The World Bank (WB), an international financial institution with a questionable track-record of interventions in the developing world, is currently thinking about the future of work as it is preparing its 2019 World Development Report. They, and every other policy wonk these days it seems, are pondering how robots and technology will change how we live, love, learn and earn.

Often, these speculative discussions take place in far off mountains of Switzerland and in the executive suites of global power brokers. In most instances, the conversations are rarefied and divorced from reality.

Input from individuals who will make up an even greater share of the future economy, care workers, is non-existent or minimal. Yet, the level of protections and rights we secure for individuals in this most marginalized sector of our economy will most certainly reflect the level afforded to other workers across industries.

Jobs in the care industry are the among the fastest growing, according to the projections of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A growing and aging population in developed countries, coupled with increasing number of millennials having children while both partners hold jobs, will further amplify the need for care work.

The care industry broadly encompasses individuals who provide live-in or home care assistance for the elderly, for the disabled, for immobilized people and for children. They are also commonly known as domestic workers, who take on the roles of nannies, chauffeurs and housekeepers.

Many consider the domestic worker the “original gig economy worker,” due to a high degree of inconsistency and insecurity associated with their work and lack of access to benefits and a safety net. The work they do and services they provide are undervalued and rarely counted by economists.

In their current form, the professions in this sector are anything but desirable. People working in the care industry have been historically marginalized and are extremely vulnerable. The average median income for home-care workers in the U.S. is roughly $13,000 per year, compared to the annual median income across other professions, which hovers around $44,000 per year.

Women are grossly over-represented in this industry, as ares racial minorities. Currently, around 40% of home-care workers in the U.S. are immigrants, many of them undocumented and thus at increased risk of exploitation. While their daily jobs entail maintaining the dignity of another human being, their own dignity and opportunity to provide for their own families is grossly diminished.

There are also very few national or international standards for the work performed by domestic workers or ways to scientifically quantify its value. As Anna Blackshaw, writer and photographer documenting lives of domestic workers in California, observed, it’s difficult to measure “just another happy child or shining kitchen floor,” as compared to the metrics of the latest tech widget.

Even scarcer are labor protections, guaranteed days off or retirement benefits. Many domestic workers work until they are physically spent or bedridden. Stories of verbal, physical and sexual abuse by employers are all too common. Being fired for being sick occurs too often. Not being paid for months on end is reality for too many.

However, change is on the way. It comes from Seattle, WA and is the result of prolonged and tireless advocacy by Working Washington, a non-profit that initially galvanized around the issue of the $15 minimum wage.

The group’s efforts have resulted in a first-ever Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, adopted in July 2018 by the Seattle City Council. While the document falls short of the activists’ demands for securing guaranteed written contracts, it is still a step in the right direction for protecting domestic workers.

The bill requires that all domestic workers, even those classified as independent contractors, must be paid at least the equivalent of Seattle’s minimum wage. It forbids employers from retaining workers’ personal documents and calls for creation of a board to advise on future regulations.

These efforts complement the work of national organizations such as National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which have also been on the front lines protecting the rights of domestic workers.

One must remain hopeful that examples from Washington State and the work of grassroots activists such as NDWA will find their way into the World Bank’s report as ideas worth spreading and replicating. This is particularly important at a time when workers, both in the United States and across the world, plunge deeper into an uncertain future and  a tech-dominated – and often exploitative – economy.

The post The future of work: Who will care about the caregivers? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A Medicare for All health system [aka “single-payer”] would be a great step forward for the US. But how difficult will it be to get from here to there?

A recent analysis by Charles Gaba yields important insights into the difficulties of making that transition. Gaba’s article focuses on one state—Texas. Using Texas as an example, Gaba shows that the logistics will be extremely touchy—and not just in a political way.

The biggest obstacle to transitioning from our current mix of employer-based and healthcare-exchange-based system, says Gaba, is “that at least a half a million people currently work directly for health insurance carriers, plus (I’m guessing) another couple million in directly related services.”

To illustrate this point, Gaba lists every company that offered private health insurance policies in the state of Texas as of 2014. There are 163 of them.

…The point is that moving to single payer (again, assuming that included replacing all private policies for everyone and assuming that it would be a comprehensive policy which didn’t leave room for supplemental coverage) would mean that every one of these companies would go out of business…or at least shut down a major division of their operations in the cases of companies which also sell life/auto/homeowners/etc.

Gaba says that, in the long run, he has no problem with the ultimate shutdown of these companies, because he sees “the very concept of profit-based health insurance as troubling and unnecessary.”

At the same time, however, these are real people working for real companies, and very few of them are the Fat Cat Multi-Million Dollar CEOs that we all despise.

If the idea is that the federal government would hire these 500,000 people (that’s nationally; I assume it’s more like 50K or so in Texas specifically) to handle the government-run equivalent of their current job, that’s fine, but we’d better make sure to take that into consideration. What happens to multi-year legal contracts between these companies and the healthcare providers? What’s the economic impact of 160 companies being shut down in one state alone? How much transition time would be needed to do all of this? Then multiply that by 50.

Then we need to add in the political realities and the still-unanswered question of whether moving to Medicare for All would be more cost-effective/ less expensive, notes Gaba.

It’s not impossible, he says. But we have to factor in…

“…the sheer logistics and real-world impact that making this move would have. I simply see no way of it happening over the course of a few years even if all of the political and economic winds were all lined up perfectly for that entire period of time.”

That bit about putting all those health-insurance workers out of jobs is very compelling. It’s an argument that often gets lost in the political shuffle. I’m in full sympathy with Bernie Sanders’ desire to get the profit motive out of something that–as he said on Fox TV’s Town Hall last night–is a human right. But Sanders–and all of us who want Medicare for All–need to talk about it in a much more pragmatic way.

The post From Obamacare to Medicare for All: Easier said than done appeared first on Occasional Planet.

My 49-year-old daughter has limited abilities, but has worked since finishing high school and has lived independently all these years. In fact, she just paid off the mortgage on her house in Springfield.

After 23 years in the catering department at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, she was fired for supposedly mixing broken mayonnaise packets in with good ones. No, I’m not kidding. She was “written up” twice before that, once for not preparing the supplies for a co-worker’s event, even though she wasn’t told to do that.

She has been a loyal employee all these years, even going in on her day off if a co-worker called in sick. I’ve always stressed to her what my mother told me about doing a good job, following orders, and giving a full day’s work for a full day’s pay. (That sounds so old fashioned now, doesn’t it?)

My daughter doesn’t handle change well. She doesn’t even like things in her kitchen to be rearranged. So you can imagine how stressful this life changing event has been for her.

She and I visited with the head of the Human Resources Department on Monday. Cathy had not been given anything in writing when she was abruptly “terminated.” (Isn’t that an awful word to use in a situation like this?)

The HR guy printed out what is in the hospital employee record system about Cathy’s “failure to…..” and the dates of the three warnings. Curiously, they were all during the 3rd week of the month, almost as if the supervisor was expected to find something to criticize at a certain point each month. The “precipitating event” which led to her being fired is, no kidding, the accusation that she mixed leaking mayonnaise packets with good ones thereby ruining them.

I told the HR guy this is so bizarre that it reminds me of the Caine Mutiny. He didn’t know what that was.

I also told him my theory that the hospital is cutting expenses by getting rid of employees at the top of their pay scale (for Cathy’s job it was $13.78/hr.) and replacing them with folks who will work for half that. He said he’d be shocked and saddened to learn that was true. At the time, my daughter and I believed him to be telling the truth.

We left with assurances he would not challenge her right to collect unemployment compensation. He also said HR won’t give a prospective employer negative information about Cathy’s reason for leaving. They supposedly only give out the dates of employment. I say “supposedly” because I know someone who called pretending to be a prospective employer and asked about her son’s firing. She was given quite an earful about him. So “policy” is one thing but actuality may be another.

My daughter and I next visited the Career Center which is the arm of the state employment agency that helps people find jobs. We were very impressed with the layout of the offices (in an open circular pattern making it very inviting) and the staff who were extremely helpful. They have lots of resources and seem honestly concerned about the clients they help. The last stop in the process was with a career counselor. She told us there have been many, many former employees of Mercy Hospital coming in for help. In fact, there were 30 from one department all fired at the same time. The work was contracted out. I assume she means to a private contractor, but I don’t know for sure. She said she knew highly skilled IT workers who left because of the pressure and the depressing work environment.

I know for a fact that doctors are leaving the Mercy system too. Both of my husband’s heart doctors left and went with other hospitals in the St. Louis area. The plastic surgeon who removed a skin cancer from my husband’s ear described Mercy as a company that was “metastasizing” in its zeal to expand. Kind of an ironic comparison from someone who removes cancerous tissue.

But it’s not just the Mercy system. My daughter’s husband works in food service at a nursing home that is part of a chain of facilities owned by a large corporation. He makes $8.50 an hour and is expected to finish the work assigned to him in a certain amount of time despite the fact that no one could possibly do that. He is written up if he doesn’t take his breaks and written up if the work isn’t done. Needless to say, there is a big turnover in that place which can’t be good for the residents.

In Southwest Missouri, the Republicans win the majority of seats in the state legislature. It’s impossible to get those voters to understand the consequences of their decision to elect people who won’t expand Medicaid and who want to cut all social service programs. They listen to right wing radio and blame everything on “Obamacare.”

Bernie Sanders is right that corporate greed is destroying America. He is trying to start a revolution in the sense that people need to wake up and see what’s being done to them. I’m too old and cynical to think we can escape the clutches of the powerful moneyed interests.

My daughter is just one of the millions of Americans being hurt by insatiable greed. We watch the stock market for encouraging news, but who is watching out for the people with no voice? Thank goodness there are non-profit organizations trying to make life better for the people at the bottom of the income scale. They may be our only hope.

The post How corporate greed got my daughter fired appeared first on Occasional Planet.

David Siegel, CEO of Florida’s Westgate Resorts, to employees: “I will cut off your nose to spite Obama’s face because I got mine. If you think I’m going to dip into my massive profits to give you the earnings and benefits you deserve, think again.” At least that’s how I read it when a CEO threatens to fire employees and take away benefits if they don’t do their part to make sure a certain candidate loses the election.

From a company email, sent by Siegel to his employees:

The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration.

And:

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company. Rather than grow this company I will be forced to cut back. This means fewer jobs, less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.

So despite the fact that his business is doing extraordinarily well under an Obama administration, he will be “forced” to fire some employees and cut others’ benefits should the same administration remain intact come Inauguration 2013. Regardless of the fact that the President has repeatedly said–including at the first presidential debate–he wants to lower the corporate tax rate, Siegel wants his employees to believe that “anti-business Obama” is going to sweep in with devastating tax hikes that will jeopardize their very livelihoods. Although business profits and CEO salaries are at all-time record-breaking highs, David Siegel says a tax hike of any kind will force his hand and employees will suffer the consequences.

But Siegel’s not trying to convince you to vote for one candidate or the other. No, he’d never do that.

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