Richard Kirsch for Next New Deal: Amazon’s business model is based on quick, easy buying and low prices. One way it does that is to force its warehouse workers to wait a long time to leave work, without getting paid. And that’s just fine with the Obama administration, which continues to have a blind spot when it comes to decent pay and working conditions at Amazon.
[Early in October] the Supreme Court heard a case (Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk) in which workers are suing the temp firm that [staffs] Amazon warehouses. The workers are in court because they don’t get paid for the time they are forced to stand on line for a security check when they leave work to be sure they haven’t stolen anything. …
The legal issues revolve around whether the security screenings, which can take 20 minutes or more, are “integral and indispensable” to the job, which would trigger pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Amazon certainly thinks so; the screenings aren’t optional. Still the firm, which pays warehouse workers around $11 or $12 an hour, cheaps out by denying the workers pay when they are waiting on line to leave. …
While President Obama has made numerous passionate speeches about giving Americans a raise, his administration is taking Amazon’s side at the Supreme Court, filing an amicus brief, alongside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about this from the administration. Last August, as I wrote at the time, “President Obama gave a great speech on why good jobs are the foundation for his middle-out economic strategy … from a huge Amazon warehouse where the workers do not have good jobs.”
The president told the Amazon warehouse workers who were in the audience, “we should be doing everything we can as a country to create more good jobs that pay good wages.”
Everything, it turns out, except being sure they get paid for all the time they are required to be at work.
RETIRED WOMEN INCREASINGLY AT RISK
Benjamin Harris and Aurite Werman for the Brookings Institution: Social mobility is often thought of as a challenge facing children and working-age adults, but sharp drops in income are a real threat for millions of elderly Americans. Widowhood and divorce are often the culprits behind this downward intragenerational mobility — especially for women. The 2012 elderly poverty rate for widowed and divorced women was nearly three times that for married women and the elderly poverty rate for divorced women stood at nearly twice that for divorced men.
Two facts help to explain this risk: men earn more, but women live longer. Higher lifetime wages for men, and the associated retirement assets and benefits, mean that divorce is more of a poverty risk factor for women than for men. Longer life expectancy can also disproportionately impact women who spend down family assets to care for a sick husband or who find their household retirement benefits cut when their spouse dies.
Declining marriage rates have, of course, reduced the risk of widowhood or divorce, but also reduced women’s access to benefits in the first place. More women are entering retirement without any claim on their spouses’ Social Security benefits — marriages must last 10 years for a spouse to qualify. Between 1990 and 2009, the share of 50-59 year old women who were never married for more than a decade more than doubled from 7.5 percent to 16.2 percent. Among African-American women, the share skyrocketed from 13.4 percent to 33.9 percent.
RESCUING THE SAGE GROUSE
Brian Seasholes for the Reason Foundation: The greater sage grouse, which is being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act across its 11-state, 165-million-acre range, is usually associated with public lands because 61 percent of its habitat is on federal land, compared to 31 percent on private land (with the remaining 8 percent split among state and Native American lands). Yet a groundbreaking new study by federal and state biologists of sage grouse habitat in California, Oregon and northwest Nevada highlights the importance of private land for sage grouse.
According to the study, 81 percent of the critically important moist habitat — irrigated meadows, steamsides and seasonal wetlands — sage grouse depend on for food in summer is privately owned, despite that it constitutes only 2 percent of the bird’s total habitat. In addition, “more than 92 percent of wet meadows in the study area were irrigated,” according to a summary of the study. And irrigated means people, not nature, are responsible for this.
Perhaps the study’s most important finding is the relationship between lowland and upland habitat. Sage grouse breeding sites, known as leks and which tend to be on dry, publicly owned uplands, are clustered around the areas of moist lowlands that are largely privately owned. …
The implications of this study are nothing short of profound … this study provides very strong evidence and makes a very strong case for the crucially important role of ranchers and farmers in any successful effort to conserve sage grouse.
