doing whatever the hell they want with no consequences, while the rest of us work in fear that the next cut might include our jobs. There are two sets of rules: one for them, and another for the rest of us (salaried people, for example, can show up late and leave early without penalty). There is no place for those who get ill, because they simply “cost too much.” The working class is worthy only of mockery, because if they were “somebody,” they’d already be part of the Salaried Class. In this environment, $25 gift cards are metaphorical slaps in the face.

We need something we can LIVE ON. I need a wage that allows me, at the very least, to afford to go to work! Many of us, myself included, are looking for another job; some fortunate ones have left already, but I don’t need to describe how tough it is to find something else. And there’s no guarantee that we won’t find the same kind of bullshit still going on, wherever we might end up.

No…it seems that we blue-collar Joes and Jills won’t ever get what we need–what’s FAIR–until those who mind the coffers–in both business and government–stop enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on February 7, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

In a crisis, it’s a tough thing to watch people scramble to survive. And those that already have a lot usually are in the driver’s seat, ready to pit one person against the other. The same is true for states–ever desperate to try to get a few jobs for its citizens (and, need I point out, voters) elected officials are ready to give away the store to corporate leaders, no matter what the price might be.

Per the Financial Times today:

As US states jockey to attract jobs to push down high unemployment rates, companies are benefiting from a host of tax breaks and other government-funded incentives.

But the race to offer sweeteners to corporations is raising questions about whether they are worth the cost.

And:

Maryland is looking at expanding benefits for biotechnology and research and development groups, while Missouri’s legislature is considering a $6m programme to keep jobs from decamping to neighbouring Kansas.

In the New York metropolitan area, competition between New York and New Jersey has generated millions of dollars in subsidies to businesses.

Does this create new jobs? Not really.

“Generally such moves involve just moving jobs around,” said James Parrott, chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute. “Companies play one [state] off the other.” He argued that for most businesses, “location is so important that no matter what the subsidy is, it can’t be the decisive factor in where they’re going to locate”.

Essentially, it’s corporate blackmail.

By the way, this is nothing new. Four years ago, I wrote about how companies were lying about jobs created in return for tax breaks given out in New York.

And one of the great corporate scam artists in this “give me a tax break to save jobs” is…surprise…Goldman Sachs, as I wrote five years ago. The leader in the financial debacle in 2008 had a lot of experience under its belt: in 2005, it extorted money from New York, threatening to leave the city unless it received tax breaks and low-interest bonds. It did so in a fairly ugly way.

Using the specter of September 11th as a club, the company pocketed an unbelievable deal: $1.65 billion in low-interest, triple-tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, enabling the firm to save as much as $9 million a year in financing costs, which would save Goldman about $250 million over the life of the bonds. If that wasn’t enough, the city also threw $115 million in sales and utility tax breaks at the company, in return for a commitment to maintain its headquarters in Lower Manhattan and employ more than 9,000 people through 2028; those breaks could rise to as much as $150 million if Goldman adds 4,000 new jobs by 2019.

And, then, came a real beauty: rather than pay those tax breaks back, it set aside $16.5 billion in cash to pay out as bonuses at the end of 2006—an average pay day of $622,000 per worker. Of course, average really is misleading—the top dogs at the company will reap the big windfalls (CEO Lloyd Blankfein was in line to cash a check of up to $50 million), with the support staff probably getting a free Metro Card or maybe a nice holiday gift basket, at best.

These are not new stories. A great organization, Good Jobs First, has been banging this drum for a long time.

But, here we are. A crisis has drawn the piranhas to suck up any dollars at the expense of the people.

This post originally appeared in Working Life on September 26, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Jonathan Tasini is the executive director of Labor Research Association. Tasini ran for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New York. For the past 25 years, Jonathan has been a union leader and organizer, a social activist, and a commentator and writer on work, labor and the economy. From 1990 to April 2003, he served as president of the National Writers Union (United Auto Workers Local 1981).He was the lead plaintiff in Tasini vs. The New York Times, the landmark electronic rights case that took on the corporate media’s assault on the rights of thousands of freelance authors.

Plaintiffs suing Costco for sex discrimination face another round of litigation thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent dismissal of the Wal-Mart sex discrimination case. Because of the Supreme Court’s decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the Costco trial court must reconsider whether the plaintiffs can prove that the company should be liable for sex discrimination in store-level promotions. On this question the Court of Appeals, like the Supreme Court before it, ruled the wrong way, discouraging companies from implementing measures that would prevent discrimination.

When companies leave employment decisions like promotions to individual decision-makers without giving them clear, relevant criteria to guide their decisions, those decisions are often discriminatory, albeit sometimes unintentionally. Many corporations, including Costco, provide no uniform criteria – or any guidance at all – for making promotion decisions. This leaves each individual manager (the vast majority of whom are male at Costco) to make promotion decisions as he sees fit. When making decisions with unfettered discretion, people tend to rely on stereotypes and to promote those they are most comfortable with and who are most like them – in short, in the absence of clear criteria, men usually promote men. Witness Costco’s demographics: female lower-level managers at Costco are less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts. It appears that only two of Costco’s top 34 executives are women. The problem is not a shortage of interested or qualified women: Costco’s competitors have a much higher proportion of women in management than Costco does.

Companies can prevent this kind of discrimination. Sociological research shows that holding top management responsible for establishing and enforcing uniform, unbiased promotion criteria goes a long way. When companies provide managers with performance-related criteria for promotion decisions, managers can evaluate whether a candidate satisfies those criteria instead of making a gut-level decision based on personal relationship or other irrelevant factors.

Companies can also prevent sex discrimination in promotions by increasing the pool of candidates. When employees don’t know promotions are available, managers may not even consider qualified women for the positions – they may not know them well, or may rely on stereotypes to conclude that they don’t want promotions. The Costco case illustrates these consequences: the three women who sued desperately wanted promotions, but none of them ever applied for one – they couldn’t, because Costco did not accept applications, and they never knew when promotions were available anyway. An easy fix is to inform employees of promotion opportunities and invite applications. Interested women will throw their hats in the ring and managers will evaluate them based on the relevant criteria, resulting in more promotions of women.

The courts in Costco and Wal-Mart ruled the wrong way because they discouraged companies from adopting these measures. They held that corporations are not liable in class actions for the discretionary decisions of individual managers, creating an incentive for companies to wash their hands of preventing discrimination in their ranks. The more anarchic the system for decisions about promotions and other perks – raises, bonuses, etc. – the more insulation the company has from discrimination class actions. The Costco decision quoted the Supreme Court’s Wal-Mart ruling on this point: “demonstrating the invalidity of one manager’s use of discretion will do nothing to demonstrate the invalidity of another’s. A party seeking to [bring] a nationwide class [action] will be unable to show that all the employees’ Title VII claims will in fact depend on the answers to common questions.” In other words, if the only thing promotion decisions have in common is that managers make those decisions however they want, the company as a whole is not liable for resulting discrimination. In contrast, if the company disseminates guidelines for making promotion decisions that result in discrimination, the company can be held liable.

Smart companies will adopt best practices like enforcing uniform criteria for promotion decisions, both to retain and get the benefit of employing talented people and to avoid discrimination suits by individuals, which are not affected by the Wal-Mart and Costco decisions.

The Court of Appeals sent the Costco class action case back to the trial court for reconsideration, giving the plaintiffs another chance. But the trial court will labor under the higher court’s instruction (again, quoting the Wal-Mart decision) that it “must determine whether there was ‘significant proof that [Costco] operated under a general policy of discrimination.’” Proving that Costco operated under a general policy of laissez faire will not suffice to save this sex discrimination case.

This post originally appeared on Piper Hoffman-Rock the Boat: Law, Society, and Social Justice on September 22, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Piper Hoffman is a writer and employee-side employment lawyer. She holds degrees with honors from Harvard Law School and Brown University. Hoffman blogs regularly on law and social justice issues at piperhoffman.com.

Mitchell Hirsch catches a whole bunch of discriminatory job listings showing up at CareerBuilder.com:

The latest examples appear two months after the National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a report detailing similarly exclusionary job postings this spring.  Since then, federal legislation has been introduced that would ban hiring practices, including job ads, that discriminate against unemployed workers by excluding them from consideration for employment opportunities.  As these harmful practices have attracted growing attention, one leading job site — Indeed.com — recently announced it would no longer post such exclusionary ads.

That’s even as the movement to ban such discrimination gains steam. Wednesday, Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Hank Johnson and Senator Richard Blumenthal, sponsors of House and Senate bills prohibiting discrimination against unemployed jobseekers, held a press conference on the issue, at which:

Congress today received a petition with 250,000 names in support of ending discrimination against the unemployed, said David Elliot, a spokesman with the Washington-based USAction, a federation of 22 state affiliates that advocates for human- service programs and support for public education.

Shockingly,

Already, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) took to the House floor to speak out against the idea as just creating another “protected class.”

Johnson said much of Republican objection is politically motivated.

“[Some Republicans] don’t want to see the president be successful.” He added the American people “are looking past the cynicism and they’re looking at their pocket books. … They want some action.”

There’s no question about the political motivations of Republicans—the question is if they’ll be willing to go to the mat against a bill simply saying that employers can’t flatly rule out hiring unemployed people, a type of discrimination a poll has shown people want banned by a two-to-one margin.

This post originally appeared at Daily Kos Labor on September 21, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

Disclaimer: The views of this post reflect those of the author and not of Workplace Fairness.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos. She has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and has taught at Dartmouth College. From 2008 to 2011, she was senior writer at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.

Last week, Wal-Mart announced the latest component of its relatively successful campaign to shift its image from corporate villain to socially responsible role model.

The company promised that it would double its business with women-owned contractors and suppliers in the U.S. and internationally, and educate and train hundreds of thousands of women through its nonprofit Wal-Mart Foundation. That means the company will buy products from more women-owned factories and farms and hire more women to construct its stores.

The move comes after Wal-Mart was up against the largest sex-discrimination class-action lawsuit in history, until the Supreme Court threw it out this summer.

Most labor and social justice advocates are glad to see any corporation change its practices in the face of social and economic pressure, so Wal-Mart’s recent announcement and its other recent efforts, such as contracting with minority suppliers, adopting sustainable environmental practices and increasing diversity and fairness in its stores, can be seen as small victories for campaigns that expose Wal-Mart’s practices.

But many labor and watchdog groups are still skeptical of the mega-corporation’s sincerity and the larger significance of its corporate responsibility initiatives, and they are calling on the company to continue examining and reforming its practices in a big way.

Jennifer Stapleton is spokesperson for Making Change at Wal-Mart, a campaign of the United Food and Commercial Workers international union. She said in a statement last week:

Wal-Mart’s latest PR gambit is trying to cover up decades of unjust treatment of women, but women know better. Wal-Mart causes systematic economic harm to women in the U.S. and around the world, and that is precisely why Wal-Mart is trying to sell us on a new image. Wal-Mart keeps millions of women in the U.S. and around the world in poverty, fails to protect women from unacceptable sexual and other forms of workplace harassment and works many women to the bone in sweatshop conditions around the globe. And, according to the women in the Dukes v. Wal-Mart gender discrimination law suit, Wal-Mart pays women less than men.

In May and June, a group called Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Wal-Mart) surveyed 501 Wal-Mart associates. On a number of questions about pay, fairness and opportunity, women were consistently less satisfied and felt treated less fairly than male workers, by margins of about 10 to 25 percent, depending on the question.

More than half the workers answered that conditions were “poor” or “fair” in terms of having dependable schedules, opportunities for advancement and training, just procedures for discipline and termination and other measures.

These answers imply a mediocre to substandard employment situation–not overwhelming dissatisfaction, but not as positive a result as one might expect from a company that has gone into overdrive to improve its image. Three-quarters of workers also said they thought under-staffing is a serious problem that has resulted in customer dissatisfaction and/or messy stores.

And given the lawsuit and the company’s recent announcement, the group stressed that the disparity between men’s and women’s answers is significant. A release quoted Lancaster, Calif.-Wal-Mart worker Maggie Van Ness saying:

If what’s going on at Wal-Mart happened at a small company, it would be bad enough. But because Wal-Mart’s the nation’s largest employer and sets standards for our communities and other companies, this is a full-scale epidemic. The data show widespread problems that are especially bad for women, who need these jobs.

Wal-Mart is the largest private employer of women in the U.S., with 808,000 women making up 65 percent of its domestic workforce as of 2001, according to a paper by Making Change at Wal-Mart. Between 1996 and 2001, women working at Wal-Mart earned on average $5,200 less per year than men, and were also much less likely to have salaried, upper-level management positions, according to a 2003 report. It also noted women in salaried positions earned $14,000 less per year than their male counterparts.

Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission negotiated an $11.7 million settlement with the company over complaints that at a Kentucky distribution facility, women were systematically discriminated against for certain positions that usually went to young males.

In light of Wal-Mart’s recent promise to increase business with women, Wal-Mart critics also point to the story of Margaret Garner, an African-American construction-business owner whom Wal-Mart had celebrated for her lead role in building its controversial first Chicago store, on the city’s impoverished West Side. Four years after it opened, Wal-Mart has billed that store as a success and planned dozens more stores for Chicago. But Garner’s firm declared bankruptcy last year, driven by $11.9 million in debt from cost over-runs on the Wal-Mart, as reported by Crain’s Chicago Business. The Crain’s investigation explains that Garner’s firm, which received incentives under city programs for minority contractors, sent most of the actual work to firms owned by white males. Garner’s firm sunk into debt when it couldn’t pay those companies as promised.

Also, a University of Illinois at Chicago and Loyola University study alleges that the West Side Wal-Mart drove other local companies out of business, a long-standing complaint which Wal-Mart says is not borne out by facts.

But according to Making Change at Wal-Mart,

For decades, Wal-Mart has shown that when it “invests” in a community, that community can expect lost jobs, depressed wages, bankrupt local business, and lowering of labor standards to follow quickly. Women in the U.S. and around the world would be far better served if Wal-Mart would improve its labor practices, raise its wages, and use its power to stand up for human rights instead of undermining them through its day-to-day business practices.

This post originally appeared in Working in These Times on September 19, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Kari Lydersen is an In These Times contributing editor, is a Chicago-based journalist whose works has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Reader and The Progressive, among other publications. Her most recent book is Revolt on Goose Island. In 2011, she was awarded a Studs Terkel Community Media Award for her work. She can be reached at kari.lydersen@gmail.com.

Article first published as Judge: Bloomberg Did Not Discriminate Against Women on Blogcritics.

The judge who ruled that Bloomberg LP did not illegally discriminate against women for taking pregnancy leave raised an important policy question in her written opinion. Judge Preska did not drop “an anvil…on the work-life balance scale,” despite commentators’ efforts to portray her decision as a calculated blow against work-life balance; in deciding in Bloomberg’s favor, all she did was follow the existing law. In her commentary, however, she questioned the wisdom of the law itself, and noted that one alternative might be for employers to “treat pregnant women and mothers better or more leniently than others.” Judge Preska did not say whether she thinks that would be a good idea. It is a dreadful idea.

The judge’s legal reasoning in the Bloomberg ruling is by the book. The federal law bans pregnancy discrimination as a form of gender discrimination, as it should – only women get pregnant. The law does not require employers to treat pregnant women better than other employees, just not to treat them worse. Based on the evidence Judge Preska summarized in her decision, Bloomberg LP did not treat women who took pregnancy leave worse than other leave-takers; to the contrary, if that evidence is to be believed (in an earlier ruling Judge Preska threw out the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s expert witnesses, leaving the evidence lopsided in Bloomberg’s favor), women returning from maternity leave may have fared slightly better in terms of compensation than employees returning from other kinds of leave.

The evidence also showed that taking leave for any reason is not a wise career move at Bloomberg. The company policy is, in essence, that employees must put Bloomberg LP ahead of God, country, family, and whatever else figures in their particular pursuits of happiness. Bloomberg scoffs at work-life balance, and while that might be poor business judgment or even reprehensible, Judge Preska was correct that it is not against the law.

Judge Preska makes it clear that the law, whether she likes it or not, grants employers the right to ignore and even discourage workers’ lives outside of work. She quotes former General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s grim assessment that there is “no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

The judge writes that “it is not the Court’s role to engage in policy debates or choose the outcome it thinks is best. It is to apply the law.” Judge Preska goes on to discuss all the things that courts do not have the power to police. She includes in that list what she calls “work-family tradeoffs” – she does not believe one can have it all. But maybe one can have more than Bloomberg gives: the judge observes that it “may be desirable” and “may make business sense” for companies to “treat pregnant women and mothers better or more leniently than others.”

I disagree. Treating pregnant women and mothers more leniently than other employees is not desirable. The view that pregnant women and mothers deserve special treatment may appear feminist, but it actually serves the interests of those who want women pregnant and at home while daddy wins the bread. The law already bars employers from discriminating against women because of pregnancy and related medical conditions, so this policy question is not about whether women’s biology holds them back in the workplace. It is about whether some mothers’ choices to spend more time away from work than fathers and non-parents do should be underwritten by the government and employers.

“Treat[ing] pregnant women and mothers better…than others” would be an insult and a disservice to several groups of “others.” First, fathers: why should employers treat mothers better than fathers? To ensure that women take more time off work and that men don’t? To reinforce sexist stereotypes that, compared to men, women are better at/prefer/should be raising children? Those stereotypes don’t need much reinforcement: studies have shown that men who take paternity leave are later penalized in terms of compensation and promotion compared to men who leave all the child-rearing to women. The attitudes behind those penalties are the same attitudes that support treating mothers better than other employees.

The second group of slighted “others” is the ill and disabled: why should pregnant women and new mothers be treated better than employees who take leave that is necessary for different medical reasons? Pregnant women at least chose to suffer their medical condition, unlike people who have to take leave for, say, a kidney transplant, or to care for a dying parent. Pregnant women and new mothers should not be treated worse than others with medical conditions, and they should not be treated better.

Third, non-mothers: treating female employees who choose to bear children better than those who do not (and in some cases cannot) devalues the lives of women without kids. Requiring employers to treat mothers better in the workplace than women who are not mothers would divert both public and private resources to subsidize the individual lifestyles of people who choose to have children. People do not have children for the greater good or out of a sense of civic duty – they have children because they want to. It makes no sense to force employers to grant preferential treatment to women who choose to spend their time and resources having children over women who choose to spend their time and resources doing something else. It is not up to employers to value any of these private, non-employment-related choices over the others.

Judge Preska put a point on this policy debate by referring to “work-family tradeoffs” rather than “work-life tradeoffs.” But these are not the same thing. Family is not a substitute for life; family is a part of life, but there is more. For most people blessed with the resources to choose how to spend their time, life includes friends, the arts, physical activity, spirituality, or any of many other interests. The judge’s phrase, “work-family tradeoffs,” frames the issue as a question of trading family time for work time, implying that family is the only thing that could possibly merit time off of work. In the context of a gender discrimination case like this one, this framing is not only reductionist, it is frightening in its confinement of female employees to only two spheres: family and making a living.

Judge Preska merely outlines the policy choice of favoring mothers over other employees. She does not claim it as her own. But it is not a straw man: it is at the heart of many “work-life balance” criticisms of the judge’s ruling. Critics are not satisfied with the law’s requirement that employers treat women who take medical leave related to pregnancy the same as other employees who take leave for other reasons. They want pregnancy and motherhood to be privileged.

I am not on Bloomberg’s side. Expecting employees to put work above all else is a recipe for misery for all but workaholics, and an ugly manifestation of corporate greed. But putting children above all else is not the answer for everyone either.
Judges lack the power to force employers to facilitate humane work schedules, and in a free market with more workers than jobs, employees lack the leverage to reach company- or industry-wide bargains for a better balance. At least for now, people who choose to have children will have to make trade-offs to pursue their dreams the same way that people without children do. Under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Judge Preska’s ruling, pregnancy and related medical conditions are not a part of that trade-off – they should have no different effect than any other medical condition.

If other “work-family” trade-offs continue to fall more heavily on mothers than fathers, they will have a discriminatory effect. The most immediate and attainable palliative is for fathers to step up and mothers to step back. As more fathers take more parental leave the stereotype of women as children’s natural caretakers will begin to erode, and if women take less leave, the stereotype that women are not as committed to their work as men are may begin to erode too. Parents who can afford for mom to take non-medical time off with the kids should not wait for the courts or the legislature to solve their childcare challenges. They should tap underutilized in-house talent instead: dads.

This blog originally appeared  at Piper Hoffman on August 26, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Piper Hoffman is a writer and employee-side employment lawyer. She holds degrees with honors from Harvard Law School and Brown University. Hoffman blogs regularly on law and social justice issues at piperhoffman.com.

Some 25 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get the few jobs that are available—there are 4.7 unemployed people for every one job open.

As if those odds weren’t difficult enough, jobless workers face another obstacle: Many employers are discriminating against the jobless by prohibiting them from even applying for open positions. Their “Help Wanted” signs come with a caveat—if you are unemployed, you need not apply.

American Rights at Work alerts to an action by the advocacy group USAction, which is taking a stand against this unfair policy. Click here to sign a petition and join USAction in asking the popular job search sites CareerBuilder and Monster.com to stop promoting ads for companies that discriminate against the unemployed.

Last month, The New York Times reported that its review of job vacancy postings on sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed:

hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) also released a report last month that found:

employers and staffing firms continue to expressly deny job opportunities to those workers hardest hit by the economic downturn, despite increased scrutiny and strong public opposition to the practice.

The report coincided with the introduction in the House of the Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011, a measure sponsored by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) to create a level playing field for unemployed job seekers by prohibiting employers and employment agencies from screening out or excluding job applicants solely because they are unemployed.

This blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO Now Blog on August 22,2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: James Parks – My first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when my colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. I saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. I am a journalist by trade, and I worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. I also have been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. My proudest career moment, though, was when I served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

XX

Think you know about LGBT employment protections? Take this quiz and see how much you know. A new poll from the Center for American Progress shows that 9 out of 10 voters think there is a federal law protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination. They’re wrong. The poll found that 73 percent of voters do support such protections, including strong support from Catholics (74 percent), senior citizens (61 percent), and even people with unfavorable attitudes toward gay people (50 percent). Unfortunately, in most states the protections don’t exist, and levels of discrimination and harassment are high.

As many as 43 percent of LGB people and a staggering 90 percent of transgender people have experienced workplace mistreatment. Another column from CAP shares some of the personal stories of individuals who had these negative experiences and the consequences that come with, such as the fact that gay men earn 10-32 percent less than their heterosexual peers (PDF). Meanwhile, transgender individuals are twice as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to be living in poverty (PDF).

If support for protections is so strong and people think they already exist, it’s peculiar that employment protection bills face such challenges in getting passed. The federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act has been introduced for decades now without passing. Just last week, non-discrimination protections in Connecticut got a very transphobic pushback. Equality opponents raise alarm over these bills, focusing on nuanced details and promoting untrue fears. This new polling suggests that the number of people actually concerned about offering these protections is near-negligible. Legislators need to begin listening to the stories of those truthfully affected by discrimination instead of the absurd cries of a small pocket of extremists.

This Blog originally appeared in Think Progress on June 2, 2011. Reprinted with Permission.

About the Author: Zack Ford is an LGBT researcher/blogger for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Zack blogged for two years at ZackFordBlogs.com with occasional cross-posts at Pam’s House Blend. He also co-hosts a popular LGBT-issues podcast called Queer and Queerer with activist and performance artist Peterson Toscano. Zack has a bachelor’s in Music Education from Ithaca College, where we served as student body president, a Master’s in Higher Education Student Affairs from Iowa State University, and also helped found the Central Pennsylvania LGBT Aging Network. Zack holds a B.M. in music education from Ithaca College and an M.Ed. in higher education (student affairs) from Iowa State University, but he’s originally (and proudly) from rural central Pennsylvania.