Group items tagged

Many workers aren’t even getting the pay they’ve been promised for the work they do. Complaints of wage theft, like that experienced by NFL cheerleaders, jumped by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011. It’s rampant in some industries: 89 percent of fast food workers say they’ve been made to work for free off the clock, denied overtime pay, or simply paid less than minimum wage. More is stolen from low-wage workers than is robbed from banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined. Lawmakers in a handful of cities and two states, Colorado and New York, have passed anti-wage theft ordinances to crack down on companies that steal wages and make it easier for workers to bring claims.

But almost entirely overlooked amid the public outrage is the massive pool of low-wage workers – especially in the sharing economy – who are vulnerable to a wide range of abuses on the job because they lack basic labor rights.

“We have to talk about this as a problem these platforms have created,” said Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor who studies online abuse. “[If you’re] going to set up a platform to make it possible for people to instantaneously communicate with people they don’t know ... you know full well it’s going to be abused and weaponized.”

The success of many on-demand companies like DoorDash depends on hiring a large, cheap workforce of contract employees who have no benefits or job security.

if you’re not among the 10-15% of the population that has learned how to master and complement computers, you’ll be doomed to earn low wages in dead-end jobs.

“There are two things people need to learn how to do to be employable at a decent wage: first, learn some skills which complement the computer rather than compete against it. Some of these are technical skills, but a lot of them will be soft skills, like marketing, persuasion and management that computers won’t be able to do any time soon. 

There has arisen a kind of parallel network – a lot of it is on the Internet, a lot of it is free – where people teach themselves things, often very effectively.

Not that this was necessarily the takeaway from a recent interview that the OECD Education Today blog did with economist Tyler Cowen, but still: 'There are two things people need to learn how to do to be employable at a decent wage: first, learn some skills which complement the computer rather than compete against it. Some of these are technical skills, but a lot of them will be soft skills, like marketing, persuasion, and management that computers won't be able to do any time soon.' Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, in Va., is more focused on higher education than K-12, but the teaching of soft skills has become a big factor in discussions of college and career readiness. As important as soft skills, though, Cowen said, is the ability of people to be able to learn new things, especially without the formal structure of school to support them: 'Twenty to thirty years from now, we'll all be doing different things. So people who are very good at teaching themselves, regardless of what their formal background is, will be the big winners.'

Also swelling is the number of adjuncts. They now make up 50 to 75 percent of those teaching in higher education. Why colleges rely so much on adjuncts has been discussed thoughtfully and at length elsewhere; chief among the reasons are that they are not as expensive as tenure-track professors, their scheduling can more easily align with the needs of the college, and firing them is not fraught with the same peril as firing full-time faculty members. It should hardly come as a surprise that all of the factors that make adjuncts attractive to administrators make them equally attractive to union organizers. For example, at Washington University in St. Louis, where adjuncts voted 138 to 111 in favor of organizing, the core issues were low wages, lack of benefits, and lack of job security.