Yesterday, I wrote about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.
From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives far better insight on a regular basis on these trends than anything you can read in the U.S. traditional press):
Bangladeshi garment workers, who make clothes for western brands such as H&M, Gap and Marks & Spencer, greeted a recent 80 per cent pay rise by rampaging angrily through the capital Dhaka burning cars and looting shops.
For the world’s lowest- paid garment workers, the increase in the minimum wage, effective from November, takes their pay from $23 to $43 (€33, £27.50) a month. It was their first pay rise for four years, a period of soaring food and fuel prices. However, the workers were enraged that Dhaka had not agreed to the $75 a month they had demanded.
“This is not enough for the survival of workers and their families,” said Amirul Haque Amin, president of Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers’ Federation, which has about 23,000 members. “Living costs – including food, clothes, shelter and medical care – are going higher and higher.”
….Demands for better pay across Asia reflect improving job opportunities in economies that are growing faster than their western markets.
….
In Cambodia, Phnom Penh recently raised the minimum wage by 21 per cent – from $50 a month to $61. That was below what the more activist of Cambodia’s 273 unions demanded, although a three-day, industry-wide strike did not materialise.
Vietnam recorded 200 strikes last year by workers hit by inflation of 9 per cent. In April, for example, nearly 10,000 workers walked out of a Taiwan-owned shoe factory, demanding better pay.
In Indonesia – where powerful trade unions with millions of members play a crucial role in negotiating with employers – minimum wages, set by regional authorities, have been increasing.
In 2008, Jakarta raised the local minimum wage by 10 per cent to nearly $100 a month, although wages in the country’s remoter regions are half that.
….
“There are no industrial relations,” says Mr Alam. “The whole attitude is arrogant and feudal. Owners and government think they are helping the workers. The workers are not treated like workers – they are treated like beggars.”[emphasis added]
What is going on here?
There is a thread that connects the anger coursing throughout the globe about the entire failed economic model foisted upon the world’s workers for decades. Here, people have had it with working hard for decades and seeing all that hard work–productivity has been rising for 30 years–turn into a steady stream of money into the pockets of CEOs and the richest one percent. Republicans and Democrats have supported a bankrupt economic system based on the “free market” and “free trade”, leveraged buyouts that obliterate middle-class jobs and a campaign finance system that greases a knee-jerk granting of tax cuts for business before making sure that regular people can form unions to act as a counter-weight to the rapacious nature of the market.
And what of those jobs flowing abroad? Well, the FT article shows the reality: slave labor. No surprise. Those stories have been surfacing for years–yet, despite the growing poverty around the world, we still have a bi-partisan support (including from our president) for the very so-called “free trade” policies that have bred substandard wages.
Where this leads is not easy to tell. It is easy to talk about worldwide solidarity–and a whole lot harder to make it happen, because of cultural and language differences, the massive physical distances between one slave-wage haven and another, the inability of the poorest to have enough resources to organize on a daily basis…a whole host of reasons.
But, it is clear–the people have had it. They cannot, and should not, put up with the siphoning of the world’s wealth and resources into the hands of a few.
About the AuthorJonathan 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.
Domestic workers in New York have won historic changes to the state’s labor law to include protections for their jobs. Final votes on Thursday ended weeks of wrangling between state Assembly and Senate leaders and Governor David Paterson, who said he would sign the bill.
The law guarantees domestic workers time-and-half pay for more than 40 hours and a day off each week, along with protection under worker compensation and anti-discrimination law and access to unemployment insurance. The compromise bill won’t include original demands for paid sick and vacation days and advance notice of termination. But three paid days off were granted after a year of service.
Domestic workers and advocates have been holding their breath since June 1, when 100 domestic workers and allies from around New York City traveled a well-worn path to Albany for a vote on the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The housekeepers and caregivers who tend to the children and homes of New York’s well-to-do had made this trip countless times in the last six years, coming face to face with lawmakers to campaign for basic protections on the job.
Promised votes that never materialized had disappointed them many times before. But on that night, after hours of worker testimonies and a few stories from state senators about the domestic work their mothers and grandmothers did, the Senate—at long last—voted 33 to 28 in favor of the bill.
“It was an incredible moment of validation,” said Priscilla Gonzalez, director of Domestic Workers United, the organization behind the bill. “We started six years ago by walking into legislators’ offices and educating them. Now we found ourselves witnessing senator after senator thanking these immigrant women of color who had been invisible for so long.”
DECADE OF STRUGGLE
The legislative victory in New York is a historic blow at domestic workers’ exclusion from federal labor protections. The legislation would be the first in the country to provide protections to domestic workers since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 first excluded them.
The biggest stumbling block appeared to be outgoing Governor Paterson. While he reaffirmed the pledge of support he made for the bill on a radio show last year—acknowledging the historical exclusion of domestic and farm workers from labor law protections as racist—he approached the bill cautiously, at first issuing a statement denying he supported it. After the Senate and Assembly approved the compromise version Thursday, with three Republicans joining all 32 Democrats in the Senate, Paterson announced he would sign the bill.
The law also calls on the state’s Department of Labor to study the feasibility of collective bargaining for domestic workers and issue a report by November.
Domestic Workers United has much to celebrate in coming this far. DWU, founded in 2000, estimates that at least 200,000 people in the state—mostly immigrant women from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—work in other people’s homes as housekeepers and live-in caregivers.
While some caregivers report decent working conditions with warm families and children they adore, others have to live with over-demanding bosses, and organizers have heard (and experienced) every horror story imaginable, from sexual assault to sewage-filled basement living conditions, abuse both physical and emotional—a litany of violations against basic human decency.
Even the not-so-bad situations can take a turn. Domestic workers report not being compensated for long trips, having to work while sick, and being let go without notice.
“A lot of times when you’re sick and can’t get up and go to work, you still get up and try to go, because you know you won’t get paid or they will replace you,” said Merilyn Blackett, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago with six years at DWU and nine years as a care provider for the elderly.
Arranging her own medical care has been difficult, too. Unable to get appointments during off hours, Blackett said she’d have to decide between getting paid or seeing her doctor.
Blackett and other determined workers met in 2004 to spell out what they wanted to see changed at work, giving birth to what would become the Bill of Rights.
TILL THE END
Domestic workers planned daily events in front of the governor’s office the week of June 14 to insist he sign the bill. Organizers burned through call lists and invited out prominent friends like the feminist leader Gloria Steinem, friendly legislators, labor leaders, and other allies gained during a decade of organizing.
Gonzalez said she expected legislators to prepare a compromise between the two bills, but argued for the strongest possible provisions. “Sick days and holidays are things that domestic workers on their own would not be able to negotiate—the power balance with the employer is too great,” she said. “We’re not asking for anything more than anyone else gets—we’re asking to get onto equal footing with other workers.”
Not everyone’s in support. Comments on news articles online show that for some employers, the bill hits a raw nerve. Gonzalez said some lawmakers fear the precedent this bill would set for domestic workers in other states and other groups of excluded workers—like farm workers.
DWU offers them no illusions: with their allies, they intend to run with the precedent as far and fast as they can.
SPREADING THE GAINS
DWU’s work is being replicated in other states through the National Domestic Workers Alliance, an organization of worker centers, immigrant rights groups, and domestic worker cooperatives that grew up out of the 2007 U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta.
Blackett said when she first got involved in DWU, after a friend encouraged her to attend a monthly meeting, “we were just thinking about mobilizing the domestic workers in New York City.” After DWU members went to Atlanta, she realized there were many other domestic workers they could help if they prevailed at home.
Domestic workers and their allies in California and Colorado are drafting their own bills of rights to introduce in their state legislatures. Organizations from the Bay to LA are collaborating to introduce a bill next year. They’ve produced a detailed survey of conditions, won the support of the San Francisco City Council, and gained a hearing on domestic worker conditions with the state legislature’s labor committee.
At the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June, the national alliance and a host of organizations planned a multi-year campaign to change federal labor law to cover all domestic and farm workers.
About The Author: Tiffany Ten Eyck, a Michigan native, has worked with the Student/Farmworker Alliance and the successful Taco Bell Boycott campaign. A former SEIU intern, USAS activist, and anti-war agitator; she covers the UAW, farm workers, workers centers, and building trades for Labor Notes.
During the past several years, we have represented employees of several clothing retailers, including sales associates working for Polo Ralph Lauren, Gap and Banana Republic, and Chico’s in California-wide class action cases. All of these cases were prosecuted under California labor law. Our most recent employment class action against Polo Ralph Lauren challenged its failure to pay employees for the time they spent waiting for and undergoing “bag checks” or internal theft prevention inspections at the end of their shifts. Our clients alleged they sometimes had to wait for up to a half an hour for managers to perform bag checks and let them leave the stores. They alleged that under California law this off-the-clock time was “work” and that they were entitled to wages for the time they spent in their stores between “clock out and walk out.”
Bag Checks Are Common In the Retail Setting
In the retail store environment, many companies require employees to undergo bag check inspections before they can leave their stores for breaks or at the end of their shifts. According to industry experts, bag checks are a loss prevention tool used by retailers to discourage internal theft. These bag checks are permitted under California law and are generally a mandatory condition of employment for certain types of retail workers. The problem arises when employees are required to wait for their managers or other authorized personnel to perform bag checks on them after they have clocked out and are no longer being paid for their time. Is this waiting time compensable under California, however?
Under California Law, an Employer’s Control Over the Worker Is Key
With certain limited exceptions, hourly employees in California are entitled to be paid for all the time they are “subject to the control of an employer.” Bono Enterprises, Inc. v. Bradshaw (1995) 32 Cal. App. 4th 968. This “includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so.” Industrial Welfare Commission Order 7-2001. In the Polo case, our clients alleged they had been locked inside their stores after they had clocked out at the end of their shifts. From our clients’ perspective, physical confinement plainly satisfied the “control” requirement under California law.
The Federal De Minimis Defense
Polo defended the claims by relying on a federal legal doctrine called the de minimis defense. The de minimis defense arose out of the Portal-to-Portal Act (a 1947 amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act). 29 U.S.C. § 254(a), a provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, provides that certain activities performed before (preliminary) or after (postliminary) the worker’s principal activities are not compensable.
Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, principle activities include any work of consequence performed for an employer, no matter when the work is performed. If the activity is necessary to the business and is performed by the employees for the primary benefit of the employer, it is generally compensable time, unless it is deemed to be de minimis. It is de minimis when the unpaid time is short, occurs infrequently and is difficult for the employer to track. Lindow v. United States, 738 F. 2d 1057 (9th Cir. 1984)
As the United States Supreme Court explained more than 60 years ago,
When the matter in issue concerns only a few seconds or minutes of work beyond the scheduled working hours, such trifles may be disregarded. Split-second absurdities are not justified by the actualities of working conditions or by the policy of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It is only when an employee is required to give up a substantial measure of his time and effort that compensable working time is involved.
Federal Courts, including the Ninth Circuit, have developed a three-part test to evaluate when unpaid work time can be described as de minimis. In Lindow v. United States, (9th Cir. 1984), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals explained that to excuse an employer from its wage obligations under the de minimis defense, the courts must evaluate: “(1) the practical administrative difficulty of recording the additional time; (2) the aggregate amount of compensable time; and (3) the regularity of the additional work.”
Thus, if the work time is short, occurs only on rare occasion and is very hard to track, under federal law the employer can essentially ignore it.
But, Does the De Minimis Defense Apply Under California Law?
One of the central legal issues in the Polo case was whether the federal de minimis exception applied to wage and hour claims under California law. We argued that applying the de minimis defense to our clients’ off-the-clock claims would undermine California’s “subject to the control” test. In other words, if employees under California law are entitled to be paid for all time they are under the employer’s control, it does not matter whether the time is preliminary, postliminary or de minimis. The only thing that matters is whether the worker is under the employer’s control. If control is present, then the worker is entitled to be paid for the time they are under that control.
While the de minimis defense has not been tested by any California appellate court, one thing is clear: “The federal authorities are of little if any assistance in construing state regulations which provide greater protection to workers.” Bono Enterprises, Inc. v. Bradshaw, 32 Cal. App. 4th 968 (1995). This distinction is of great benefit to California workers and is one reason most wage and hour cases in California are prosecuted under California, and not federal, law.
So, does the de minimis defense apply to wage and hour claims under more employee-friendly California law? We still do not know. Just days before the trial court in the Polo class action was scheduled to decide whether to apply the federal de minimis defense to our clients’ claims, the case settled for $4 million.
Eventually, of course, a California appellate court will be asked to decide whether the de minimis defense applies to California off-the-clock claims. For now, California law remains unclear. What if the de minimis defense is deemed to apply to California claims? If workers can establish that the off-the-clock work occurred regularly, amounted to substantial time during the course of employment and that it would have been feasible for the employer to track the time, the de minimis defense should not have a substantial impact on their right to be paid wages for all the time they are subject to their employer’s control.
About the Author: Patrick Kitchin is a labor rights attorney with offices in San Francisco and Alameda, California. He has represented thousands of employees in both individual and class action cases involving violations of California and federal labor laws since founding his firm in 1999. According to retail experts and the media, his wage and hour class actions against Polo Ralph Lauren, Gap, Banana Republic, and Chico’s led to substantial changes in the retail industry’s labor practices in California. Patrick is a 1992 graduate of The University of Michigan Law School and is personally and professionally committed to the protection of workers’ rights everywhere.
A new report shows that comprehensive immigration reform would help American workers and the U.S. economy. Reform that offers a path to citizenship for currently unauthorized workers and enforces workers’ rights would raise the “wage floor” for the entire U.S. economy and increase the total gross domestic product (GDP) by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade, the report says.
The temporary worker program only generates an annual increase of 0.44 percent in the nation’s GDP or $792 billion over 10 years. It also leads to declining wages for newly legalized immigrant workers, the report says.
Mass deportation would reduce U.S. GDP by 1.46 percent annually or $2.6 trillion, not including the actual cost of deportation, the report adds. Wages would rise for less-skilled native-born workers, while wages for higher-skilled natives would drop. The deportations would lead to widespread job loss as well.
History bears out these findings, according to the report. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided opportunities for citizenship, was enacted during an economic recession characterized by high unemployment. Yet it helped raise wages and spurred increases in educational, home and small-business investments by newly legalized immigrants.
Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the report’s author, says:
This is a compelling economic reason to move away from the current “vicious cycle” where enforcement-only policies perpetuate unauthorized migration and exert downward pressure on already low wages, and toward a “virtuous cycle” of worker empowerment in which legal status and labor rights exert upward pressure on wages.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on January 11, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He has also been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris
A recent Time magazine poll found that 71% of Americans who responded want the government to place limits on the executive compensation at firms that received bailout money. Yet accomplishing this task selectively is impossible to do.
The government did appoint a czar of executive compensation for these corporations, but he approved a $7-million salary/$3.5-million bonus plan for the head of AIG, 80% of which is now owned by taxpayers. Few workers, executives included, would agree to work for less than the going rate. Executives are simply used to earning millions of dollars, and there is little that either the czar or shareholders can do about it unless Congress limits all executive compensation. But the chance of such legislation passing is slim.
Why is limiting executive compensation so difficult? Because executives have a seemingly unassailable argument — market forces — that University of Chicago professor Steven Kaplan defended in an October debate: “Market forces govern CEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth.”
Of course, market forces are cited not only to justify outsized compensation for executives but also poverty wages for workers. Textbooks claim that minimum wage laws and union wages create unemployment. Just what are these market forces, and should we let them determine executive compensation and wages?
When British economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith examined this question 200 years ago, they concluded that what a person earns is determined not by what the person has produced but by that person’s bargaining power. Why? Because production is typically carried out by teams of workers, managers and machines, and the contribution of each member cannot be separated from that of the rest. A driver and a bus, for example, generate $100,000 of income a year. The driver is paid $25,000. Is this because the driver had transported 10 of the passengers without the bus while the bus had transported 30 of the passengers without the driver? The driver’s pay is so small only because the driver is so weak at the bargaining table.
It was Smith who explained that the bargaining power of each party is determined by the laws that the government passes and the way that it enforces them, and that, as a rule, the government sides with employers against employees. He was particularly concerned with anti-unionization laws. Had he witnessed the largesse that boards of directors are permitted to offer executives, and the government’s behavior toward executives in the current crisis, he probably would have added that the government also sides with executives against shareholders and taxpayers.
Despite the logic of Ricardo and Smith’s explanation that it is power, not productivity, that determines what people earn, the notion that people earn what they “deserve” persists. It dates to the Haymarket riot of 1886 in Chicago — in which police and labor protesters clashed and several policemen and demonstrators were killed — and the labor unrest that followed. Concerned about this unrest, John Bates Clark, a Columbia University professor, warned in an 1899 book: “The indictment that hangs over society is that of ‘exploiting labor.’ If this charge were proved, every right-minded man should become a socialist.”
It was thus with a clear political agenda that Clark took it upon himself to prove that the charge of exploitation of workers was dead wrong. Clark’s “proof” was to ignore the fact that production is carried out by teams and that individual contributions cannot be measured. He simply declared that the contribution of each individual worker and each machine could be measured, and that the earnings of either workers and executives or machines are simply the values of these contributions.
In this view, if the government were to raise wages by law, employers would have no choice but to fire workers, because no employer can pay out more than the worker puts in. And if the government were to set limits on executive compensation, the bright and the talented would choose to work less or limit the level of their performance.
Evidence that Clark’s theory is wrong — that production is carried out by teams and that astronomical compensation is not a requirement for good performance — can be found everywhere. In 1941, Wassily Leontief, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, tried to alert economists to the fallacy of Clark’s theory. But Leontief, like Ricardo and Smith, was ignored. And Clark’s tale that earnings are determined by productivity alone is still being taught around the globe.
Corporate executives take a different approach: picking the argument that suits them. When it comes to their workers’ wages, Clark’s theory rules: The wage of each worker is equal to the value of his or her product, and raising wages will cause unemployment. When it comes to the executives’ own compensation, however, they hide behind the idea that an individual’s contribution can’t be measured. So even when the corporations they run lose big and their stocks decline, they still collect millions in pay. Executive compensation is now so large that executives’ work effort no longer has any relation to the level of their compensation.
Adam Smith got it right: The remedy for the rule of power is the rule of law. We need new laws to check the unfair distribution of the fruits of our labor. One such law could set a maximum ratio at any given company between the highest executive compensation and the lowest worker’s wage. Another could set a minimum ratio for the division of income between labor and shareholders. Still another could raise the minimum wage and tie it to the median wage, which would make the minimum wage a consistent living wage.
Overpaid executives take more than their fair share and leave too little for the rest of us, threatening our health — and that of society.
Moshe Adler teaches economics at Columbia University and is the author of “Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal.”
*This article originally appeared in The L.A. Times on January 4, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
If we have Mother’s Day to celebrate mothers, Father’s Day to celebrate fathers, and Valentine’s Day to celebrate lovers, it makes eminent sense to have a day—Labor Day—to celebrate the nation’s workers. Far too often the accomplishments of the nation’s workers—whether it’s producing the food we eat or protecting us from hurricanes—are ignored, instead of honored. Labor Day should be a day in which the nation dedicates itself to the proposition that its workers—indeed every worker—deserves respect and fair treatment.
The two main themes of my book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, are that America’s workers are being squeezed economically and treated with less and less respect. This declining respect has taken several disturbing forms. First, many companies and managers treat their workers with a shocking callousness. A Wal-Mart cashier in Kansas City told me that managers were so stingy about bathroom breaks that some cashiers ended up soiling themselves. A computer engineer was laid off while his eight-year-old was visiting on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Corporate managers told Myra Bronstein, a software engineer in Seattle, that as long as the company did well and she worked hard—she put in many 14-hour days—she would have a job. But one day the company suddenly fired Bronstein and 17 other engineers, telling them that if they wanted any severance pay, they had to spend the next four weeks training the workers from India who would be replacing them. “We felt sucker-punched,” Bronstein told me. I remember a janitor in Houston—who made $5.25 an hour after a decade on the job—telling me, “They treat us worse than animals.”
Another sign of diminished respect is the way many managers cheat employees out of wages. Managers at Wal-Mart, Pep Boys and Family Dollar admitted to me that they secretly erased hours from workers’ time records because of fierce pressures from above to minimize costs. At many stores and restaurants, managers strong-arm employees into working off the clock, threatening to write them up unless they work several hours unpaid. It’s galling that many of these victims of wage theft earn less than $10 an hour and are barely scraping by. The growing number of lawsuits over wage theft underlines that something is badly broken in the nation’s workplaces.
This declining respect has also translated into a worse economic deal for millions of workers. During the economic expansion that began in November 2001, corporate profits soared and productivity per worker rose more than 15 percent. Nonetheless, hourly wages have actually slid since then, after inflation, while median income for working-age households has fallen by $2,000 this decade. At the same time, health and pension benefits are deteriorating and job security shriveling. That the nation’s corporations have not shared their increased prosperity, profits and productivity with their workers also shows that something is broken.
In The Big Squeeze, I write of other ways that companies show little respect for their employees. Workers have a right to unionize, but many corporations (and their union-busting consultants) flout the law to keep out unions, by, for example, firing the workers who lead organizing drives. And some companies, most notably FedEx Ground, insist that workers are independent contractors even as judges and labor officials say the companies maintain such tight control over everything these workers do that it’s a sham to call them independent contractors.
To put it crudely, many companies seem to treat their workers like chumps—to be squeezed on wages, pushed to the limit and discarded when no longer needed.
What this nation needs is a movement to revalorize its workers—and what better day to launch such a movement than Labor Day. Plain and simple, revalorization would mean treating workers with a newfound respect, to start treating them as if they and their concerns matter. For too many years, the American worker has not been part of the conversation. For too long, the nation’s workers are viewed as Bud drinkers, NASCAR fans, Oprah watchers, members of the ownership society, but not as workers qua workers. For too long, the nation’s politicians, news media and public discourse have largely ignored the struggling worker (except every four years when presidential candidates descend on factories in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with TV cameras in tow). All this has made it easier for corporations to continue squeezing workers ever so quietly and for many political leaders to ignore workers’ problems (while cozying up to corporate donors).
Fortunately the nation has begun paying more attention to workers in recent months because of the economic downturn and the presidential campaign. Here’s hoping that after the next president is inaugurated on Jan 20, the nation’s beleaguered workers will not again be ignored and forgotten.
Labor Day should be a day to help push the nation’s workers—and their problems—onto center stage.
About the Author:Steven Greenhouse has been covering labor and workplace issues for The New York Times since October 1995. He joined the Times in 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago and then five years as the paper’s European economics correspondent, based in Paris. He then spent four years in Washington D.C. for the Times, covering economics and foreign affairs.
He has a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also has a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.
For more information on his book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, see the Web site stevengreenhouse.com.
Yesterday, I wrote about how the decline of U.S. wages has made workers here cheaper to hire than workers in India, at least in the call center industry. Today, the news hails from Asia where workers are rising up against poverty-level wages.
Domestic workers in New York have won historic changes to the state’s labor law to include protections for their jobs. Final votes on Thursday ended weeks of wrangling between state Assembly and Senate leaders and Governor David Paterson, who said he would sign the bill.
During the past several years, we have represented employees of several clothing retailers, including sales associates working for 
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