Bryce Covert | Vox

The economy could lose a generation of working mothers

2020-12-15T17:37:14-05:00

Kari McCracken helps her children with virtual learning in their home in La Grange, Kentucky, on October 29. | Morgan Hornsby for Vox

Kari McCracken loved her job managing a team as regional supervisor at a bottling company for Coca-Cola in Kentucky. “The people that I worked with and interacted with daily were like a family to me,” she said. She was getting ready to celebrate her five-year anniversary. It was where she planned to retire. There, “I knew that I had a bright future,” she said.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. McCracken was furloughed in early April but was told she’d likely be called back in June. Since schools had closed, her five children — ages 11, 9, 7, 3, and 2 — were all at home. The furlough at least allowed her to manage the “chaos” of it all, she said.

When her boss called in June, she said she could probably save McCracken’s position — if she could return to work in person within the week.

“My first instinct is to say, ‘Okay I’m excited to go back to work,’” she recalled. “It hit me after the fact that oof, I can’t go back, I don’t have a sitter.” Her sister, who had helped watch her kids in the past, wasn’t available. She requested unpaid leave so she could make arrangements but was denied.

In April, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which included up to 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leave for workers whose child care or schools closed due to the pandemic. But it included a number of exemptions, including an exclusion for businesses with 500 or more employees. That applied to McCracken’s employer. “Had I worked for a smaller corporation, my job would have been protected,” she said.

Instead, she set about frantically calling anywhere and everywhere that might be able to offer child care, even just for a week or two. But with child care capacity reduced as a Covid-19 safety precaution, “nobody had anything remotely available.” In July, one in five child care centers across the country were still closed.

A few days later, she received an overnighted letter from the company saying that if she didn’t come back, it would consider her to have voluntarily resigned. Her last official day with the company was July 3. Coca-Cola Consolidated didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“It crushed me,” she said. She had always felt that the company cared about her, but the letter made her feel like “I was another number.” Because she wasn’t technically fired, she wasn’t eligible for severance pay, paid out unused time off, or job assistance that was offered to others who were laid off. She lost her health insurance just as she had hit the annual deductible.

McCracken is part of a mass exodus of women from the paid workforce — the likes of which the country may have never seen before. In August and September, 865,000 women left work altogether; in September, there were 2.2 million fewer women in the labor force than a year earlier. There are fewer women employed or looking for work, and more women simply sitting on the sidelines of the labor force, than any time since 1986.

Some of the pain has been caused by intense contractions in the places where women, and in particular women of color, work: service industries like restaurants and retail that had to shut down, as well as state and local governments whose workforces are predominantly female and Black but are facing severe budget cuts.

Women are also being squeezed out of the workforce by the vice of yet another remote school year, lack of child care, and the inability to take paid time off work to care for their children.

Then there is the nagging, ingrained expectation that, even in a supportive heterosexual partnership, the person who is supposed to sacrifice their career to take care of the children is the woman. Even though most mothers work outside the home in non-pandemic times, they are also almost always the default caretaker when family needs to be cared for.

In August, the federal monthly jobs report showed that even as employment began to rebound, women in their prime working years actually left the labor force, on net. And in September, more women left the labor force than any other month on record other than April, the peak of the pandemic.

Women are getting the worst of this recession
But it turns out there’s a huge marriage story we’ve been missing

Married women lost almost 1 million jobs last month.
(single men gained 1.2 million)https://t.co/IE4UEtTbp2

1/ pic.twitter.com/MozPMf42Yr
— Michael Madowitz (@mikemadowitz) October 6, 2020

“I was prepared for pretty grim stuff,” said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Center for American Progress who has been tracking the numbers. “In August, it started to look much grimmer.”

He had assumed that the exodus from the workplace would be more limited, perhaps just for mothers of elementary-aged children who are still too young to do remote learning on their own. “It’s a lot more broad-based than that,” he said.

Women are bearing the brunt of having to choose child care over work

The monthly jobs data is noisy and liable to revisions, so no single month can determine a trend. Still, it lines up with other data. In one national survey, 13 percent of working parents said they had lost a job or reduced their hours due to lack of child care. That survey was conducted in the late summer.

“If that was an issue in the spring, you can imagine how bad that is at this point,” noted Betsey Stevenson, an economist and professor at the University of Michigan. In August, nearly half of manufacturers said child care constraints were making it hard to bring employees back or hire new ones.

“It’s not a question of whether women are set back in the workplace. It’s a question of how far back will we go: 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?”

It’s mothers who are bearing the brunt of abruptly losing child care and school. Mothers of young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers during the pandemic. An August analysis found that young mothers were nearly three times more likely than fathers to say they couldn’t work due to school or daycare closures. Among parents whose children are ages two to six, mothers were more than four times as likely to leave the workforce as fathers.

Anecdotally, A Better Balance, a nonprofit focused on women’s workplace rights, is getting calls to its legal hotline “all the time” from women who have been pushed out of their jobs due to caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic, said vice president Elizabeth Gedmark. In the beginning, many people simply weren’t aware of the FFCRA’s paid leave, and the organization could help them assert their rights. But many others were carved out altogether — not just at large employers, but also at those with fewer than 50 employees, and health care workers. As the pandemic drags on, they’re also getting calls from people who were able to take the leave but have now run out. “That is an increasing problem as virtual schooling is so predominant in the country,” Gedmark said.

And while families may have muddled through the spring, whatever they did to make it work may just not be feasible anymore. “We’ve all been doing somewhat unsustainable things for seven months,” Madowitz said. “You can only do three jobs with two people, or two jobs with one person, for so long.”

Carrie Westenhofer had worked at a bank for five years when Covid-19 hit, and because banks were deemed to be essential businesses, her employer required her to keep reporting to work, even though she thinks she could have easily done her job from home. When her four children’s three different schools all went remote in the spring, she adjusted her schedule so that she was working part-time. After she left for work at 7 am, her now-husband would supervise the start of school until he left for work at 11 am, at which point they paid a friend to come help. Westenhofer would leave work at noon and take over for the rest of the day. “It did not work. Unless the whole plan was for us to go insane — that worked,” she said with a laugh. “It was just a disaster.”

School ended in June and she went back to full-time, and that worked for a while. But when she found out school would once again be remote in the fall, she asked her supervisor if she could go back down to part-time hours. While her supervisor agreed, the market president refused. When Westenhofer took the issue to human resources, she was told there was nothing they could do and was chided that employers were also having a hard time.

Like McCracken, Westenhofer looked into the paid leave offered under the FFCRA, but her bank also has more than 500 employees, so she realized she wasn’t eligible. The only thing the company offered her was to work in retail banking part-time, a position that wouldn’t come with any benefits. They wouldn’t hold her current position for her after the pandemic. It would have put her right back where she started five years earlier. “That was a huge slap in the face,” she said. That’s when she decided to quit; her last day was August 21.

It was “difficult to process the fact that they had no loyalty to me after five years of loyalty to them,” she said. “To be treated like I literally could be replaced instantly was hard.” And while she knows she’s doing work watching her children all day, it’s been difficult not to contribute financially to the household. She’s worked since she was 15 and this is the first time in her life when she isn’t working outside the home.

Westenhofer’s husband is a dispatch manager at a trucking company who works long hours. Though he offered to figure out a way to make it work, ultimately, he makes more money than her. “It wouldn’t have made sense for him to leave work,” she said.

McCracken was in a similar situation. Her husband is “very supportive” of her having both a career and being a “super mom,” but just as she was furloughed, his job as a director for GE Appliances in the washer and dryer division became far more demanding. Even before Covid-19, his salary was nearly twice hers. Having her be the one to step back made financial sense; otherwise they risked not being able to pay their bills or keep their house on her salary alone. They couldn’t even afford his taking a leave of absence.

The gender wage gap likely plays at least a partial role in women being the ones to duck out of work in the face of an impossible dilemma. Across the economy, women who work full-time, year-round earn 82 percent of what men make. Black women make just 63 percent of what white men make; Latinas make 55 percent. “On average, we know that women are being paid less than men, even when they’re at least as qualified,” Madowitz said. “If you’re going to lose a large fraction of your income, you probably want to keep the higher paying of the two jobs.”

But beyond the cold, hard numbers, there is also a powerful social expectation that women are supposed to be the ones to care for children — and to sacrifice their careers if the two come into conflict, no matter how supportive their husbands are. “I’m not sure what caused it, but I definitely felt like this was my thing to tackle,” Westenhofer said. “[My husband is] an extremely good team player. But I just have this drive to handle it myself.”

Even as most mothers work outside the home and their families increasingly rely on their paychecks, they are still putting in much more time on child care. Mothers today still spend twice as much time caring for children as fathers do, and actually spend more time on child care than women in the 1960s — even though they’re also working more. The attempt to make everything work can fail, pushing them out of the labor force. The professional penalty women pay for becoming mothers is a big driver of the gender wage gap to begin with.

Since leaving the bank, Westenhofer has been applying for remote work, and has accepted a customer service position that starts on November 2. Her hours will be 3:30 pm until midnight. She’ll still have a stretch in the evening when she’ll be juggling work while watching her children before her husband gets home. Because it’ll be done over chat, and the school day will end just as her workday starts, she hopes she can make it work.

The women’s recession could impact a generation

Women will almost certainly suffer career setbacks and lost wages from the pandemic. A new report from the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress estimates that if current conditions persist, their families will suffer $64.5 billion in lost wages per year. When women drop out of the workforce, “the consequences are actually really grave,” Stevenson said.

She hopes that, if such a large number of women have been pushed out all at once, “there will be safety in numbers” and employers won’t be able to exclude all of them when the economy recovers. But we could still have “a generation of women left behind,” she said. “A decade from now their kids will be grown and they will still be bearing the scars of the Covid pandemic.”

“It’s not a question of whether women are set back in the workplace,” Gedmark said. “It’s a question of how far back will we go: 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?”

The effects won’t stay sequestered in individual families. Women flooding into the paid workforce between the 1970s and the 2000s increased GDP by 11 percent. Women have spent years graduating college at higher rates and investing in careers that contribute to economic growth. If we “drive a bunch of people out of not just the labor force, but the long-term career paths they’re on, that’s going to have significant consequences for how fast our economy grows,” Madowitz said.

Mothers of young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers during the pandemic.

“If you don’t send all the women back, you can’t have a V-shaped recovery,” in which the economy quickly bounces back from the depths of the pandemic, Stevenson said. “We couldn’t fully recover if we don’t bring them back.”

While Congress extended paid leave through the FFCRA for parents whose children have nowhere to go, the exclusions meant only about 20 percent of workers were eligible. Meanwhile, many state and local governments have rushed to reopen bars and restaurants without prioritizing the safe reopening of daycares and schools, when those could have been prioritized instead. “We should never forget that that was a choice that we didn’t make,” Stevenson said.

The exodus may only just be beginning. After seven months of desperately trying to make it work, some women may be ready to throw in the towel. Leigha Thomason was sent home to do her job as a certified medical assistant at a mental health clinic just as her two younger children’s schools went remote in the spring. “It was incredibly overwhelming,” she said. “I was having to learn a new job.”

Meanwhile, her children weren’t even given instruction online when schools shut down — they were sent home with giant folders full of paperwork and told to complete it. Thomason, whose husband works as a truck driver and is gone until the evenings, found herself trying to juggle helping her children complete schoolwork while helping her patients. “I felt myself going crazy sometimes,” she said.

Her employer eventually agreed to give her 80 hours of time off, which she spread out over five weeks. But she was denied the extra 10 weeks allowed under FFCRA. “That was very discouraging and felt like a slap in the face,” she said. She thought about quitting, but reasoned that her family needed the money.

After starting school remote this fall, her children have gone back to full-time, in-person. But if schools close and go fully remote again — even if it’s just temporarily to deal with a cluster of Covid-19 cases in her district — and her employer still refuses to give her time off, she’ll probably quit. “My kids at that point do come first,” she said. “I’m not going to sit here and deprive them anymore than I have to, like I did in the past.”

For McCracken, “basically, my life is on hold,” she said. After Covid-19 cases rose in her state, the governor delayed the opening of in-person school, so all of her children — including her three-year-old — were doing remote learning at first. It was only a few weeks ago that two of her kids started attending some days of the week. Everyone else is home full-time. “I don’t even know how I haven’t fallen apart yet,” she said. “You feel like you’re taking on this all by yourself.”

She’s looking for other work, but it’s not easy to find the right thing. There aren’t many jobs that pay what she was making before, but she needs to make enough to be able to cover the cost of child care if she goes back. “It’s like I have to start all over,” she said, and she’s not sure she wants to start at the bottom and work her way up again.

“I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my career,” she said, and had “defied all odds” to pull it off with five children in a male-dominated industry. “I was so proud of that. To be an example to my girls especially, to show them that you can be a mom and you can work.”

For now, she said, it makes the most sense for her to be a stay-at-home mother. “I eventually will go back into the workforce, I believe that,” she said. “I just don’t know when.”

She added, “I had so much to offer and so much potential.”

PPP loans were supposed to be forgiven. Business owners say they’re still waiting.

2020-10-30T14:28:17-04:00

Jackie Laundon was already on the phone when I called her, trying to get an answer from her bank about how to get her Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiven. She had been put on hold twice only to be shunted back to the original menu. She had no more clarity than when she’d placed the call 45 minutes earlier. It was the second time she’d tried reaching the bank by phone.

Laundon is a public health consultant in Denver, Colorado, where she works with state and local government agencies as the sole proprietor of the business she started at the end of last year. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, two big contracts were about to end, and she wasn’t able to do the normal networking that brings in more work. The public health agencies she usually works with are all suffering from budget cuts. So she decided she needed some help to get through, and the PPP seemed like “the most straightforward” option, Laundon said with a laugh, especially if the money was essentially a grant.

Congress created the PPP when it passed the CARES Act in March, aiming to funnel billions of dollars through banks to businesses that were suffering from widespread lockdowns during the pandemic. The loans were mainly meant to cover payroll, a way to keep employees earning money while stopping companies from going under, and were designed to be completely forgiven if used properly.

“I was like, ‘Okay, it’s been eight weeks, where’s my forgiveness application?’”

But getting the $15,000 Laundon received forgiven has been anything but straightforward. She tried to find out what would be required to get forgiveness the day after she got her loan, but her lender didn’t have the information. The Small Business Association (SBA), the federal agency overseeing the program, had originally issued rules saying the money had to be spent in eight weeks, so Laundon did just that. “I was like, ‘Okay, it’s been eight weeks, where’s my forgiveness application?’”

Laundon kept checking her lender’s website over the next five months to see if there was anything about how to apply for forgiveness, but it wasn’t until early October that she was told she could start applying. By mid-October, she still hadn’t managed to submit her application. There is a deadline for applying for forgiveness: business owners have to apply within 10 months of their PPP loan ending in order to avoid having to start payments.

The SBA released an “EZ application” for PPP forgiveness on June 16, but business owners can’t submit the forms directly to the agency — they have to go through their lenders instead. And both banks and the SBA have barely gotten things off the ground.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the SBA received only about 56,000 decisions on whether to forgive loans from banks by September 8 — which amounts to just 1 percent of the 5.2 million loans issued. None had actually been forgiven as of October 1, although the SBA said it finally began sending forgiveness payments out on October 2. Meanwhile, the SBA issued new information and rules on July 23, August 4, and August 11, and it still hadn’t finished creating a process for reviewing lenders’ decisions as of August 14. On October 1, the SBA said it would start forgiving loans after banks and borrowers complained.

Laundon is not the only small business owner anxiously waiting for the chance to get her PPP loan forgiven as the process drags out. In a survey of 93 small business owners conducted in late September that was shared exclusively with Vox, the Main Street Alliance found that 39 percent have tried to start the forgiveness process, but have been told their banks aren’t ready. More than one-third are worried that the lengthy process leaves them sitting on potential debt, affecting their creditworthiness. There is a lack of clarity as to whether PPP loans will be taxed as business income or as an expense, leaving year-end tax planning more complicated.

Minneapolis-based Kevin Brown, owner of print service company Smart Set, scrupulously followed the program’s rules, spending his $35,000 PPP loan on payroll and other expenses as allowed and within the right time frame. “And then it was like, ‘Okay what’s next?’” he said. “The answer was, ‘Good luck, you’re on your own.’”

As soon as the SBA published paperwork for forgiveness, Brown downloaded it and spent three hours going over it with his bookkeeper. They didn’t even finish, but they were able to make a list of all the documents they needed and fill out the application. At the end of June, he contacted his banker about what he should do with the paperwork. His banker told him not to send it in yet. That was the last time he had any communication from his banker about PPP forgiveness.

“I’ve never asked for charity from the government,” Brown said. “I’m very much committed to holding up my end of the bargain. But at some point it’s like, what’s the government’s end of the bargain?” While he waits to submit his forgiveness application, he’s holding off on buying a new piece of equipment that he had been set to buy in early March.

Back then, Brown had spoken to his banker about rolling over a loan for a different piece of equipment that he just paid off into a new one to cover the cost. Now, as he’s facing his busy season in November and December, he’s eager to actually buy it. But Brown has a $35,000 outstanding loan on his books, so his banker can’t issue the new loan, even if they both know the PPP loan should be forgiven.

“I’m very much committed to holding up my end of the bargain. But at some point it’s like, what’s the government’s end of the bargain?”

Davis Senseman, an attorney who works with small business owners in Minneapolis, had assumed they would already be wrapping up work with clients to get their loans forgiven by now. Instead, they have clients who call and anxiously say that they’re watching interest accruing on their PPP loans. “It’s so hard to say to them … ‘We can’t do the forgiveness yet,’” Senseman said. Others have decided not to use the PPP money in case it’s not forgiven. Some clients have even held off on calling employees back to work.

Senseman is also waiting to apply to have their own $16,500 PPP loan forgiven. They applied after realizing that all of their small business clients weren’t going to be able to pay them for work done in January and February as businesses shuttered in March. They precisely followed the program’s rules. Still, they said, they aren’t “100 percent sure” that the rules won’t change again. “It takes an emotional toll,” Senseman said. “I would like this debt that should not be a debt to not be a debt.” And if it does turn into debt, even partially, it would be a “burden,” forcing Senseman to start demanding payment from clients who still can’t pay.

Michael Fusco-Straub, the co-owner of bookstore Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, still hasn’t been allowed to apply for forgiveness for his $100,000 loan. He was told in July that it would start in August; in August he was told September; in September, October. When we spoke in October, he said the last he’d been told was November. He’s assuming that “their goal is not to forgive it,” so he is planning to do everything he can to do it absolutely right. It would be a hardship, he said, if it weren’t forgiven.

For Laundon, the delay in getting forgiveness means that she’s not using her PPP money the way it was intended. “I have been pinching pennies,” she said, to make sure she has $15,000 in case she has to pay it back. She’s been marketing herself for smaller research projects outside of what her business is supposed to focus on in order to make more income. She’s held off on getting a customized email suite and setting up her own website to build more business. She can’t take the classes she would normally invest in to get her higher certifications and allow her to charge higher rates. “Anything I feel like I can cut back on, I’ve just cut back on,” she said.

Even once the forgiveness process truly gets underway, many business owners aren’t sure exactly what paperwork will be required of them. Sixty-eight percent of the Main Street Alliance survey respondents were concerned that the process wasn’t clear, with two-thirds saying they don’t understand what’s eligible for forgiveness given the many changes in the program, and over half were confused about what documents are required. The details matter: About two-thirds fear not getting their loans forgiven, while 43 percent are concerned they won’t have any recourse if they feel a decision isn’t fair.

It wasn’t too difficult for Laundon to apply for a PPP loan: She submitted profit and loss statements from January and February of this year, the months when she actually had income. She was hoping the lengthy delay in her bank allowing her to apply for forgiveness was due to the bank setting up a portal that would make that process easy as well.

“No one really seems to understand what is needed”

Instead, her bank told her that she needs to submit different documentation to be forgiven: It wants her to send a Form 941, which small businesses with employees submit to the IRS to show taxes withheld from workers’ paychecks, and a Schedule C form for 2019, which sole proprietors file with the IRS at tax time. But she has no employees and was only in business for four weeks last year. She hadn’t started making money but had startup costs, so she had a loss for that time period.

Each time Laundon sends an email explaining and asking what she can submit instead, she gets a form response telling her she needs to send a 941 and Schedule C. “The right hand is not really working with the left hand, and no one really seems to understand what is needed,” she said.

Laundon has resorted to looking at the SBA’s website and accounting blogs to try to figure out what her lender should be asking her for. “This is a lot of unpaid time that we’re spending on trying to provide this documentation,” she noted. “I’m someone who likes to make sure all of my Ts are crossed and my Is are dotted. I just want them to be very clear about what is needed.”

Brown’s situation is more straightforward. And yet even he’s unsure, once he’s able to submit his forgiveness paperwork, if it will be wiped clean. The program required business owners to spend 75 percent of the money on payroll, but it was never explained if it had to be on the same employees for the same hours as pre-pandemic, or if things could be shifted around — which is what he ended up having to do with his employees. Even his banker didn’t know the answer. If it’s not forgiven, he said, it “would be pretty catastrophic.”

“The whole thing has just been hilariously poorly executed,” Laundon said. “But it’s incredibly unfunny because this is people’s livelihoods.”

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How bookstores are weathering the pandemic

2020-10-28T11:53:26-04:00

Customers browse at Rodney’s Book Store in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2020. | Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The pandemic arrived early for Emily Powell, owner of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. The state had one of the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US in February. As she watched more cases pop up across the country, “I felt an increasing sense of panic and crisis,” she said. On March 15, she abruptly closed her stores in the middle of the day. She immediately shrank her staff from 500 to 60 who were “just helping us turn the lights off and put out-of-office messages on the website.” Almost overnight, she shifted her business entirely to online orders.

She’s since been able to bring back around 150 employees, and thanks to a flood of online sales, a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal Small Business Administration, and partial reopenings of her stores, she’s made it this far.

Twenty percent of independent bookstores across the country are in danger of closing

Still, Powell’s and other independent bookstores across the country face an uncertain and undoubtedly difficult future: Government assistance has dried up, foot traffic is still low, and the virus is again threatening to bring everything to a screeching halt. Independent bookstore owners dug deep into their wells of creativity and passion and found ways to transform their businesses to cope with Covid-19. But even so, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), 35 member bookstores have closed during the pandemic, with roughly one store closing each week. Twenty percent of independent bookstores across the country are in danger of closing, the ABA says.

Between mid-April and June, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC) distributed $2.7 million to store owners and employees in need. “That equals the distribution that we had had in the previous eight years,” said executive director Pamela French. The individual grants it gives out have increased 443 percent over last year. The level of need has subsided somewhat since the peak of the pandemic, but it’s remained consistently elevated, even with many stores now open.

A number of bookstores shut their doors voluntarily before any government lockdowns were imposed. “We were one of the first places in our town to close down,” said Suedee Hall-Elkins, manager of Dickson Street Bookshop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her store’s aisles are very narrow, so they felt the need to close “for morally responsible reasons.”

Closing off browsing meant a seismic shift in bookstore business models. Kris Kleindienst’s shelves at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, were fully stocked with newly released books in March. “All of a sudden, they just became décor,” she said.

Still, owners pivoted as quickly as they could. “These independent bookstore owners are just tenacious,” French said. Owners suddenly found themselves arranging curbside pickups, shipping thousands of online orders, and staging completely virtual events.

Many factors boosted sales just when stores needed them. Customers flooded online ordering systems, many in the hope of helping their local stores, others simply desperate for something to read during lockdown. Amazon started prioritizing essential goods over things like books, giving an edge to independent stores. Annie Philbrick’s online orders at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, and Savoy Bookshop & Café in Westerly, Rhode Island, are about 10 times what they were each year for the past five. Michael Fusco-Straub, co-owner of Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, sold 50,000 books during his city’s lockdown.

Then the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd took off, prompting another deluge of purchases as readers were eager to get their hands on books about race and racism. “The summer was mostly fulfilling … anti-racism orders,” Kleindienst said.

The switch to online and curbside ordering saved bookstores from ruin. But it wasn’t easy, nor was it enjoyable. “It started to feel like a fulfillment warehouse for widgets,” said Steven Salardino, manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California. “It really took a toll on us psychologically.” What kept him going, he said, was getting notes in online orders saying thank you.

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Philbrick took it upon herself to pick up books from her two stores and drive them to customers’ homes. “I was a UPS driver for a month or so,” she said. She would hang bags of books on their doors, ring the bell, and walk back to her car. She even drove an hour and a half out of town to bring books to a couple who would leave her snack bags in thanks. “That was a pleasure,” she said.

In many ways, online ordering is the antithesis of what independent bookstores are. “We are a community space that thrived with that in-person, face-to-face conversation about ideas and literature,” said Hilary Gustafson, owner of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her store typically stages 300 events a year, and the in-store ones pack 50 people “elbow to elbow,” she said. Now, she’s been entirely focused on online orders, which requires “10 times as much work for a sale of one book.”

Stores like Gustafson’s quickly moved their programming — author events, book clubs, classes — to online platforms. But it’s a difficult and often money-losing way to do them. Stores typically make money from free events when people buy books, often getting them autographed. Online, it’s different. “Sales are down even though audience levels are, in some cases, up,” Graham said. Readers also now have a vast array of stores’ events to choose from because they’re all online. “The competition has just become fierce,” Philbrick said.

Despite the many hurdles small-business owners faced in getting PPP loans, all of the stores I spoke to were able to secure loans, and the money was vital. “The thing that got us this far and avoided bankruptcy was the PPP money,” said Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, DC. Even so, it was gone within a couple of months.

Other money came from unexpected places. Philbrick got $5,000 from Spanx, which was offering grants to women-owned businesses. That, she said, was a turning point of sorts, when she realized that not only would she have a cushion to get through, but “we’re all in this together trying to figure this out.”

Some customers even gave their local bookstores donations in the hope of keeping them alive. Gustafson’s store launched a GoFundMe, which was a “lifeline,” she said. She raised more there than she got in PPP money.

But at this point, most of the money has dried up. “Given the current level of economic activity, it’s not realistic to think that bookstores or other retail businesses can, on their own, make a go of it,” Graham said with a heavy sigh. “More federal assistance is needed so long as the pandemic persists.”

“We want to survive, so it’s like, ‘How do we make this work?’”

Some stores are doing as well as they would otherwise expect thanks to loyal customers and a thirst for books as people stay closer to home. But those factors aren’t making the numbers work for everyone.

Vroman’s, which bills itself as the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Southern California, has warned that without a significant increase in sales, its 126-year tenure will come to a close. Powell’s has exhausted its PPP loan and isn’t making enough in sales to support the business. Politics & Prose is still not breaking even, and the store will need to make enough in the next few months to have a cushion headed into 2021. “It’s not a sustainable position to continue to operate in the red,” Graham said. Laughing, he added, “You don’t need a degree in anything to understand that fact.”

A number of stores have opened their doors simply to remain as financially solvent as possible. When we spoke, Gustafson was preparing to open with limited hours and days. “Our rent is still due and we still have payables,” she said. “We want to survive, so it’s like, ‘How do we make this work?’”

“We face this tension between the need to welcome in more customers for the holiday shopping season in order to at least get back in the black,” Graham said, “while at the same time being very careful not to create a public health hazard.”

Public health has been at the forefront of the minds of owners who have reopened as fully as possible. All stores have reduced their hours as well as their capacity. Everyone has installed Plexiglas barriers at cash registers and hand sanitizing stations throughout their stores. There’s crowd control not just to limit the number of shoppers but to ensure that masks are worn correctly. Many stores have rearranged their layouts so customers don’t have to squeeze by each other in tight aisles.

Hall-Elkins went even further, installing UV lights and ionizing cleaners in all three of her HVAC units, putting fans around the store, and keeping the door open as much as possible to better ventilate. She replaced her old carpets and installed touchless credit card systems.

Owners have found themselves in entirely new roles, worried not just about their business’s finances but the health of their employees, their customers, and their own families. Hall-Elkins finds herself up late reading medical articles. “I’m in a heightened state of anxiety for sure,” she said. Laughing, she added, “I feel responsible for everybody’s life, and that’s a really weird thing to feel as a manager of a bookstore.”

Some have kept their doors closed. When we spoke in the first week of October, Kleindienst said she was planning to open that weekend by appointment and only after 6 pm. “Our staff really did not feel like they wanted people to be just walking in off the street and wandering around,” she explained. “It just didn’t seem like it was worth risking our lives.” She’s hoping that allowing a very select group of customers back in will be enough to keep the store afloat. But, she added, “I don’t see us opening the doors to walk-in traffic for quite a while.”

The holiday season will be crucial. Nearly every bookstore owner mentioned how important the season is normally — and therefore what it will mean now. Graham said the store typically makes anywhere from a quarter to a third of the whole year’s sales in December alone. “It’s an absolutely critical period.”

To help stores that need to see high sales without big crowds, the American Booksellers Association has begun a campaign urging consumers to shop early called “October Is the New December.” Other things will have to change, too. Normally, Salardino’s store offers gift-wrapping for a fee, and he’d have a long line of people waiting to have books wrapped. That’s not possible now.

One book could make or break the future for many stores: The first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoir will be released November 17. Not only is it destined to be a bestseller — the publisher ordered a first printing of 3 million copies — but it’s pricey, coming in at $45. “I literally think that that book is going to save a lot of stores,” Fusco-Straub said. His store will be ordering a whole pallet.

The future, of course, remains completely uncertain. It’s difficult just to plan ahead. Philbrick noted she’s ordering paperback copies of hardcover books that she struggled to sell during the shutdown, which means the data she typically relies on to predict future sales are almost useless. “As a business person, we’re all used to being able to forecast,” Powell said. But now, “we can’t see beyond a 30-day time horizon.”

“Books aren’t … groceries or rent. How much will people be willing to come out to our stores?”

Hall-Elkins worries that a virus spike or just cold weather will keep people home from holiday shopping. Then there’s what could happen with the election or the economy. The immediate pandemic-caused contraction appears to be turning into a full-blown recession. “We don’t know how much folks will be able to shop,” Powell noted. “Books aren’t … groceries or rent. How much will people be willing to come out to our stores?”

Few owners were willing to contemplate what another complete shutdown would mean. “I don’t even know what we would do,” Hall-Elkins said. “We would probably be in pretty big trouble.”

Losing an independent bookstore is a huge blow to a community. “These are places where folks can come together to discuss what’s going on in the world, to also have a safe haven and a safe place for exploring new ideas,” French said. Bookstores “provide everything from sanctuary to just meditative spaces.” And they help keep an economy humming, retaining money in the local community and generating jobs and tax revenue.

Still, independent bookstores have been through a lot, including competition from big chains and Amazon. “People have been predicting the end of indie bookstores since the Great Depression,” said Kate Weiss, programs manager at BINC. Even with a pandemic, 30 bookstores have opened this year so far, although that’s still a far cry from the 104 that opened in 2019.

“We’re a stalwart bunch,” Philbrick said. “We’re just going to keep going. We’re not dead.”

Across the country, essential workers are on strike for Black lives

2020-07-20T14:18:06-04:00

Workers in a Miami McDonald’s before the Covid-19 pandemic. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Before she got sick with Covid-19, Deatric Edie typically left her house at 5:30 in the morning every day and wouldn’t get home until 1:30 or 2 in the morning, long after her family was asleep. She has worked in fast food her whole life to support her four children and now a grandchild, and even after the pandemic hit she worked several jobs: one at McDonald’s, another at Papa John’s, and a third at Wendy’s.

She’s a shift leader at McDonald’s but still makes just $9 an hour, even though she says some of her peers make $11. “Working three jobs, it’s not enough to cover rent, water, and food,” she said. “I still have to find another way to make those ends meet.” Sometimes that means there’s no food in the house. “I would go without eating to make sure my kids eat,” she said.

That was before the pandemic. Now things are even more difficult. She said McDonald’s didn’t provide her with protective equipment or force customers to wear masks. Edie has diabetes and high blood pressure, putting her at higher risk of complications from the coronavirus, but she had to keep working to make sure her family had enough money to pay the rent and buy food. Then one of her coworkers recently got sick. A few days ago she felt very ill herself, struggling to breathe. She tested positive for Covid-19.

“I’m very scared right now. My lights can go off, I can’t pay rent.”

That means she’s now out of work, at home isolating from her family. She’s not getting paid leave from any of her jobs. “I’m very scared right now,” she said. “My lights can go off, I can’t pay rent.”

In response to a request for comment, a McDonald’s representative said in a statement, “McDonald’s enhanced over 50 processes in restaurants. McDonald’s and our franchisees distributed an ample supply of PPE [personal protective equipment] with no supply breaks, including gloves and over 100 million masks, in addition to installing protective barriers in restaurants. We are confident the vast majority of employees are covered with sick pay if they are impacted by COVID-19.”

Being home sick with Covid-19 won’t keep Edie from participating in the Strike for Black Lives, though, which she plans to do over FaceTime. On Monday, July 20, tens of thousands of workers from a variety of lines of work in more than 25 cities will go on strike to demand that the corporations they work for and the government that’s supposed to work for them confront systemic racism.

Fast food workers like Edie will be joined by an enormous swath of the workforce: other low-wage workers like airport employees, ride-hail drivers, nursing home caregivers, and domestic workers alongside middle-class teachers and nurses and even high-paid Google engineers. Those who can’t strike the whole day will walk off the job for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time a white police officer kept his knee on Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd’s neck before he died.

It’s a massive action that will bring together major unions as well as grassroots organizers. The Service Employees International Union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and American Federation of Teachers will join forces with the Fight for 15, United Farm Workers, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Social justice organizations, such as the Movement for Black Lives, Poor People’s Campaign, and youth climate organizers will also participate. It represents a unique partnership: Labor unions don’t always act in concert, let alone partner with grassroots and social justice groups.

But demand for putting together such an action came from the bottom: workers who have been activated by the toll of the pandemic and the massive uprisings against racial injustice and police violence across the country. They see these things as inextricable.

“Across the country, people are gaining a new understanding that it is impossible to win economic justice without racial justice. That health care for all, fair immigration policies, and bold action on climate change all require racial justice,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of SEIU. “This is a unique and hopeful moment in our movement’s history, because in organizing this strike with our partners, we found broad acceptance and acclamation that now is the time to take large-scale action to demand that corporations and government do more to dismantle structural racism and protect Black lives. We are all clear that until Black communities can thrive, none of us can.”

Edie says on top of low pay, as a Black woman she’s also had to deal with racism. She sees her ordeal reflected in the struggles of the other workers who will go on strike. “We … are in the same boat,” Edie said. “Because we all are essential workers and we all are fighting for the same things.”

Trece Andrews works on the front lines caring for elderly nursing home residents in Detroit, Michigan. Despite her tenure spanning two decades at the same facility, Andrews makes just over $15 an hour. She notes she’s among the luckier ones at her facility; those who work in housekeeping, dietary services, or laundry make more like $10 an hour. “It’s poverty wages we make here,” she said. She makes so little, in fact, that the nursing home isn’t her only job. She’s also started a caregiving business on the side with three clients. As a single mother, she has to forgo health care for her daughter because it would cost so much to add her. She pays out of pocket for her shots and annual physicals.

Andrews is now caring for the elderly in the middle of a pandemic that preys on the vulnerable. Nursing homes have been linked to a third of Michigan’s Covid-19 deaths. At first, she said, her facility didn’t give out the proper personal protective equipment, but only distributed it when workers specifically asked for it. Only recently did the facility hand out everything they needed, like masks, gowns, and gloves. And yet there’s a Covid-19 unit at her facility, and some of her coworkers have gotten sick.

“We all are essential workers, and we all are fighting for the same things”

“Anxiety been high for a lot of us,” she said. “People just scared to come to work.”

Her family is also vulnerable. She cares for her father, who has cancer. Her doctor advised her not to go to work, so she took about a month off. But she doesn’t get paid leave, so she eventually went back. “I came on back because you got to have something, money, to survive,” she said. “I just try to distance myself and wear my mask … and protect myself the best I can. But it’s still scary.”

Andrews and her coworkers will be walking off the job on Monday to push for change. “We just want to let people know that we are essential workers, too,” she said. “We been put on the back burner.” They’re demanding better pay, benefits, staffing levels, and safety guidelines.

She sees their fight connected to the larger movement for racial justice. “A lot of my co-workers are Black and brown people,” she said. She herself is Black. “That’s why to us, we relate it to racism. Because we are the ones doing this hard work, but we’re not getting recognized properly.”

Jerome Gage is also a Black worker on the front lines. He’s been a full-time driver for Lyft in Los Angeles for two years. At first he thought he would be able to earn a basic, steady income while fitting in work as he went back to school. And in the beginning he was paid a proportion of his fares. But then the ride-hailing companies changed their systems, and he now gets paid a flat rate per mile. He found himself having to work at specific times to take advantage of peak hours; if he didn’t, there would be times when he made less than minimum wage. “It’s an incredibly depressing experience sitting at 3, 4 am because I have a bill due Monday I have to pay, hoping to make a couple more bucks in the middle of the night,” he said.

That’s why he got involved in the fight in his state of California not just to pass AB5, a law passed in September that classifies many gig workers as employees, but to continue fighting to protect it as tech companies have lobbied against it. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash have bankrolled a November ballot measure that would exempt them from the law.

The pandemic has made things more urgent. Demand for rides all but halted as the pandemic hit, which meant Gage went weeks without work. And yet he still hasn’t gotten unemployment benefits despite applying for the benefits Congress extended to nontraditional workers like him.

“We are the ones doing this hard work, but we’re not getting recognized properly”

Then there’s safety. Lyft was “incredibly slow to react to the need for PPE for drivers,” he said. “It was an incredibly scary situation.” In July, he said, he got his first packet from Lyft in the mail with protective equipment in it. “They’ve really been negligent in their effort to make a safe, sanitized driving environment.” And yet, he noted, people who are wary of taking public transportation are turning to Uber and Lyft. The services, he said, “are key to help flatten the curve.”

On Monday, he plans to cover his car in signs and join a caravan that will begin at a McDonald’s and then travel to the Los Angeles Unified School District and the University of Southern California to demand they both stop using police on campus. He noted that a lot of his fellow gig workers are people of color. “These two things are totally related,” he said. He won’t take any rides while he’s out protesting, and he hopes other drivers, even if they don’t join the caravan, will also turn off the app in solidarity. “I think that will send a significant signal to Lyft and Uber,” he said, “that we have the ability to organize.”

Striking workers are making a series of demands: first, that corporations make “an unequivocal” declaration that Black lives matter, but also that they raise wages, allow workers to form unions, offer child care support, and provide health care and sick leave. They also want politicians at every level to “use their executive, legislative, and regulatory powers to begin to rewrite the rules and reimagine our economy and democracy so that communities of every race can thrive.”

The movement already has some wins under its belt. When I spoke several days ago to Patricia Parks-Lee, an employee at Loretto Hospital in Illinois, she and her coworkers were planning to time a strike over unfair labor practices with Monday’s action.

They had accused management of failing to bargain in good faith over a new contract since December. Parks-Lee makes $19.50 an hour, and many others among the predominantly Black workforce make less than $15. To get by, Parks-Lee usually works at least one other job at a different hospital as a certified nursing assistant. She said she and her coworkers weren’t just striking for better pay, but for “dignity and respect.”

“If you respect who I am and respect my job, why would you limit my ability to do it?”

But on July 17, before they had to walk off the job, Loretto reached an agreement with workers. Their union, SEIU, said it included “life-changing” wins, such as bringing all workers to at least $15 an hour and raises for others, improved staffing, greater scheduling stability, and immigration protections.

The hospital was short-staffed and under-resourced long before the pandemic. Employees bring clothes in from home for the patients who come in without undergarments or wearing soiled clothing. Then, Parks-Lee said, the hospital rationed personal protective equipment like hand sanitizer and gloves. “If you respect who I am and respect my job, why would you limit my ability to do it by counting out the number of gloves?” she said.

In response to a request for comment, Mark Walker, director of community relations at Loretto, called the allegation that workers were not given proper PPE “blatantly not true and unfounded.”

Parks-Lee, who is Black, is a crisis worker in the emergency room at Loretto. That means she is often helping community members most in distress — women fleeing domestic violence, people going without food or shelter. “Whatever the crisis situation presents itself, we try to assist,” she said. Racial injustice impacts not just her and her coworkers, but her patients, too. They are “Black, brown,” lacking in “financial stability,” she said. And yet other hospitals often refuse to accept them and send them on to Loretto instead. “Nobody wants them. But we welcome them,” she said.

That’s the throughline bringing all of these varied workers together: outrage over racial injustice, which impacts pay, benefits, and how Black and brown Americans are treated both inside and outside of work. “It’s not surprising that we’re in this together,” Gage said. “We may have different careers, but we’re all going through the same issues.”

Andrews says seeing so many different workers come together is “awesome.”

“That’s going to show unity,” she said. “It’s going to show that we tired, we’re not playing anymore. We want to be heard.”

“I am very scared”: What it’s like for pregnant essential workers in the pandemic

2020-06-13T17:17:32-04:00

Karigme Alpizar, who is five months pregnant, is a cashier at a Los Angeles Wendy’s. She does not feel safe since the franchise has not provided any guidelines to protect employees against Covid-19. | Courtesy of Karigme Alpizar

Karigme Alpizar feels unsafe at work. The management at the Los Angeles Wendy’s where she is a cashier has never had a meeting with employees to lay out guidelines for how to keep workers protected against Covid-19. The restaurant doesn’t enforce hand-washing protocols, she said — and because they’re understaffed, no one has the time to wash their hands anyway, with some of her coworkers going a whole shift without a rinse. She has taken it upon herself to remind coworkers to wear gloves at all times.

Management also doesn’t make sure everyone stays 6 feet apart, she said. Even customers aren’t asked to stay spaced out. And until the end of March, no one was given a mask, so Alpizar sometimes used her own, although she had to make sure it was solid black to match her uniform.

“They haven’t made it a priority,” she said of management, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter.

Alpizar isn’t just worried about her own health. She’s five months pregnant with twins and worries about the impact Covid-19 might have on her babies. “Of course I’m scared,” she said.

The potential exposure at work pushed Alpizar to file a complaint with the Los Angeles County Public Health Department in April. “I am afraid. I am pregnant and I am very scared about getting sick right now because of that, but I need my job,” she wrote.

She also staged a strike with her husband, who also works the restaurant, and two other coworkers to demand greater protections. After the health department showed up in response to the complaint, she says management started providing hand sanitizer. They have also put up a piece of clear plastic in front of the cash register.

A Wendy’s spokesperson noted that Alpizar’s location is a franchise, but said in an email to Vox, “As a Wendy’s system, we believe that the safety and well-being of our team members and customers are a top priority.” The spokesperson noted that the company has implemented training to enforce hygiene practices and has created materials to encourage social distancing. It has also adopted “brand standards” that require employees to wear masks and gloves while working, and all restaurants are expected to supply them.

But Alpizar says she is “still working under fear.”

She can’t afford to do anything else. While she’s planning to take some time off once she gives birth, “I’m working out of necessity” right now, she said. Her husband’s hours at Wendy’s were reduced, so she has to bring in as much income as she can. “We have to pay the rent, the bills. And for that reason I continue to work.”

While many white-collar workers have been able to work from home to protect themselves from Covid-19, essential employees have had to keep going to their jobs. It’s potentially scary for any of them, but pregnant workers face the extra uncertainty of what exposure could mean not just for their own health, but that of their babies. They also face an uneven legal landscape when it comes to whether they have the right to extra protection at work. And as states reopen businesses and stay-at-home rules loosen, more workers are being called back to work, putting pregnant employees in a precarious position.

Pregnant people are at low risk of getting sick from the coronavirus but fear remains

There is much that remains unclear about the novel coronavirus, including how it affects pregnant people and their babies. “Unfortunately, there is a lot we don’t know,” Denise J. Jamieson, chair of the department of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University, said in an email to Vox. “We need more carefully conducted studies of pregnant women and their infants to understand more about the disease course in pregnancy, how best to protect pregnant women and their infants, and how to manage and treat pregnant women with Covid.”

The good news is that, from what is known, pregnant people don’t appear to be at any higher risk than others of contracting Covid-19 or having more severe illness. “It doesn’t mean pregnant women cannot have serious illness,” said Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University who has written about pregnancy and Covid-19. “But it’s mostly pretty mild or moderate.”

“I am afraid. I am pregnant and I am very scared about getting sick right now because of that, but I need my job.”

Some common pregnancy conditions, such as gestational diabetes or hypertension, may come with a higher risk of complications from Covid-19, however, potentially putting those who develop those conditions at higher risk. Many of these conditions are more common among black and Latinx women, who also make up a disproportionate share of low-wage essential workers.

There is also the worry that even if a pregnant person infected has only mild symptoms, they could pass the virus on to the fetus. “There is increasing evidence that Covid can be passed from mothers who are ill with Covid to their fetuses,” Jamieson said. “Although the evidence is still suggestive and not definitive, I think that based on what we do know, that it is likely that this can occur.”

Still, in keeping with the overall data that indicates children are at lower risk of getting seriously sick from the virus, it appears that the infants of women who have it generally don’t contract Covid-19 themselves or have a mild illness.

Samantha Halseth, an intensive care unit nurse who is 13 weeks pregnant, considers herself lucky, even though she had been working in the Covid-19 unit at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. Her managers immediately took her off that duty when she told them the news. Meanwhile, her hospital hasn’t run into shortages of personal protective equipment, and it’s now also able to do rapid testing for Covid-19, so she feels relatively well protected.

Still, she wasn’t expecting to get pregnant, so she didn’t find out until she was eight or nine weeks along, which meant “I had technically cared for a Covid-19 patient before I even knew,” she said. And in some ways, she said, working with people who have tested positive for Covid-19 is a bit more reassuring because she knows they have it and she can protect herself accordingly.

In the unit Halseth works in now, however, nurses are only given surgical masks, not the more protective N95 or powered air-purifying respirators. “You do worry, ‘Holy cow, what if they do come back positive, I was just in there with just a surgical mask,” she said.

Halseth’s general outlook on life, though, is that there’s not much use getting wrapped up in fear, and at 29, she’s young and healthy. Before she got pregnant, she assumed that if she did get Covid, she had a good chance of being okay. “But obviously when you’re pregnant, it’s not just about you anymore,” she said.

There are numerous health-related shifts people make when they find out they are pregnant — from small things like avoiding deli meats to making sure they don’t lift heavy objects at work to psychologically coming to terms with parenthood itself — to protect themselves and their babies. There is “almost this visceral desire to do everything you possibly can to make sure that you have a healthy pregnancy,” noted Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, a legal advocacy organization for women’s workplace rights.

But trying to ensure a healthy pregnancy is even more fraught in the midst of a pandemic. “We just need to respect the fact that the guidance is vague and pregnant workers, many are scared,” Bakst said.

Both Jamieson and Oster emphasize that pregnant people should take the same precautions as everyone else: wearing a mask, washing their hands, avoiding touching their faces, and reducing exposure to other people. However, those things may not be easy to do for pregnant workers whose jobs require interacting with the public.

Pregnant workers are unsure if they have the right to the protections they need

Sophia Lopez works in the kitchen of a McDonald’s in Oakland, California, and is six months pregnant. When the virus first hit her area, “nothing changed,” she said, speaking Spanish through an interpreter. Employees weren’t given protective equipment right away; in early April, management started giving out masks, but they weren’t properly protective — some were simply dog diapers, she said. Her coworkers were getting sick, but management wasn’t notifying everyone else. “At the beginning, I really didn’t want to go to work,” she said. But “I decided to go because I need to get paid, I need to survive.”

Her doctor told her that he didn’t think she should be working under those conditions, but if she had to keep going to work, she should take extra precautions. But she hasn’t been able to make any changes other than wearing gloves and a mask. She didn’t even bother asking management if there were ways to keep her more protected at work; before the pandemic, when she asked to work earlier hours so she could get more rest, her manager responded by saying she could have her hours docked instead. So she’s been on strike since May 25 along with 33 of her coworkers.

“Our organization’s highest priority is to protect the health and well-being of our employees and customers,” Michael Smith, McDonald’s owner/operator, said in an emailed statement. The company, he said, is providing PPE and requiring employees to wear it at all times, and it has installed protective barriers in the restaurants as well as implemented temperature checks. He called the claim that workers were given dog diapers “false.”

But Lopez is not the only pregnant worker concerned about workplace conditions in the pandemic. “Our work has just exploded,” Bakst said. “The fear is through the roof.”

Calls to her organization’s legal hotline for women asking about their workplace rights have quadrupled. “A lot of what we’re doing is talking pregnant women through what their options are and informing them what the law provides so they can effectively self-advocate.”

On top of the uncertainty around the medical risks, navigating the legal landscape is also challenging. Twenty-nine states have pregnant worker fairness acts, laws that require employers to give pregnant employees reasonable accommodations so that they can stay healthy while on the job. Those workplace changes could include things like more protective equipment, temporarily changing work duties to something less exposed to the public, staggering work times so that commuting is less fraught, and even telecommuting, if possible.

But some workers are going to have a harder time finding a way to stay safe at work than others. It’s more challenging “when the limitation in the ability to work and the nature of the job just really seem at odds with each other,” said Emily Martin, vice president for workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. “If the request is, ‘Can I have a job that doesn’t involve exposure to the public,’ and the nature of the business is such that interacting with the public is the entire job, it can be more difficult to figure out what is an accommodation that addresses that need.”

Outside of those 29 states, those who work for companies with 15 or more employees could be entitled to a modification under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act if they can prove that their employer has provided the same accommodation to a similar non-pregnant worker. The challenge is that it’s up to the employee to identify a coworker who’s gotten the same accommodation they need. Those who have pregnancy-related complications — anything from gestational diabetes to preeclampsia — could also be entitled to an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But federal agencies have offered little additional clarity. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released pandemic guidance that included information about accommodations, but nothing specifically about how to handle pregnancy during Covid-19. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration has similarly issued general guidance but not enforceable requirements. This “is a shortcoming,” Martin said. “There could definitely be a productive role for federal agencies to play in setting out what are presumptions around what is safe and what is not safe.”

The murkiness is only going to become more confusing as states allow businesses to open back up and employees are called back to work.

Susan, a pseudonym used because she fears retribution for sharing her story, has been easily doing her job for a public transportation company from home since mid-March. “I was actually told that … I was even more responsive at home,” she noted, especially since she has made herself available on email before and after work hours. “I knew it was a privilege to be able to work from home and I didn’t want to take advantage of it.”

But she’s now 15 weeks pregnant, and she’s considered high-risk as a cancer survivor with endocrine issues. So when her employer said the work-from-home program would be expiring except for those who have health-related issues, she spoke to her doctor, who recommended she keep working from home and gave her a note saying as much. And yet the human resources department denied her request in an email on a Friday, telling her she had to report to work the following Monday. “They gave me no time to feel anything other than panic,” she said.

The company later sent Susan a letter saying it doesn’t believe she has a high-risk pregnancy based on its own doctor’s recommendation, a doctor she’s never seen. “I don’t even think they could pick me out of a lineup, they don’t even know who I am,” she said. “To be so confident to say that I’m not a high-risk pregnancy and put my unborn child at risk, that’s a really unsettling feeling.”

On top of that, Susan’s employer hasn’t instituted basic protocols like temperature checks and can’t ensure that staff will wear masks. “I have never, ever once said I don’t want to work. I’ve said I’m fearful to report to work without measures put in place,” she said. “They basically said that my health and safety are not important, and that being pregnant doesn’t put me in a special category.” She’s currently using some of her meager sick time while she fights for the ability to keep working from home.

“There could definitely be a productive role for federal agencies to play in setting out what are presumptions around what is safe and what is not safe”

Bakst heard from a hair stylist in Washington state whose salon reopened. Her doctor had told her that because she had a high-risk pregnancy, she shouldn’t be back at work, but she was told she had to return. While salon employees wore masks, the customers didn’t have to. “She was really petrified,” Bakst said.

The lack of medical certainty can also mean an uneven response from doctors, even though they are usually an important part of the process. Without a doctor’s note specifying that a pregnant person needs to change the way she works, “it’s certainly a harder situation,” Martin said. Employers are often within their legal rights to demand documentation from a medical professional.

“We’re seeing women running into issues with their doctors,” Bakst said. One client’s doctor told her that if her employer was requiring her to go to work, then she had to do what she was told, even if she may have had the legal right to ask for an accommodation, Bakst said.

“Because the evidence about Covid-19 is sort of fast-shifting, the individual medical professionals are making different assessments of risk,” Martin said.

Meanwhile, employers may find it easier to get out of having to make accommodations. Most laws that require employers to make changes to allow pregnant workers to stay in their jobs include an exemption for “undue hardship” on a business. Bakst said she’s seeing more employers invoking this excuse, particularly given how devastated businesses have been under pandemic-imposed lockdowns. With few employees coming to work and revenues underwater, they are arguing they can’t afford to give a pregnant worker different duties or let the worker stay home.

“It’s such a class issue,” Bakst said. Low-income workers, like Alpizar and Lopez, tend to have less power at work to ask for the things they need to stay healthy.

“The precautions that pregnant workers can and can’t take — it’s just really highlighted in this pandemic … who’s able to stay healthy and safe and who may not be able to.”

Once the strike is over, Alpizar will have to return to work and hope that she and her babies continue to remain healthy. “Until I give birth, I’m going to keep going until I can’t, until my body doesn’t allow me,” she said.

Reporting for this article was supported by a grant from the Economic Security Project.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at the Nation. Her writing has appeared in Time, the Washington Post, New York magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and others, and she won a 2016 Exceptional Merit in Media Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus.

“It’s not right”: why Uber and Lyft drivers went on strike

2019-05-20T14:12:29-04:00

Uber and Lyft drivers protesting in Long Island City, New York, on May 8. | Bryce Covert for Vox

In the warm springtime sun on Wednesday afternoon, about 200 New York City drivers for Uber and Lyft stood outside the headquarters of the Taxi & Limousine Commission, the city agency tasked with regulating cabs and for-hire cars. They chanted, “Drivers united will never be defeated!” and waved signs calling for higher pay and solidarity among all the city’s drivers: taxis, private companies, and apps.

The mostly male crowd was still diverse, made up of older men in sharp suits, young men in hoodies and jeans with keys clipped to their belt buckles, middle-aged men in turbans, and a range of accents from different countries. But they rallied around a set of shared demands: that the app companies give them a bigger cut of fares and enough pay to live on while creating a process for drivers to protest being deactivated.

They were some of the thousands of Uber and Lyft drivers across the country who shut off their apps and refused to do their usual work, going on strike to protest the company’s pay and other policies in the wake of Lyft going public in March and Uber’s expected move to do the same this week. Drivers also called on consumers to support the strike by refusing to use the apps during their strikes.

When Inder Parmar, a tall, dark-haired driver in a black double-breasted suit, started driving for Uber in 2013, he was seeking better pay than what he got from the black car company he had been driving for since 2006. Back then, he could make $37 an hour, he pointed out, pulling payment records out of his pocket. Uber’s cut of his fares was just 10 percent. Today his hourly pay is more like $9.18 an hour because the company is taking a bigger share and has changed how it compensates drivers.

“We lost a third of our incomes, and our expenses have not been decreased,” he noted. When his pay started dropping, he went to Uber’s office but was told that although he was working 70 hours a week, he was considered a part-time driver. He says he was counseled to get another job.

“What Uber is paying us, that is below a poverty wage. Anybody who buys [into Uber’s] IPO, they are basically supporting exploitation.”

He doesn’t even pocket all the money he makes; he has to pay for gas, an E-ZPass for bridge and tunnel tolls, and insurance. In the beginning, “I still had something for myself” after all those expenses, he said. Now “I have nothing left.”

All three of his children have graduated from college. But because Parmar makes so little, they are now supporting him. “If my kids were still in college, I have no idea how I’d get through,” he said. He’s had to cut back where he can; all winter, he brought lunch from home with him to work, but he’s worried his food will spoil as the weather gets warmer.

“What Uber is paying us, that is below a poverty wage,” he said. “Anybody who buys [into Uber’s] IPO, they are basically supporting exploitation.”

Drivers in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and London took part in the strike on Wednesday or held rallies in solidarity. In Los Angeles, Drivers United LA said that of its 4,300 members, 98 percent were committed to going on strike. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance expected the “vast majority” of its approximately 10,000 app drivers to do the same.

Each city’s drivers coalesced around their own particular demands, although drivers across the country were demanding more livable incomes, job security, and better treatment. A study by the executive director of Stanford’s Center for Automotive Research found that more than half of Uber and Lyft drivers earn less than the minimum wage in their state. Median profit is just $8.55 an hour, and when vehicle expenses are taken into account, 8 percent of drivers actually lose money. A different study from the Economic Policy Institute found that drivers make $11.77 an hour on average, and that just a third of what passengers pay goes to drivers.

In New York City, ride-hailing companies have to pay drivers about $17.22 an hour. Still, drivers are demanding an end to upfront pricing, where apps charge passengers one fare — typically higher, they say — and then pay drivers a rate as much as 30 to 40 percent lower based on their mileage and minutes. Instead, they want drivers to be guaranteed at least 80 to 85 percent of the fare. They also called for an end to “arbitrary and unjust deactivations.”

Buchung Bista was at the protest on Wednesday because he says he’s been unfairly shut out of Uber’s app for eight months. Thin and emphatic, with a graying goatee covering his chin, he says he received a couple of customer complaints about difficulties making multiple stops — something he argues was due to the way the app works, not his own behavior. He used to have a 4.86 rating and has completed more than 40,000 trips. “My reviews are excellent,” he noted.

But when he tried to protest, he found no appeal process. “There’s no second chance, no justice,” he said. He’s been told he is permanently locked out.

While Bista is now driving for Lyft, he doesn’t make enough only working for one app. “If I drive two apps, I can make a living,” he said. He supports two children; to get by, he recently signed up for public benefits. “That’s why I’m here — my income and my family,” he said. “And also this is not right.”

LA drivers, who first called for the strike, are demanding the same pay floor as New York City and that the app companies’ commission be capped at 10 percent. They also want a “transparent, speedy, independent” appeals process for deactivations and that any discipline adhere to a “just cause” standard, more transparency on fares and trips, the ability to organize and negotiate with management, the election of a driver representative to the companies’ boards, and increased environmental standards. “We need California and Los Angeles to take action to ensure drivers have basic labor protections,” a spokesperson for Drivers United LA told Vox, since “they have none right now.”

“That’s why I’m here — my income and my family. And also this is not right.”

In response to a request for comment on the strike and drivers’ demands, Eric Smith, a Lyft spokesperson, emailed a statement saying:

Lyft drivers’ hourly earnings have increased over the last two years, and they have earned more than $10 [billion] on the Lyft platform. Over 75 percent drive less than 10 hours a week to supplement their existing jobs. On average, Lyft drivers earn over $20 per hour. We know that access to flexible, extra income makes a big difference for millions of people, and we’re constantly working to improve how we can best serve our driver community.

Harry Hartfield, a spokesperson for Uber, pointed out that the New York Taxi Workers Association, which helped organize the strike and rally in the city, is “not a union,” “so it’s not really a voice for rideshare driver[s].”

The timing ahead of Uber’s IPO, and in the wake of Lyft’s, is no coincidence. Drivers hope to leverage the publicity both companies are trying to garner to shed light on their own working conditions. “In their S1 filing, Uber unabashedly states that denying workers of basic employment protections like minimum wage, Social Security contributions, and other benefits is essential to their business model,” a statement from the NYTWA reads. “Uber thinks their drivers make too much money even though in many cities drivers make as little as $7 per hour after expenses. But Uber plans to reduce driver incentives and even admits that ‘driver dissatisfaction will … increase.’”

“Investors must be clear: Uber and Lyft are not viable,” it continues. “At their core, their business models are based on impoverishing workers.”

Drivers are also vowing that Wednesday’s action is not a one-day affair but the start of something bigger. “We’re not scared of them,” a driver told the assembled crowd outside the TLC over a loudspeaker, referring to app companies. “This is just the beginning!”

As the protest wrapped up, about an hour after it began, drivers shouted out, “We’ll be back!”

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Retail workers are more vulnerable than ever. A new campaign wants to protect their jobs.

2018-09-27T13:59:56-04:00

Rise Up Retail protests Toys R Us’s treatment of laid off workers. | Sarah Marie Mayo

For 60 years, Toys R Us was a company that offered full-time employment with benefits. It was a place where many made careers, spending decades as salespeople or cashiers who were able to provide for their families and also save money for retirement.

But, in 2005, things changed. Private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Bain Capital and real estate company Vornado Realty Trust bought the company, saddling it with so much debt it started slimming down, eliminating positions and cutting back on benefits. With so much money going toward interest payments, it had little left to invest in the upgrades it needed to keep up with the times. In March 2018, the company announced it would liquidate all of its U.S. stores as part of its bankruptcy process, offering none of the more than 30,000 people losing their jobs severance pay.

It’s rare that laid off employees become more than an obscure number in a headline, but the Toys R Us severance debacle garnered national attention. In a time when workers have little leverage and unionization is at an all time low, it helped bring focus and urgency to a growing movement to protect the retail labor force.

Retail jobs have become a backbone of the American economy. In early 2015, retail salespersons and cashiers were the most common jobs. The so-called retail apocalypse, which last year saw the closure of nearly 7,000 stores, thinned the ranks, but there are still nearly 16 million people who work in the industry.

Still, these jobs are also a bellwether of how precarious work has become. Retail workers’ schedules usually change week to week and they often don’t find them out until a week or less in advance. Some are asked to be ready to work at virtually any moment. Many don’t get enough hours to be full-time employees and therefore don’t get benefits like health insurance. Pay is paltry. In a national survey of 1,000 retail employees, only 8 percent had a full-time job that paid at least $15 an hour and offered them health insurance and some paid time off.

Retail employees are now reeling from the effects of technology — a shift to online shopping driven by Amazon alongside automated checkouts — as well as disruption from Wall Street investors like private equity firms that have left a trail of bankruptcies in their wake. Corporate consolidation has reduced the number of retailers, which has been found to keep pay down across the economy. Retail “really tells a story around what’s happening in America” and “the forces that are transforming people’s lives,” said Andrea Dehlendorf, co-director of OUR, an organization that helped organize the mega retailer’s employees.

So a new campaign, dubbed Rise Up Retail, had launched to fight for decent pay, predictable schedules, and stability for the country’s million-strong retail workforce.

“What Rise Up Retail’s about first and foremost is about good jobs that can support your family in today’s economy,” said Carrie Gleason, policy director of OUR. “Second, it’s about having some kind of voice and taking on these big corporations.”

A front-row seat to retail’s deterioration

Pilar Barragan has spent most of her working life in retail, starting over a decade ago when she got her first job at the age of 16 at a gift shop on a quiet main street in Missouri. “I really enjoyed it,” she recalled. Then the recession hit hard and after seven years of existence, the store disappeared.

In more recent years, the industry that offered her an easy path into work has led her into more unsettling territory. She worked stints at Michael’s and Office Max, but when she saw that Walmart offered higher pay, she decided to take a job there. Her hourly pay may have been higher, but she was thrown into the deep end with little training and an ever-changing schedule.

Then she got a job at JCPenney in late 2016. She was supposed to be trained to eventually become a manager, but her supervisor kept putting the training off. In March she was brought into her supervisor’s office and told that the company was “restructuring” and eliminating her position. The brand would eventually announce that it was closing 138 stores.

Reached for comment, JCPenney would not speak to “individual associate HR activities” but said, “Earlier this year, JCPenney implemented a store staffing model to simplify processes, improve productivity and reduce overhead expenses, impacting approximately 2,200 store positions nationwide. The new structure redistributed tasks and responsibilities more efficiently among store associates to support company growth initiatives, resulting in substantial cost savings while maintaining our commitment to delivering excellent customer service. The vast majority of associates impacted were offered alternate positions within the store.”

For the last few months she’s worked at a Gordmans department store. But she’s already seen around six or seven employees leave in that time. The company never seems to hire anyone to replace them, which means everyone else is picking up the slack. “There’s just no bodies, no workers,” she said. (Gordman’s did not response to requests for comment for this story.)

“It’s just a really scary time to be working in [retail].”

She’s wary of what the future holds at Gordmans. After the brand was bought by private equity firm Sun Capital Partners in 2008, it filed for bankruptcy in early 2017, selling some of its stores to Stage Stores. She worries that it’s still on shaky financial footing

She has reason to be wary. Her decade in retail encapsulates the changing industry landscape. She’s watched smaller stores disappear as big box companies encroached on more and more territory. She’s watched retailers fail to contend with the shift to selling products online. “Even four years ago, I wouldn’t have thought so many retailers would be closed,” she noted. She’s seen companies decide to hire fewer employees, loading responsibilities onto fewer people, and make their schedules less and less predictable.

“It’s just a really scary time to be working in [retail],” she said.

All of the factors that have made jobs in retail so much more precarious have also pushed Barragan to start organizing her fellow retail workers. She’s now part of a growing movement demanding that employees be treated better.

Moving from Walmart to the rest of the retail sector

The Rise Up Retail campaign is a melding of the Center for Popular Democracy, which is a nonprofit that advocates for a variety of workplace issues, and OUR (Organization United for Respect) Walmart, which is now going by OUR and branching out beyond the original retail behemoth. Most of the work consists of retail workers reaching out to other retail workers to organize and mobilize them, much of it done through social media.

OUR Walmart’s decision to expand came out of its original theory of how to change the retail sector: by changing things within Walmart, industry standards were likely to shift, thanks to how large the company is. (Walmart is the single biggest private sector employer in the country.) It also notched some important victories: after workers started going on strike, it increased starting pay to $10 an hour and expanded paid family leave. “Every win we’ve had at Walmart has rippled across the industry and others have followed suit,” Dehlendorf said. Both Target and the owner of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls raised base pay to $9 an hour shortly after Walmart said it would raise its wages.

It’s also part of a wave of worker-focused organizations that have cropped up outside of the traditional labor movement at a time of declining unionization. “We are not a union, we’re not aiming to unionize,” Dehlendorf said. “We are building new forms of organizations for people to come together and support each other to improve their work lives and work towards industry-wide change.” It joins the ranks of other, similar initiatives in different industries that are similarly pushing for workplaces changes without unions: the National Domestic Workers Alliance that works with nannies and housekeepers, Restaurant Opportunities United that organizes restaurant employees, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network that reaches out to day laborers.

It also helps that many OUR Walmart members have left the company and gone to work at other retailers, where they can carry on organizing. “We have a network of 150,000 people spread out across the country,” Dehlendorf said. “As people move into other jobs, they’re bringing their experiences [with] our organization with them.”

That was Barragan’s experience. After an OUR Walmart organizer contacted her through one of the employee Facebook groups, she realized “I wasn’t the only one this happened to,” she said. “It wasn’t just my store, it’s the whole company.” But she was also eager to go beyond the retailer’s walls. “I kept being like, ‘Hey, when are we going to…organize other retailers?’” she said. “The same issues are in all retail, they’re all happening beyond Walmart and beyond Target and beyond Gordmans… We need to make change in all of them.”

The campaign is focused on retail in part because they are the canaries in the coalmine of our economy. “People working in the retail sector are on the frontlines of the crisis that working families are facing across the economy,” Gleason said. Retail has long suffered the symptoms of a larger problem now infecting the economy: jobs that offer low pay, unpredictable schedules, and few benefits.

At Walmart, Pilar said she got “nothing” in terms of training, including watching someone use a cash register for five minutes before working it herself. She never knew when she was working — although the company handed out schedules ahead of time, they frequently changed, as late as a few days ahead of a scheduled shift. Hours fluctuated wildly from week to week — some weeks 30 hours, the next week three.

Barragan had been in a car accident that left her with nerve pain and she had to miss some days of work to see a neurologist, who signed paperwork to excuse her. But any time she failed to come to work, either because of a last-minute schedule change or the doctor’s visits, she was given a point, and after four points employees are fired.

Those experiences are now following her to her new job at Gordmans. When she started she and her manager were able to work together on her schedule to accommodate her needs. Now she has to offer completely open availability —meaning she can get scheduled to work at any time. “I never know what I’m working,” she said. She only gets a copy of her own schedule a week in advance. “It’s hard to make appointments, it’s hard to go get groceries,” she noted. She can’t even plan ahead to attend someone’s birthday party because she might not end up with that day off. “I have no control over it.”

The company is now rolling out the same scheduling software that Walmart uses, which has meant it’s cutting hours and disrupting schedules. The new system will mean workers have their hours set by corporate headquarters with little ability to change them.

The Toys R Us bankruptcy jump starts a movement

And then the Toys R Us layoffs happened; more than 30,000 works losing their jobs without severance. OUR members saw what was happening and wanted to do something. Joanna Chambers got her start organizing with OUR Walmart when her own Walmart store closed and she was demoted after starting in a new store. “When I found out Toys R Us stores were closing I felt passionate about that, because I also had worked in a store closing,” she said. “I know what it’s like to turn in the keys for the last time, I know what it’s like to check out the last customers.”

So she and other OUR leaders reached out to Toys R Us workers and offered to help them start petitions, speak to the press, and even lobby members of Congress. Toys R Us proved to be fertile organizing ground, particularly as everyone was on the verge of losing their jobs, and managers got involved alongside lower-level employees. “People were so heartbroken, they overcame their fear and built a channel [for their] anger,” Gleason said.

That collaboration, and the desire of Toys R Us workers to keep fighting, was the fuel that lit the Rise Up Retail fire. The organizations involved didn’t plan to launch it as early as they did, but they sped up the timeline to meet the demand of workers. “The Toys R Us campaign has been a pivotal moment to demonstrate what’s possible when we activate the women working in the service economy,” Gleason said.

Since that campaign launched, Toys R Us employees have secured a vow from the private equity owners to contribute to severance pay for laid off workers and a number of politicians–including Senators Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Bob Menendez, and others–have joined them in their call for relief.

The success of the Toys R Us campaign offers organizers optimism that they can wield influence in an industry that faces so many challenges–even in the face of liquidation. Social media and people’s personal networks allowed them to reach a number of employees who were ready to do something very quickly. Workers themselves were eager to fight because they had been promised severance pay, a promise that was then broken. “There was an immediate betrayal that then moved folks into action,” Gleason said. And that action made people pay attention and turned Toys R Us into a “tipping point and a breaking point,” she said.

It also helped that consumers had an emotional connection to a brand like Toys R Us. “We all know these companies,” Gleason said. “We all participate in making these companies grow.” That’s a key point in retail workers’ favor: these are names that the public is familiar with, that may garner attention and empathy.

They hope what happened with Toys R Us sets the tone going forward with other struggling retailers, too. “We’re about to set a precedent [of] what happens with the next wave of job losses,” Gleason said. “We actually have found a pathway to respond.”

Meanwhile, not every corner of retail is in danger of going under. Walmart is the country’s largest private employer; Amazon keeps growing. “These jobs may be changing, but they are continuing,” Dehlendorf said. There is “an urgent need…for working people to have a voice in shaping the changes in the industry.”

The campaign is now casting a far wider net, talking to workers in workplaces as varied as T.J. Maxx and Victoria’s Secret, Home Depot and Lowe’s, Dollar General and Target. “We talk to anyone,” Gleason said.

The day before the July 4th holiday, in fact, Target employees who are organizing with Rise Up Retail went on strike at a store in Maryland. A big issue they’re fighting for is a fair workweek — a lot of employees say that their hours were cut after the company raised its minimum pay. They’re also protesting what Erica Feldenzer, who has taken a leadership role among her coworkers, says is racism and sexual harassment in the workplace. She herself has been sexually harassed by a coworker who still works at her store, she said. “On days that I know that he’s there, I just feel very uncomfortable because I don’t know what he’s going to say to me or try and do something,” she said.

As a result, one of their demands was that the managers they accused of racism and sexism be fired. Next they demanded that everyone be given enough hours to make a living while also not being scheduled outside of their availability. “It’s definitely a vast, wide variety of issues, and we’re trying to tackle as many of them as we can,” Feldenzer said.

In a statement Target representative Jenna Reck responded, saying, “We want everyone who works at Target to feel valued and respected and take any allegations of workplace misconduct seriously. We worked for several weeks this summer to address issues brought forth by team members at the Timonium store and took swift actions to address them. We continue to work closely with the store’s new leadership team to ensure the team member experience meets Target’s workplace standards.”

Management didn’t really respond to the strike, Feldenzer said, so they’re contemplating doing another one. But it hasn’t been easy organizing her coworkers. “People are very scared,” she said. She felt she had no choice but to take a stand. “I got to do something or no one else will,” she said. She also thinks the next one will be easier. “Once we did it, I think more people are actually willing [to] be on the frontlines with us.”

“We really see a ripple effect,” Dehlendorf noted. “Every group of people who are stepping forward to speak out and telling their story are inspiring people to come into the network and start to share their stories.”

Workers have a list of demands: better pay, better schedules, and better treatment

Generally the Rise Up Retail campaign wants to see change on a few key issues: higher pay and minimum wages (they aim for $15 an hour), a guarantee of paid sick and family leave, and more humane schedules that both allow people to achieve full-time status while also giving them set hours ahead of time. It wants a guarantee of severance pay for people who are laid off. It also wants to see “guardrails,” as Gleason puts it, in place for how private equity operates in the sector to limit the damage on jobs.

“If [workers] can’t get policymakers to raise the standards, then they know what they need to do when election time comes around.”

“There’s a tremendous confluence of issues,” Dehlendorf said. “If we can change these sectors, it really can make a massive shift across the entire economy in terms of how working people are being treated.”

The idea is to push individual employers to change their policies while also pushing lawmakers to raise standards for everyone. “Workers know they can win either way,” Gleason said. “They can get companies to change or move policymakers. If they can’t get policymakers to raise the standards, then they know what they need to do when election time comes around.”

Rise Up Retail plans to let the workers lead the way on what kinds of tactics to deploy. “I think you’ll see some growing militancy from these folks…as they feel more power,” Gleason predicted. That could even include more strikes. The campaign is also setting its sights next on the midterm elections, planning to organize members to turn out and vote.

Barragan isn’t sure if she can stick it out in the industry. “I’ve been in retail a very long time… It’s what I know. It’s what I’m good at,” she said. She loves helping customers find what they need. But she doesn’t want to go through another restructuring like at JCPenney or work for another employer like Walmart who throws her life into chaos. “It’s Russian roulette,” she said. “You don’t know who’s going and who’s coming.”

Still, she’s heartened to see her fellow retail workers speaking up as part of the new campaign. “That’s empowering,” she said. “We will not stand for the injustices.”

“People are just getting fed up,” Chambers said. “They’re tired of being underappreciated and disrespected.”

How universal free preschool in DC helped bring moms back to work

2018-09-26T12:03:02-04:00

Babies together at daycare. | Shutterstock

Not too long ago, day care centers were smeared as dens of satanic rituals and Soviet-style indoctrination. When President Richard Nixon vetoed the creation of a national network of child care centers in the 1970s, he argued that they would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

Then the 1980s came packed with news coverage of day care providers who supposedly molested children in their care and even involved them in animal sacrifice and witchcraft. Today the fearmongering has faded away and the issue of child care has become bipartisan, with everyone from Bernie Sanders to Ivanka Trump talking about the struggle parents of young children face when they try to secure care for their children in order to work or continue their education.

Yet little has actually changed for most of today’s working parents. Only a third of the country’s young children attend a preschool, and most of them go to private centers that can come with exorbitant price tags for parents. The nation’s capital, however, took one of the boldest steps yet toward providing affordable, quality care to parents with young children in 2009 when it began offering free preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds who live in the District.

High-quality preschools can provide structure and help children’s development and social skills. But a lot less attention has been paid to what happens to parents when they have an affordable, safe place to send their kids every day. The full-day, free, universal preschool program in Washington, DC, had a huge impact on the employment of mothers with young children according to new research shared exclusively with Vox by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank. It offers evidence that government investment in providing early childhood education doesn’t just benefit kids, but also women, and potentially, the economy at large.

Providing child care for mothers who want to work could have some economic impact

The study, authored by CAP senior policy analyst Rasheed Malik, found that after the city implemented its universal preschool program, the share of mothers with children under the age of 5 who participated in the labor force — who were either employed or actively looking for work — increased about 12 percentage points, to 76.4 percent. Ten percentage points can be attributed to the preschool program.

That is a huge increase from one single policy change. These mothers now participate in the city’s labor force at about the same rate as mothers of kids in elementary school.

Preschool also appears to have increased how much women worked. The share of mothers with young kids who were employed rose from 56 percent to 67 percent; the share of married women with full-time work increased, as did the share of unmarried women with part-time work.

“When I started looking at the rates of moms with young children going into the workforce … it’s really stark,” Malik told Vox. “It [was] just chugging along at a pretty flat level, and then it just immediately shoots up. It’s the sort of thing where you’re like, ‘This is too good to be true or too big to be real.’”

These results are not just significant because they suggest that free quality care in kids’ early years could help working parents. They also provide a clue as to why women’s labor force participation in the United States has been falling since the early 2000s, lagging behind many other developed countries. The federal government invests a paltry amount in early childhood education compared to its peers: In 2013 it ranked 21st out of 36 developed countries in how much it spends on early childhood education.

“These results suggest that two years of universal, full-day preschool is associated with a large, positive effect on maternal labor supply,” the paper states. “Providing full-day, year-round child care for working parents will benefit millions of families, increase the lifetime earnings and savings of women, and bring women’s labor force participation into line with those of other advanced economies.”

It also affects overall economic growth. From the 1970s to the 2000s, a rise in women (many of them mothers) entering the workforce increased GDP by 11 percent. But the increase started flatlining and then declining in the early 2000s. One likely reason is how little structure exists to support working parents.

Enticing mothers to return to work with subsidized child care could potentially reverse the trend and, therefore, and increase GDP. The process, though, wouldn’t be cheap — an estimate by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine of providing all children younger than Kindergarten age with high-quality care came to $140 billion a year, including $53 billion footed by the government itself. But, Malik argues, “I think that an investment in high-quality child care would pay for itself several times over in terms of overall economic growth nationwide.”

He added, “In very simple terms, economic growth is about how many people are able to participate in the labor force and how productive they can be. This clearly shows that investing in child care is going to increase labor force participation.”

CAP’s findings have other potential ramifications, too. The gender wage gap between men and women workers is in large part due to the impact having children has on women’s careers but not men’s. If the availability of preschool allows mothers to stay in the workforce, it could help erase that gap. “It tends to be Mom who is on the margin of being in or out of the labor force,” Malik noted. So investing in child care and preschool is “an investment in the choices that moms are able to make about whether they’re going to work or look for work.”

“If you want to think about gender equality, this is one thing you should think about,” noted Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

The current landscape of child care in the US is a tough game for working parents

In most places around the country, day care for 4-year-olds costs parents more than $8,000 a year, on average, while private care in DC costs over $18,000 a year. And that’s if they can even find an open slot. Other CAP research has found that 42 percent of children under age 5 live somewhere that either has no child care centers or three times as many kids for each available opening. Most states earn a D or failing grade for their child care health and safety standards.

That’s what makes DC’s program so unique. It offers all parents who live within the district’s limits two years of free, full-day preschool, funded through the city’s general education fund. As of last year, about 90 percent of the city’s 4-year-olds and 70 percent of its 3-year-olds were enrolled. The program is also funded at levels similar to what the city spends on K-12 education, including comparable salaries for early childhood teachers, and meets research-based quality standards. It is, as the paper states, “one of the most robust, high-quality preschool programs.”

There’s the question, of course, of what DC parents do before their children turn 3. Child care for infants is even more expensive than for toddlers given that it requires more providers in the room and more hands-on care. The city council has started to consider that question, approving a bill to expand its current child care subsidy program to all children ages zero to 3 and put a cap on how much families spend out of pocket.

Other cities have also experimented with these policies. New York City rolled out universal preschool for 4-year-olds in 2014 and is now expanding it to 3-year-olds. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the city would do the same earlier this year, although he is now no longer running for reelection.

There’s been less action in the federal government, even if the issue has more bipartisan support these days. Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state and her colleagues introduced a bill last fall that would offer states money to implement universal pre-K and increase child care subsidies, while the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s budget calls for child care for all.

Republicans have also waded into the issue: President Donald Trump put forward a plan to address the cost of care on the campaign trail, while both Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have advocated for expanding tax breaks to help parents cover the price. Still, the country is a long way from providing free, high-quality care to all children, despite the evidence that it could offer enormous benefits.

“It reduces poverty, presuming it’s quality care it’s really good for kid’s education, it’s good for families, it improves gender equality, it will increase economic growth,” Albelda pointed out. “How many different ways can we study the benefits of early education and care before we have the political will to fund it?”