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Tag: labor

  • You aren’t likely to lose a job in the US but may find it harder to land one

    You aren’t likely to lose a job in the US but may find it harder to land one

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Laid off by the music streaming service Spotify last year, Joovay Arias figured he’d land another job as a software engineer fairly soon. His previous job search, in 2019, had been a breeze.

    “Back then,” he said, “I had tons of recruiters reaching out to me — to the point where I had to turn them down.”

    Arias did find another job recently, but only after an unexpected ordeal.

    “I thought it was going to be something like three months,’’ said Arias, 39. “It turned into a year and three months.’’

    As Arias and other jobseekers can attest, the American labor market, red-hot for the past few years, has cooled. The job market is now in an unusual place: Jobholders are mostly secure, with layoffs low, historically speaking. Yet the pace of hiring has slowed, and landing a job has become harder. On Friday, the government will report on whether hiring slowed sharply again in August after a much-weaker-than-expected July job gain.

    “If you have a job and you’re happy with that job and you want to hold onto that job, things are pretty good right now,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “But if you’re out of work or you have a job and you want to switch to a new one, things aren’t as rosy as they were a couple of years ago.’’

    Since peaking in March 2022 as the economy accelerated out of the pandemic recession, the number of listed job openings has dropped by more than a third, according to the government’s latest monthly report on openings and hiring.

    Temporary-help firms have reduced jobs for 26 of the past 28 months. That’s a telling sign: Economists generally regard temp jobs as a harbinger for where the job market is headed because many employers hire temps before committing to full-time hires.

    In a roundup this week of local economic conditions, the Federal Reserve’s regional banks reported signs of a decelerating job market. Staffing agencies have said that job gains have slowed “as firms are approaching hiring decisions with greater hesitancy,” the New York Fed found. “Job candidates are lingering on the market longer.”

    The Minneapolis Fed said that a staffing agency reported that “businesses are getting a lot more picky” about whom they hire. And the Atlanta Fed found that “only a few” companies planned to step up hiring.

    Job-hopping, so rampant two years ago, has slowed as workers have gradually lost confidence in their ability to find better pay or working conditions somewhere else. Just 3.3 million Americans quit their jobs in July, compared with a peak of 4.5 million in April 2022.

    “People are staying put because they’re afraid they won’t find new jobs,’’ said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at the employment website Glassdoor.

    And the Labor Department has reported, in its annual revised estimates of employment growth, that the economy added 818,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months that ended in March than it had previously estimated.

    In one respect, it’s not at all surprising that the pace of hiring is now moderating. Job growth in 2021 and 2022, as the economy roared back from the COVID-19 recession, was the most explosive on record. Workers gained leverage they hadn’t enjoyed in decades. Companies scrambled to hire fast enough to keep up with surging sales. Many employers had to jack up pay and offer bonuses to keep employees.

    It was inevitable — and even healthy, economists say, in the long run — for hiring to slow, thereby easing pressure on wage growth and inflation pressures. Otherwise, the economy could have overheated and forced the Fed to tighten credit so aggressively as to cause a recession.

    The post-pandemic jobs boom was a marked contrast to the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Back then, it took more than six years for the economy to recover the jobs that had been lost. By contrast, the breathtaking pandemic job losses of 2020 — 22 million — were reversed in less than 2 1/2 years.

    Still, the surging economy ignited inflation, leading the Fed to raise interest rates 11 times in 2022 and 2023 to try to cool the job market and slow inflation. And for a while, the economy and the job market appeared immune from higher borrowing costs. Consumers kept spending, businesses kept expanding and the economy kept growing.

    But eventually the continued high rates began leaving their mark. Several high-profile companies, including tech giants like Spotify, announced layoffs last year in the face high interest rates. Outside of the economy’s technology sector, though, and, to a lesser extent, finance, most American companies haven’t cut jobs. The number of people filing first-time applications for unemployment benefits is barely above where it was before the pandemic struck.

    Yet the same companies that are keeping workers aren’t necessarily adding more.

    “Compared to a year or two ago, it’s a lot more difficult, particularly for entry-level folks,’’ Glassdoor’s Terrazas said. “Because of the gradual drip of layoffs in tech and finance, in professional services over the past year and a half, there have been a lot of high-skilled, experienced folks on the job market.

    “By all evidence, they are finding jobs. But they are also pushing more entry-level folks further and further down the queue… Recent grads, folks without a lot of on-the-job experience are feeling the effects of suddenly competing with people who have two, five, 10 years’ experience in the jobs market. When those big fish are in the market, the little fish naturally get squeezed out.’’

    Despite the pressure of the highest interest rates in decades, the economy remains in solid shape, having grown at a healthy 3% annual pace from April through June. Most Americans are enjoying solid job security.

    Still, given the growing difficulty of changing jobs, even some of those job holders are feeling the chill.

    “The reality is a lot of people, even when they have jobs, are feeling a lot of angst about the economy,’’ Terrazas said. “People are feeling a little bit job insecurity, a lot more pressure in the workplace than they have in a while.’’

    In an August survey, the New York Fed found that Americans as a whole are more worried about losing their jobs now than at any time since 2014, when people were just beginning to feel the full effects of the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-2009.

    Adding to the anxiety is that memories of the recent job boom are still fresh.

    “The reference point for most people is still 2021, 2022, when the job market was very strong, and what looks like for us economists as a normalization (of the job market from unsustainable levels), I think for a lot of people feels like a loss of status,’’ Terrazas said.

    Consider Abby Neff, who, since graduating from Ohio University in May 2023, has struggled to find the “old-fashioned writing job’’ that she hoped to land in journalism

    “It’s been pretty tough,” she said, “to find a permanent journalism job.”

    In the meantime, Neff, 23, has joined the government’s AmeriCorps agency, which mobilizes Americans to perform community service, in southeastern Ohio. The job doesn’t pay much. But it has given her the opportunity to write and to learn about everything from forestry to sustainable agriculture to watershed management.

    She hadn’t expected to encounter such difficulty in finding a job in her field.

    “I feel like I did all the ‘right things’ in college,’’ Neff said ruefully.

    She edited a campus magazine and made contacts in the business. She has landed some interviews, only to learn later that the job was filled without her having heard from the employer.

    “I will get ‘ghosted,’ ‘’ she said. “I almost feel like I have to hunt employers down to even get a response to an application or submission.”

    Arias, the software engineer, started looking for a job “the minute I got laid off’’ in June 2023. At first, he was casual about it. He took time off to care for his newborn daughter and drew money out of his severance package from Spotify. But when the job hunt proved difficult, he “decided to really ramp it up’’ early this year.

    Arias started driving for a ride-sharing service and getting job leads from passengers. He reached out to a company through which he had taken part in a computer coding bootcamp, seeking contacts. Eventually, the networking paid off with a new job.

    Yet the process proved much more frustrating than he had envisioned. Employers he had communicated with would vanish without explanation.

    “That’s the worst part about the experience,’’ Arias said. “You get that introductory message. Then you send your resume. And then that’s it. Communication would end there. Or you’d get an automated response. So you don’t know what happened, what you did wrong … It just feels really demoralizing, really stressful, because you don’t know what happened.”

    ___

    AP Economics Writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this report.

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  • Most retailers, grocers will be open on Labor Day. Here’s what’s open and closed

    Most retailers, grocers will be open on Labor Day. Here’s what’s open and closed

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    WASHINGTON — The origins of Labor Day date back to the late 19th century, when activists first sought to establish a day that would pay tribute to workers.

    The first U.S. Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882. Some 10,000 workers marched in a parade organized by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor.

    A handful of cities and states began to adopt laws recognizing Labor Day in the years that followed, yet it took more than a decade before President Grover Cleveland signed a congressional act in 1894 establishing the first Monday of September as a legal holiday.

    While many workers have the day off, most big consumer-facing businesses are open and even offering promotional sales to lure customers.

    Here’s what is open and closed this year on Labor Day:

    Government offices, post offices, courts and schools are closed.

    U.S. stock markets and banks are closed Monday.

    Standard FedEx and UPS pickup and delivery services will not be available on Labor Day, although some critical services will be offered at certain locations.

    Warehouse membership club Costco will be closed on Labor Day, but the vast majority of major national retailers and grocery stores will be open, with some offering promotional sales to lure customers. Hours may vary by location, so check your local store.

    Despite the fact that many schools are back in session and the summer travel season is winding down, the Transportation Security Administration anticipates screening more than 17 million people at airports between Thursday and next Wednesday — a record for the Labor Day period.

    AAA says bookings for domestic travel are running 9% higher than last year for the holiday weekend, while international trips are down 4%.

    If you are traveling by car, you will be getting a break on gasoline compared with last year. The nationwide average was recently $3.44 per gallon, compared to $3.86 a year ago, according to AAA.

    The auto club doesn’t provide a full travel forecast for Labor Day as it does for Memorial Day and July Fourth. But AAA does offer some useful advice for travelers:

    — Leave early. Everything will take longer than you expect.

    — Watch the weather. Even if skies are clear at home, there could be storms at your flight’s destination or along your road route. Have a backup route.

    — Be nice. Flight cancellations and bumper-to-bumper traffic are frustrating, but you won’t be the only one who is stuck or delayed.

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  • Opinion: Why are so many California hospitals closing their labor and delivery units?

    Opinion: Why are so many California hospitals closing their labor and delivery units?

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    Last week, Keck Medicine of USC announced the closure of USC Verdugo Hills Hospital obstetric services on Nov. 20. They cited a 40% decline in deliveries over the past decade within “our community” and the resulting financial effect on the hospital as reasons for the decision. While this justification appears reasonable at first glance, it conceals an unsettling trend with significant implications for maternal health.

    The closing of hospital labor and delivery units is a nationwide trend, resulting in “maternity care deserts.” The closures primarily affect patients with Medicaid insurance, which pays for more than 40% of deliveries in the United States, and through Medi-Cal, more than 50% of deliveries in California. Unequal access to obstetric care contributes to America’s shamefully high maternal mortality rate which, at 22 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, was double or triple the rate of peer nations.

    Obstetric care is different from many other types of healthcare in its unpredictability. Babies do not arrive on anyone’s schedule, and the busyness of labor and delivery units can wax and wane accordingly. For doctors to care for laboring mothers and their babies safely, hospitals must be staffed for the possibility of a sudden abundance of patients requiring emergency care.

    The modern fee-for-service healthcare model, which pushes hospitals to maximize efficiency and reduce staffing, treats the resiliency necessary for delivering babies as a drag on their bottom line. In this model, hospitals must fund round-the-clock capacity but are only reimbursed when their facilities and staff are in action. So if not enough deliveries are happening, expenses outweigh reimbursement. This drives hospitals to get out of the baby delivery business altogether.

    California has experienced a higher rate of obstetric unit closures than other states, and it continues to accelerate. More than 46 labor and delivery departments closed in the state between 2012 and 2023, with 60% occurring within the last three years. These closures are not limited to sparsely populated rural areas: 17 were within Los Angeles County, resulting in a local rate of closures that far outpaces the declining birth rate. This year, five more California hospitals have stopped providing obstetric care, and USC Verdugo Hills Hospital will be the fifth in L.A. County to close labor and delivery within a two-year period.

    Healthcare and medical benefit administrators talk of scaling and consolidation, of concentrating obstetric care at fewer hospitals so that there will be enough deliveries to cover the expense of remaining open. This will only work if we assume that market forces will sort out the balance between supply and demand so enough labor and delivery departments remain open to meet demand. But such forces only work if prices are dynamic and responsive to changes in supply. Insurance providers, especially Medicaid and Medi-Cal, have not shown this type of flexibility.

    Medi-Cal, the Medicaid program in California, has reimbursement rates for obstetric care that are fifth lowest in the nation. In our state, even busy labor and delivery departments that care primarily for Medicaid patients do not break even. South L.A.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital is struggling to stay open despite increasing its volume of obstetric patients as other Los Angeles labor and delivery units have closed. This shows that the amount paid by Medi-Cal is below the market cost of providing obstetric care. This deficit is at the core of the California closures.

    There are at least two paths forward.

    The first is to increase Medi-Cal’s reimbursement of each delivered patient. The second would require directly regulating and subsidizing the maintenance of labor and delivery units the way the state does for emergency rooms. Either approach will be costly, because providing safe, modern, evidence-based obstetric care is expensive.

    Reproductive freedom is much in the news this campaign season. It should include reasonable, safe and dependable access to labor and delivery services.

    Anna Reinert is an assistant professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.

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    Anna Reinert

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  • Florida abandoned workplace safety for its public employees and attacked their unions instead

    Florida abandoned workplace safety for its public employees and attacked their unions instead

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    Tens of thousands of state and municipal employees in Florida have lost their union representation — and their union contracts — this year, due to consequences of a  “reform” law approved in 2023.  And while the issue is little-discussed, one clear example of the law’s impact is its potential to undermine the few workplace health and safety protections that Florida’s public sector has in large part historically been excluded from.

    It started 50 years ago.

    Under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, millions of workers in Florida’s private sector — which make up the majority of the state’s workforce — are covered by basic health and safety regulations that are meant to help protect people from injury, illness, and death on the job.

    Thanks to OSHA, workers have a right to protections such as the information and training for chemical hazards in the workplace, safety equipment like respirators, and a workplace that is “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

    But there’s a glaring loophole baked into the law that has never been fixed: It doesn’t cover state, city or county employees.

    In Florida, that means the federal government doesn’t have authority to require or enforce basic workplace safety protections for the more than 900,000 employees in local and state government, including the public employees who fix malfunctioning traffic lights, pick up your trash, drive your kids to school, and clear debris and fix power lines after major storms.

    Labor unions, for their part, can negotiate protective language into union contracts for public employees who are exempted from OSHA’s federal protections, and many— including the Laborers’ International Union of North America and the Service Employees International Union — have.

    The federal government’s landmark workplace safety law has a glaring loophole that excludes Florida’s state and municipal workers.

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    According to Ronnie Burris, a former wastewater treatment employee of 25 years and union official for LiUNA Local 630 in Jacksonville, all of his local’s municipal contracts — covering certain groups of workers employed by Orlando, Jacksonville, Cocoa Beach and other cities — contain explicit requirements for the public employer to “comply with federal, state, and local legislation concerning safety, health, sanitation, and working conditions.”

    “That’s been negotiated in all the contracts,” Burris told Orlando Weekly in a phone call.

    In practice, he explained, this means if an employer did violate federal OSHA regulations, the affected employee wouldn’t be able to go to OSHA, since the federal agency doesn’t have jurisdiction. But they would have the right to file a grievance through their union over a breach of their union contract.

    That, Burris confirmed, is the union difference. “If they’re non-union, then I’m not sure that [the employer] have to follow anything.”

    As of last year, less than one-third of Florida’s public sector had union representation according to federal data, and even that low number has taken a drastic nosedive.

    In the wake of a union “reform” law approved by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and Florida Gov. DeSantis last year, more than 68,000 public employees in Florida — including thousands represented by LiUNA — have so far lost their union contracts, as well as the certification from the state that would allow their unions to negotiate new ones. Cops and firefighters were excluded from the new law, so their unions weren’t decertified.

    Burris’s Local 630 recently lost certification (and contracts) for 11 public sector unions, as a result of the law, covering over 1,700 employees in Florida altogether.

    These now-dissolved unions provided negotiating power for mechanics and other trades workers at the Orlando International Airport, as well as certain groups of workers employed by the cities of Melbourne, Atlantic Beach, Jacksonville Beach, Edgewater, and employees of Levy, Breward, Columbia, Alachua and Nassau counties.

    Some of these unions were established decades ago. The union at Orlando International Airport, governed by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, was first certified in 1977. The now-defunct union in Alachua County — formerly representing over 200 employees, from janitors to tax clerks and equipment operators — was certified the same year.

    “Most municipalities want to keep their employees safe,” Burris allowed. But without any sort of mandate or regulation in place, he said, there is no authority forcing employers to abide by or respect the same rules afforded to private sector employees under OSHA, and the state government doesn’t require similar protections either.

    Deadly consequences
    Even union representation has its limitations, however. The general lack of OSHA coverage for Florida’s public sector laid the groundwork for a deadly explosion in Daytona Beach back in 2006, which eventually led to a federal investigation.
    Three union-represented city employees were working on the roof of the Bethune Wastewater Treatment Plant in Daytona, damaged from recent hurricanes, unaware that they were working above a massive methanol tank.

    Sparks from a cutting torch the men used to remove parts of the damaged roof ignited methanol vapors from the tank, creating an explosion and a “fireball on top of the tank,” according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s report.

    All three employees were swallowed by flames. One worker, 43-year-old Michael Martin, managed to survive with severe injuries, while the two others — 59-year old Eric Johnson and 40-year-old Clyde Jones — died from the devastating incident, later deemed preventable.

    The federal board noted in its investigative findings that Daytona Beach had “no program to evaluate the safety of non-routine tasks” and there was “no evidence” to suggest the employees who died that day had received any methanol hazard training in the past 10 years. Jones’ family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, and his widow called on state leaders and Congress to establish greater protections.

    Florida abandoned workplace safety for its public employees and attacked their unions instead (3)

    Courtesy of Daytona Beach via Chemical Safety Board

    But it was clear this wasn’t just a city of Daytona Beach problem. “No state or federal oversight of public employee safety exists in the State of Florida,” the federal board noted, bluntly, in its findings.

    The investigation board recommended in its 2007 report that Florida lawmakers and the governor (then-Republican Charlie Crist) enact legislation to implement policies “covering the workplace health and safety of Florida public employees that are at least as effective as OSHA.”

    Nearly 20 years later, this has not happened.

    Some municipal governments — including Orange County — have voluntarily adopted health and safety programs that follow OSHA standards. But some safety officials have admitted that simply adopting these programs may not be enough.

    During that investigation into the 2006 wastewater treatment plant incident, Brian Berke, an employee safety manager for Palm Beach County at the time, testified that his county’s voluntarily created health and safety program reflected its “strong responsibility” to provide a safe work environment for county employees.

    “Extreme pressures,” however — such as “cost-cutting” — “could be brought to bear on even our program in the future,” Berke admitted. “It is my belief that only mandatory regulatory requirements, whether coming from a state or federal level, are needed to support and nurture safety efforts within the public sector.”

    Marc Brody, then a union official for AFSCME Council 79 — which represented the workers at the treatment plant — agreed. Brody, the union’s director of education, described OSHA’s public sector loophole as “scandalous” in his own testimony.

    “Many public-sector unions, including ours, have tried to include safety language in our contracts,” Brody said. But the problem, he added, was that in many cases, this language “has really no teeth, and you have no way to back it with administrative criminal sanctions and violations.”

    A failure to opt in

    The public sector “loophole” has been around since OSHA was first established half a century ago, and efforts to close it (dating back decades) have so far been unsuccessful.

    The 50-year-old law does offer the option for states like Florida to opt in their public sector workers, by creating a state OSHA plan with standards that are at least as effective as federal standards. Adopting a state plan, a move that can also serve to bolster compliance for the private sector, was another recommendation of the federal board that investigated the deadly 2006 accident in Daytona Beach.

    Only about half of states in the U.S. have created their own state OSHA plans, however, excluding an estimated 7.9 million public employees in the country from OSHA’s protections.

    Florida, a state that’s home to the third-largest workforce in the U.S., has never created a comprehensive state OSHA program.

    In Florida, the lack of a state program leaves enforcement for the state’s much larger private sector fully up to a very limited number of federal OSHA investigators. As of 2021, Florida had only 53 federal OSHA compliance regulators to enforce protections for over 8.4 million workers in Florida’s private sector.

    According to federal data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, analyzed by the AFL-CIO, however, public employers have in recent years reported higher injury rates. In 2022, state and local public sector employers reported a combined injury rate of 4.9 per 100 workers, compared to a reported rate of 2.7 per 100 workers in the private sector. 

    “No state or federal oversight of public employee safety exists in the State of Florida”

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    Florida’s Republican leaders, believe it or not, briefly flirted with the idea of creating a state plan in 2021. But the proposal to explore this option ultimately led nowhere and has seemingly been abandoned.

    During a brief state legislative special session that fall, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a controversial bill (HB 5-B) that was pitched as an effort to withdraw from federal OSHA oversight and establish a state plan to alternatively enforce workplace regulations for Floridians in the public and private sectors.

    The proposal, approved by state lawmakers along party lines with Republicans in favor, emerged only after OSHA had issued a rule — later blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court — that would have placed a COVID-19 vaccination requirement on workers at large employers.

    The Florida bill — later described as “theater” by lone GOP dissenter Jeff Brandes — gave the Governor’s Office $1 million to come up with a proposal for state OSHA plan, and to provide a status report to leaders of the Florida House and Senate by January 17, 2022.

    The report released that January ultimately estimated that the process of taking over federal oversight would take up to nine years, and would require the state to establish a new state agency. Such an endeavor would be costly, and would still have required the state to offer the bare minimum oversight that OSHA does (and enforce the same rules).

    click to enlarge LiUNA Local 630 members - Courtesty of LiUNA Local 630

    Courtesty of LiUNA Local 630

    LiUNA Local 630 members

    The January 2022 status report, signed by a DeSantis staffer, added that it’s “too early” to definitively determine if the plan would be prudent. Despite a vague commitment to provide a “detailed timeline” and an estimation of required resources, there is no evidence of such a plan actually moving forward.

    Dr. Rich Templin, chief lobbyist for Florida’s largest federation of labor unions — the Florida AFL-CIO — said the GOP’s plan was insincere from the start.

    “Our position was, if you guys want to do this, we’re not opposed to it, but bring everybody to the table,” Templin told Orlando Weekly. “But that’s not what they wanted. They just wanted headlines.”

    “Did they just abandon it? Yes,” he shared bluntly. “They just let it go. They got their headlines, and they just let it go.”

    A request for an update sent by Orlando Weekly to the Governor’s Office has been unreturned as of publication.

    A pattern of deregulation

    Beyond basic safety regulation, Florida has lacked a state Department of Labor entirely since 2002, after the Florida legislature approved a plan at the behest of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to abolish it.

    Most programs and services in that department were passed off to other departments or agencies, but some — including minimum wage enforcement and a now-defunct workplace safety division — were not.

    Before Florida’s elected leaders dissolved the labor department, that department had for a time housed a Division of Safety, created under the Florida Occupational Safety and Health Act.

    The division offered more protections afforded to state and municipal employees today, both establishing and enforcing state standards on workplace health and safety from at least 1993 to 2000. Violations of these standards were subject to a penalty of up to $50,000 per violation, according to state records.

    Motivated by a national move by conservative leaders toward cost reduction and decentralization, however, Florida’s state leaders decided to repeal the Florida OSH Act in 1999, effectively dissolving the division and laying off nearly 100 staff in the process, according to former union official Brody.

    Jeb Bush deregulates workplace safety regulations (please clap) - University of Arkansas at Little Rock

    University of Arkansas at Little Rock

    Jeb Bush deregulates workplace safety regulations (please clap)

    Just a few years later, state leaders got rid of the state labor department altogether, following a years-long push by Jeb Bush, who directed the state to identify workforce programs that could be “eliminated, consolidated, or privatized.”

    Today, labor unions in Florida can help fill some gaps in protection, but limitations in enforcement and a lack of resources persist.

    Business lobbyists for major employers of largely private sector workers in the tourism industry and construction trades have pushed state leaders in Florida to deregulate child labor and to prevent local governments from guaranteeing workers access to certain workplace protections — including protection from extreme heat on the job.

    AFSCME, one of the largest public sector unions in the state, recently adopted a resolution at its national convention that represents a commitment to try and negotiate contracts that offer protections from exposure to extreme heat, specifically.

    As temperatures in some of the hottest states and communities in the U.S. surge, the Biden administration recently released a proposed federal standard to help protect workers from extreme heat, mandating certain rights for workers once temperatures on the job exceed 80 degrees.

    But even if the administration does manage to finalize and implement that rule — the process is expected to take years, and could be scrapped under a Trump administration — that standard still wouldn’t cover state and municipal workers in states like Florida and Texas that don’t have state OSHA plans.

    Bipartisan legislation recently introduced at the federal level in June — sponsored by Congressman Chris Deluzio (D-PA) and Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — could change that, but it’s unclear if there will be enough political will to push it near or past the finish line.

    “Our dedicated public sector workers throughout our country deserve to be safe at work and the robust level of protection that OSHA coverage provides,” said U.S. Rep. Fitzpatrick in a news release.

    “Congressman Deluzio and I are committed to protecting hardworking public servants throughout our nation’s communities, and I implore my colleagues to join us in this vital effort to safeguard workers.”

    This story has been updated to clarify the use of the term “withdraw” in regards to HB 5-B (2021).

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  • ‘Brightlies’: Passenger railway Brightline Florida hires union avoidance lawyers to discourage organizing workers

    ‘Brightlies’: Passenger railway Brightline Florida hires union avoidance lawyers to discourage organizing workers

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    Photo via Brightline/Twitter

    Florida’s high-speed passenger train Brightline has responded to their onboard attendants’ newly announced effort to unionize by hiring lawyers from the notorious union avoidance law firm Littler Mendelson and internally communicating that they would prefer for Brightline to remain union-free. (Shocker!)

    Patrick Goddard, president of Brightline, sent an internal company email to Brightline employees earlier this month, informing employees that while it is their “right” to seek union representation, he believes a “direct relationship” between the company and its employees — without a union — is “in the best interest of all of us.”

    click to enlarge 'Brightlies': Passenger railway Brightline Florida hires union avoidance lawyers to discourage organizing workers (8)

    “The fact that many Onboard Teammates have inquired about representation is their right, and it’s clear to me, that many feel unheard,” wrote Goddard, according to screenshots of the internal email, obtained by Orlando Weekly. “I believe the best way to approach these matters is by working together, without a third party involved.”

    Goddard’s use of the phrases “third party” and “direct relationship” are telling. They come directly from the union avoidance industry playbook, and from rhetoric encouraged by anti-union law firms like Littler Mendelson, which is representing Brightline as their legal counsel during the unionization process.

    This kind of language, which downplays the direct role that workers have in forming a union in their workplace, was also used by Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks — another client of Littler Mendelson.

    click to enlarge 'Brightlies': Passenger railway Brightline Florida hires union avoidance lawyers to discourage organizing workers (7)

    “One hundred million people come in to Starbucks. The customer experience will be significantly challenged and less-than if a third party is integrated into our business,” then-Starbucks CEO Shultz told the New York Times during a live interview in 2022, as cafe employees at dozens of corporate-owned locations, including in Florida, were organizing to join Starbucks Workers United.

    Goddard, who helped oversee Brightline’s $2.7 billion expansion project to Orlando, worked in the hotel industry before joining Brightline. He founded and led luxury hotel management companies, and worked for hotel groups like Hilton Hotels — a multinational company that has historically spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (more likely, millions) on anti-union labor consultants (some of whom are attorneys, but not all).

    Goddard’s email to the Brightline employees earlier this month goes on to offer a brief rundown of “Frequently Asked Questions” concerning the process of forming a union, union dues, and warnings that, if onboard attendants democratically vote to unionize, contract negotiations between the union and Brightline could take years. “There will be legal limitations on Brightline’s ability to work directly with you to make changes,” he adds.

    The Transport Workers Union, the labor organization that some Brightline employees are seeking to join, emailed its own response to Brightline employees after Goddard sent his email, which they titled “Brightlies.”

    “Straight out of their high-priced attorney’s playbook, [Goddard] brought forward the argument that by forming a Union, the Onboard Workers would disrupt the ‘direct relationship’ that he so much enjoys having with all of you,” the union’s email reads. “The truth is, what you have all set out to do is exactly that: Form a Real Direct Relationship where the company will have to sit and listen to your concerns and demands.”

    Anti-union bingo card sent to Brightline employees, in response to Brightline's anti-union email to employers earlier this month (August 2024) - Transport Workers Union

    Transport Workers Union

    Anti-union bingo card sent to Brightline employees, in response to Brightline’s anti-union email to employers earlier this month (August 2024)

    The union’s email includes its own responses to Goddard’s list of frequently asked questions, which they describe as more truthful. The union, for instance, clarifies Goddard’s claims on union dues, sharing that no union member would be required or asked to pay union dues until a union contract has been successfully negotiated. The union also denies Goddard’s claim that dues would amount to $600 for each employee, annually.

    According to TWU, union dues are equal to two hours of pay per month, and under Florida’s right-to-work law, signing up to become a dues-paying union member would presumably be completely voluntary anyway. The union quips that Goddard would need to give Brightline employees a raise in order for dues to cost $600 annually, and further explained what members’ dues would support.

    “70% of the dues remain with your Local to use to run the union. 30% goes to TWU International to help further grow the union and to fight for rulemaking with agencies like the Federal Railroad Administration to improve the livelihoods of railroad workers despite rail companies fighting like hell to reduce safety and working standards,” the email reads.

    The company’s effort to frame the union as a third party is a “smokescreen,” the union argues. “YOU AND YOUR COWORKERS are the union and YOU all will directly negotiate with the company with TWU’s help!”

    click to enlarge Screenshot of an email sent by Brightline Florida to employees. - Email screenshot obtained by Orlando Weekly

    Email screenshot obtained by Orlando Weekly

    Screenshot of an email sent by Brightline Florida to employees.

    Delay tactics at a price

    The notable unionization effort first publicly kicked off earlier this month, as the Transport Workers Union — an international labor union representing more than 155,000 workers — announced that a majority of the roughly 100 onboard attendants for Brightline Florida had signed authorization cards in support of unionizing — signifying a historic organizing effort.

    The Transport Workers Union then filed those cards with the National Mediation Board — a federal government agency that oversees railroad and airline labor relations — requesting a union election for the employees.

    According to TWU, however, Brightline’s Littler Mendelson lawyers are making the argument that a union election needs to be requested through the National Labor Relations Board — which oversees private sector labor relations in other industries — not the NMD. Neither Brightline nor the two lawyers the company has retained have responded to a request for confirmation or comment.

    The union, in a separate email to Brightline employees, described this argument as a “poorly written objection” and a purposeful delay tactic based solely on the position that this union election is not under the jurisdiction of the rail industry.

    The union also claims the move will ultimately just serve to pad the pockets of Littler Mendelson, whose attorneys have been known to bill clients hundreds of dollars per hour. The firm is one of the oldest in the country that specializes in “union avoidance” and one of the largest, with dozens of locations around the world.

    Their lawyers have historically been used to help fend off organizing efforts such as the Fight for $15 campaign organized by fast food workers (a project of the Service Employees International Union, which recently rebranded as Fight for a Union) and have represented clients such as Starbucks, Apple, Amazon and Trader Joe’s that have been accused of labor law violations.

    According to TWU president John Samuelsen — who is an elected official, chosen by TWU membership — Brightline Florida employees reached out to the union within the last three months, after first having organizing talks among themselves. “The motivation is similar to every other work group that seeks to unionize: to build collective power in a workplace,” Samuelsen told Orlando Weekly earlier this month.

    Workers are dissatisfied with their pay — as many Floridians continue to struggle to afford basic living expenses — and their current benefits, and are also concerned about safety issues, according to Samuelsen.

    Headlines reporting deadly accidents between Brightline trains and vehicles emerge nearly on a weekly basis. Samuelsen told the Palm Beach Post that workers don’t feel like Brightline is taking into consideration the trauma this creates for employees.

    “As opposed to other rail operators, Brightline has an indifference to its workforce after the trauma that comes when a Brightline train runs somebody over,” he claimed.

    Brightline, a for-profit passenger train that also operates on the West Coast, has courted both the state and federal government for grants to help support their projects in Florida, which have been highly anticipated by the public. Out west, the company has received billions of dollars in federal grants for a much larger project that will run from Southern California to Las Vegas, and has developed an amicable relationship with labor unions, including the TWU.

    Brightline Florida runs a high-speed train line running from Miami to Orlando, first expanding to the Orlando area last fall. Further expansion is also in the works, as Brightline courts commuters to make up for recent quarterly losses.

    “Brightline made a strategically stupid decision in hiring a union-busting law firm, Littler Mendelson, infamous for their anti-labor tactics at Starbucks,” Samuelsen told Orlando Weekly. “Brightline — which glommed huge sums of government assistance — is now using taxpayer money to fight the democratic desire of its workers to form a union.”

    Samuelsen has shared that more Brightline employees — not just the onboard attendants, who help passengers with bags and serve food and drinks — have also approached the union, similarly interested in organizing.

    At this time, union officials have been unable to connect Orlando Weekly with rank-and-file Brightline employees they have been communicating with, citing a wish to protect the employees from employer retaliation — an issue that’s common during union drives. A similar concern was shared back in April, when airline JetBlue began (allegedly) posting anti-union flyers at airports, including Orlando International Airport.

    Statewide, just 6.1 percent of Florida’s workforce is represented by a union, according to federal data, and a new state law has further undercut unions’ presence in the public sector. Just about 26 percent of Florida’s public sector workforce had union representation as of last year, but tens of thousands of employees have seen their unions decertified, or dissolved by the state, since.

    If you’re a Brightline Florida employee with thoughts on the union drive among onboard attendants, we want to hear from you. Contact reporter McKenna Schueler at [email protected].

    Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.

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    McKenna Schueler

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  • A national staffing company owes more than $2.3 million to Denver workers in stolen wages and fines, according to the city

    A national staffing company owes more than $2.3 million to Denver workers in stolen wages and fines, according to the city

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    Downtown Denver. May 22, 2024.

    Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

    A California-based staffing company could owe more than $2.3 million in restitution, penalties and fines for minimum wage, overtime and sick leave violations involving thousands of Denver workers, according to a report from the Denver Auditor’s Office released Monday.

    The company, Advantage Workforce Services, provides gig work jobs that let workers choose from things like food service and cleaning shifts, classifying its workers as independent contractors.

    But the Auditor’s Office says that structure is the same as other staffing companies where employees do not have control over things like their salary or work structure — meaning workers are not independent contractors but are instead employees who should get paid sick leave and overtime.

    “When employees are misclassified as independent contractors, they are denied critical workplace protections and frequently have their wages stolen,” wrote Taylor Overschmidt, a spokesperson for the Auditor’s Office.

    Denverite has reached out to Advantage Workforce Services’ parent company, Instawork, for comment.

    Instawork is suing Denver over other wage theft fines the city levied on the company in January.

    The office found that Instawork owed more than $1 million in restitution and fines over similar violations involving about 3,000 misclassified workers.

    In July, Instawork sued the city over those fines. Advantage Workforce Services also sued the city over hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines the city said the company owed because Advantage Workforce Services did not turn over relevant documents, which the company claimed were “sensitive and confidential.”

    Now, the Auditor’s Office says Advantage Workforce Services is the same company as Instawork, and that the business failed to hand over payroll data involving 1,450 employees in that January investigation.

    “Instawork claimed these employees worked for Advantage Workforce Services, which we determined is not a separate company,” Overschmidt said. “Instawork fully owns and controls Advantage Workforce Services. They provide the same kind of labor, sometimes for the same clients, and subject employees to the same rules, requirements, and policies. All work gets performed through Instawork’s app and workers have a single profile and performance score.”

    Denver has passed stronger wage protection laws in recent years.

    The city raised its minimum wage starting in 2020 and passed a number of laws strengthening the ability of the Auditor’s Office to go after wage theft. Since then, the office has recovered record-breaking money for workers.

    In a statement Monday, Auditor Timothy O’Brien emphasized that companies committing wage theft hurt other businesses in the city.

    “The staffing industry has been around for a long time, and its members shouldn’t have to compete against a rival who profits from wage theft,” he said. “The fact that Instawork uses an app doesn’t change the basic principle that these people are employees entitled to legal wages, including overtime and paid sick and safe leave.”

    Meanwhile, disputes over gig work and independent contracting have played out with other national tech companies like Uber and Lyft for years. The federal government released new rules this year expanding protections for gig workers, but those protections are expected to be challenged in court.

    In Denver, Instawork will be able to appeal the Auditor’s Office finding.

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  • Detroit Marriott sued over alleged sexual assault and hostile work environment

    Detroit Marriott sued over alleged sexual assault and hostile work environment

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    A former employee of the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center is suing the hotel chain after she alleges she was sexually assaulted by a manager and then forced to leave her job.

    The Dearborn woman, whom Metro Times won’t identify because she was the victim of an alleged crime, claims in the lawsuit filed in Wayne County Circuit Court that the Detroit Marriott “created a sexually hostile environment” and failed to protect her.

    According to the lawsuit, manager Dhurba Koirala invited the employee to his hotel room at the end of her shift at 1 p.m. on Aug. 8 “under the guise that other employees would be present.”

    Koirala made her drinks and food, and at 7 a.m. the next day, she woke up disoriented in his bed, the lawsuit alleges. She “discovered that her underwear was inside out, and her menstruation product was missing,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Marko Law, a prominent Michigan civil rights firm.

    Koirala “made harmful, unlawful and offensive contact” with the employee’s body, the lawsuit alleges.

    The woman filed a police report and underwent a rape testing kit, and the DNA matched the manager, according to the suit.

    Marko says Koirala has been criminally charged.

    Every employer has an “obligation to provide a safe business environment for its staff and prevent its employees from injuring others,” her attorney Jon Marko said in a statement Monday. “Not only did Marriott breach its duty when it failed to protect our client, no person should be sexually assaulted as a condition of employment.”

    She was “forced to leave her position at Marriott as a result of this incident and has not been able to work since due to the trauma she has endured,” Marko said.

    The lawsuit alleges negligence, gross negligence, direct negligence, retaliation, hostile work environment, and violations of the Michigan Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act.

    The defendants named in the suit are Marriott International, Detroit HMS LLC, Detroit Hotel Services, Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, and Sodexo.

    According to the suit, the hotel breached its duty because “they knew or should have known that Koirala had a history of sexually assaulting and sexually harassing employees and intentionally and willfully ignored the behavior and allowed him to assault and harass employees.”

    Metro Times couldn’t immediately reach the Marriott for comment.

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    Steve Neavling

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  • Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Here’s why privacy advocates care

    Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Here’s why privacy advocates care

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    On a hot summer day in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dozens of men removed pipes, asbestos and hazardous waste while working to decontaminate a nuclear facility and prepare it for demolition.

    Dressed in head-to-toe coveralls and fitted with respirators, the crew members toiling in a building without power had no obvious respite from the heat. Instead, they wore armbands that recorded their heart rates, movements and exertion levels for signs of heat stress.

    Stephanie Miller, a safety and health manager for a U.S. government contractor doing cleanup work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, watched a computer screen nearby. A color-coding system with little bubbles showing each worker’s physiological data alerted her if anyone was in danger of overheating.

    “Heat is one of the greatest risks that we have in this work, even though we deal with high radiation, hazardous chemicals and heavy metals,” Miller said.

    As the world experiences more record high temperatures, employers are exploring wearable technologies to keep workers safe. New devices collect biometric data to estimate core body temperature – an elevated one is a symptom of heat exhaustion – and prompt workers to take cool-down breaks.

    The devices, which were originally developed for athletes, firefighters and military personnel, are getting adopted at a time when the Atlantic Council estimates heat-induced losses in labor productivity could cost the U.S. approximately $100 billion annually.

    This article is part of AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health. Read more Be Well.

    But there are concerns about how the medical information collected on employees will be safeguarded. Some labor groups worry managers could use it to penalize people for taking needed breaks.

    “Any time you put any device on a worker, they’re very concerned about tracking, privacy, and how are you going to use this against me,” said Travis Parsons, director of occupational safety and health at the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there, but there’s no guardrails around it.”

    VULNERABLE TO HEAT

    Wyatt Fischer, a furnace mason employee at Cardinal Glass, sits on an excavator while wearing a SlateSafety armband, Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024, in Menomonie, Wis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)

    Image

    FILE – Construction worker Fernando Padilla wipes his face as he works in the heat on June 30, 2023 in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV, File)

    At the Tennessee cleanup site, the workers wearing heat stress monitors made by Atlanta company SlateSafety are employed by United Cleanup Oak Ridge. The company is a contractor of the U.S. Department of Energy, which has rules to prevent on-the-job overheating.

    But most U.S. workers lack protections from extreme heat because there are no federal regulations requiring them, and many vulnerable workers don’t speak up or seek medical attention. In July, the Biden administration proposed a rule to protect 36 million workers from heat-related illnesses.

    From 1992 to 2022, 986 workers died from heat exposure in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Experts suspect the number is higher because a coroner might not list heat as the cause of death if a sweltering roofer takes a fatal fall.

    Setting occupational safety standards can be tricky because individuals respond differently to heat. That’s where the makers of wearable devices hope to come in.

    HOW WEARABLE HEAT TECH WORKS

    Employers have observed workers for heat-related distress by checking their temperatures with thermometers, sometimes rectally. More recently, firefighters and military personnel swallowed thermometer capsules.

    “That just was not going to work in our work environment,” Rob Somers, global environment, health and safety director at consumer product company Perrigo, said.

    Instead, more than 100 employees at the company’s infant formula plants were outfitted with SlateSafety armbands. The devices estimate a wearer’s core body temperature, and a reading of 101.3 degrees triggers an alert.

    Another SlateSafety customer is a Cardinal Glass factory in Wisconsin, where four masons maintain a furnace that reaches 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

    “They’re right up against the face of the wall. So it’s them and fire,” Jeff Bechel, the company’s safety manager, said.

    Cardinal Glass paid $5,000 for five armbands, software and air-monitoring hardware. Bechel thinks the investment will pay off; an employee’s two heat-related emergency room visits cost the company $15,000.

    Another wearable, made by Massachusetts company Epicore Biosystems, analyzes sweat to determine when workers are at risk of dehydration and overheating.

    “Until a few years ago, you just sort of wiped (sweat) off with a towel,” CEO Rooz Ghaffari said. “Turns out there’s all this information packed away that we’ve been missing.”

    Research has shown some devices successfully predict core body temperature in controlled environments, but their accuracy remains unproven in dynamic workplaces, according to experts. A 2022 research review said factors such as age, gender and ambient humidity make it challenging to reliably gauge body temperature with the technology.

    The United Cleanup Oak Ridge workers swathed in protective gear can get sweaty even before they begin demolition. Managers see dozens of sensor alerts daily.

    Laborer Xavier Allison, 33, was removing heavy pieces of ductwork during a recent heat wave when his device vibrated. Since he was working with radioactive materials and asbestos, he couldn’t walk outside to rest without going through a decontamination process, so he spent about 15 minutes in a nearby room which was just as hot.

    “You just sit by yourself and do your best to cool off,” Allison said.

    The armband notifies workers when they’ve cooled down enough to resume work.

    “Ever since we implemented it, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of people who need to get medical attention,” Miller said.

    COLLECTING PERSONAL DATA

    United Cleanup Oak Ridge uses the sensor data and an annual medical exam to determine work assignments, Miller said. After noticing patterns, the company sent a few employees to see their personal physicians, who found heart issues the employees hadn’t known about, she said.

    At Perrigo, managers analyze the data to find people with multiple alerts and speak to them to see if there’s “a reason why they’re not able to work in the environment,” Somers said. The information is organized by identification numbers, not names, when it goes into the company’s software system, he said.

    Companies keeping years of medical data raises concerns about privacy and whether bosses may use the information to kick an employee off a health plan or fire them, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    “The device could hurt, frankly, because you could raise your hand and say ‘I need a break,’ and the boss could say, ‘No, your heart rate is not elevated, go back to work,’” Schwartz said.

    To minimize such risks, employers should allow workers to opt in or out of wearing monitoring devices, only process strictly necessary data and delete the information within 24 hours, he said.

    Wearing such devices also may expose workers to unwanted marketing, Ikusei Misaka, a professor at Tokyo’s Musashino University, said.

    A PARTIAL SOLUTION

    The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advises employers to institute a plan to help workers adjust to hot conditions and to train them to recognize signs of heat-related illness and to administer first aid. Wearable devices can be part of efforts to reduce heat stress, but more work needs to be done to determine their accuracy, said Doug Trout, the agency’s medical officer.

    The technology also needs to be paired with access to breaks, shade and cool water, since many workers, especially in agriculture, fear retaliation for pausing to cool off or hydrate.

    “If they don’t have water to drink, and the time to do it, it doesn’t mean much,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said. “It’s just something extra they have to carry when they’re in the hot fields.”

    ___

    This story corrects the spelling of Natural Resources Defense Council in last paragraph.

    ___

    Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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  • Back-to-work order issued for 2 major Canada railroads. Union will comply, but lawsuit planned

    Back-to-work order issued for 2 major Canada railroads. Union will comply, but lawsuit planned

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    TORONTO — The Canadian arbitrator appointed to resolve a messy railroad labor dispute to protect the North American economy has ordered employees at the country’s two major railroads back to work so both can resume operating.

    The Teamsters union representing workers said Saturday that it will comply with the order and send its members back on the job, but it will also move forward with a legal challenge.

    “This decision by the CIRB sets a dangerous precedent. It signals to Corporate Canada that large companies need only stop their operations for a few hours, inflict short-term economic pain, and the federal government will step in to break a union,” said Paul Boucher, President of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents more than 9,000 engineers, conductors and dispatchers.

    “The rights of Canadian workers have been significantly diminished today,” Boucher added.

    The order should allow Canadian National trains to continue rolling and help Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. railroad get its operation running again.

    Both railroads have said they would follow the Canada Industrial Relations Board’s orders. Canadian National trains started running again Friday morning but the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference threatened to go on strike there starting Monday morning. CPKC workers have been on strike since the lockout began early Thursday, and the railroad’s trains have remained idle.

    Union officials have said they would “work within the framework of the law” even as they challenged the constitutionality of the arbitration order, announced by the government Thursday afternoon to avert potentially disastrous consequences to the economy.

    Businesses all across Canada and the United States said they would quickly face a crisis without rail service because they rely on freight railroads to deliver their raw materials and finished products. Without regular deliveries, many businesses would possibly have to cut production or even shut down.

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  • Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Why privacy advocates care

    Sensors can read your sweat and predict overheating. Why privacy advocates care

    [ad_1]

    On a hot summer day in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dozens of men removed pipes, asbestos and hazardous waste while working to decontaminate a nuclear facility and prepare it for demolition.

    Dressed in head-to-toe coveralls and fitted with respirators, the crew members toiling in a building without power had no obvious respite from the heat. Instead, they wore armbands that recorded their heart rates, movements and exertion levels for signs of heat stress.

    Stephanie Miller, a safety and health manager for a U.S. government contractor doing cleanup work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, watched a computer screen nearby. A color-coding system with little bubbles showing each worker’s physiological data alerted her if anyone was in danger of overheating.

    “Heat is one of the greatest risks that we have in this work, even though we deal with high radiation, hazardous chemicals and heavy metals,” Miller said.

    As the world experiences more record high temperatures, employers are exploring wearable technologies to keep workers safe. New devices collect biometric data to estimate core body temperature – an elevated one is a symptom of heat exhaustion – and prompt workers to take cool-down breaks.

    The devices, which were originally developed for athletes, firefighters and military personnel, are getting adopted at a time when the Atlantic Council estimates heat-induced losses in labor productivity could cost the U.S. approximately $100 billion annually.

    But there are concerns about how the medical information collected on employees will be safeguarded. Some labor groups worry managers could use it to penalize people for taking needed breaks.

    “Any time you put any device on a worker, they’re very concerned about tracking, privacy, and how are you going to use this against me,” said Travis Parsons, director of occupational safety and health at the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff out there, but there’s no guardrails around it.”

    At the Tennessee cleanup site, the workers wearing heat stress monitors made by Atlanta company SlateSafety are employed by United Cleanup Oak Ridge. The company is a contractor of the U.S. Department of Energy, which has rules to prevent on-the-job overheating.

    But most U.S. workers lack protections from extreme heat because there are no federal regulations requiring them, and many vulnerable workers don’t speak up or seek medical attention. In July, the Biden administration proposed a rule to protect 36 million workers from heat-related illnesses.

    From 1992 to 2022, 986 workers died from heat exposure in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Experts suspect the number is higher because a coroner might not list heat as the cause of death if a sweltering roofer takes a fatal fall.

    Setting occupational safety standards can be tricky because individuals respond differently to heat. That’s where the makers of wearable devices hope to come in.

    Employers have observed workers for heat-related distress by checking their temperatures with thermometers, sometimes rectally. More recently, firefighters and military personnel swallowed thermometer capsules.

    “That just was not going to work in our work environment,” Rob Somers, global environment, health and safety director at consumer product company Perrigo, said.

    Instead, more than 100 employees at the company’s infant formula plants were outfitted with SlateSafety armbands. The devices estimate a wearer’s core body temperature, and a reading of 101.3 degrees triggers an alert.

    Another SlateSafety customer is a Cardinal Glass factory in Wisconsin, where four masons maintain a furnace that reaches 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.

    “They’re right up against the face of the wall. So it’s them and fire,” Jeff Bechel, the company’s safety manager, said.

    Cardinal Glass paid $5,000 for five armbands, software and air-monitoring hardware. Bechel thinks the investment will pay off; an employee’s two heat-related emergency room visits cost the company $15,000.

    Another wearable, made by Massachusetts company Epicore Biosystems, analyzes sweat to determine when workers are at risk of dehydration and overheating.

    “Until a few years ago, you just sort of wiped (sweat) off with a towel,” CEO Rooz Ghaffari said. “Turns out there’s all this information packed away that we’ve been missing.”

    Research has shown some devices successfully predict core body temperature in controlled environments, but their accuracy remains unproven in dynamic workplaces, according to experts. A 2022 research review said factors such as age, gender and ambient humidity make it challenging to reliably gauge body temperature with the technology.

    The United Cleanup Oak Ridge workers swathed in protective gear can get sweaty even before they begin demolition. Managers see dozens of sensor alerts daily.

    Laborer Xavier Allison, 33, was removing heavy pieces of ductwork during a recent heat wave when his device vibrated. Since he was working with radioactive materials and asbestos, he couldn’t walk outside to rest without going through a decontamination process, so he spent about 15 minutes in a nearby room which was just as hot.

    “You just sit by yourself and do your best to cool off,” Allison said.

    The armband notifies workers when they’ve cooled down enough to resume work.

    “Ever since we implemented it, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of people who need to get medical attention,” Miller said.

    United Cleanup Oak Ridge uses the sensor data and an annual medical exam to determine work assignments, Miller said. After noticing patterns, the company sent a few employees to see their personal physicians, who found heart issues the employees hadn’t known about, she said.

    At Perrigo, managers analyze the data to find people with multiple alerts and speak to them to see if there’s “a reason why they’re not able to work in the environment,” Somers said. The information is organized by identification numbers, not names, when it goes into the company’s software system, he said.

    Companies keeping years of medical data raises concerns about privacy and whether bosses may use the information to kick an employee off a health plan or fire them, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    “The device could hurt, frankly, because you could raise your hand and say ‘I need a break,’ and the boss could say, ‘No, your heart rate is not elevated, go back to work,’” Schwartz said.

    To minimize such risks, employers should allow workers to opt in or out of wearing monitoring devices, only process strictly necessary data and delete the information within 24 hours, he said.

    Wearing such devices also may expose workers to unwanted marketing, Ikusei Misaka, a professor at Tokyo’s Musashino University, said.

    The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health advises employers to institute a plan to help workers adjust to hot conditions and to train them to recognize signs of heat-related illness and to administer first aid. Wearable devices can be part of efforts to reduce heat stress, but more work needs to be done to determine their accuracy, said Doug Trout, the agency’s medical officer.

    The technology also needs to be paired with access to breaks, shade and cool water, since many workers, especially in agriculture, fear retaliation for pausing to cool off or hydrate.

    “If they don’t have water to drink, and the time to do it, it doesn’t mean much,” Juanita Constible, senior advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, said. “It’s just something extra they have to carry when they’re in the hot fields.”

    ___

    Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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  • This Detroit beauty salon aims to give stylists a bigger cut

    This Detroit beauty salon aims to give stylists a bigger cut

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    Over the course of her career as a hairstylist, Kelsie Angst says she’s appreciated the camaraderie with her coworkers and the opportunity to learn new skills along the way. That’s the spirit she hopes to cultivate at her new beauty salon Studio Vera, which recently opened in Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood.

    “I’ve worked in a few salons, and I stayed at most of them for at least three years,” Angst says. “The biggest thing is I wanted a place that I would stay at and have a home and learn at.”

    At Studio Vera, Angst has also developed what she says is a competitive compensation model. In the industry, stylists earn a commission based on sales percentages, typically starting at 30-40% and capping at 50% when the stylist grows their roster of clients.

    After a stint working at Village Parlor in Detroit’s West Village, Angst says she was inspired by how the salon started its stylists off at a generous 50% commission.

    “I just don’t believe in taking more than 50% from someone at work,” she says. “At Studio Vera, you’ll be able to start off at 50%, and then you have the choice to go to 60% or [rent a booth].”

    Angst says she hopes to foster a community of stylists.

    click to enlarge

    Samantha Bankle

    Studio Vera hopes to foster a community of stylists with a competitive compensation model.

    “I missed having stylists around me to learn from because it’s a growing career,” she says. “You’re constantly learning new stuff.”

    She adds, “It’s not easy for the owner to do. But I come from a family of business owners and they’ve always taught me to feed your employees first. Take care of them, value them — and it all starts with making sure they’re paid right.”

    Angst’s career started when she was studying fashion at the American InterNational University in London, England. After noticing Angst was spending more energy on her models’ hair than her fashion collection, her instructor Vera Urban encouraged Angst to pursue hair styling instead. Studio Vera is named for Angst’s former mentor.

    Angst next studied hair at the Paul Mitchell the School in Chicago, and later moved to Grand Rapids for her first job before arriving in Detroit, which she says she immediately fell in love with.

    On her first night in the city, she says she went out for drinks at Willis Show Bar and the Raven’s Lounge, with breakfast the next morning at the Clique.

    “I remember my friends taking me to all these places, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, Detroit is so cool,’” she says.

    After working at at Village Parlor, Angst co-founded Lynwood Studio in suburban Ferndale. While many salons are located in the suburbs, Angst wanted to open her own salon in the city. When she worked at Village Parlor, she lived in an apartment next door.

    “I loved working and being in a neighborhood … that has more of a community, and so I wanted to find somewhere that had that,” she says, adding, “I’m excited to be part of the Woodbridge community.”

    The salon is located at 1521 Putnam St., in a complex that has seen an influx of new businesses in recent years, including the Lexington Bar, Petite Sweets, and Bash Izakaya.

    Angst acquired the Studio Vera space last year. The design was handled by interior designers Parini and brand consultant Shirakaba Studio, and Angst tapped her friend and local artist India Solomon to create a colorful mural for the side of the building with warm tones that match the inside of the salon.

    “I think one of the biggest compliments of a space is when someone tells you it feels very comfortable and cozy,” Angst says. “So I just wanted to make sure that the space felt like that for the stylists and the customers.”

    She adds, “I’m just really, really excited to finally have a salon in the city that I love so much.”

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    Lee DeVito

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  • Nursing home workers warn of care crisis at long-term facility in Orlando

    Nursing home workers warn of care crisis at long-term facility in Orlando

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    photo by McKenna Schueler

    Nursing home staff and fellow 1199 SEIU union members picket outside Aspire at Rosewood in Orlando amid ongoing union contract talks (Aug. 8, 2024)

    Nursing home staff in Orlando organized a picket line outside the long-term care facility Aspire at Rosewood last week, as part of a statewide action organized to raise awareness of what staff call a “care crisis.”

    Eleven nursing homes were targeted. All are owned by Aspire Health Group, a for-profit company that recently acquired ownership of the 120-bed Orlando facility.

    Aspire at Rosewood, formerly known as Rosewood Health and Rehabilitation, was previously owned by the mega-chain Consulate Health Care, which no longer lists facilities located in the state of Florida (save for one) after suffering years of bad press, filing for bankruptcy and going through a conveniently timed rebranding in 2022.

    Staff members’ picketing action was coordinated through their union, the 1199 Service Employees International Union. The picket was organized following unsuccessful talks between the union and Aspire, which owns more than 55 facilities in the state.

    Aspire and the union — including nursing home staff on the union’s bargaining committee — are currently in negotiations for a new union contract, covering over 1,000 certified nursing assistants, dietary aides and housekeepers across Florida.

    Denise Allegretti, chief negotiator for the union and a former CNA herself, said Aspire’s labor relations team has put up a fight at the bargaining table, particularly on the issue of staffing levels.

    “They’re refusing to even talk about staffing,” Allegretti told Orlando Weekly on the picket line, which featured about a dozen staff joined by other union members and community allies in purple union shirts, marching on the sidewalk outside Rosewood in solidarity.

    According to Allegretti, “They’re [Aspire] saying they’re going to go with whatever the state says, and that’s unacceptable.” Under a Republican-backed bill signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, long-term residents of nursing homes are now only required to receive two hours of CNA care daily, down from 2.5 hours per resident.

    Staff at Rosewood say this isn’t enough time to dress, feed, bathe and provide quality care for residents. They’re chronically understaffed and underpaid — many earn just a few dollars above Florida’s minimum wage of $12 an hour — leaving caregivers overstretched, frustrated and burnt out.

    “We just want to give them the love that they deserve,” said longtime caregiver Diane McMullen, a CNA of 20-plus years at Rosewood. McMullen shared that she was inspired to become a CNA because of her brother, who also spent time in a nursing home. “That inspired me to become a CNA.”

    Speaking of Rosewood’s residents, and the quality of resident care, McMullen stressed the importance of maintaining a workforce that’s also taken care of, and not suffering from the instability of staff turnover.

    “We are their family,” McMullen said of Rosewood’s residents, as Florida’s 90-plus degree heat enveloped her and others gathered around her on the sidewalk. “We love them, too.”

    click to enlarge Diane McMullen, a CNA at Aspire at Rosewood and union member, pickets alongside her fellow staff and union members (Aug. 8, 2024) - photo by McKenna Schueler

    photo by McKenna Schueler

    Diane McMullen, a CNA at Aspire at Rosewood and union member, pickets alongside her fellow staff and union members (Aug. 8, 2024)

    Yet, when staff like herself are overstretched — tasked with taking care of more residents, with less support from their employer — they have less time to actually provide the quality of care they’d reasonably wish to provide for someone they treat as family.

    This includes smaller actions like finding a resident’s favorite necklace to wear that mean a lot. “Staff don’t have five minutes to go find their necklace or their lipstick, or even give a bath on some days,” said Allegretti, the union’s negotiator.

    Staffing shortages — and low pay for nursing home staff — were some of the primary issues voiced by workers Thursday, who carried signs outside of the Orlando facility demanding “Safe Staffing Now” and “Contract Now.”

    “The turnover is ridiculous,” said Allegretti, clad in a purple shirt like the nursing home staff around her. “Back in the day in the ’90s, when I was a CNA, it was like eight to 10 patients on a day shift, maybe 15 on an evening shift, but never more than that,” she recalled. “Nowadays, they’re doing 15 patients on a day shift, 20 or more on a night shift, which is criminal.”

    According to federal data compiled by ProPublica, nursing homes owned by Aspire Health Group in Florida have seen a higher-than-average rate of “serious deficiencies,” and higher-than-average staff turnover.

    A federal inspection report, published in April, found over a dozen deficiencies in the Rosewood facility’s operations in Orlando, all posing “no harm, but with a potential for more than minor harm,” according to inspectors.

    Deficiencies identified ranged from quality of care issues, such as failing to provide trauma-informed or culturally competent care, to pharmacy issues, like medication errors.

    “We just want to give them the love that they deserve,” said longtime caregiver Diane McMullen, a CNA of 20-plus years at Rosewood.

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    Under different ownership, the facility in 2022 was fined $163,183 over three severe deficiencies identified by inspectors, posing an “immediate jeopardy to resident health or safety,” and two deficiencies posing minimal or no harm.

    Some of Aspire’s other facilities in Florida have similarly been cited for deficiencies, including inadequate supervision at Aspire at Saint Lucie on the Treasure Coast and a failure to “[E]nsure that a nursing home area is free from accident hazards,” according to an April report summarizing deficiencies.

    Aspire Health Group has faced an average fine of $50,782 in penalties for health citations, according to the ProPublica database. Penalties are issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for serious health citations, or for health citations that have not been fixed.

    As The New Yorker reported in 2022, federal staffing rules haven’t changed for nursing homes since 1987. In April of this year, the Biden-Harris administration took action to change that, announcing a new rule on minimum staffing standards in nursing homes that will, for the first time, establish minimum staffing requirements in such facilities overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

    The implementation of this new rule, however, is subject to a “staggered implementation timeframe,” according to CMS. The union in Florida argues that “immediate and contractual obligations for safe staffing” are needed from nursing home operators in Florida now — not later.

    “Staffing and retention always has been an issue because it can be a complicated and back-breaking job for very little pay,” said Margarette Nerette, vice president of the union’s Long-Term Care division, in a recent statement.

    “Add the pandemic where workers were at ground zero of COVID risk, lowered safe-staffing rules in Florida, and the state’s skyrocketing housing and insurance costs, and we have a perfect storm of pressure,” Nerette continued. “To help relieve this crisis and to better protect patients and their caregivers across the state, we’re fighting for new contracts that respect us, protect us, pay and staff us.”

    The workers’ fight for a fair contract — and meaningful action on the issue of staffing — comes in the wake of a financial boost approved for nursing home operators by the Florida legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year. As part of the state’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, state leaders approved a $247.8 million Medicaid increase for the state’s nursing home operators, in part to help address staffing problems.

    “The state budget provides an 8% increase ($247.8 million) in Medicaid funding, amounting to nearly $470,000 per center, per year to support the state’s nursing centers with meeting the growing demand for qualified caregivers and the needs of Florida’s vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities,” the Florida Health Care Association shared in a statement celebrating the extra funding.

    The Florida Health Care Association, a state affiliate of the nation’s largest nursing-home lobbying group, represents over 86 percent of Florida’s nursing centers — with Aspire-owned facilities among their federation’s membership.

    Aspire Health Group facilities in Florida have, as part of their membership, contributed to the FHCA’s political activities through regular contributions to an associated FHCA PAC. State records show Aspire facilities have contributed over $20,000 to one of their PACs in 2024 alone.

    Getting a fair union contract for staff at Aspire-owned nursing homes would give residents “a better home,” said CNA McMullen. “A better home for them, better staffing and better wages for us,” she added.

    Registered nurses at HCA Hospitals in Florida have similarly raised alarms about unsafe staffing levels at their facilities, and are also in negotiations for a new union contract.

    Nurses at HCA Osceola Hospital, represented by National Nurses United, organized their own picket line on Thursday, calling on their multi billion-dollar, for-profit employer to invest in high quality staff and patient care.

    click to enlarge Nursing home staff and fellow union members picket outside Aspire at Rosewood, a nursing home in Orlando (Aug. 8, 2024) - photo by McKenna Schueler

    photo by McKenna Schueler

    Nursing home staff and fellow union members picket outside Aspire at Rosewood, a nursing home in Orlando (Aug. 8, 2024)

    “We’ve been at the bargaining table for months fighting for what we need to take care of our patients,” said Elisabeth Mathieu, a registered nurse in HCA Osceola Hospital’s emergency department, in a statement. “We need HCA to hear us, so we’re holding this informational picket to let the public know what we’re demanding in our contract when it comes to patient care and, especially, safe staffing.”

    The most recent NNU contract covering RNs at 10 HCA hospitals in Florida — including HCA Osceola and HCA Lake Monroe in Sanford — was negotiated in 2021. The contract officially expired July 1, after being extended once from its original May 31 expiration date.

    The union contract covering nursing home staff at Aspire Health Group facilities, represented by 1199 SEIU Healthcare East, has also expired, according to Allegretti.

    Nearly 50 nursing home facilities in Florida represented by 1199 SEIU Healthcare East, covering 4,000 staff total, have union contracts that have expired or will expire at some point this year, according to the union.

    While NNU staff have politely declined to comment on what the next steps are for RNs that they represent, if HCA continues to remain resistant at the bargaining table, Allegretti said that if Aspire Health Group fails to budge, the next step for their union is a strike vote.

    “If management doesn’t follow us with [bargaining] dates, and come with real proposals, the next step is that we will be out on strike,” Allegretti confirmed.

    The last time workers went on strike at the Rosewood facility in Orlando, and 18 other nursing homes in Florida, was 2016. The union described it then as the largest-held strike in the Southeastern United States in nearly two decades.

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  • FTC ban on noncompete agreements comes under legal attack

    FTC ban on noncompete agreements comes under legal attack

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    NEW YORK (AP) — The federal government wants to make it easier for employees to quit a job and work for a competitor. But some companies say a new rule created by the Federal Trade Commission will make it hard to protect trade secrets and investments they make in their employees.

    At least three companies have sued the FTC after it voted to ban noncompete agreements, which prevent employees from working for competitors for a period of time after leaving a job. Their cases are now pending in Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas and the issue could end up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Here’s what you should know about noncompete agreements:

    What are they?

    Once seen as a way to protect trade secrets among high-level executives, noncompete agreements have become more common, with some companies requiring lower-wage employees in fast-food and retail establishments to sign them before accepting a job.

    The agreements prohibit employees from taking a job with a rival company or starting a competing business for a set period of time, to prevent employees from taking corporate secrets, sales leads, client relationships or skills to a competitor.

    What did the FTC do?

    The FTC voted in April to prohibit employers nationwide from entering into new noncompete agreements or enforcing existing noncompetes starting Sept. 4, saying the agreements restrict freedom of workers and suppress wages.

    “In many cases, noncompetes are take-it-or-leave-it contracts that exploit workers’ lack of bargaining power and coerce workers into staying in jobs they would rather leave, or force workers to leave a profession or even relocate,” the FTC said.

    The FTC says roughly 30 million people, or 1 in 5 workers, are subject to noncompete agreements. That in turn limits their ability to change jobs, which is often the best way to get a pay raise or promotion. Some people don’t even realize they’ve signed such an agreement until they’re hit with a lawsuit after changing jobs.

    The FTC rule does not apply to senior executives, which the agency defines as workers earning more than $151,164 who are in a policy-making position.

    Several states, including California, already have bans on noncompete agreements.

    “As far as I know there’s a lot of companies in California, and high tech employees who are doing just fine,” said Tom Spiggle, founder of the Spiggle Law Firm based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on protecting workers.

    “They’ve just gotten a little out of hand with line cooks being subject to noncompetes in some industries,” Spiggle added. “Think about it. You can’t work in a similar position for a year or more, and there’s often a geographical radius. You’ve got to move so you’re able to continue to work. For people who are spooning the beans on the front line, they’re signing noncompetes. Why?”

    Who is suing the FTC and why?

    Companies opposing the ban say they need noncompete agreements to protect business relationships, trade secrets and investments they make to train or recruit employees.

    “The ban would make it easy for top professionals to go across the street and compete against us,” said John Smith, chief legal officer at Ryan, LLC, a tax services firm based in Dallas that sued the FTC.

    Ryan uses noncompete agreements and nondisclosure agreements to ensure employees don’t share trade secrets when they leave. But nondisclosure agreements are harder to detect — and enforce — than noncompete agreements.

    “In a nondisclosure agreement, that employee leaves, and you don’t know what information they are sharing with the new employer, a competitor of yours,” Smith said. “It can take a lot of time and money to figure that out.”

    Business groups have voiced support for Ryan’s lawsuit, including the Society for Human Resource Management, which said the FTC rule is overly broad and would discourage employers from investing in training for workers if those workers could easily quit the next day and take their knowledge elsewhere.

    U.S. District Judge Ada Brown has ruled that Ryan and its co-plaintiffs, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are likely to prevail in court and that the ban on noncompete agreements cannot go into effect for them until their case is resolved.

    In Florida, a retirement community called Properties of the Villages sued saying its sales associates’ lifelong relationships with residents of the community are central to its business model. The company said it invests heavily in training its sales associates, and they sign noncompetes, which say for 24 months after leaving the company they won’t compete to sell homes within the Villages community, which spans 58,000 acres.

    Lawyers for Properties of the Villages said in a hearing Wednesday that the FTC’s rule would have major economic consequences, and under the so-called “major questions” doctrine, Congress cannot delegate to executive agencies issues of major political or economic significance.

    While stating sympathy for lower-wage workers caught in noncompete agreements, U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan said the plaintiff is likely to succeed in its argument that the FTC’s rule invokes the major questions doctrine.

    He noted that the FTC, by one metric, estimates that employers will pay from $400 billion to $488 billion more in wages over 10 years under the rule. “Suffice it to say that the transfer of value from employers to employees, from some competitors to other competitors, from existing companies to new companies and other ancillary effects will have a huge economic impact.”

    Congress intended for the FTC to take action to prevent unfair competition, and all noncompete agreements are unfair, said Rachael Westmoreland, an attorney with the Department of Justice who defended the FTC Wednesday. “They restrict competition. That’s their entire purpose,” she said.

    Corrigan granted a preliminary injunction in the case, prohibiting enforcement of the rule just for Properties of the Villages, until the case is resolved. His ruling did not apply to any other company, and will not stop the FTC’s rule from going into effect on Sept. 4, he said.

    Meanwhile in a separate case, ATS Tree Services sued the FTC in Pennsylvania, calling its proposed ban unfair and saying it usurps states’ authority to establish their own laws.

    ATS said it makes employees sign noncompete agreements because it invests in specialized training for workers and it couldn’t afford to if the employees could leave and immediately use that training and the company’s confidential information for a competitor.

    But U.S. District Court Judge Kelley Hodge said the tree company failed to show it would be irreparably harmed by the ban and the company wasn’t likely to win the case.

    What happens next?

    In Texas, the judge there is planning to file a merits disposition, which is essentially a decision about the case without a trial, on or before Aug. 30. And in Pennsylvania, ATS Tree Services is expected to file a request for summary judgment later this month.

    With divergent rulings expected to emerge from the cases — and with lawyers on the losing sides likely to appeal — observers are expecting the issue to work its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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  • Seeds are gifts from nature, one organic producer says. It’s ending sales and giving them away

    Seeds are gifts from nature, one organic producer says. It’s ending sales and giving them away

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    NAPLES, New York (AP) — An organic seed company with national reach has surprised its supporters by announcing it will end sales and give hundreds of varieties away, declaring “we can no longer commodify our beloved kin, these seeds, or ourselves.”

    The Cocozelle zucchini, now $14.25 per 100 seeds? No charge. Catnip, kale, the rampant mint? All free.

    Petra Page-Mann and Matthew Goldfarb, the couple who run Fruition Seeds in upstate New York, said they’re letting go workers, stopping sales on Aug. 27 and relying on public goodwill — donations of money, talent and effort — to grow and distribute seeds on a $76,000 budget.

    That’s a dramatic shift for a company with a budget of over $1 million in 2022 and a profile high enough that it’s among a handful of seed companies featured in the New York Botanical Garden’s shop.

    “The call is simple enough: Seeds are gifts. Gifts are shared,” the couple said in a long and searching announcement weeks ago. They’ve thought about barriers to access and what they call the indignity of the dollar. Burnout, too, played a role. “We’re weaving a new fabric together, Friends.”

    As ripe apples plunked into the grass at their farm in the hilly Finger Lakes region, and workers pounded together a bunkhouse for the volunteers who’ll now be crucial, Page-Mann and Goldfarb were open about not having all the answers.

    Their parents are “terrified,” said Goldfarb, 48. “I’m concerned you’re freeloading, I’m concerned you’re gonna become a liability to this community,” he recalled friends and family saying. “And I think the potentially hard thing for people to hear is, yes, that’s actually how this is gonna work.” In a way.

    Next year, instead of shipping seed packets, they plan to give away seeds by hosting events and visiting cities around the Northeast. It’s a radical extension of their work with seed libraries, seed swaps and community harvests.

    The move has inspired some and bewildered others in their green village of Naples, where cyclists zip past produce stands and Black Lives Matter signs. Elsewhere, some customers have said they’re too far away to get Fruition’s seeds without shipping and will look to other sources.

    The announcement noted Fruition’s decision during the COVID-19 pandemic to face painful economic losses and make their online growing courses, featuring the exuberant Page-Mann, 40, free for all. There was joy in giving.

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    A greenhouse shows past work with the garlic harvest at Fruition Seeds. (AP Photo/Cara Anna)

    Now they hope others feel the same. They have begun listing their own needs, from financial donations and legal expertise to items like printer paper and Mason jars. “I trust, like air, what is present – though not yet visible – will carry us all,” Page-Mann wrote.

    The Fruition founders said they were inspired in part by friend and mentor Adam Wilson, who runs a farm in Keeseville, New York, that he describes as an “experiment in neighborly farming and feeding,” with all food and events offered as gifts.

    “And he’s still alive,” Goldfarb said.

    But Fruition has been a much larger endeavor, partnering with nearby Cornell University and a number of growers in the region and as far away as Oregon and Idaho.

    “They embark on an agri/cultural experiment many times the scale of the work here,” Wilson wrote after the announcement. “I am shaking with excitement, but also a tinge of responsibility.”

    Already, Cornell has told Fruition that some of the seed varieties they had agreements for must be returned to Cornell or destroyed, Goldfarb told supporters last month. Conversations with the university continue.

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    Goldfarb and Page-Mann aren’t saying others should stop selling seeds. They’re looking into forming a nonprofit. They admire the collective work of the not-too-far-away Amish and Mennonite communities. But there is no definite plan.

    “We’ll have different answers tomorrow. I hope,” Goldfarb said.

    About 40% of the seeds that Fruition has sold have been produced by partners. One of them, Daniel Brisebois with Tourne-Sol farm in Canada, said he was excited to see what would happen now. Others didn’t respond.

    Page-Mann and Goldfarb said the most excruciating part of their decision was taking it without the collective consent of their 12 employees.

    “Simultaneously they were very gracious, like, ‘This makes sense for you and your lives,’ and also, ‘This sucks,’” Page-Mann said.

    One worker told the AP that while they respect where Fruition’s founders are coming from, “so far this transition feels like a big missed opportunity to learn how to minimize harm in the process of trying to transform systems, especially harm toward workers.” The worker, who is looking for new work, spoke on condition of anonymity.

    At the bunkhouse under construction on the Fruition farm, local mushroom producer David Colle, 49, said the thinking behind the transformation — a purpose bigger than the individual — drew him to help build.

    Some in the community have said, “I won’t do business with these people anymore,” Colle said, but “you have to have people willing to explore the edges to learn what’s possible.” He’s as curious about Fruition’s future as anyone. He’s given away mushrooms but doesn’t see how to do it full time and still pay the bills.

    And he wasn’t completely volunteering his time. “I need money,” he said, sweating in the afternoon heat, and acknowledged: “We’re all walking paradoxes.”

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  • Possible work stoppage at Canada’s two largest railroads could disrupt US supply chain next week

    Possible work stoppage at Canada’s two largest railroads could disrupt US supply chain next week

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    DETROIT (AP) — Canada’s two largest railroads are starting to shut down their shipping networks as a labor dispute with the Teamsters union threatens to cause lockouts or strikes that would disrupt cross-border trade with the U.S.

    Both the Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National railroads, which haul millions of tons of freight across the border, have stopped taking certain shipments of hazardous materials and refrigerated products.

    Both are threatening to lock out Teamsters Canada workers starting Thursday if deals are not reached.

    On Tuesday, CPKC will stop all shipments that start in Canada and all shipments originating in the U.S. that are headed for Canada, the railroad said Saturday.

    The Canadian Press reported that on Friday, Canadian National barred container imports from U.S. partner railroads.

    Jeff Windau, industrials analyst for Edward Jones & Co., said his firm expects work stoppages to last only a few days, but if they go longer, there could be significant supply chain disruptions.

    “If something would carry on more of a longer term in nature, then I think there are some significant potential issues just given the amount of goods that are handled each day,” Windau said. “By and large the rails touch pretty much all of the economy.”

    The two railroads handle about 40,000 carloads of freight each day, worth about $1 billion, Windau said. Shipments of fully built automobiles and auto parts, chemicals, forestry products and agricultural goods would be hit hard, he said, especially with harvest season looming.

    Both railroads have extensive networks in the U.S., and CPKC also serves Mexico. Those operations will keep running even if there is a work stoppage.

    CPKC said it remains committed to avoiding a work stoppage that would damage Canada’s economy and international reputation. “However we must take responsible and prudent steps to prepare for a potential rail service interruption next week,” spokesman Patrick Waldron said in a statement.

    Shutting down the network will allow the railroad to get dangerous goods off of its network before any stoppage, CPKC said.

    Union spokesman Christopher Monette said in an email Saturday that negotiations continue, but the situation has shifted from a possible strike to “near certain lockout” by the railroads.

    CPKC said bargaining is scheduled to continue on Sunday with the union, which represents nearly 10,000 workers at both railroads. The company said it continues to bargain in good faith.

    Canadian National said in a statement Friday that there had been no meaningful progress in negotiations and it hoped the union “will engage meaningfully” during a meeting scheduled for Saturday.

    “CN wants a resolution that allows the company to get back to what it does best as a team, moving customers’ goods and the economy,” the railroad said.

    Negotiations have been going on since last November, and contracts expired at the end of 2023. They were extended as talks continued.

    The union said company demands on crew scheduling, rail safety and worker fatigue are the main sticking points.

    Concerns about the quality of life for rail workers dealing with demanding schedules and no paid sick time nearly led to a U.S. rail strike two years ago before Congress intervened and blocked a walkout. The major U.S. railroads have made progress since then in offering paid sick time to most rail workers and trying to improve schedules.

    Windau said the trucking industry currently has a lot of excess capacity and might be able to make up some of the railroads’ shipping volumes, but, “You’re not going to be able to replace all of that with trucking.”

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  • Possible work stoppage at Canada’s two largest railroads could disrupt US supply chain next week

    Possible work stoppage at Canada’s two largest railroads could disrupt US supply chain next week

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    DETROIT — Canada’s two largest railroads are starting to shut down their shipping networks as a labor dispute with the Teamsters union threatens to cause lockouts or strikes that would disrupt cross-border trade with the U.S.

    Both the Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Canadian National railroads, which haul millions of tons of freight across the border, have stopped taking certain shipments of hazardous materials and refrigerated products.

    Both are threatening to lock out Teamsters Canada workers starting Thursday if deals are not reached.

    On Tuesday, CPKC will stop all shipments that start in Canada and all shipments originating in the U.S. that are headed for Canada, the railroad said Saturday.

    The Canadian Press reported that on Friday, Canadian National barred container imports from U.S. partner railroads.

    Jeff Windau, industrials analyst for Edward Jones & Co., said his firm expects work stoppages to last only a few days, but if they go longer, there could be significant supply chain disruptions.

    “If something would carry on more of a longer term in nature, then I think there are some significant potential issues just given the amount of goods that are handled each day,” Windau said. “By and large the rails touch pretty much all of the economy.”

    The two railroads handle about 40,000 carloads of freight each day, worth about $1 billion, Windau said. Shipments of fully built automobiles and auto parts, chemicals, forestry products and agricultural goods would be hit hard, he said, especially with harvest season looming.

    Both railroads have extensive networks in the U.S., and CPKC also serves Mexico. Those operations will keep running even if there is a work stoppage.

    CPKC said it remains committed to avoiding a work stoppage that would damage Canada’s economy and international reputation. “However we must take responsible and prudent steps to prepare for a potential rail service interruption next week,” spokesman Patrick Waldron said in a statement.

    Shutting down the network will allow the railroad to get dangerous goods off of its network before any stoppage, CPKC said.

    Union spokesman Christopher Monette said in an email Saturday that negotiations continue, but the situation has shifted from a possible strike to “near certain lockout” by the railroads.

    CPKC said bargaining is scheduled to continue on Sunday with the union, which represents nearly 10,000 workers at both railroads. The company said it continues to bargain in good faith.

    Canadian National said in a statement Friday that there had been no meaningful progress in negotiations and it hoped the union “will engage meaningfully” during a meeting scheduled for Saturday.

    “CN wants a resolution that allows the company to get back to what it does best as a team, moving customers’ goods and the economy,” the railroad said.

    Negotiations have been going on since last November, and contracts expired at the end of 2023. They were extended as talks continued.

    The union said company demands on crew scheduling, rail safety and worker fatigue are the main sticking points.

    Concerns about the quality of life for rail workers dealing with demanding schedules and no paid sick time nearly led to a U.S. rail strike two years ago before Congress intervened and blocked a walkout. The major U.S. railroads have made progress since then in offering paid sick time to most rail workers and trying to improve schedules.

    Windau said the trucking industry currently has a lot of excess capacity and might be able to make up some of the railroads’ shipping volumes, but, “You’re not going to be able to replace all of that with trucking.”

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  • Cisco cuts thousands of jobs, 7% of workforce, as it shifts focus to AI, cybersecurity

    Cisco cuts thousands of jobs, 7% of workforce, as it shifts focus to AI, cybersecurity

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    Cisco Systems is planning to lay off 7% of its employees, its second round of job cuts this year, as the company shifts its focus to more rapidly growing areas in technology, such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.

    The company based in San Jose, California, did not specify the number of jobs it is cutting. It had 84,900 employees as of July 2023. Based on that figure, the number of jobs cut would be about 5,900. In February, Cisco announced it would cut about 4,000 jobs.

    The networking equipment maker said in June that it would invest $1 billion in tech startups like Cohere, Mistral and Scale to develop reliable AI products. It recently also announced a partnership with Nvidia to develop infrastructure for AI systems.

    Cisco’s layoffs come just two weeks after chipmaker Intel Corp. announced it would cut about 15,000 jobs as it tries to turn its business around to compete with more successful rivals like Nvidia and AMD. Intel’s quarterly earnings report disappointed investors and its stock took a nosedive following the announcement. In contrast, Cisco’s shares were up about 6% after-hours on Wednesday.

    In a foray into cybersecurity, Cisco launched a cybersecurity readiness index back in March to help businesses measure their resiliency against attacks.

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    Cisco Systems Inc. said Wednesday it earned $2.16 billion, or 54 cents per share, in its fiscal fourth quarter that ended on July 27, down 45% from $3.96 billion, or 97 cents per share, in the same period a year ago. Excluding special items, its adjusted earnings were 87 cents per share in the latest quarter.

    Revenue fell 10% to $13.64 billion from $15.2 billion.

    Analysts, on average, were expecting adjusted earnings of 85 cents per share on revenue of $13.54 billion, according to a poll by FactSet.

    For the current quarter, Cisco is forecasting adjusted earnings of 86 cents to 88 cents per share on revenue of $13.65 billion to $13.85 billion. Analysts are expecting earnings of 85 cents per share on revenue of $13.74 billion.

    Edward Jones analyst David Heger said Cisco is starting to see demand recover after it slowed over the past few quarters, noting that product orders were up 6% even when excluding those from its recent acquisition of cybersecurity firm Splunk.

    He added that “the restructuring will help offset the earnings impact from interest expenses associated with financing the Splunk acquisition and will rationalize combined workforces.”

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  • ‘The company hires these people to basically lie to them’: Trucking company hires union busters to obstruct Florida drivers’ effort to unionize

    ‘The company hires these people to basically lie to them’: Trucking company hires union busters to obstruct Florida drivers’ effort to unionize

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    Trucking company MBM Logistics, affiliated with logistics companies DHL Express and VMW Express, has hired two out-of-state “union avoidance” professionals to discourage its drivers in Orlando and other Florida cities from joining forces with the Teamsters.

    According to a report recently filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, the company last month entered into an agreement with the anti-union labor relations firm Action Resources to “communicate” with drivers in Orlando, Gainesville, Lakeland, Daytona Beach, and Palm Bay, Florida about “their rights to unionize and refrain from unionizing.”

    The Teamsters labor union (formally known as the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters) represents about 1.3 million workers, including tens of thousands of people in Florida who work at places like UPS, Walt Disney World and in the public sector.

    Action Resources, a labor relations firm based in Nevada, prides itself on helping employers in “fending off an organizing campaign.” Records show the firm enlisted two anti-union consultants (also known as “persuaders”) for the job. Both persuaders — Gustavo Flores and Fernando Rivera — have been hired to disrupt organizing campaigns with the Teamsters in the past.

    Flores, based out of California, belongs to a family of anti-union persuaders, including at least one former Teamsters official who was allegedly ousted from his union. The Californian also runs his own union avoidance firm out on the West Coast, and his services — pulling workers into meetings, passing out anti-union literature — don’t come cheap.

    A contract filed with the U.S. labor department in early August shows MBM Logistics agreed to pay Action Resources a daily rate of $3,750 per consultant for onsite “employee relations consulting services,” plus “all reasonable expenses,” including travel costs and meals. Services performed off-site will similarly be billed at a rate of $375 an hour, according to the agreement.

    The timing of the agreement is notable. Signed by representatives of both parties, the agreement is dated July 19, 2024 — the very same day that MBM Logistics filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election, after a majority of their 115 delivery drivers demonstrated support for unionizing with the Teamsters Local 385.

    Under a federal rule finalized last year, an employer is required to file a petition for a union election if they are presented with evidence that a majority of employees want to unionize. The employer has the opportunity to then voluntarily recognize the union, or otherwise file a petition for a union election.

    Walt Howard, president of Teamsters Local 385 in Orlando, told Orlando Weekly over the phone that local drivers contacted the union in the hopes of addressing issues they were experiencing on the job such as lack of job security, insufficient pay, and poor or nonexistent benefits.

    Jose Faneitty, a new organizer for the local who’s been in close contact with the workers, confirmed Howard’s account. He said that workers have also reported unsafe vans — one worker shared that his vehicle’s windshield literally flew off while he was driving one day on the Florida Turnpike — and said benefits like healthcare are “so expensive, nobody can basically afford them.”

    Faneitty specifically recalled one pregnant worker he spoke to who said she felt pressured to keep working as her pregnancy progressed, because the company didn’t offer maternity leave. Another driver, according to Faneitty, had a death in the family. After requesting time off to go to the funeral, however, the driver was told that if he left to attend it, he would be fired. 

    “I don’t even work for the company and I want to quit,” Faneitty quipped.

    Both Howard and Faneitty said drivers for MBM Logistics are also concerned about what they perceive as a lack of transparency from their employer, especially when it comes to pay.

    click to enlarge UPS Teamsters (from left to right: Walt Howard, John Gregory, and April Hope) organize a practice picket outside of a UPS warehouse in Orlando. July 13, 2023. - photo by McKenna Schueler

    photo by McKenna Schueler

    UPS Teamsters (from left to right: Walt Howard, John Gregory, and April Hope) organize a practice picket outside of a UPS warehouse in Orlando. July 13, 2023.

    The company has been cited for wage theft in the past, reaching a settlement with the Berger Montague law firm in 2021 over a wage-and-hour lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. The law firm reached a $292,000 settlement with MBM Logistics and DHL Express on behalf of over 300 hourly drivers who the firm says were not paid for all hours worked, including overtime pay.

    MBM Logistics, registered with the state as MBM Delivery and Logistics LLC, is a service provider for DHL Express, a logistics company that employs over 7,300 workers who are unionized with the Teamsters. It also recently settled a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of employees.

    MBM Logistics itself has a muted presence online. However, the company’s controller, Amir Danesh — who signed MBM’s agreement with the anti-union firm — is affiliated with VMW Express, a regional carrier based in Virginia with clients that include DHL and UPS.

    Danesh’s name also appears on a permit agreement that MBM Logistics has with the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, a governmental entity and operator of the Orlando International Airport that has entered into publicly funded contracts with union-busting employers in the past. The permit agreement essentially allows for the company to conduct business and make money from their use of the airport’s property.

    Orlando Weekly reached out to Danesh and MBM for comment on the new agreement with Action Resources via email, but did not receive a response ahead of publication.

    Brother of a former Teamster, now busting the Teamsters

    Flores, one of the two union avoidance professionals hired to turn local drivers off the idea of organizing, has a messy history of alleged labor violations that some Teamsters, and members of other labor unions, know well.

    Last year, Flores’ firm — GNE Consulting — led a union-busting effort at the private equity-owned Aspire Bakeries in California that was so aggressive the National Labor Relations Board ordered a re-do union election.

    Workers in that case narrowly voted against unionizing with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union both times, after Flores’ union-busting outfit was accused by the union of multiple violations of federal labor law, including unlawful intimidation tactics, harassment and surveillance.

    Gustavo’s brother Carlos — a former Teamster who later joined the union avoidance industry — reportedly threatened undocumented workers at the Long Island-based Tate’s Bakeshop who were trying to unionize a few years ago up north. As reported by Gothamist, Carlos allegedly told the workers he would look into their immigration documents and have them deported if they voted in favor of the union.

    Both Carlos and Gustavo also appear to be related to Abraham “Abe” Flores, another union avoidance professional from California who is allegedly a former Teamsters official who was kicked out of the union.

    “He got terminated because of the use of political campaign funds for his reelection,” Teamsters Local 135 organizer Vance Smith told Orlando Weekly in December, after facing off with the Flores family and Wildine Pierre (a consultant based near Orlando) during an organizing drive in Indiana.

    According to federal records, Gustavo has in the past also been hired to bust organizing efforts among employees of the Hershey Company (targeting production and maintenance workers), Portillo’s Hot Dogs, Williams-Sonoma and La Maestra Community Health Centers, a federally qualified health center that serves low-income and immigrant communities in San Diego, among others.

    His partner on the new job here in Orlando — Fernando Rivera — also has a history of targeting Teamsters’ union drives. According to Vice, Rivera was hired by Amazon in 2022 to obstruct organizing efforts by contracted Amazon delivery drivers, who ultimately voted to join the union anyway.

    As Vice reported at the time, Amazon’s hiring of anti-union consultants was notable due to the fact that Amazon had repeatedly argued that these drivers were contracted drivers technically employed by a third-party company, not Amazon itself.

    The Teamsters claimed this was just Amazon’s way of evading responsibility for recognizing the drivers’ union — and said the company’s hiring of so-called “union busters” was proof of the ruse. Amazon has spent millions of dollars on anti-union consultants, including several that are reportedly based in Central Florida.

    The more you know

    Under federal law, anti-union consultants — also known as “persuaders” — are required to file reports known as LM-20s with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Services when they enter into agreements with employers.

    When filled out correctly, these reports offer a basic snapshot of what these consultants are being hired to do and how much they’re being paid for it.

    According to the Economic Policy Institute, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-union persuaders each year, although due to lackluster enforcement of reporting requirements, not all of it is publicly reported. Employers, by law, must also file reports, known as LM-10s, detailing how much they’ve spent on this persuader activity.

    It’s common for employers to report spending thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars on persuaders. As HuffPost reported in their five-part series on the union-busting industry last summer, it’s also not uncommon for former union officials who are spurned or ousted from office to later switch sides and make bank as professional union busters.

    Joseph Brock, a self-described “unabashed liberal union buster” who may or may not work out of Apollo Beach, Florida, is one of them. Then there’s the Flores brothers, former Unite Here organizer-turned-union-buster Lupe Cruz, and David Grima, who formerly served as president of a United Auto Workers local before he was ousted from his post for alleged internal election misconduct.

    A spokesperson for the Teamsters told HuffPost last year that this kind of switch by a former union official “really brings into question what their [the persuaders’] values were, if they ever had any to begin with.”

    Sometimes, persuaders will even use pseudonyms to hide their real identities from workers, or (unlawfully) report inaccurate or incomplete information in reports submitted to OLMS.

    Once they’re hired on, persuaders will spread the employer’s anti-union message by, at times, training managers or supervisors (who aren’t eligible to join the union) to talk down the union without breaking federal law.

    Action Resources, a Nevada-based labor relations firm prides itself on helping employers in “fending off an organizing campaign”

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    They are also known to hold one-on-one or so-called “captive audience” meetings with workers during work hours, featuring presentations on what they depict as the “truth about unions.” Workers for companies like Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Chipotle have described such meetings as manipulative, and several states — not including Florida — have even moved to ban them.

    Faneitty, the local Teamsters organizer, said that a language barrier for drivers here makes it easier for the employer to exploit and take advantage of them. Many drivers, he explained, came from other countries, and don’t know their legal rights as workers under U.S. law. As The Intercept has reported, the union avoidance industry has been diversifying itself in order to accommodate such changes in unionizing workforces.

    Common messages from persuaders, who may depict themselves as a neutral third party, include that union staffers offer false promises or will force workers to go on strike whenever they feel like it. Another common talking point is that unions only serve to stuff the pockets of politicians and union leaders with members’ dues.

    “The company hires these people to basically lie to them,” Faneitty said, with distaste. One driver he reached out to said he’d walked out of one of the company’s recent captive-audience meetings because he was pro-union and “because he got tired of hearing the lies.”

    A Barnes & Noble College Bookstore worker up in New Jersey told Orlando Weekly last year that a persuader hired through an Orlando-based firm subjected one of their Black co-workers to a comparison of union membership to “chattel slavery.”

    Brothers Gustavo and Carlos Flores also found themselves in trouble for things they said during a counter-campaign they were hired to lead against a unionization effort at Alstyle Apparel in California in 2005.

    Their conduct during the job was flagged in a complaint filed with the federal labor board, which later wrote in their decision that, according to multiple workers, Gus described “potential consequences” of unionizing that included “stymied bargaining and strikes with resultant plant closure and or job loss, drawing on recent, widespread grocery store strikes as illustrative examples.”

    Flores reportedly shared a similar message with Colectivo Coffee workers who unionized their own shop in Milwaukee a few years ago, and was paid $29,104 to do so. Before their IBEW contract, that could’ve been a year’s pay for some Colectivo workers.

    Threatening job loss as a result of unionization is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. So is firing workers, demoting them, or giving them less hours for supporting organizing efforts or for engaging in lawful strikes.

    Former President Donald Trump doesn’t know this, apparently, and is now facing his own labor complaint over it. The United Auto Workers union, which has repeatedly called Trump a “scab,” filed a complaint against the Republican presidential nominee Tuesday, after Trump voiced support for (illegally) firing striking workers on X.

    Trump has crossed a picket line before — during the filming of his show The Apprentice — and Trump-owned hotels have in the past also hired their own union busters, paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to keep the hotels union-free. Even so, the former president has been courting the Teamsters in his bid to return to the White House.

    Action Resources did not respond to a request from Orlando Weekly for an explanation of the work they’ve been hired to do in Florida, nor did the Teamsters international union, when asked for comment on the DHL Express service provider’s agreement with the firm. More than 1,300 DHL workers in Kentucky officially joined the Teamsters this week.

    Faneitty, the local organizer, however, expressed frustration over the company’s hiring of professional union busters to trash-talk the union. Persuaders “build a narrative,” said Faneitty, that organizing collectively to better people’s working conditions isn’t the answer to their problems. “It’s discouraging,” he said, that the law “allows them to hire these people.”

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    McKenna Schueler

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  • Stock market today: Wall Street rallies closer to its records as US shoppers help drive the economy

    Stock market today: Wall Street rallies closer to its records as US shoppers help drive the economy

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    NEW YORK — Wall Street is rallying closer to its records on Thursday following signals the U.S. economy is holding up better than expected, with particular credit going to the country’s shoppers.

    The S&P 500 was up 1.1% in morning trading and on track for a sixth straight gain as the U.S. stock market rights itself following a scary few weeks. It’s back to within 3% of its all-time high set last month after earlier falling nearly 10% below it.

    The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 357 points, or 0.9%, as of 10:20 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.6% higher as Big Tech stocks recover more of their stumbles from the last month.

    Treasury yields leaped in the bond market following the encouraging economic data. One report said U.S. shoppers increased their spending at retailers last month by much more than economists expected, while another said fewer U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits.

    A year ago, such reports could have sent the stock market reeling on worries they would worsen high inflation. But good news on the economy is once again good news on Wall Street, particularly after a report earlier this month showed U.S. employers pulled back on their hiring by much more than expected.

    That dud of a jobs report raised worries the U.S. economy could buckle under the weight of high interest rates brought by the Federal Reserve, and it contributed to turmoil in stock markets worldwide. But Thursday’s reports hint a perfect landing may still be possible, one where the Fed slows the economy’s growth by just enough through high rates to stifle inflation but not so much that it causes a recession.

    “The growth scare isn’t over, but it’s a little less scary,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.

    Walmart added to the optimism after it delivered a bigger profit for the spring than analysts expected. The retail giant also raised its forecasts for sales and profit over the full year. Walmart’s shares rose 6.7%.

    Other big companies likewise joined the parade that’s built of businesses topping analysts’ expectations for springtime profit.

    Tapestry rose 1.8% after the company behind the Coach and Kate Spade brands reported stronger profit than expected.

    Cisco System’s profit and revenue for the latest quarter squeaked past analysts’ forecasts, and its stock jumped 8.3% after the maker of networking equipment also said it would cut costs by eliminating thousands of jobs as it shifts to faster-growing areas of technology.

    Ulta Beauty’s stock rose 10.4% to help lead the market after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed it has built an ownership stake in the retailer.

    In the bond market, the 10-year Treasury yield clambered up to 3.92% from 3.84% following the strong economic data.

    The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely follows expectations for action by the Federal Reserve, jumped to 4.07% from 3.96%.

    Traders still widely expect the Federal Reserve to cut its main interest rate at its next meeting in September, which would be the first such cut since the 2020 COVID crash. But they’re now largely expecting the Fed to lower rates by the traditional quarter of a percentage point, according to data from CME Group. A week ago, many traders were forecasting a more more severe cut of half of a percentage point because of worries that the U.S. economy’s growth was sliding too fast.

    The Fed has been clear about the tightrope it began walking when it started hiking rates sharply in March 2022: Being too aggressive would choke the economy, but going too soft would give inflation more oxygen and hurt everyone.

    The Fed ultimately raised its main interest rate from virtually zero to a two-decade high, where it’s sat for about a year. Inflation has slowed sharply from its peak above 9% two summers ago, and an easing of rates would remove pressure on the economy and on prices for investments.

    Signals of a stronger U.S. economy helped drive smaller stocks in particular on Thursday. Smaller companies can be more beholden to the strength of the U.S. economy than huge multinationals, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks rose 1.9% to help lead the market.

    Smaller stocks have been even jumpier than the rest of the market recently, rising more than the S&P 500 when signals indicate the U.S. economy is doing well and interest rates are about to come down, but tumbling more sharply when pessimism rises.

    In stock markets abroad, indexes also rose in much of Asia and Europe.

    Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.8% after data showed its economy returned to growth during the spring. The U.K. economy also grew during the latest quarter, a welcome signal following a rough run, and the FTSE 100 rose 0.6% in London.

    ___

    AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama contributed.

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  • US shoppers sharply boosted spending at retailers in July despite higher prices

    US shoppers sharply boosted spending at retailers in July despite higher prices

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    WASHINGTON — Americans stepped up their spending at retailers last month by the most in a year and a half, easing concerns that the economy might be weakening under the pressure of higher prices and elevated interest rates.

    The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales jumped 1% from June to July, the biggest such increase since January 2023, after having declined slightly the previous month. Auto dealers, electronics and appliance stores and grocery stores all reported strong sales gains.

    The July retail sales data provided reassurance that the U.S. economy, while slowing under the pressure of high interest rates, remains resilient. It showed that America’s consumers, the primary driver of economic growth, are still willing to spend.

    The prospect of a still-growing economy is likely to be promoted by Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, which is preparing to roll out policies Friday to ban “price gouging” on groceries. On Wednesday, her opponent, former President Donald Trump slammed the economic record of the Biden-Harris administration Wednesday, though he wildly inflated cost increases on food and monthly mortgage payments.

    Other economic data released Thursday was also mostly positive, including a report on first-time applications for unemployment benefits. The figures show that businesses are mainly holding onto their workers and not increasing layoffs.

    With Americans spending more, economists at Morgan Stanley have boosted their forecast for growth in the July-September quarter to a 2.3% annual rate, from an earlier estimate of 2.1%. The economy expanded at a healthy 2.8% rate in the April-June quarter.

    All told, the latest data is consistent with an economy that is headed toward a “soft landing,” in which the Federal Reserve raises interest rates enough to cool inflation but not so much as to cause a recession.

    “The ongoing resilience of consumer spending should ease recession fears and reduce the odds markets have placed on a larger (half-point) cut” at the Fed’s meeting in mid-September, said Michael Pearce, an economist at Oxford Economics. Instead, economists increasingly expect the Fed to begin cutting interest rates next month with a modest quarter-point reduction in its key rate, which affects many consumer and business loans.

    Adjusted for inflation, sales rose about 0.8% last month. And excluding gas station sales, which don’t reflect Americans’ appetite to spend, retail purchases also rose 1%.

    Consumers have been pummeled since the pandemic by high prices and elevated interest rates. Yet at the same time, average wages have also been rising, providing many households with the means to keep spending.

    Inflation-adjusted wages have increased slightly from a year ago. Upper-income households have also seen their wealth increase, with stock prices and home values having jumped in the past three years. Increases in wealth can encourage more spending.

    Auto sales jumped 3.6% last month, the largest increase since January 2023. It marked a rebound from the previous month, when a cyberattack involving many dealerships slowed sales.

    Sales at electronics and appliances stores surged 1.6%. And they rose 0.9% at hardware stores and garden centers. Restaurant sales were up 0.3%, a sign that Americans are still willing to spend on discretionary items, such as eating out.

    Financial markets had plunged earlier this month on fears surrounding the economy after the government reported that hiring was much weaker than expected in July and the unemployment rate rose for a fourth straight month.

    Yet since then, economic reports have shown that layoffs are still low and that activity and hiring in services industries remains solid. Americans are also still splurging on services, such as travel, entertainment, and health care, which are not included in Thursday’s retail sales report.

    Still, some economists worry that much of Americans’ spending now is being fueled by the increased use of credit cards. And the proportion of Americans who are falling behind on their credit card payments, while still relatively low, has been rising.

    But cooling inflation may give households a needed boost. Consumer prices rose just 2.9% in July from a year earlier, the government said Wednesday. That was the smallest year-over-year inflation figure since March 2021. And core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, slipped for the fourth straight month.

    While Americans are still willing to spend, they are increasingly searching out bargains. On Thursday, Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, reported strong sales in the three months that ended July 31.

    More Americans appear to be shopping at lower-prices outlets like Walmart. The company also boosted its sales outlook for this year and said that it hasn’t seen any signs of weakness from the consumer.

    Other companies are also starting to offer lower prices to entice consumers, a trend that is helping slow inflation. McDonald’s said its global same-store sales fell for the first time in nearly four years in the second quarter. The company introduced a $5 meal deal at U.S. restaurants in June; most franchisees plan to extend that deal through August.

    Arie Kotler, CEO of Arko Corp., a convenience chain based in Richmond, Virginia, said he’s noticed that shoppers have cut back their spending on discretionary items like salty snacks and candy bars since May. He said he thinks people are struggling with high interest rates on credit cards, with many of them maxed out.

    ___

    AP Business Writers Anne D’Innocenzio in New York and Dee-Ann Durbin in Detroit contributed to this report.

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