A few decades ago the Bush family in Texas the the REAGAN/SCHWARZENEGGER family in CA used DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS to install these International Economic Zones creating the employment dynamic a few decades ago of Texas and CA citizens moving away or getting pushed into national contract work employment taking them all over the nation, working temporary assignments getting these citizens used to life a global labor pool NON-CITIZENS. Obama's terms moved this DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS and national contractor employment to all states and cities and this is when Maryland became Texas in sending its citizens all over the nation working for national contractors on temporary assignments. The Latino immigrants brought to CA and Texas decades ago left in large numbers as Asian immigrants came to those states and global corporate campus and global factories were built bringing with them more and more brutal work conditions and third world wages. That was last decade and again, Obama super-sized this problem because he embraced FEDERALISM ACT saying he would not enforce Federal laws and set the stage for the next immigrant flooding of US cities deemed international economic zones----with the IMMIGRATION BILL all ending badly for both US workers and immigrants already living and working in America.
THIS NEXT DECADE IF TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT IS INSTALLED IN THE US-----THAT MIGRATION OF US WORKERS NATIONALLY WILL BECOME GLOBAL ----SONS, DAUGHTERS, HUSBANDS, WIVES SENT OVERSEAS TO WORK IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES ROTATED FROM ONE TO ANOTHER.
THIS HAS BEEN THE GOAL OF BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION AND JOHNS HOPKINS THESE FEW DECADES AND IT IS TOWARDS WHAT BALTIMORE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL POLS WORK WHILE TIED TO WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT.
Keep in mind-----Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations know this is happening----religious leaders partnered with Johns Hopkins and Baltimore Development know this is happening----labor and labor union organizations know this is happening----SO WHEN ALL OF THE ABOVE PARTICIPATE IN ELECTION RIGGING AND FRAUD BY ALLOWING ONLY THE ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATES HAVE FORUM AND MEDIA TIME----they are embracing the people creating the injustice they then come out to protest.
This race to the bottom of wages effects ALL CITIZENS---there will only be a 1% with a global 2% and that will not include 99.8% of Americans. Our Johns Hopkins Ivy League grads will be that white collar sweat shop global labor force being lucky to earn $20-30 a day.
The construction building in Texas is International Economic Zone global corporate campuses and global factories and the housing is just like Baltimore's city center----it's goal is for the world's rich and their 2% but for now a middle-class set to be soaked with taxes and fees to further subsidize global corporate expansion are being moved in----very soon to be replaced.
NO ONE WINS IN THESE ONE WORLD WALL STREET 1% US INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE POLICIES UNDER TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT BROUGHT TO US BY WALL STREET DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS LIKE BALTIMORE'S.
'If wage theft is a nasty cousin of slavery, Tzintzun says there's a deeper, more fundamental sickness affecting the Texas construction industry: the misclassification of construction workers as independent contractors instead of as employees'.
Business
Construction Booming In Texas, But Many Workers Pay Dearly
April 10, 2013 3:20 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Wade Goodwyn
Marchers at the state capitol building in Austin, Texas, in February protest working conditions in the state's construction sector.
Jason Cato/Courtesy of Workers Defense Project
almost everything in the Texas, the construction industry in the Lone Star State is big. One in every 13 workers here is employed in the state's $54 billion-per-year construction industry.
Homebuilding and commercial construction may be an economic driver for the state, but it's also an industry riddled with hazards. Years of illegal immigration have pushed wages down, and accidents and wage fraud are common. Of the nearly 1 million workers laboring in construction here, approximately half are undocumented.
Many of those workers have been in the U.S. for years, even decades. This critical mass of eager, mostly Hispanic workers means it's possible for a family from New York or California to move to Texas and buy a brand new, five-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot home for $160,000.
More From This Series
Texas Contractors Say Playing By The Rules Doesn't Pay
April 11, 2013
Just how cheap is the cheap labor in Texas? Sometimes, it's free. Guillermo Perez, 41, is undocumented and has been working commercial construction jobs in Austin for 13 years.
"[The employer] said he didn't have the money to pay me and he owed me $1,200," Perez says of one job. "I told him that I'm going to the Texas Workforce Commission, which I did. Then after that, he came back two weeks later and paid me."
Perez is brave. Undocumented workers are usually too afraid to complain to Texas authorities, even when they go home with empty pockets. And they almost never talk to reporters.
Widespread Wage Theft
The economic collapse of 2008 brought with it an onslaught of wage theft, according to the Austin-based Workers Defense Project. At the end of the week, construction workers sometimes walk away with $4 or $5 an hour, sometimes less, sometimes nothing.
"Ninety percent of the people who come to our organization have come because they've been robbed of their wages," says Cristina Tzintzun, the Workers Defense Project executive director.
The organization has co-authored a report with the University of Texas, Austin, that examines working conditions in the Texas construction industry. For more than a year, WDP staff and University of Texas faculty canvassed Texas construction sites, surveying hundreds of workers and gathering information about pay, benefits, working conditions and employment and residency status.
Cheated workers keep working, Tzintzun says, because contractors dangle wages like bait from one week to another, paying just enough to keep everybody on the hook.
iTwo workers died when a crane collapsed under windy conditions at a University of Texas, Dallas, campus site in July 2012. OSHA cited the construction company with six serious safety violations and levied a $30,000 penalty.
Jack White/Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News
"We're talking large commercial projects, even state and county projects," she says. "So it's a problem that's widespread in the industry."
If wage theft is a nasty cousin of slavery, Tzintzun says there's a deeper, more fundamental sickness affecting the Texas construction industry: the misclassification of construction workers as independent contractors instead of as employees.
"We found that 41 percent of construction workers, regardless of immigration status, were misclassified as subcontractors," she says.
It works like this: Pretend you're an interior contractor, drop by the Home Depot parking lot and pick up four Hispanic guys to install Sheetrock for $8 an hour.
By law, these men are your employees, even if just for the day. But in Texas, as in many other states, it's popular to pretend they're each independent contractors — business owners. Which means you are not paying for their labor but for their business services.
With this arrangement, the contractor — you — don't have to pay Social Security taxes or payroll taxes or workers' compensation or overtime. Instead, you pretend the undocumented Hispanic worker you've just paid in cash is going to pay all those state and federal taxes out of his $8 an hour himself.
"Our estimation is that there's $1.6 billion being lost in federal income taxes just from Texas alone," says the Workers Defense Project's Tzintzun. The report estimates that $7 billion in wages from nearly 400,000 illegally classified construction workers is going unreported in Texas each year, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue lost owing to institutionalized statewide payroll fraud.
"It's really the Wild West out there," Tzintzun says.
A Dangerous State For A Dangerous Industry
Making a dangerous but profitable living has long been part of the Texas ethos. Handsomely paid and heavily mustached Texas Rangers died atop their horses chasing bandits and Comanches; since 1901, so-called roughnecks flush with cash have lost their fingers, and sometimes their lives, working Texas oil rigs.
But working Texas construction is a good way to die while not making a good living. More construction workers die in Texas than in any other state, the WDP-UT study finds. With 10.7 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2010, construction workers in the lightly regulated Lone Star State died at twice the rate as those in California, with a rate of 5.2. That's compared with the U.S. rate of 8.8 in that same year.
Take the story of 48-year-old Angel Hurtado, an undocumented roofer who died at an Austin warehouse site that had fallen behind schedule. He plummeted 20 feet to a concrete floor, hitting his head on a girder as he fell.
Standing on the back road in the upscale Austin suburb of West Lake Hills where his father died, Angel's son Christian grows quiet and sad. His mother was also working at the site that day and saw her husband fall. She cradled his broken head in her lap, hysterical with grief.
When Christian arrived, the subcontractor took him aside and promised to pay for his father's funeral, Christian says. "The next day, we never see this guy. He never pick up the phone. We never hear anything from him, and he never called us back."
According to the study, 1 in every 5 Texas construction workers will require hospitalization because of injuries on the job. Texas is the only state in the nation without mandatory workers' compensation, meaning hospitals and taxpayers usually end up shouldering the cost when uncovered construction workers are hurt.
And who profits from the system in Texas?
Remember that five-bedroom house for $160,000? Customers are the winners, workers are the losers and many construction firm owners have been transformed into the exploiters.
That's not the case for all construction firms, of course. But for many smaller contractors and subcontractors — who together make up the majority of the industry here -- it's exploit your workers and cheat the taxpayers or go out of business. Those are the cold hard Texas construction industry facts.
_______________________________________________
Ivy League universities are indeed sending their grads off on missionary work for team Ivy League brand in US cities deemed international economic zones. This ethos of taking time from professional wages for the global team does not sit well with these grads as it does not for AmeriCorp student grads. Here you see a Harvard as is true with Johns Hopkins taking a Teach for America job as part of dismantling our K-12 public education system for global corporate neo-liberal online education which Ivy League universities largely write. Ivy League university grads have been used to the roaming existence of global labor pool at the white collar level----I think they will be surprised to find THEY TOO will be working for sweat shop labor wages.
EVERYONE IN AND NO ONE OUT ----A GLOBAL 2% TO THE 1% COMES FROM 5 BILLION HUMAN CAPITAL FROM ALL NATIONS.
There is absolutely NO DATA that shows Teach for America is doing any good---most shows it is making classroom learning worse. Weingarten came out early for Hillary and has been partnered with the Clinton Initiative and International Economic Zone neo-liberal education for years........here she is at the Clinton neo-liberal think tank institution-----ASPEN INSTITUTE. To have ... WE THE PEOPLE must be aware that the people in leadership today for all our labor and justice organizations are Clinton neo-liberals------working to install International Economic Zone policies. When we look at Baltimore Development Corporation and think what we want our local economy to look like-----it is not a bunch of temporary student/college grads working temporarily throughout our K-12 on their way to different careers
Teach For America Fails Students and Recruits
06/06/2016 06:09 am 06:09:03 | Updated Jun 06, 2016
Alan Singer Social studies educator, Hofstra University, my opinions, of course, are my own
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Promoting alternative pathways for recruiting teachers and attacks on the inadequacies of Schools of Education are among the hallmarks of the so-called education reform agenda. I teach in a School of Education (SOE) and definitely do not defend everything that I see in the field. But we do try to prepare teachers who are curriculum creators and classroom decision makers committed to lifetime professional growth and the education of children. But educational deformers do not value these kinds of teachers. Among other things, with experience they become more expensive and less likely to adopt the latest fad without raising questions. Reformers prefer revolving door recruits that follow scripts, enforce rules, and administer tests. Their plan would turn teaching from a respected profession into a low-paid temporary job.
Teach for America (TFA), the oldest, best known, and maybe the most controversial alternative pathway to teaching has been in operation since 1990. But trouble is building at TFA and it may be starting to fade away.
In San Francisco the school board decided not to accept any more TFA recruits, even though the district has teaching vacancies. Meanwhile applications to become a TFA recruit have declined for three consecutive years. There are 37,000 TFA applicants in 2016. This is down from 57,000 in 2013.
A recent TeachNY Advisory Council report prepared for the New York State Education Department on preparing, recruiting, and retaining quality teachers concluded, “However praiseworthy, TFA hardly offers a solution that can be brought to scale, both because of its limited size and more importantly because too few of the students who enroll in the program and who subsequently enter the classrooms, no matter how successful they may be, are still teaching two years later.”
“Truth For America” is a podcast about Teach For America (TFA) co-hosted by Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of California (Sacramento) and Jameson Brewer of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Its eight episodes include interviews with TFA recruits about their experiences as part of the program. Because of the sensitive nature of some of their comments and complaints, the interviewees are assigned pseudonyms.... '
I have especially harsh feelings towards our 5% to the 1% of WOMEN.....
Why Isn't Harvard Training More Teachers?
Students are attracted to Teach for America, but it's hard to fight the perception that education programs are "beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school."
The Atlantic
About one in five Harvard seniors applies to Teach for America. However, only a "minuscule" percentage of the class actually studies education, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan.
What accounts for this difference? Why are so many of America's brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?
Part of what's to blame is a long-standing institutional snobbery toward teaching. As Walter Isaacson put it at this year's Washington Ideas Forum, there's a perception that "it's beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers."
Teach for America has helped change that perception. "I think TFA has done a lot in terms of elevating the profession of teaching and elevating the importance of public education and education generally," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in conversation with Isaacson, CEO of The Aspen Institute, and Ryan.
But Harvard and other schools like it haven't made it a priority to encourage students to pursue teaching—and so students are looking for opportunities elsewhere. As Ryan put it, "There's a tremendous demand for teacher training—and the main outlet is TFA."
Ryan, who was installed as dean less than three months ago, says one of his goals is to train more Harvard students to become teachers. He hopes that eventually between five and 10 percent of the class will go through the undergraduate teaching program.
"There's an opportunity to capitalize on interest from students who could do anything and who want to go into teaching," said Ryan.
Not all top schools are taking Harvard's approach, though. Cornell University (Weingarten's alma mater) recently stopped offering undergraduate teacher-training.
"We say education is really important, but here you have the land grant institution of New York State that has eliminated teacher-training programs," said Weingarten. "If we don't actually have real preparation like Finland and Singapore do that really teaches teachers how to teach ... then what are we doing?"
____________________________________________
Baltimore Development Corporation and Johns Hopkins have worked hard to eliminate the structure of stable jobs----careers with promotions leading to middle-class income----and have been holding city citizens hostage to job creation just to push them further into this mindset of citizens and workers having NO RIGHTS taking anything they can get. This is the totality of economic policy coming from Baltimore Maryland Assembly and Baltimore City Hall pols working for Baltimore Development.
This is when employment agencies for contract and temporary work soar -----and we find these corporations on our Baltimore Development supposedly representing labor---but representing the 1%.
Below we see people who may be from Baltimore working for what some think are local or regional employment agencies or businesses. We have shouted these several years that the contract awards at local and state level often go to BRANCHES of global corporations made to look local-----hiding the fact they are simply a global subsidiary. This is important because that global corporation and its headquarters defines it as international even though the branch is registered in DC or MD. This enables them to operate as they do overseas including how immigrant labor and US global labor pool are moved and treated.
Any Baltimore City election forum and media outlets only allowing establishment candidates---and that includes all Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations----any individual who backs a PUGH, Dixon, Embry, Warnock, Stokes, Mosby---and the farm team neo-liberals Gutteriez and Joshua Harris----are working hard to install all this abusive work and economic structure ----religious leaders???? REALLY????? All these NGOs in Baltimore touting FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES-----all tied to this Baltimore Development Corporation power and policy.
Ms. Christine Bivens
Director
Minority & Women-Owned Business Development
Ms. Armentha “Mike” Cruise
President & CEO
The Aspen Group, Inc.
Mr. Gilberto de Jesus, Esquire
Board of Directors
Maryland Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
Why careers are gone, and jobs are going next
By Sarah Gardner
June 17, 2016 | 12:23 PM
Car makers, both U.S. and foreign, rely partly on temporary workers in their U.S. assembly plants. Brian Gammey, Korisa Warlick and Steven Ferguson were hired as contract labor at the Nissan assembly plant in Smyrna, Tennessee. They now work union jobs at a GM plant. - Hayley Hershman
The days of lifetime employment and a gold watch at retirement are long gone, but the CEOs who engineered mass layoffs in the 1980s and '90s might be shocked at just how tenuous our ties to employers have become.
New research from Harvard economist Lawrence Katz and Princeton economist Alan Krueger suggests that all the net job growth in the last decade is in “alternative work arrangements.” That includes temps, on-call and on-demand workers, contractors at companies, independent contractors and freelancers. Online “gig” work like Uber is a tiny slice of that. The chart below shows the percent of workers in alternative work arrangements, by industry.
Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015, March 2016
"Most of this growth is the janitor who used to work for the auto company who now works for the janitorial services company," Katz said. "Or the accountant who used to work for a larger firm now works for a temp agency. Or the reporter who used to work full time now is part time and a does a bunch of freelance to fill in their income."
Visit any American city and you’ll encounter this growing workforce.
Take Greater Nashville. Aspiring musicians work gigs, musical and otherwise. Independent contractors and temps fill in or work on a project basis for companies, including corporate heavyweights like Nissan, HCA and Bridgestone. Temp agency workers, in fact, make up nearly 4 percent of the workforce in Tennessee, higher than the national average, according to Labor Department statistics.
Randstad, the staffing agency, is the fifth-largest employer in the area, counting internal staff as well as placements. The city’s growing tech and hospitality industries supply plenty of freelance work to developers, marketers and other professionals.
Amy Walters, 41, is part of this growing independent workforce. She freelances for an online startup in Nashville called Gun.io, as in “hired gun.” The company matches freelance software developers with business clients who want to outsource digital projects. Walters chose freelance work because she wanted a more flexible schedule. From a converted bedroom in her 1960s ranch house, she collaborates with developers across the world.
Walters doesn't need much to do her job.
“I need a laptop, I need a phone, I need an Internet connection." she said.
Gun.io's overhead is exceedingly low, too. Three people, including the 27-year-old CEO, run the online platform. Their tiny rented office space includes a few desks and computer equipment.
David Ledgerwood, 39, vice president of services, said the barriers to entry today are lower because of technology.
"You can really do professional business and run a really solid-looking shop on paper without having to have all those trappings of Class A office space and all this business that just becomes very superfluous," Ledgerwood said. "We do really important big business and we get to have a nice lifestyle and it doesn't own us. And I think that's what we can give to people as freelancers."
When mugginess and mosquitos are scarce, tech freelancer Amy Walters works from her backyard in the Bellevue section of Nashville. - Sarah Gardner
Walters and her fellow freelancers are paid well — typically $100 an hour. But it’s part-time work, and some of them have other gigs as well, or perhaps a spouse with a full-time job, like Walters. Gun.io doesn't pay benefits, and any career development is up to "the talent." As long as they can keep up their skills, the thinking goes, they’ll have work.
But Walters said that getting laid off once from a full-time job -- on 9/11 of all days — shook her.
“So I think about financial future now or going forward, I mean how stable are any of us, really?”
Job stability hasn’t defined the American workplace for decades. Just ask anyone who has been escorted out by security in a mass layoff or whose factory moved offshore. In a global marketplace constantly upended by technology, companies are under unrelenting pressure to cut costs and maximize profits.
If companies can do business without permanent employees, they will. Technology and contractors make that easier every day, and companies are often rewarded for a lower headcount.
The economist Gerald Davis, author of “The Vanishing American Corporation,” said investors often cheer layoffs.
“At minimum, Wall Street does not value having employees," he said. "At maximum, you might be punished.”
Corporations have quietly been shedding permanent employees for years. Not just through offshoring and technology. American business farms out a surprising amount of work that used to be done in-house, from HR to IT, from marketing to maintenance. Witness the growth of the U.S. staffing industry, especially since the recession. The idea is to focus on "core competencies" and farm out the rest.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, said, "Employees impose overhead costs and burdens, and you have to fire them using some reasonable due process, and you have to pay benefits and social security and all this other stuff. And so it's much cheaper to just get rid of them."
Firms like Concept Technology Inc. in Nashville provide IT services for 250 companies and nonprofits in the area. The company's website reads: \"Outsource your IT Department.\" - Sarah Gardner
Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School, isn't sure it's always cheaper. But companies often operate by a rule of thumb that "employees are a bad thing because they're a fixed cost," he said. "And if we bring in a staffing company or temps or independent contractors, even though we're paying them a lot, we're getting this sort of flexibility."
Even physicians can be outsourced. Angeline Brunetto is an ER doctor and independent contractor at several HCA-owned hospitals in the Nashville area. She is paid an hourly wage by EmCare, a physician staffing firm. - Sarah Gardner
Contingent workers are common in manufacturing. Steven Ferguson, 33, was a contract assembly line worker at the Nissan assembly plant in Smyrna, 23 miles outside Nashville. He helped build SUVs like the Rogue and the Pathfinder.
His employer was a staffing firm called Yates Services, which has supplied Nissan with thousands of temps since the recession ended. When Yates hired Ferguson in 2011, he worked alongside regular Nissan employees doing the same job, but for roughly half the pay (starting at $13.25 an hour) and no guarantee of a permanent position.
Ferguson believes job insecurity sometimes prevented Yates workers from using the in-house clinic. He said they worried they would be sent home permanently.
"So there would be people that would work on the line or in the plant hurt or injured," he said.
In an email, Nissan spokesman Parul Bajaj said employee safety was a “top priority” at the company.
“The company continuously strives to comply with all workplace safety laws and regulations while adhering to 'best practice' safety principles and values.”
The Center for Automotive Research said Nissan's total U.S.temporary staff may have been as high as 40 percent at one point. Nissan won't comment on the numbers.
“All production team members at Nissan’s U.S. plants are considered full-time headcount and receive good wages and a comprehensive package of benefits," Bajaj said. Nissan said it has transitioned thousands of Yates workers to Nissan employees “and will continue to do so based on the needs of its business."
But the needs of a business don’t always match the needs of workers. Ferguson did eventually get hired by Nissan through a transition program called Pathways. But others can stay contract workers for years. Another ex-Nissan contractor, Brian Gammey, said that when he returned home from serving in Iraq in 2010, he was shocked that all he could get was fill-in and contract jobs. At one point he was working for three different temp firms.
“It seems to be an ever-growing trend in the job force that everything is temp, and it is really hard to actually get on with an actual company anymore,” Gammey said. “Even if you want to get a home loan, the bank looks at it and says, “Oh, well, you work for Yates Services. You’re a temporary employee. When are you going to get a real job?”
The business case for “hiring out” is easy to make. As market demands change, employers can quickly and cheaply staff up or down. They can access a staffing firm’s vast database of talent, rather than investing in their own, and move from one project to the next without lag time for training.
All this corporate efficiency lowers prices for consumers and raises profits for stockholders, but it often comes at the expense of workers. David Weil, head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, said the outsourced economy exacerbates wage inequality.
“We have a lot of good economic studies that show this actually happens,” Weil said. “That the wages of a janitor who works as a contractor are significantly below those of the same janitor doing the same kind of job if it’s directly my employee.”
Weil described in "The Fissured Workplace" how various forms of outsourcing have affected wages and benefits, from the cable TV installer who works on contract at lower pay and no benefits while being treated like an employee, to the maid who works for a hotel that may be owned, operated and staffed by a dozen or more different companies. He argued all this subcontracting puts downward pressure on wages and benefits, and lets owners off the hook for working conditions.
At worst, subcontractors violate labor laws to stay competitive.
Diana Lopez, 28, was a housekeeper in a four-star hotel in Nashville. But she was employed by a hotel staffing agency, not the name on the marquee.
“There was quite a lot of pressure to work very fast, to clean the room in 20 or 25 minutes and have it be perfect,” Lopez told Marketplace.
Diana Lopez, 28, was hired by a subcontracting agency to clean rooms at a Nashville hotel. She earned $8.75 an hour and no benefits. - Sarah Gardner
She said she was paid $8.75 an hour with no benefits. At one point, she said, she and her co-workers noticed hours and entire days missing from their paychecks.
Chuck Yezbak, an employee rights attorney in Nashville, said that in the world of low-wage subcontracting, "At some point it’s hard to get more efficiency. So they cut corners to get it. I’ve seen a lot of maids that work in hotels that don’t even make minimum wage. How can it happen? It happens because the employer will pay them a rate per room and the rate per room isn’t enough for them to earn minimum wage and often they won’t pay overtime.”
Lopez and her co-workers did recover their wages with the help of a workers’ rights group, and the Labor Department is trying to make companies more responsible for contracted workers.
Today both Ferguson and Gammey are working union jobs at the GM auto plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Korisa Warlick, another ex-Nissan contractor, is also working at GM. The 23-year-old mother of three said the job she has now is physically harder, but she feels more secure.
"I know if my son is sick, I can take a day off without having to worry about getting fired," Warlick said. GM, by the way, also hires "temps," but it's subject to negotiation with the United Auto Workers. GM's chief financial officer recently said that about 25 percent of GM’s workforce are short-term workers who are “truly variable" so the company could adjust quickly if demand fell.
Lawrence Katz, co-author of the study measuring "alternative work arrangements," said offshoring, technology, regulation and "firms figuring out new ways to maximize shareholder value" have all eroded the job security that Americans once enjoyed. The mid-20th century may be an "outlier period," Katz said. "I think we need to re-think labor laws, should independent contractors have the right to organize, how do you provide benefits to workers who don't have a stable, single job. That's what we really need to think about going forward," he said. "We need a safety net and set of employer policies and regulations that allow people to have security but also be able to navigate a labor market where they may work at many jobs simultaneously or across their career."
______________________________________________
Critics of Affordable Care Act like to make it sound an accident that everything about our public health care----from patient accessibility , quality of care, pathway to professional well-paying employment----when the goal of ACA was doing just that. It is the mirror of banking deregulation and consolidation to create global health systems predatory and profit-driven as Wall Street banks so we KNEW LABOR AND JUSTICE would be killed.
Baltimore Development Corporation is Johns Hopkins and Bloomberg School of Public Health controls all health policy and of course Hopkins controls all outsourcing of our public health department. Between global labor market policies and temporary workers and fraudulent independent contractor status----our health care system has been built to be third world profit-driven and competitive.
So, when Baltimore citizens look for economic development in the city and allow yet another industry to fall to fraud, corruption, attacking people's ability to have strong, gainful employment----WE HAVE A FAILED ECONOMIC POLICY COMING FROM WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS.
'When market for labor is more competitive, firms often can’t get away with hiring high-quality workers on a temporary basis.
We know global monopolies kill competition and free-market and it creates stagnation allowing for high-unemployment and VOILA---GLOBAL LABOR POOL HITS HEALTH CARE.
Why Temp Agencies Are Learning to Love the Affordable Care Act
If you believe the stock market, the temporary staffing industry stands to gain from Obamacare's implementation.
By Christopher Matthews @crobmatthewsJune 27, 2013Follow @TIMEBusiness
This is the first in a series of articles on businesses developing around, and in anticipation of, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare.
Whatever your opinion of Obamacare, there’s no denying that its full implementation next year presents a major challenge for many businesses across the country. Starting in 2014, firms of more than 50 employees will be required to offer health insurance to their full-time employees — defined as those that work more than 30 hours per week — or pay a penalty. These expenses, along with added costs of complying with the law, will force many businesses to raise prices or reduce profit margins, two things business leaders never enjoy doing.
While these mandates will increase costs for many businesses across the country, there actually are others that will benefit from the law. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies were brought onboard early in the healthcare reform effort by the the Obama Administration, lured by the prospect of tens of millions of new customers who would be required to buy health insurance. But if you believe the stock market, another industry that stands to gain from Obamacare implementation is the temporary staffing industry.
Staffing companies like Robert Half International and On Assignment have seen their stock prices soar since President Obama’s reelection in November, as the election made it nearly certain that the implementation of the law would continue as planned. “In general [Obamacare] is viewed as something that will lead to increases in the penetration rate of temporary workers,” says Tobey Sommer, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. Firms like Robert Half International are especially well positioned to benefit from the law, Sommer says, because they specialize in small and medium-sized companies, the very sort that may be using temporary workers to help them stay below that all-important 50-worker mark.
There’s also an opening for staffing companies to present themselves as experts in the labor rules of the Obamacare law, and as a resource that other businesses can turn to for help with its many rules and regulations. “The increasing burden of these regulations will cause some clients to throw up their hands and say, ‘I can’t deal with all of this,” says Sommer. And when that happens, a full-service staffing company could be the perfect place to seek help navigating the unknown waters of Obamacare.
This change comes during a time when the staffing industry is already doing well compared to the economy at large. According to Susan Houseman, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute, temporary employment as a percentage of total employment is close to an all-time high. Houseman says that the overall weakness of the labor market has made it a buyer’s market when it comes to companies looking for labor. When market for labor is more competitive, firms often can’t get away with hiring high-quality workers on a temporary basis. But with the unemployment rate so high and wage growth stagnant, companies have found that they don’t need to make long-term commitments or offer generous benefits to get the same quality of work they’re used to.
Even if some staffing companies are doing relatively well in this era of economic uncertainty, many still face hurdles with a weak economy and uncertainty about the new healthcare law. Steve Berchem, chief operating officer of the American Staffing Association says that his member businesses are concerned about Obamacare implementation — and that just because certain types of staffing firms may stand to benefit doesn’t mean the industry as a whole is welcoming the law.
“It’s a myth that temporary employees are part-time employees,” Berchem says. While many temp workers won’t average more than 30 hours per week over the course of a year, the IRS assesses Obamacare fines on a monthly basis. That means that if a temporary worker puts in 120 hours in a given month, the temp agency may be required to offer that worker healthcare or face a penalty. At the same time, many temp agencies are having trouble finding insurance plans for their workers because they often experience high turnover and employ people who are high-risk as far as insurance companies are concerned. Furthermore, Obamacare eliminated lifetime caps on coverage, making the riskiest to insure even less appealing to insurers.
As is often the case when it comes to dealing with government rules and regulations, large firms are more equipped to handle Obamacare than small companies. Large, publicly traded staffing firm tend to have teams dedicated to navigating benefits and regulation compliance, so adding another layer of rules and regulations doesn’t hurt as much on the margin as it would for a smaller company. That being said, Obamacare implementation is something every business with more than 50 employees is going to have to grapple with in the coming weeks and months, and the smart staffing firms will be looking to turn that fact from a weakness into an advantage.
__________________________________________
I want to end this discussion on Baltimore Development Corporation and its community associations with leadership installed to assure the original MASTER PLAN from the 1990s ----Baltimore as International Economic Zone with global corporate campuses and global factories ----is sold to citizens in each community.
I shout that since we know Wall Street Baltimore Development has its 'labor and justice' organizations the 99% need to stay away from those organizations and start new groups with people honestly passionate about labor and justice. As well, I shout out the failure of our labor unions----as they struggle with simply maintaining their union rights they partner with the 1% Wall Street and Clinton neo-liberals to do that. This is a downward spiral to nowhere and labor must stop its partnership with DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS.
The drive of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA to privatize all that is public to silence our WE THE PEOPLE voice as citizens pits our public labor unions against our private labor unions all over these same issues of OUTSOURCING.
Below you see BART in Oakland CA----Oakland is the same as Baltimore----and we know here in Baltimore they are privatizing our public transportation----even MARC trains----to VEOLA Transportation now called TRANS DEV----and BART is doing the same. NEITHER UNION SHOULD WANT TO BE TIED TO GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION CORPORATIONS-----
Who is bound to our Baltimore Development Corporation by Maryland Transit policy? Global transportation corporations with our MTA unions being thrown under the bus.
PLEASE REMEMBER-----THE TERM PROGRESSIVE IS MORE LIKELY TO MEAN CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL GETTING PROGRESSIVELY RICHER-----NOT SOCIALLY PROGRESSIVE. JUST BECAUSE A GROUP SUPPORTS GBLT RIGHTS DOES NOT MAKE IT LEFT-LEANING LABOR AND JUSTICE.
The two industries being attacked now the most ---construction and public sector ---have the unions often most closely tied to DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS.
''Now, San Francisco’s famously progressive and largest public employee union
CWA accuses SEIU local of contracting out jobs
By John Coté
Updated 6:03 pm, Monday, October 13, 2014
Transit workers and supporters picket in solidarity at the Lake Merritt BART station in Oakland, CA Friday, October 18, 2013.
Bay Area Transit workers went on strike shutting down train service after BART ... moreUsing strikes, protests and political hardball, Service Employees International Union Local 1021 has fought for years against efforts to contract out government jobs to workers who earn less and get fewer benefits.
Now, San Francisco’s famously progressive and largest public employee union is being accused by another union of doing exactly that: contracting out jobs.
The accusation, contained in a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board by a chapter of the Communications Workers of America, has led to a messy intra-labor fight with political undertones in a city where unions hold considerable electoral power.
SEIU Local 1021, a politically active Northern California chapter of the country's second largest union, is deeply involved in several local contests on the Nov. 4 ballot, including supporting Republican BART Board Director James Fang because of his pro-union stance during two BART strikes last year. The union has also contributed more than $161,000 to committees supporting Supervisor David Campos’ bid for San Francisco’s 17th Assembly District seat.
“We oppose, and we challenge, and we picket, and then our own union is contracting out our jobs,” said Daz Lamparas, the CWA shop steward who filed the original complaint in July. CWA Local 9404 represents the organizers and other staff at SEIU Local 1021.
“It’s ironic,” he said.
Local denies charge
SEIU Local 1021 maintains it did not take away jobs from unionized workers, merely hired temporary contractors for specific jobs around election season or to fill in for staff on leave.
“We don’t subcontract,” said Pete Castelli, SEIU Local 1021’s executive director. “We don’t believe in it. We’re politically against it, and we’re not doing it now.”
A document that CWA filed with the federal labor regulators Aug. 26 indicates SEIU Local 1021 contracted with at least seven individual consultants and two organizations since March. CWA contends that six of those contracts amount to “arbitrarily contracting out bargaining unit jobs without notification to the union.”
That includes hiring labor organizer and comedian Nato Green at up to $9,000 a month for negotiations involving nurses in San Francisco and Marin, paying former longtime San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond $3,000 a month to work on a quarterly news magazine, and paying People Organizing for Worker’s Rights $150,000 for “representation and bargaining,” the documents indicate.
Minutes from a 2013 meeting of the union’s executive board say People Organizing for Worker’s Rights “is comprised of current and former SEIU members, leaders and staff, as well as local community activists.”
Castelli declined to comment on the specific work each contractor was doing.
Joseph Frankl, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in San Francisco, recently ordered the dispute to go to arbitration, and indicated CWA could ask him to review the arbitrator’s award, documents show.
SEIU Local 1021 represents more than 54,000 employees, from custodians to swim instructors, in Northern California, and is heavily involved in campaigns to raise the minimum wage, including Proposition J on the Nov. 4 ballot to raise it to $15 in San Francisco. The union is also a major backer of Campos, who is battling Board of Supervisors President David Chiu for a seat in the state Assembly.
'I am not involved’
Chiu’s campaign sees at least one of the contract hires as a political one designed to attack their candidate.
“After running a $250,000 campaign to try to elect David Campos in the June primary, SEIU 1021 ... took it one step further by putting journalists on their payroll,” said Chiu Campaign Manager Jen Kwart. “It's no wonder that Tim Redmond has been acting as a mouthpiece for the David Campos campaign.”
Redmond, who now runs the online local news site 48 Hills, said his work at the union did not involve politics and was separate from what he wrote for his news site.
“I am not involved in SEIU political campaigns,” Redmond said. “I’m a freelance editor.”
Redmond is also a member of a different chapter of the CWA than the one that brought the complaint. (Newsroom staff at The Chronicle, including reporters, are also represented by that chapter, known as the Pacific Media Workers Guild.)
Redmond has sometimes noted on his news site when writing about the SEIU that he contracts with them, but in at least one case, an Aug. 14 story that included a reference to SEIU Local 1021’s role in the Democratic Party’s endorsement fight for the BART board race, he did not.
Redmond, who describes himself as “proudly part of the progressive movement,” said that was an oversight.
“I have never been an unbiased reporter,” Redmond said. “I have always been a journalist with a point of view. ... My agendas are wide open.”
THIS NEXT DECADE IF TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT IS INSTALLED IN THE US-----THAT MIGRATION OF US WORKERS NATIONALLY WILL BECOME GLOBAL ----SONS, DAUGHTERS, HUSBANDS, WIVES SENT OVERSEAS TO WORK IN INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONES ROTATED FROM ONE TO ANOTHER.
THIS HAS BEEN THE GOAL OF BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION AND JOHNS HOPKINS THESE FEW DECADES AND IT IS TOWARDS WHAT BALTIMORE MARYLAND ASSEMBLY AND BALTIMORE CITY HALL POLS WORK WHILE TIED TO WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT.
Keep in mind-----Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations know this is happening----religious leaders partnered with Johns Hopkins and Baltimore Development know this is happening----labor and labor union organizations know this is happening----SO WHEN ALL OF THE ABOVE PARTICIPATE IN ELECTION RIGGING AND FRAUD BY ALLOWING ONLY THE ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATES HAVE FORUM AND MEDIA TIME----they are embracing the people creating the injustice they then come out to protest.
This race to the bottom of wages effects ALL CITIZENS---there will only be a 1% with a global 2% and that will not include 99.8% of Americans. Our Johns Hopkins Ivy League grads will be that white collar sweat shop global labor force being lucky to earn $20-30 a day.
The construction building in Texas is International Economic Zone global corporate campuses and global factories and the housing is just like Baltimore's city center----it's goal is for the world's rich and their 2% but for now a middle-class set to be soaked with taxes and fees to further subsidize global corporate expansion are being moved in----very soon to be replaced.
NO ONE WINS IN THESE ONE WORLD WALL STREET 1% US INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ZONE POLICIES UNDER TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT BROUGHT TO US BY WALL STREET DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS LIKE BALTIMORE'S.
'If wage theft is a nasty cousin of slavery, Tzintzun says there's a deeper, more fundamental sickness affecting the Texas construction industry: the misclassification of construction workers as independent contractors instead of as employees'.
Business
Construction Booming In Texas, But Many Workers Pay Dearly
April 10, 2013 3:20 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Wade Goodwyn
Marchers at the state capitol building in Austin, Texas, in February protest working conditions in the state's construction sector.
Jason Cato/Courtesy of Workers Defense Project
almost everything in the Texas, the construction industry in the Lone Star State is big. One in every 13 workers here is employed in the state's $54 billion-per-year construction industry.
Homebuilding and commercial construction may be an economic driver for the state, but it's also an industry riddled with hazards. Years of illegal immigration have pushed wages down, and accidents and wage fraud are common. Of the nearly 1 million workers laboring in construction here, approximately half are undocumented.
Many of those workers have been in the U.S. for years, even decades. This critical mass of eager, mostly Hispanic workers means it's possible for a family from New York or California to move to Texas and buy a brand new, five-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot home for $160,000.
More From This Series
Texas Contractors Say Playing By The Rules Doesn't Pay
April 11, 2013
Just how cheap is the cheap labor in Texas? Sometimes, it's free. Guillermo Perez, 41, is undocumented and has been working commercial construction jobs in Austin for 13 years.
"[The employer] said he didn't have the money to pay me and he owed me $1,200," Perez says of one job. "I told him that I'm going to the Texas Workforce Commission, which I did. Then after that, he came back two weeks later and paid me."
Perez is brave. Undocumented workers are usually too afraid to complain to Texas authorities, even when they go home with empty pockets. And they almost never talk to reporters.
Widespread Wage Theft
The economic collapse of 2008 brought with it an onslaught of wage theft, according to the Austin-based Workers Defense Project. At the end of the week, construction workers sometimes walk away with $4 or $5 an hour, sometimes less, sometimes nothing.
"Ninety percent of the people who come to our organization have come because they've been robbed of their wages," says Cristina Tzintzun, the Workers Defense Project executive director.
The organization has co-authored a report with the University of Texas, Austin, that examines working conditions in the Texas construction industry. For more than a year, WDP staff and University of Texas faculty canvassed Texas construction sites, surveying hundreds of workers and gathering information about pay, benefits, working conditions and employment and residency status.
Cheated workers keep working, Tzintzun says, because contractors dangle wages like bait from one week to another, paying just enough to keep everybody on the hook.
iTwo workers died when a crane collapsed under windy conditions at a University of Texas, Dallas, campus site in July 2012. OSHA cited the construction company with six serious safety violations and levied a $30,000 penalty.
Jack White/Courtesy of The Dallas Morning News
"We're talking large commercial projects, even state and county projects," she says. "So it's a problem that's widespread in the industry."
If wage theft is a nasty cousin of slavery, Tzintzun says there's a deeper, more fundamental sickness affecting the Texas construction industry: the misclassification of construction workers as independent contractors instead of as employees.
"We found that 41 percent of construction workers, regardless of immigration status, were misclassified as subcontractors," she says.
It works like this: Pretend you're an interior contractor, drop by the Home Depot parking lot and pick up four Hispanic guys to install Sheetrock for $8 an hour.
By law, these men are your employees, even if just for the day. But in Texas, as in many other states, it's popular to pretend they're each independent contractors — business owners. Which means you are not paying for their labor but for their business services.
With this arrangement, the contractor — you — don't have to pay Social Security taxes or payroll taxes or workers' compensation or overtime. Instead, you pretend the undocumented Hispanic worker you've just paid in cash is going to pay all those state and federal taxes out of his $8 an hour himself.
"Our estimation is that there's $1.6 billion being lost in federal income taxes just from Texas alone," says the Workers Defense Project's Tzintzun. The report estimates that $7 billion in wages from nearly 400,000 illegally classified construction workers is going unreported in Texas each year, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue lost owing to institutionalized statewide payroll fraud.
"It's really the Wild West out there," Tzintzun says.
A Dangerous State For A Dangerous Industry
Making a dangerous but profitable living has long been part of the Texas ethos. Handsomely paid and heavily mustached Texas Rangers died atop their horses chasing bandits and Comanches; since 1901, so-called roughnecks flush with cash have lost their fingers, and sometimes their lives, working Texas oil rigs.
But working Texas construction is a good way to die while not making a good living. More construction workers die in Texas than in any other state, the WDP-UT study finds. With 10.7 deaths per 100,000 workers in 2010, construction workers in the lightly regulated Lone Star State died at twice the rate as those in California, with a rate of 5.2. That's compared with the U.S. rate of 8.8 in that same year.
Take the story of 48-year-old Angel Hurtado, an undocumented roofer who died at an Austin warehouse site that had fallen behind schedule. He plummeted 20 feet to a concrete floor, hitting his head on a girder as he fell.
Standing on the back road in the upscale Austin suburb of West Lake Hills where his father died, Angel's son Christian grows quiet and sad. His mother was also working at the site that day and saw her husband fall. She cradled his broken head in her lap, hysterical with grief.
When Christian arrived, the subcontractor took him aside and promised to pay for his father's funeral, Christian says. "The next day, we never see this guy. He never pick up the phone. We never hear anything from him, and he never called us back."
According to the study, 1 in every 5 Texas construction workers will require hospitalization because of injuries on the job. Texas is the only state in the nation without mandatory workers' compensation, meaning hospitals and taxpayers usually end up shouldering the cost when uncovered construction workers are hurt.
And who profits from the system in Texas?
Remember that five-bedroom house for $160,000? Customers are the winners, workers are the losers and many construction firm owners have been transformed into the exploiters.
That's not the case for all construction firms, of course. But for many smaller contractors and subcontractors — who together make up the majority of the industry here -- it's exploit your workers and cheat the taxpayers or go out of business. Those are the cold hard Texas construction industry facts.
_______________________________________________
Ivy League universities are indeed sending their grads off on missionary work for team Ivy League brand in US cities deemed international economic zones. This ethos of taking time from professional wages for the global team does not sit well with these grads as it does not for AmeriCorp student grads. Here you see a Harvard as is true with Johns Hopkins taking a Teach for America job as part of dismantling our K-12 public education system for global corporate neo-liberal online education which Ivy League universities largely write. Ivy League university grads have been used to the roaming existence of global labor pool at the white collar level----I think they will be surprised to find THEY TOO will be working for sweat shop labor wages.
EVERYONE IN AND NO ONE OUT ----A GLOBAL 2% TO THE 1% COMES FROM 5 BILLION HUMAN CAPITAL FROM ALL NATIONS.
There is absolutely NO DATA that shows Teach for America is doing any good---most shows it is making classroom learning worse. Weingarten came out early for Hillary and has been partnered with the Clinton Initiative and International Economic Zone neo-liberal education for years........here she is at the Clinton neo-liberal think tank institution-----ASPEN INSTITUTE. To have ... WE THE PEOPLE must be aware that the people in leadership today for all our labor and justice organizations are Clinton neo-liberals------working to install International Economic Zone policies. When we look at Baltimore Development Corporation and think what we want our local economy to look like-----it is not a bunch of temporary student/college grads working temporarily throughout our K-12 on their way to different careers
Teach For America Fails Students and Recruits
06/06/2016 06:09 am 06:09:03 | Updated Jun 06, 2016
Alan Singer Social studies educator, Hofstra University, my opinions, of course, are my own
The Washington Post via Getty Images
Promoting alternative pathways for recruiting teachers and attacks on the inadequacies of Schools of Education are among the hallmarks of the so-called education reform agenda. I teach in a School of Education (SOE) and definitely do not defend everything that I see in the field. But we do try to prepare teachers who are curriculum creators and classroom decision makers committed to lifetime professional growth and the education of children. But educational deformers do not value these kinds of teachers. Among other things, with experience they become more expensive and less likely to adopt the latest fad without raising questions. Reformers prefer revolving door recruits that follow scripts, enforce rules, and administer tests. Their plan would turn teaching from a respected profession into a low-paid temporary job.
Teach for America (TFA), the oldest, best known, and maybe the most controversial alternative pathway to teaching has been in operation since 1990. But trouble is building at TFA and it may be starting to fade away.
In San Francisco the school board decided not to accept any more TFA recruits, even though the district has teaching vacancies. Meanwhile applications to become a TFA recruit have declined for three consecutive years. There are 37,000 TFA applicants in 2016. This is down from 57,000 in 2013.
A recent TeachNY Advisory Council report prepared for the New York State Education Department on preparing, recruiting, and retaining quality teachers concluded, “However praiseworthy, TFA hardly offers a solution that can be brought to scale, both because of its limited size and more importantly because too few of the students who enroll in the program and who subsequently enter the classrooms, no matter how successful they may be, are still teaching two years later.”
“Truth For America” is a podcast about Teach For America (TFA) co-hosted by Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of California (Sacramento) and Jameson Brewer of the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Its eight episodes include interviews with TFA recruits about their experiences as part of the program. Because of the sensitive nature of some of their comments and complaints, the interviewees are assigned pseudonyms.... '
I have especially harsh feelings towards our 5% to the 1% of WOMEN.....
Why Isn't Harvard Training More Teachers?
Students are attracted to Teach for America, but it's hard to fight the perception that education programs are "beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school."
- Eleanor Barkhorn
- Nov 13, 2013
The Atlantic
About one in five Harvard seniors applies to Teach for America. However, only a "minuscule" percentage of the class actually studies education, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean James Ryan.
What accounts for this difference? Why are so many of America's brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?
Part of what's to blame is a long-standing institutional snobbery toward teaching. As Walter Isaacson put it at this year's Washington Ideas Forum, there's a perception that "it's beneath the dignity of an Ivy League school to train teachers."
Teach for America has helped change that perception. "I think TFA has done a lot in terms of elevating the profession of teaching and elevating the importance of public education and education generally," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in conversation with Isaacson, CEO of The Aspen Institute, and Ryan.
But Harvard and other schools like it haven't made it a priority to encourage students to pursue teaching—and so students are looking for opportunities elsewhere. As Ryan put it, "There's a tremendous demand for teacher training—and the main outlet is TFA."
Ryan, who was installed as dean less than three months ago, says one of his goals is to train more Harvard students to become teachers. He hopes that eventually between five and 10 percent of the class will go through the undergraduate teaching program.
"There's an opportunity to capitalize on interest from students who could do anything and who want to go into teaching," said Ryan.
Not all top schools are taking Harvard's approach, though. Cornell University (Weingarten's alma mater) recently stopped offering undergraduate teacher-training.
"We say education is really important, but here you have the land grant institution of New York State that has eliminated teacher-training programs," said Weingarten. "If we don't actually have real preparation like Finland and Singapore do that really teaches teachers how to teach ... then what are we doing?"
____________________________________________
Baltimore Development Corporation and Johns Hopkins have worked hard to eliminate the structure of stable jobs----careers with promotions leading to middle-class income----and have been holding city citizens hostage to job creation just to push them further into this mindset of citizens and workers having NO RIGHTS taking anything they can get. This is the totality of economic policy coming from Baltimore Maryland Assembly and Baltimore City Hall pols working for Baltimore Development.
This is when employment agencies for contract and temporary work soar -----and we find these corporations on our Baltimore Development supposedly representing labor---but representing the 1%.
Below we see people who may be from Baltimore working for what some think are local or regional employment agencies or businesses. We have shouted these several years that the contract awards at local and state level often go to BRANCHES of global corporations made to look local-----hiding the fact they are simply a global subsidiary. This is important because that global corporation and its headquarters defines it as international even though the branch is registered in DC or MD. This enables them to operate as they do overseas including how immigrant labor and US global labor pool are moved and treated.
Any Baltimore City election forum and media outlets only allowing establishment candidates---and that includes all Wall Street Baltimore Development 'labor and justice' organizations----any individual who backs a PUGH, Dixon, Embry, Warnock, Stokes, Mosby---and the farm team neo-liberals Gutteriez and Joshua Harris----are working hard to install all this abusive work and economic structure ----religious leaders???? REALLY????? All these NGOs in Baltimore touting FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES-----all tied to this Baltimore Development Corporation power and policy.
Ms. Christine Bivens
Director
Minority & Women-Owned Business Development
Ms. Armentha “Mike” Cruise
President & CEO
The Aspen Group, Inc.
Mr. Gilberto de Jesus, Esquire
Board of Directors
Maryland Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
Why careers are gone, and jobs are going next
By Sarah Gardner
June 17, 2016 | 12:23 PM
Car makers, both U.S. and foreign, rely partly on temporary workers in their U.S. assembly plants. Brian Gammey, Korisa Warlick and Steven Ferguson were hired as contract labor at the Nissan assembly plant in Smyrna, Tennessee. They now work union jobs at a GM plant. - Hayley Hershman
The days of lifetime employment and a gold watch at retirement are long gone, but the CEOs who engineered mass layoffs in the 1980s and '90s might be shocked at just how tenuous our ties to employers have become.
New research from Harvard economist Lawrence Katz and Princeton economist Alan Krueger suggests that all the net job growth in the last decade is in “alternative work arrangements.” That includes temps, on-call and on-demand workers, contractors at companies, independent contractors and freelancers. Online “gig” work like Uber is a tiny slice of that. The chart below shows the percent of workers in alternative work arrangements, by industry.
Lawrence Katz, Alan Krueger, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015, March 2016
"Most of this growth is the janitor who used to work for the auto company who now works for the janitorial services company," Katz said. "Or the accountant who used to work for a larger firm now works for a temp agency. Or the reporter who used to work full time now is part time and a does a bunch of freelance to fill in their income."
Visit any American city and you’ll encounter this growing workforce.
Take Greater Nashville. Aspiring musicians work gigs, musical and otherwise. Independent contractors and temps fill in or work on a project basis for companies, including corporate heavyweights like Nissan, HCA and Bridgestone. Temp agency workers, in fact, make up nearly 4 percent of the workforce in Tennessee, higher than the national average, according to Labor Department statistics.
Randstad, the staffing agency, is the fifth-largest employer in the area, counting internal staff as well as placements. The city’s growing tech and hospitality industries supply plenty of freelance work to developers, marketers and other professionals.
Amy Walters, 41, is part of this growing independent workforce. She freelances for an online startup in Nashville called Gun.io, as in “hired gun.” The company matches freelance software developers with business clients who want to outsource digital projects. Walters chose freelance work because she wanted a more flexible schedule. From a converted bedroom in her 1960s ranch house, she collaborates with developers across the world.
Walters doesn't need much to do her job.
“I need a laptop, I need a phone, I need an Internet connection." she said.
Gun.io's overhead is exceedingly low, too. Three people, including the 27-year-old CEO, run the online platform. Their tiny rented office space includes a few desks and computer equipment.
David Ledgerwood, 39, vice president of services, said the barriers to entry today are lower because of technology.
"You can really do professional business and run a really solid-looking shop on paper without having to have all those trappings of Class A office space and all this business that just becomes very superfluous," Ledgerwood said. "We do really important big business and we get to have a nice lifestyle and it doesn't own us. And I think that's what we can give to people as freelancers."
When mugginess and mosquitos are scarce, tech freelancer Amy Walters works from her backyard in the Bellevue section of Nashville. - Sarah Gardner
Walters and her fellow freelancers are paid well — typically $100 an hour. But it’s part-time work, and some of them have other gigs as well, or perhaps a spouse with a full-time job, like Walters. Gun.io doesn't pay benefits, and any career development is up to "the talent." As long as they can keep up their skills, the thinking goes, they’ll have work.
But Walters said that getting laid off once from a full-time job -- on 9/11 of all days — shook her.
“So I think about financial future now or going forward, I mean how stable are any of us, really?”
Job stability hasn’t defined the American workplace for decades. Just ask anyone who has been escorted out by security in a mass layoff or whose factory moved offshore. In a global marketplace constantly upended by technology, companies are under unrelenting pressure to cut costs and maximize profits.
If companies can do business without permanent employees, they will. Technology and contractors make that easier every day, and companies are often rewarded for a lower headcount.
The economist Gerald Davis, author of “The Vanishing American Corporation,” said investors often cheer layoffs.
“At minimum, Wall Street does not value having employees," he said. "At maximum, you might be punished.”
Corporations have quietly been shedding permanent employees for years. Not just through offshoring and technology. American business farms out a surprising amount of work that used to be done in-house, from HR to IT, from marketing to maintenance. Witness the growth of the U.S. staffing industry, especially since the recession. The idea is to focus on "core competencies" and farm out the rest.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, said, "Employees impose overhead costs and burdens, and you have to fire them using some reasonable due process, and you have to pay benefits and social security and all this other stuff. And so it's much cheaper to just get rid of them."
Firms like Concept Technology Inc. in Nashville provide IT services for 250 companies and nonprofits in the area. The company's website reads: \"Outsource your IT Department.\" - Sarah Gardner
Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the Wharton School, isn't sure it's always cheaper. But companies often operate by a rule of thumb that "employees are a bad thing because they're a fixed cost," he said. "And if we bring in a staffing company or temps or independent contractors, even though we're paying them a lot, we're getting this sort of flexibility."
Even physicians can be outsourced. Angeline Brunetto is an ER doctor and independent contractor at several HCA-owned hospitals in the Nashville area. She is paid an hourly wage by EmCare, a physician staffing firm. - Sarah Gardner
Contingent workers are common in manufacturing. Steven Ferguson, 33, was a contract assembly line worker at the Nissan assembly plant in Smyrna, 23 miles outside Nashville. He helped build SUVs like the Rogue and the Pathfinder.
His employer was a staffing firm called Yates Services, which has supplied Nissan with thousands of temps since the recession ended. When Yates hired Ferguson in 2011, he worked alongside regular Nissan employees doing the same job, but for roughly half the pay (starting at $13.25 an hour) and no guarantee of a permanent position.
Ferguson believes job insecurity sometimes prevented Yates workers from using the in-house clinic. He said they worried they would be sent home permanently.
"So there would be people that would work on the line or in the plant hurt or injured," he said.
In an email, Nissan spokesman Parul Bajaj said employee safety was a “top priority” at the company.
“The company continuously strives to comply with all workplace safety laws and regulations while adhering to 'best practice' safety principles and values.”
The Center for Automotive Research said Nissan's total U.S.temporary staff may have been as high as 40 percent at one point. Nissan won't comment on the numbers.
“All production team members at Nissan’s U.S. plants are considered full-time headcount and receive good wages and a comprehensive package of benefits," Bajaj said. Nissan said it has transitioned thousands of Yates workers to Nissan employees “and will continue to do so based on the needs of its business."
But the needs of a business don’t always match the needs of workers. Ferguson did eventually get hired by Nissan through a transition program called Pathways. But others can stay contract workers for years. Another ex-Nissan contractor, Brian Gammey, said that when he returned home from serving in Iraq in 2010, he was shocked that all he could get was fill-in and contract jobs. At one point he was working for three different temp firms.
“It seems to be an ever-growing trend in the job force that everything is temp, and it is really hard to actually get on with an actual company anymore,” Gammey said. “Even if you want to get a home loan, the bank looks at it and says, “Oh, well, you work for Yates Services. You’re a temporary employee. When are you going to get a real job?”
The business case for “hiring out” is easy to make. As market demands change, employers can quickly and cheaply staff up or down. They can access a staffing firm’s vast database of talent, rather than investing in their own, and move from one project to the next without lag time for training.
All this corporate efficiency lowers prices for consumers and raises profits for stockholders, but it often comes at the expense of workers. David Weil, head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, said the outsourced economy exacerbates wage inequality.
“We have a lot of good economic studies that show this actually happens,” Weil said. “That the wages of a janitor who works as a contractor are significantly below those of the same janitor doing the same kind of job if it’s directly my employee.”
Weil described in "The Fissured Workplace" how various forms of outsourcing have affected wages and benefits, from the cable TV installer who works on contract at lower pay and no benefits while being treated like an employee, to the maid who works for a hotel that may be owned, operated and staffed by a dozen or more different companies. He argued all this subcontracting puts downward pressure on wages and benefits, and lets owners off the hook for working conditions.
At worst, subcontractors violate labor laws to stay competitive.
Diana Lopez, 28, was a housekeeper in a four-star hotel in Nashville. But she was employed by a hotel staffing agency, not the name on the marquee.
“There was quite a lot of pressure to work very fast, to clean the room in 20 or 25 minutes and have it be perfect,” Lopez told Marketplace.
Diana Lopez, 28, was hired by a subcontracting agency to clean rooms at a Nashville hotel. She earned $8.75 an hour and no benefits. - Sarah Gardner
She said she was paid $8.75 an hour with no benefits. At one point, she said, she and her co-workers noticed hours and entire days missing from their paychecks.
Chuck Yezbak, an employee rights attorney in Nashville, said that in the world of low-wage subcontracting, "At some point it’s hard to get more efficiency. So they cut corners to get it. I’ve seen a lot of maids that work in hotels that don’t even make minimum wage. How can it happen? It happens because the employer will pay them a rate per room and the rate per room isn’t enough for them to earn minimum wage and often they won’t pay overtime.”
Lopez and her co-workers did recover their wages with the help of a workers’ rights group, and the Labor Department is trying to make companies more responsible for contracted workers.
Today both Ferguson and Gammey are working union jobs at the GM auto plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Korisa Warlick, another ex-Nissan contractor, is also working at GM. The 23-year-old mother of three said the job she has now is physically harder, but she feels more secure.
"I know if my son is sick, I can take a day off without having to worry about getting fired," Warlick said. GM, by the way, also hires "temps," but it's subject to negotiation with the United Auto Workers. GM's chief financial officer recently said that about 25 percent of GM’s workforce are short-term workers who are “truly variable" so the company could adjust quickly if demand fell.
Lawrence Katz, co-author of the study measuring "alternative work arrangements," said offshoring, technology, regulation and "firms figuring out new ways to maximize shareholder value" have all eroded the job security that Americans once enjoyed. The mid-20th century may be an "outlier period," Katz said. "I think we need to re-think labor laws, should independent contractors have the right to organize, how do you provide benefits to workers who don't have a stable, single job. That's what we really need to think about going forward," he said. "We need a safety net and set of employer policies and regulations that allow people to have security but also be able to navigate a labor market where they may work at many jobs simultaneously or across their career."
______________________________________________
Critics of Affordable Care Act like to make it sound an accident that everything about our public health care----from patient accessibility , quality of care, pathway to professional well-paying employment----when the goal of ACA was doing just that. It is the mirror of banking deregulation and consolidation to create global health systems predatory and profit-driven as Wall Street banks so we KNEW LABOR AND JUSTICE would be killed.
Baltimore Development Corporation is Johns Hopkins and Bloomberg School of Public Health controls all health policy and of course Hopkins controls all outsourcing of our public health department. Between global labor market policies and temporary workers and fraudulent independent contractor status----our health care system has been built to be third world profit-driven and competitive.
So, when Baltimore citizens look for economic development in the city and allow yet another industry to fall to fraud, corruption, attacking people's ability to have strong, gainful employment----WE HAVE A FAILED ECONOMIC POLICY COMING FROM WALL STREET BALTIMORE DEVELOPMENT AND JOHNS HOPKINS.
'When market for labor is more competitive, firms often can’t get away with hiring high-quality workers on a temporary basis.
We know global monopolies kill competition and free-market and it creates stagnation allowing for high-unemployment and VOILA---GLOBAL LABOR POOL HITS HEALTH CARE.
Why Temp Agencies Are Learning to Love the Affordable Care Act
If you believe the stock market, the temporary staffing industry stands to gain from Obamacare's implementation.
By Christopher Matthews @crobmatthewsJune 27, 2013Follow @TIMEBusiness
This is the first in a series of articles on businesses developing around, and in anticipation of, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare.
Whatever your opinion of Obamacare, there’s no denying that its full implementation next year presents a major challenge for many businesses across the country. Starting in 2014, firms of more than 50 employees will be required to offer health insurance to their full-time employees — defined as those that work more than 30 hours per week — or pay a penalty. These expenses, along with added costs of complying with the law, will force many businesses to raise prices or reduce profit margins, two things business leaders never enjoy doing.
While these mandates will increase costs for many businesses across the country, there actually are others that will benefit from the law. Pharmaceutical and insurance companies were brought onboard early in the healthcare reform effort by the the Obama Administration, lured by the prospect of tens of millions of new customers who would be required to buy health insurance. But if you believe the stock market, another industry that stands to gain from Obamacare implementation is the temporary staffing industry.
Staffing companies like Robert Half International and On Assignment have seen their stock prices soar since President Obama’s reelection in November, as the election made it nearly certain that the implementation of the law would continue as planned. “In general [Obamacare] is viewed as something that will lead to increases in the penetration rate of temporary workers,” says Tobey Sommer, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. Firms like Robert Half International are especially well positioned to benefit from the law, Sommer says, because they specialize in small and medium-sized companies, the very sort that may be using temporary workers to help them stay below that all-important 50-worker mark.
There’s also an opening for staffing companies to present themselves as experts in the labor rules of the Obamacare law, and as a resource that other businesses can turn to for help with its many rules and regulations. “The increasing burden of these regulations will cause some clients to throw up their hands and say, ‘I can’t deal with all of this,” says Sommer. And when that happens, a full-service staffing company could be the perfect place to seek help navigating the unknown waters of Obamacare.
This change comes during a time when the staffing industry is already doing well compared to the economy at large. According to Susan Houseman, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute, temporary employment as a percentage of total employment is close to an all-time high. Houseman says that the overall weakness of the labor market has made it a buyer’s market when it comes to companies looking for labor. When market for labor is more competitive, firms often can’t get away with hiring high-quality workers on a temporary basis. But with the unemployment rate so high and wage growth stagnant, companies have found that they don’t need to make long-term commitments or offer generous benefits to get the same quality of work they’re used to.
Even if some staffing companies are doing relatively well in this era of economic uncertainty, many still face hurdles with a weak economy and uncertainty about the new healthcare law. Steve Berchem, chief operating officer of the American Staffing Association says that his member businesses are concerned about Obamacare implementation — and that just because certain types of staffing firms may stand to benefit doesn’t mean the industry as a whole is welcoming the law.
“It’s a myth that temporary employees are part-time employees,” Berchem says. While many temp workers won’t average more than 30 hours per week over the course of a year, the IRS assesses Obamacare fines on a monthly basis. That means that if a temporary worker puts in 120 hours in a given month, the temp agency may be required to offer that worker healthcare or face a penalty. At the same time, many temp agencies are having trouble finding insurance plans for their workers because they often experience high turnover and employ people who are high-risk as far as insurance companies are concerned. Furthermore, Obamacare eliminated lifetime caps on coverage, making the riskiest to insure even less appealing to insurers.
As is often the case when it comes to dealing with government rules and regulations, large firms are more equipped to handle Obamacare than small companies. Large, publicly traded staffing firm tend to have teams dedicated to navigating benefits and regulation compliance, so adding another layer of rules and regulations doesn’t hurt as much on the margin as it would for a smaller company. That being said, Obamacare implementation is something every business with more than 50 employees is going to have to grapple with in the coming weeks and months, and the smart staffing firms will be looking to turn that fact from a weakness into an advantage.
__________________________________________
I want to end this discussion on Baltimore Development Corporation and its community associations with leadership installed to assure the original MASTER PLAN from the 1990s ----Baltimore as International Economic Zone with global corporate campuses and global factories ----is sold to citizens in each community.
I shout that since we know Wall Street Baltimore Development has its 'labor and justice' organizations the 99% need to stay away from those organizations and start new groups with people honestly passionate about labor and justice. As well, I shout out the failure of our labor unions----as they struggle with simply maintaining their union rights they partner with the 1% Wall Street and Clinton neo-liberals to do that. This is a downward spiral to nowhere and labor must stop its partnership with DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS.
The drive of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA to privatize all that is public to silence our WE THE PEOPLE voice as citizens pits our public labor unions against our private labor unions all over these same issues of OUTSOURCING.
Below you see BART in Oakland CA----Oakland is the same as Baltimore----and we know here in Baltimore they are privatizing our public transportation----even MARC trains----to VEOLA Transportation now called TRANS DEV----and BART is doing the same. NEITHER UNION SHOULD WANT TO BE TIED TO GLOBAL TRANSPORTATION CORPORATIONS-----
Who is bound to our Baltimore Development Corporation by Maryland Transit policy? Global transportation corporations with our MTA unions being thrown under the bus.
PLEASE REMEMBER-----THE TERM PROGRESSIVE IS MORE LIKELY TO MEAN CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL GETTING PROGRESSIVELY RICHER-----NOT SOCIALLY PROGRESSIVE. JUST BECAUSE A GROUP SUPPORTS GBLT RIGHTS DOES NOT MAKE IT LEFT-LEANING LABOR AND JUSTICE.
The two industries being attacked now the most ---construction and public sector ---have the unions often most closely tied to DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS.
''Now, San Francisco’s famously progressive and largest public employee union
CWA accuses SEIU local of contracting out jobs
By John Coté
Updated 6:03 pm, Monday, October 13, 2014
Transit workers and supporters picket in solidarity at the Lake Merritt BART station in Oakland, CA Friday, October 18, 2013.
Bay Area Transit workers went on strike shutting down train service after BART ... moreUsing strikes, protests and political hardball, Service Employees International Union Local 1021 has fought for years against efforts to contract out government jobs to workers who earn less and get fewer benefits.
Now, San Francisco’s famously progressive and largest public employee union is being accused by another union of doing exactly that: contracting out jobs.
The accusation, contained in a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board by a chapter of the Communications Workers of America, has led to a messy intra-labor fight with political undertones in a city where unions hold considerable electoral power.
SEIU Local 1021, a politically active Northern California chapter of the country's second largest union, is deeply involved in several local contests on the Nov. 4 ballot, including supporting Republican BART Board Director James Fang because of his pro-union stance during two BART strikes last year. The union has also contributed more than $161,000 to committees supporting Supervisor David Campos’ bid for San Francisco’s 17th Assembly District seat.
“We oppose, and we challenge, and we picket, and then our own union is contracting out our jobs,” said Daz Lamparas, the CWA shop steward who filed the original complaint in July. CWA Local 9404 represents the organizers and other staff at SEIU Local 1021.
“It’s ironic,” he said.
Local denies charge
SEIU Local 1021 maintains it did not take away jobs from unionized workers, merely hired temporary contractors for specific jobs around election season or to fill in for staff on leave.
“We don’t subcontract,” said Pete Castelli, SEIU Local 1021’s executive director. “We don’t believe in it. We’re politically against it, and we’re not doing it now.”
A document that CWA filed with the federal labor regulators Aug. 26 indicates SEIU Local 1021 contracted with at least seven individual consultants and two organizations since March. CWA contends that six of those contracts amount to “arbitrarily contracting out bargaining unit jobs without notification to the union.”
That includes hiring labor organizer and comedian Nato Green at up to $9,000 a month for negotiations involving nurses in San Francisco and Marin, paying former longtime San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond $3,000 a month to work on a quarterly news magazine, and paying People Organizing for Worker’s Rights $150,000 for “representation and bargaining,” the documents indicate.
Minutes from a 2013 meeting of the union’s executive board say People Organizing for Worker’s Rights “is comprised of current and former SEIU members, leaders and staff, as well as local community activists.”
Castelli declined to comment on the specific work each contractor was doing.
Joseph Frankl, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in San Francisco, recently ordered the dispute to go to arbitration, and indicated CWA could ask him to review the arbitrator’s award, documents show.
SEIU Local 1021 represents more than 54,000 employees, from custodians to swim instructors, in Northern California, and is heavily involved in campaigns to raise the minimum wage, including Proposition J on the Nov. 4 ballot to raise it to $15 in San Francisco. The union is also a major backer of Campos, who is battling Board of Supervisors President David Chiu for a seat in the state Assembly.
'I am not involved’
Chiu’s campaign sees at least one of the contract hires as a political one designed to attack their candidate.
“After running a $250,000 campaign to try to elect David Campos in the June primary, SEIU 1021 ... took it one step further by putting journalists on their payroll,” said Chiu Campaign Manager Jen Kwart. “It's no wonder that Tim Redmond has been acting as a mouthpiece for the David Campos campaign.”
Redmond, who now runs the online local news site 48 Hills, said his work at the union did not involve politics and was separate from what he wrote for his news site.
“I am not involved in SEIU political campaigns,” Redmond said. “I’m a freelance editor.”
Redmond is also a member of a different chapter of the CWA than the one that brought the complaint. (Newsroom staff at The Chronicle, including reporters, are also represented by that chapter, known as the Pacific Media Workers Guild.)
Redmond has sometimes noted on his news site when writing about the SEIU that he contracts with them, but in at least one case, an Aug. 14 story that included a reference to SEIU Local 1021’s role in the Democratic Party’s endorsement fight for the BART board race, he did not.
Redmond, who describes himself as “proudly part of the progressive movement,” said that was an oversight.
“I have never been an unbiased reporter,” Redmond said. “I have always been a journalist with a point of view. ... My agendas are wide open.”
RSS Feed
