Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market

[Coalition, National Jobs for All]

Dawn has yet to break as a woman leaves the breakfast she’s making in a Manhattan
kitchen to wake up sleeping children—not hers, but those of the family that employs
her. A few hours later in Chicago, scores of day laborers start a 10-hour shift—
minimum wage, no overtime—packing toys into boxes at a wholesale distribution
center. Outside Atlanta, poultry workers break for lunch, their unprotected hands
raw from chemicals.

Across the country it continues, this day of labor. Health-care aides in Dallas struggle through an under-staffed shift. Minneapolis gas station attendants hustle for tips, their only wage. In New Orleans, a dishwasher works late into the night several hours after his boss has clocked him out. And in Los Angeles—an international symbol of dreams and ambitions—a midnight janitor buffs the floor in a high-end retail shop for $8 an hour, no benefits, no guarantee he will get his full pay, and no recourse.

This is what it’s like to work in the new America.

Over the last three decades the lowest rungs of American labor have endured a quantum shift in working and living conditions as many employers, aided by lax enforcement, have made a lucrative game of flouting labor and employment laws. But the erosion of protections hasn’t been limited to the working poor. Well before the current economic downturn, the sweatshop ethic expanded broadly throughout the economy, with a wide range of business owners and managers adopting a “gloves-off” approach to their own employees. ....

...new research is documenting that this gloves-off management approach has had a corrosive effect across entire industries, as opportunistic employers operate in a cultural and regulatory environment conducive to cheating. Their behavior forces responsible employers to either follow suit or be undercut on contracts, effectively lowering the floor of working standards. And when that floor is lowered (or dismantled altogether), everyone is affected.

We do not suggest that all employers have shed the gloves of workplace protection, or that every strategy to cut labor costs is inherently gloves-off. But unregulated work has become pervasive enough to create new and significant challenges. Short-staffed government regulators can’t keep up with fast-evolving forms of violations. Responsible employers who obey the laws suffer competitive disadvantages while the rule-flouters go unpunished. Unions and other worker advocates scramble to keep up with changing employer tactics.

This report, which is a distillation of The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom
of America’s Labor Market (Labor and Employment Relations Association, 2008), seeks to spell out exactly how this new hard-nosed and sometimes illicit approach has played out across industries and affected the broader labor marketplace. It is primarily a diagnosis of what has gone wrong, but also starts the process of identifying solutions. Righting these wrongs will take some intense political will. We hope the Obama Administration has the courage to add the gloves-off economy to its already full plate.

.... full report at  http://www.irle.ucla.edu/publications/pdf/glovesoffeconomy.pdf

The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America’s Labor Market, edited by Annette Bernhardt, Heather Boushey, Laura Dresser, and Chris Tilly. 2008, Labor and Employment Relations Association, Champaign, IL.

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National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org