#Labor Department

[threefeline]

Haven’t seen anything about this here yet but they’re trying to pass something in March that basically makes companies like Lyft and DoorDash to reclassify their workers from "contractors" to "employees" and idk this is kinda cool. It basically makes them follow six criteria to see wether the worker is an ‘employee’ or a ‘contractor’ whereas Trump’s old rule was only two and it was like super weirdly vaguely worded

The title is a bit inflammatory but the article describes that it’s a pretty big win for the workers so

[follow-up-news]

The U.S. Department of Labor wants a federal judge to prevent Hyundai and two other Alabama companies from what the government contends is the illegal employment of children. The complaint filed Thursday follows an investigation by the department’s Wage and Hour Division that found a 13-year-old worked between 50 and 60 hours a week operating machines on an assembly line that formed sheet metal into auto body parts. The defendants include Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama LLC, SMART Alabama LLC and Best Practice Service, LLC. The lawsuit said it seeks to end the use of child labor and require that the companies give up profits linked to the alleged practice.

[rightnewshindi]

मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ नहीं दे रहे शिक्षण संस्थान, श्रम विभाग ने 15 संस्थानों को भेजे नोटिस

मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ नहीं दे रहे शिक्षण संस्थान, श्रम विभाग ने 15 संस्थानों को भेजे नोटिस #News #RightNewsIndia #RightNews

श्रम विभाग ने कर्मचारियों को मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ न देने वालों संस्थानों पर शिकंजा कसना शुरू कर दिया है। शिमला जोन के तहत विभाग के श्रम निरीक्षकों ने 50 से अधिक शिक्षण संस्थानों का निरीक्षण किया है। इनमें 15 संस्थानों को कानून का उल्लंघन करने पर नोटिस जारी किए गए हैं। यदि यह संस्थान कानून का पालन सुनिश्चित नहीं करते तोे अब इनके खिलाफ कानूनी कार्रवाई होगी। मातृत्व लाभ (संशोधन)…

[narmadanchal]

लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ ने कलेक्टर के नाम दिया मांगों का ज्ञापन

इटारसी। लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ (Public Service Center Employees Union) ने कलेक्टर को ज्ञापन देकर कर्मचारियों ने अपनी समस्या सुनाई। संघ ने कलेक्टर (Collector), अनुविभागीय अधिकारी, तहसीलदार एवं श्रम विभाग (Labor Department) के नाम ज्ञापन दिया। लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ के जिला अध्यक्ष सचिन केवट (Sachin Kevat) एवं प्रदेश कर्मचारी संघ के सह मंत्री उत्तम यादव (Uttam Yadav), भारतीय मजदूर संघ…

[parttimereporter]

PSSI, one of the country's largest cleaning services for food processing companies, started being investigated last summer, the DOL said. 

While searching three meatpacking plants owned by JBS USA and Turkey Valley Farms in Nebraska and Minnesota, department officials found 31 underage workers as young as 13. PSSI's headquarters in Kieler, Wisc., was also searched.

The DOL ultimately found 13 plants in eight states had 102 underage workers – Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas. 

[iww-gnv]

Oct 6 (Reuters) - Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) must provide U.S. regulators with documents detailing its spending on efforts to discuss unionizing with workers, part of the agency's probe into whether the coffee chain violated financial disclosure laws, a federal judge has ruled. The decision, which the U.S. Labor Department announced on Friday, requires Starbucks to document travel expenses it paid to send former CEO Howard Schultz and other company officers to Buffalo, New York in 2021 after workers there filed a petition to hold a union election. The Labor Department subpoenaed the information as part of its investigation into whether Starbucks should have disclosed expenses related to the trip and bonuses paid to the company officers. Federal law requires employers to report expenses aimed at discouraging organizing and union membership.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Salaried employees who work long hours for low pay aren’t finding much sympathy among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

GOP lawmakers filed a resolution in Congress on Wednesday that would block the Labor Department from extending overtime protections to millions of salaried workers, a key workplace reform pursued by President Joe Biden.

Under federal law, only certain workers have a right to time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Currently, salaried workers must earn less than $35,568 per year to be automatically entitled to the overtime pay.

A new rule from the Labor Department, finalized in April, would raise that salary threshold to $58,656 per year, bringing an estimated 4 million additional workers under the law’s protection. Employers would then have to pay those workers a premium when they work additional hours, whereas now they don’t have to pay them anything at all for that time.

But the GOP lawmakers have filed what’s known as a “resolution of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act, which, if passed and signed into law, would nullify the reform.

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) sponsored the resolution in the GOP-controlled House. Forty Republican colleagues have joined him as co-sponsors as of Friday. No Democrats have signed on to the legislation.

GOP Sen. Mike Braun (Ind.) is leading the companion legislation in the Senate, where Democrats hold a threadbare majority.

Republicans have used the Congressional Review Act to kill progressive reforms before, most notably at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency.

This particular effort has slim chances of succeeding, since the legislation would face a Biden veto threat if it managed to pass both chambers. And regardless of the maneuvers in Washington, Biden’s overtime reforms face the possibility of being blocked in federal court. But the resolution still helps show where both parties stand on a key economic issue — worker pay — in an election year.

Business groups have come out strongly against Biden’s overtime rule and have opposed similar reforms for years, claiming they would force employers to cut jobs. But giving more employees overtime protections is popular among voters, much like the idea of raising the minimum wage.

The Labor Department estimates the reform would transfer $1.5 billion a year from employers to employees in the form of higher wages. The benefits would go disproportionately to workers who are women and people of color, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

But Walberg called the overtime changes “burdensome” in a statement and claimed it would lead to inflation.

“Small businesses, nonprofits, and colleges across America will now be looking at bottom lines, and then make the tough decisions to lay off valuable staff or force salaried workers into hourly positions,” he said.

Braun argued that overtime decisions should be left to the bosses. “If the free market sets the price of labor, opportunity and prosperity are the result,” he said.

Overtime protections in the U.S. stretch back to the Great Depression, when the right to time-and-a-half pay was first enshrined in law. The idea was to prevent employers from overworking their employees, and to spread more work around during a time of high unemployment. If a company would have to pay a premium to work someone overtime, the thinking went, then the employer might choose to hire another worker to cover the additional hours.

But the law has gone long stretches without being updated, and so fewer employees as a share of the broader workforce now enjoy overtime rights compared with decades ago.

The Labor Department said when it announced the proposed reforms that it was trying to rectify “outdated and out-of-sync rules” that leave many low-paid salaried employees — retail store managers in particular — working lots of extra hours with nothing to show for it.

[science70]

U.S. Department of Labor Graphic Communication Standards Manual, 1974.

Designer: John Massey

[todaysdocument]

News from the U.S. Department of Labor, "Federal Stop-Order on Indio Farmer" (USDL-IX-59S56), San Francisco, August 3, 1959.

Record Group 174: General Records of the Department of LaborSeries: Records Relating to the Mexican Labor ("Bracero") ProgramFile Unit: Mexican Labor Program, General Correspondence

NEWS from the U. S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

James P. Mitchell, Secretary

CONTACT: Tor Torland, Info Officer

630 Sansome Street, San Francisco

YUkon 6-3111, Ext. 647

[handwritten] Mr Robertson

File

Mexican Program [/handwritten]

[stamp] RECEIVED

AUG 4 1959

REGIONAL ATTORNEY

SAN FRANCISCO [/stamp]

FEDERAL STOP-ORDER ON INDIO FARMER

SAN FRANCISCO, August 3: Joseph Munoz, a member of the Coachella Valley Farmers Association in Indio, has been refused further authorization to employ Mexican farm workers in a decision made public today by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Under the terms of public law 78 and the international agreement between the governments of the U.S. and Mexico, Mexican nationals may be imported to work on our farms only if it has been determined by authorities that there are not enough American workers in a specific area to fill farm-labor needs there.

Munoz was found to be using Mexican nationals to sort tomatoes in his packing shed despite repeated warnings by the U. S. Labor Department and the California Department of Employment that American workers were available for the jobs.

Glenn E. Brockway, regional director of the Labor Department's employment security bureau, issued his decision in a letter to the Coachella Valley Farmers Association. Brockway said, in part:

"All authorizations issued to the Coachella Valley Farmers Association to contract Mexican national workers are hereby revoked with respect to the employment of Mexican national workers by the said Joseph Munoz."

The federal stop-order also specified that because of Munoz's "repeated failure to give preference in employment of United States domestic workers", no authorizations would be granted him in future to use Mexican nationals.

The move came as part of the U.S. Labor Department's continuing policy of strictly policing the foreign-labor importation program so as to ensure first preference for farm jobs to American citizens.

#####

USDL-IX-59S56

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing plan to provide policy and staffing to a future Republican president, proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years. It would also weaken overtime regulations, give corporations wider latitude in misclassifying workers as independent contractors, and dismantle safety regulations that prohibit young people from working dangerous jobs.

The initiative’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, is an attempt to roll back New Deal-era, working class victories by allowing state-level exemptions from the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and by creating nonunion “employee involvement organizations” to undermine unions’ negotiating power. It additionally calls for sharp reductions in the budgets of the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor and a freeze on new hires. Project 2025 is organized by The Heritage Foundation and includes more than 100 conservative groups on its advisory board, which have collectively received more than $55 million from groups tied to conservative megadonors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch. Leo has been pushing the Supreme Court to further erode the power of organized labor, and the Koch family has waged a war on unions for more than 60 years.

[...]

Project 2025: Eviscerate overtime and dismantle pro-worker regulations

One central proposal in Mandate that illuminates Project 2025’s extreme anti-work posture is the suggestion that employers should be allowed to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. The attacks on overtime take several forms, including a proposal to allow workers to accrue vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation — but at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted paid time off. Under this policy employers could coerce workers into “voluntarily” selecting vacation that they’re either formally or informally prohibited from taking, thereby denying them overtime compensation. Project 2025 further recommends that workers and bosses agree to extend the overtime threshold to a period of two weeks or one month. The policy would empower management to overload busy weeks with extra-long shifts and take advantage of slow periods through under-scheduling — effectively eliminating overtime altogether. 

[...]

A return to company unionism

Project 2025 seeks to roll back New Deal-era labor victories by proposing that Congress “pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws” — like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — “under certain conditions.” Allowing state-level exemptions to the NLRA and FLSA would almost certainly trigger a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where firms relocate to states with the weakest (or nonexistent) labor protections at the expense of workers. That’s what happened in states that passed so-called “right-to-work” laws — which starve unions of resources by preventing them from collecting fees from all employees they represent, thereby creating a free-rider problem — where employers were able to depress wages and union membership.    Unions have made significant gains under the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labor law and investigates anti-union practices. That progress is largely thanks to NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has taken an aggressive, pro-worker enforcement posture. Project 2025 promises to fire her on “Day One.” It also calls for reductions in the budgets of the NLRB and the Department of Labor to the “low end of the historical average,” as well as implementing a “hiring freeze for career officials.” 

[...] Project 2025 would further undermine unions by eliminating “card check” — where a majority of workers who have signed union authorization forms can ask their employer for voluntary recognition — and mandating “the secret ballot exclusively.” Although the idea of a secret ballot has the veneer of democracy, in practice it’s a power grab for management. By forcing organizers to go through the byzantine NLRB election process, an employer can buy itself time to wage an anti-union campaign and bog down the process, often through illegal means. A 2019 study found that employers violated labor laws in 41.5% of NLRB-supervised union elections in 2016 and 2017 and intimidated or coerced workers in nearly a third of all elections. 

The radical right-wing Project 2025 spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation in association with over 100 organizations has an agenda attacking labor and unions.

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Aug. 29, 2023

"The evidence presented in Treasury's report challenges the view that worker empowerment holds back economic prosperity," a department economist wrote.

A report released Monday by the U.S. Treasury Department argues that labor unions are critical to combating income inequality, which has risen dramatically in recent decades as union membership has declined and real wages have largely stagnated.

The report estimates that unions boost the wages of their members by between 10% and 15%, an impact that spreads to the broader economy as nonunion workplaces compete for employees.

"Unions also improve fringe benefits and workplace procedures such as retirement plans, workplace grievance policies, and predictable scheduling," the report notes. "These workplace improvements contribute substantially to middle-class financial stability and worker well-being. For example, one study has estimated that the average worker values their ability to avoid short-notice schedule changes at up to 20% of their wages."

In a summary of the report's findings, Treasury Department economist Laura Feiveson wrote that "increased unionization has the potential to contribute to the reversal of the stark increase in inequality seen over the last half-century."

"All in all, the evidence presented in Treasury's report challenges the view that worker empowerment holds back economic prosperity," wrote Feiveson. "In addition to their effect on the economy through more equality, unions can have a positive effect on productivity through employee engagement and union voice effects, providing a roadmap for the type of union campaigns that could lead to additional growth."

The Treasury Department report was released less than a week after UPS Teamsters ratified a five-year contract that includes substantial wage increases, a deal secured after the union threatened a nationwide strike.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is also looking to win a major pay increase for General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis employees. Last week, 97% of UAW members who participated in the vote opted to authorize a strike if contract talks with the three automakers fail.

Meanwhile, Hollywood writers and actors are still on strike, and others across the country—including nurses, hotel workers, and city employees—have walked off the job in recent weeks to demand better pay, benefits, and conditions.

The wave of strikes followed significant labor victories in 2022, a year in which Starbucks employees organized hundreds of locations across the U.S.—victories that contributed to an increase in the total number of U.S. workers in unions last year.

The union membership rate, however, fell from 10.3% in 2021 to a record-low 10.1% in 2022 as nonunion jobs grew at a faster rate than union jobs.

In a Monday speech outlining her department's findings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that unions are "critically important to workers' well-being."

"Unionization also has spillover effects," Yellen added. "Competition means workers at nonunionized firms may see increased wages too. Heightened workplace safety norms can pull up whole industries. Benefits also spill over to workers' families and communities."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[moleshow]

Real ones know I don't play about full employment. I was born a Keynesian.

(i have typos in these tags)

[writtenbylenora]

every day I go to work :’(

[enigmatic-97]

CYCLES

Breaking the cycle's

The woman in my family suffered submissively

They hate on who I am because it is what they were too scared to be

I will break the chain to heal what they refused to see

No more silencing the voice's that long to be free ~ BX