From the article:

An angry, lawbreaking employer just became $39,000 poorer.

Fox 5 Atlanta reports:

“A decision has been made in the case involving the Fayetteville man who was given 91,500 oil-covered pennies in January 2021 as his final paycheck by the owner of Peachtree City auto repair shop A OK Walker Autoworks.

The former employee named Andreas Flaten contacted the Department of Labor when Miles Walker refused to give him a final paycheck. The Wage and Hour Division contacted Walker. The shop owner then dumped the thousands of pennies in the employee’s driveway along with a pay stub marked with an expletive and published defamatory statement about the former employee on the company’s website.

The US Department of Labor announced a lawsuit against Miles Walker in January 2022.

It was determined Walker violated the FLSA’s overtime provisions by paying the complainant and other employees straight-time rates for all hours worked, including for hours over 40 in a workweek when an overtime rate-of-pay was legally required.

The court has now ordered the Walker to pay nine former employees $39,934 in back wages and damages and has forbidding the owner from additional discrimination and retaliation against any employee.

The court ordered the auto shop operator to pay $39,934, representing back wages owed and an equal amount in liquidated damages, to nine workers.”

For the full story, visit Fox 5 Atlanta here.

The words of Greta Thunberg this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pyi0L7_vwo

Activists are being systemically targeted with repression and are paying the price for defending life and the right to protest.

We are seeing now extremely worrying developments where activists all over the world are experiencing increased repressions just for fighting for our present and our future.

There is extreme hypocrisy when it comes to this. All over the world we're experiencing this. Not the least, for example, here in France. Just the other day - that activists are being systemically targeted with repression and are paying the price for defending life and the right to protest.

We're still speeding in the wrong direction

We are now at an extremely critical point. The emissions of greenhouse gasses are at an all-time-high, and the concentration of Co2 in the atmosphere hasn't been this high in the entire history of humanity.

And we're still speeding in the wrong direction. The emissions are on the rise, and science has been very clear on this. And the people living on the front-lines of the climate emergency have been sounding the alarm for a long time

Your thoughts?

Regarding the recent child labor crisis.

Thoughts?

Listen.

I also suggest the podcast.

Especially in Nebraska.

What are your favorite episodes of labor history?

Cool beans.

On Tuesday, workers for Cognizant, a major Alphabet and YouTube contractor, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board that they were being retaliated against for announcing a decision to join the AWU. They say Alphabet changed its policy to make relocation to Austin, Texas, mandatory for all workers, and noncompliance would result in “voluntary termination.” This, the workers say, is against NLRB rules that state that no major policy can be changed once organizing has been made public.

The tech industry has certainly shown it will go to unsavory lengths to limit worker pay and power. In 2015, Apple, Google and other tech companies agreed to pay a $415-million settlement after a lawsuit alleged the companies had colluded to keep pay low with a “non-poaching” agreement between CEOs. The tech sector seems to be betting that these massive, algorithmically orchestrated firings will not only cut labor costs, but also once again remind increasingly empowered tech workers of their insecurity, and the power the companies still hold. It’s a bet that has historically paid off and has helped transform the tech giants into some of the most profitable companies in history. it’s spurring interest in further tech worker organizing. “I think this really highlights the need for the people not just in the Microsoft ecosystem, but across the industry to organize,” he says. “I think this was a wake-up call. There’s a wave coming. And there’s no stopping it.”

On Thursday and Friday, about 32,000 Disney employees will be voting on a contract offer from management. These workers do everything from performing as characters to working in restaurants and shops, driving buses, trams and monorails as well as working at front desks and performing housekeeping duties at hotels.

Those working under this contract, all of them full-time employees, represent more than 40% of all workers at Disney World. The company’s five-year offer would raise salaries for cast members by a minimum of $1 an hour per year, taking most workers to at least $20 an hour by 2026. That would be $5 an hour more than the Florida minimum wage, which is in the process of being increased from the current $11 an hour .. This is a “very strong offer” with guaranteed raises each year of the five-year agreement, said Andrea Finger, a Disney spokesperson. She said the majority of employees will see raises totaling 33% to 46% during the life of the contract.

The company’s offer would pay housekeepers and bus drivers at least $20 an hour immediately and culinary staff would start at $20 to $25 per hour, depending on their role.

There will also be retroactive pay increases dating back to October 1, when the previous contract expired, providing lump-sum pre-tax payments of about $700 to full-time workers.

But union leadership is urging members to vote no. The unions say Disney presented this as its best offer and that is why it’s going to membership for a vote – not because there is a tentative agreement, which is the point at which an offer normally goes to rank-and-file union members for a vote.

And this time around, all indications are that the company’s offer will be rejected.

The six union locals working under the current contract want an immediate $3 an hour raise, or a 20% raise, for what it says is 75% of the members currently making $15 an hour, plus an additional $1 an hour raise every year after that. “While Disney insists at the bargaining table that this is the best offer, we know Disney can do better, and Disney knows they must do better,” said Hollis. He said the workers who would get more than a $1 an hour pay increase are in jobs where Disney is having trouble filling openings and retaining workers. Revenue was up 36% and profits more than doubled from the previous fiscal year. And both revenue and operating profits are above what the company posted in fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic, with a 12% rise in revenue and a 10% gain in earnings.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/18/s-korea-spy-agency-raid-unions-over-suspected-link-to-north-korea

https://www.ituc-csi.org/south-korea-government-raids

A shameless attack on labour rights - the Red Scare is real. If there're any Korean comrades reading this, stay strong.

"Corporate America is fighting back hard and the government is not on the workers' side at this point, unless the American people realise what's happening, realise the barrier and ask their elected officials to change the law."

A new study shows that firms of all types are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime a new study shows that firms of all types and sizes are giving workers phony managerial titles in order to avoid paying them overtime in what researchers see as an exploitation of federal labor laws. “If you are a manager and you're paid over a certain amount, in fact, that lifts the burden of firms having to pay you overtime,” said Lauren Cohen, a professor at Harvard Business School and one of the paper’s authors.

The logic at the time of the law’s creation was that managers are a special class of employee with a particular stake in the company’s future success. But today, many such workers are managers in name only, and the national threshold is only $455 a week, or under $24,000 a year. Cohen and his fellow researchers scoured job listings in the 2010s and discovered that right above that weekly $455 threshold, there was a 485 percent increase in the number of salaried positions with fancy-sounding managerial titles. Companies, it seemed, were often doling out fancy-sounding titles to salaried employees and then paying them just enough to legally shirk overtime rules. “We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a federal law,” the researchers state in their paper, which was recently published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30826 On average, the strategy appears to save companies significant amounts of money (and costs workers just as much). The researchers estimate that firms pocket 13.5 percent in overtime payments for each bullshit manager title they hand out.

The overtime-evasion trick held across industries and around the country, according to the data, but was most obvious within industries and states where workers had fewer rights and less bargaining power, as well as in low-wage industries that are more often dinged for overtime violations, like retail and food and drink services.

The lawsuit filed on Thursday alleges their employer has engaged in widespread wage theft resulting from repeated and ongoing problems with payroll. Through an online form, the union has received more than 1,000 reports from members describing problems ranging from missed and incomplete paychecks to improperly deducted taxes and health care premiums, among other issues.

The union has filed class action grievances against the company for violations of its collective bargaining agreement, and in December, the union filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against Kroger through the National Labor Relations Board. “As our case will show, Kroger has engaged in a persistent pattern of wage theft through its failure to correct ongoing and systemic payroll problems resulting from its new ‘MyTime’ software,�? said Matthew Handley, whose firm Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC filed the suit. “The company’s failure to correct these problems is in clear violation of federal and state law, and we intend to seek every remedy available on behalf of these workers. “What we once thought was an isolated local glitch has since revealed itself to be a national problem, said Mr. Federici. “We have spoken to several other UFCW local unions around the country and they’ve all reported widespread and egregious payroll errors. It is outrageous that we should have to bring a lawsuit like this to ensure our members are paid properly and promptly.

The company’s sole director Ayang Sony had arranged for him to travel from China to work for her company under her direction and supervision - but that required a $16,500 premium. While Song claimed the money was a refundable deposit, it was not returned when Sun’s employment ended - something the Employment Relations Authority has now found to have been a breach of the Wages Protection Act 1983. Sun signed an employment contract to work 40 hours a week over five days at $22 an hour when he got the job. But, once he started in the job he was forced to work longer hours for less money. Some fortnights he wasn’t paid at all and others he was underpaid which reduced his hourly rate to below the minimum wage of $15.75 for the next 18 months. A thorough investigation concluded the company had breached minimum employment standards by failing to pay Sun the minimum wage for all hours worked, not paying time-and-a-half and providing alternative holidays for working public holidays, failing to keep full holiday and leave records, not paying for unworked public holidays, not keeping full wage and time records and not providing compliant employment agreements. The company also breached the act by taking the illegal premium payment from Sun to secure the job. The inspector found Sun was entitled to $65,503.78 for underpayment of wages, holiday pay, other allowances and required the company to pay that money to him.

The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fundraising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters. For years, the restaurant association and its affiliates have used ServSafe to create an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management’s lobbying. First, in 2007, the restaurant owners took control of a training business. Then they helped lobby states to mandate the kind of training they already provided — producing a flood of paying customers. The president of the National Restaurant Association, Michelle Korsmo, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, she said the group had sought to protect both public health and the financial health of the industry. As money flowed in from the National Restaurant Association’s training programs, its overall spending on politics and lobbying more than doubled from 2007 to 2021, tax filings show. The national association donated to Democrats, Republicans and conservative-leaning think tanks, and sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to state restaurant associations to beef up their lobbying.

During the Clinton and Obama administrations, the association was a major force in limiting employer-provided health care benefits. And though pressure from liberal groups has grown and workers’ wages have fallen for decades when adjusted for inflation, the group helped assemble enough bipartisan opposition to scuttle a bill in 2021 to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour over five years.

The association had also won a series of battles over state-level wage minimums, though its fortunes reversed last year. Both the District of Columbia and Michigan moved to eliminate the “tip credit” system — where restaurants are allowed to pay waiters a salary below the minimum wage, on the expectation that tips from customers will make up the rest. That was the first time any state had eliminated the tip-credit system in more than 10 years.

Legally, the National Restaurant Association and its state-level affiliates are a species of nonprofit called a “business league,” with more freedom to lobby than a traditional charity.

Since the 1960s, their lobbying has focused heavily on the minimum wage — arguing that labor-intensive operations like restaurants, which employ more workers at or near the minimum wage than any other industry, could be put out of business by any significant increase in employee costs.

Fifteen years ago, they had just lost a battle in that fight.

Over the association’s objections, Congress had raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Former board members said they were searching for a new source of revenue — without asking members to pay more in dues.

“That’s when the decision was contemplated, of buying the ServSafe program,” said Burton “Skip” Sack, a former chair of the association’s board. “Because it was profitable.”

At the time, the ServSafe program was run by a charity affiliated with the restaurant association. The association bought the operation, transforming it into an indirect fundraising vehicle.

After that, state restaurant associations in California, Texas and Illinois lobbied for changes in state law.

Previously, those states had required food-safety training for restaurant managers, which typically was paid for by restaurants themselves. After the association’s takeover of ServSafe, lobbying records show, the state affiliates pushed for a broader and less-common type of mandate, covering all food “handlers” like cooks, waiters, bartenders and those who bus tables.

The three state legislatures agreed, in lopsided votes. “This law was happening with or without our participation in the process,” said the president of the California Restaurant Association, Jot Condie. California legislative records show his association was the sponsor of the bill that imposed the mandate.

After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck.

For $96.12.

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Attendance and sick leave policies have led to widespread anger and frustration among rank-and-file railroad workers on major freight lines

One of the largest railroad unions narrowly voted to reject a contract deal brokered by the White House, bringing the country once again closer to a rail strike that could paralyze much of the economy ahead of the holidays, union officials announced on Monday.

The union SMART Transportation Division voted the deal down by 50.9 percent, the union said. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents engineers, announced 53.5 percent of members voted to ratify the deal. The two are considered among the most politically powerful of the 12 rail unions in contract discussions.

The move highlights months of tension between unions and companies across a variety of sectors, as companies have been dealing with labor shortages and workers have taken advantage of more leverage in the workplace to press for better working conditions, more sick pay and more flexible schedules in the aftermath of the pandemic.

The rejection of the contract adds new pressure to the White House, which had been closely involved in negotiating the contract between the unions and rail companies. A shutdown of the nation’s transportation infrastructure heading into the holiday season would spell a political disaster.

Already seven of 12 unions have voted to approve their contracts. But in recent weeks, three of the smaller unions have also rejected their contracts and are back in negotiations.

The main sticking points for rank-and-file members have been points-based attendance policies that penalize workers for taking time off when they are sick or for personal time, and contribute to grueling, unpredictable schedules that weigh on workers’ mental and physical health, they say. In June, a 51-year-old union engineer put off a doctor’s visit, and died of a heart attack on a train weeks later, his family said.

the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees and the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, have rejected their contracts and would be allowed to strike or companies would be able to impose a lockout even sooner, right after midnight Dec. 5, unless Congress intervenes.

If those unions strike on Dec. 5, all of the unions would likely move in solidarity, provoking an industry-wide work stoppage.

In late September, with less than 48-hours to spare before a railroad shut down, Biden and other top administration officials helped negotiate a last-minute agreement. Points-based attendance policies had been at the heart of that dramatic showdown.

The deal struck included a 24 percent pay increase by 2024 — the largest for railroad workers in more than four decades — and, for the first time, flexibility for workers to take time off when they are hospitalized or to attend three routine doctor’s appointments a year without penalty. The deal also included a single additional paid day off. Currently conductors and engineers do not receive a single paid sick day, but carriers have said their attendance policy allows workers “to take time off when needed.”

But discontent among rail workers continued to brew. They say these concessions did not meaningfully change the points-based attendance policies that carriers began rolling out in 2020 to maintain staffing levels that they said they needed to keep trains running during the pandemic. Union members say the changes have come at the expense of their health.