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Amazon Is Fined Nearly $6 Million Over Warehouse Work Quotas

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California officials cited failures to disclose productivity requirements at two locations. The company said it would appeal.A California labor regulator said on Tuesday that it had fined Amazon nearly $6 million for thousands of violations of a safety law that took effect in 2022.The measure, known as the Warehouse Quotas Law, lets employees request written explanations of any productivity quotas that apply to them, as well as explanations of any discipline they may face in failing to meet the quotas.The state labor commissioner’s office said Amazon violated the law more than 59,000 times at two Southern California warehouses between October and March.The system that Amazon used in the two warehouses “is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas Law was put in place to prevent,” the labor commissioner, Lilia García-Brower, said in a statement.An Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement that the company had appealed the penalties and denied that the company used “fixed quotas.” The spokeswoman, Maureen Lynch Vogel, said that “individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is performing,” and that workers can “review their performance whenever they wish.”The California law also proscribes quotas that interfere with employees’ ability to take state-mandated breaks or use the bathroom, or that prevent employers from following state health and safety laws.Experts have said the law was among the first in the country to regulate warehouse quotas that are monitored by algorithms and to require employers to make the quotas transparent to workers. The penalties announced on Tuesday are the largest issued under the law.The labor commissioner’s office said its investigation had been assisted by a labor advocacy group, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, which issued a statement quoting a worker at one of the penalized Amazon facilities who described significant pressure to hit quotas.“If you don’t scan enough items you will get written up,” said the worker, Carrie Stone. “This happened to me. I got written up for not making rate. They said I missed by one point, but I didn’t even know what the target was.”Other Amazon workers raised similar concerns while the Legislature debated the bill in 2021, and studies by labor advocacy groups have shown that Amazon has significantly higher rates of serious injury than other warehouse employers, like Walmart.The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited Amazon several times in recent years for exposing workers to ergonomic injuries and over record-keeping for such injuries, and the Justice Department is investigating whether the company made false representations about its safety record when applying for loans.Amazon has cited hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investments in safety improvements in recent years, including more than $300 million in 2021.Other states, like New York and Washington, have since enacted similar laws, and Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced a federal version last month. More

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    If A.I. Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your C.E.O.

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    Chief executives are vulnerable to the same forces buffeting their employees. Leadership is important, but so is efficiency — and cost-cutting.As artificial intelligence programs shake up the office, potentially making millions of jobs obsolete, one group of perpetually stressed workers seems especially vulnerable.These employees analyze new markets and discern trends, both tasks a computer could do more efficiently. They spend much of their time communicating with colleagues, a laborious activity that is being automated with voice and image generators. Sometimes they must make difficult decisions — and who is better at being dispassionate than a machine?Finally, these jobs are very well paid, which means the cost savings of eliminating them is considerable.The chief executive is increasingly imperiled by A.I., just like the writer of news releases and the customer service representative. Dark factories, which are entirely automated, may soon have a counterpart at the top of the corporation: dark suites.This is not just a prediction. A few successful companies have begun to publicly experiment with the notion of an A.I. leader, even if at the moment it might largely be a branding exercise.A.I. has been hyped as the solution to all corporate problems for about 18 months now, ever since OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT in November 2022. Silicon Valley put $29 billion last year into generative A.I. and is selling it hard. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. that mimics human reasoning is finding a foothold among distressed companies with little to lose and lacking strong leadership.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Japan’s Labor Market Has a Lesson for the Fed: Women Can Surprise You

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    Japan’s improved labor force participation for women is a reminder not to assume that job market limits are clear and finite.Japan’s economy has rocketed into the headlines this year as inflation returns for the first time in decades, workers win wage gains and the Bank of Japan raises interest rates for the first time in 17 years.But there’s another, longer-running trend happening in the Japanese economy that could prove interesting for American policymakers: Female employment has been steadily rising.Working-age Japanese women have been joining the labor market for years, a trend that has continued strongly in recent months as a tight labor market prods companies to work to attract new employees.The jump in female participation has happened partly by design. Since about 2013, the Japanese government has tried to make both public policies and corporate culture more friendly to women in the work force. The goal was to attract a new source of talent at a time when the world’s fourth-largest economy faces an aging and shrinking labor market.“Where Japan did well over the recent decade is putting the care infrastructure in place for working parents,” Nobuko Kobayashi, a partner at EY-Parthenon in Japan, wrote in an email.Still, even some who were around when the “womenomics” policies were designed have been caught off guard by just how many Japanese women are now choosing to work thanks to the policy changes and to shifting social norms.Japanese Women Are Working in Greater NumbersThe share of women who are active in the job market has picked up sharply in Japan.

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    Female labor force participation rate, ages 25-54
    Source: O.E.C.D.By The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why Doctors and Pharmacists Are in Revolt

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    Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.At the time he and his colleagues voted to unionize, they were one of the largest groups of private-sector doctors ever to do so. But by October, that distinction went to a group that included about 400 primary-care physicians employed in clinics that are also owned by Allina. The union that represents them, the Doctors Council of the Service Employees International Union, says doctors from dozens of facilities around the country have inquired about organizing over the past few years.And doctors are not the only health professionals who are unionizing or protesting in greater numbers. Health care workers, many of them nurses, held eight major work stoppages last year — the most in a decade — and are on pace to match or exceed that number this year. This fall, dozens of nonunion pharmacists at CVS and Walgreens stores called in sick or walked off the job to protest understaffing, many for a full day or more.The reasons for the recent labor actions appear straightforward. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists said they were being asked to do more as staffing dwindles, leading to exhaustion and anxiety about putting patients at risk. Many said that they were stretched to the limit after the pandemic began, and that their work demands never fully subsided.“We’re seen as cogs in the wheel,” Dr. Alia Sharif said, “You can be a physician or a factory worker and you’re treated exactly the same way by these large corporations.”Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesBut in each case, the explanation runs deeper: A longer-term consolidation of health care companies has left workers feeling powerless in big bureaucracies. They say the trend has left them with little room to exercise their professional judgment.“People do feel put upon — that’s real,” said John August, an expert on health care labor relations at the Scheinman Institute at Cornell University. “The corporate structures in health care are not evil, but they have not evolved to the point of understanding how to engage” with health workers.Allina said that it had made progress on reducing doctors’ workloads and that it was partnering with health care workers to address outstanding issues. CVS said it was making “targeted investments” in pharmacies to improve staffing in response to employees’ feedback, while Walgreens said it was committed to ensuring that workers had the support they needed. Walgreens added that it had invested more than $400 million over two years to recruit and retain staff members.Professionals in a variety of fields have protested similar developments in recent years. Schoolteachers, college instructors and journalists have gone on strike or unionized amid declining budgets and the rise of performance metrics that they feel are more suited to sales representatives than to guardians of certain norms and best practices.But the trend is particularly pronounced in health care, whose practitioners once enjoyed platinum-level social status at high school reunions and Thanksgiving dinners.For years, many doctors and pharmacists believed they stood largely outside the traditional management-labor hierarchy. Now, they feel smothered by it. The result is a growing worker consciousness among people who haven’t always exhibited one — a sense that they are subordinates constantly at odds with their overseers.“I realized at end of the day that all of us are workers, no matter how elite we’re perceived to be,” said Dr. Alia Sharif, a colleague of Dr. Wust’s at Allina who was heavily involved in the union campaign. “We’re seen as cogs in the wheel. You can be a physician or a factory worker, and you’re treated exactly the same way by these large corporations.”‘We were all partners.’ Then came the metrics.Pharmacists at Walgreens and CVS have complained of understaffing and overly aggressive performance targets. Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe details vary across health care fields, but the trend lines are similar: A before-times in which health care professionals say they had the leeway and resources to do their jobs properly, followed by what they see as a descent into the ranks of the micromanaged.As a pharmacy intern and pharmacist at CVS in Massachusetts beginning in the late 1990s, Dr. Ed Smith found the stores consistently well staffed. He said pharmacists had time to develop relationships with patients.Around 2004, he became a district manager in the Boston area, overseeing roughly 20 locations for the company. Dr. Smith said CVS executives were attentive to input from pharmacists — raising pay for technicians if there was a shortage, or upgrading clunky software. “Every decision was based on something that we said we needed,” he recalled.Dr. Wust looked back on his days in an independent practice of about 25 doctors with a similar wistfulness. “We were all partners,” he said. “It was relative workplace democracy. Everybody got a vote. Everybody’s concerns were heard.”Over time, however, consolidation and the rise of ever-larger health care corporations left workers with less influence.As so-called pharmacy benefit managers, which negotiate discounts with pharmacies on behalf of insurers and employers, bought up rivals, retail giants like Walgreens and CVS made acquisitions as well, to avoid losing market power.The chains closed many of their newly owned locations, driving more customers to existing stores. They sought to cut costs, especially labor costs, as the benefit managers reined in drug prices.Around 2015, Dr. Smith stepped down from his role as a district manager and became a frontline pharmacist again, reluctant to supervise co-workers under conditions he considered subpar. “I couldn’t ask my pharmacists to do what I couldn’t accomplish,” he said.Among his frustrations, he said, was the need to strictly limit the number of workers each pharmacy could schedule. “Every week that you’re over your labor budget, you get a call, regardless of prescription volume, from your district manager,” Dr. Smith said. “If your budget for tech hours is 100 and you used 110, you get a phone call. It’s not much money — maybe $180 — but you’re getting a call.”Asked how labor budgets were applied, CVS said managers were “provided guidance” based on expected volume and other factors, with adjustments made to ensure adequate staffing.Dr. Smith and other current and former CVS and Walgreens pharmacists said their stores’ allotment of hours for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians had dropped most years in the decade before the pandemic.The pharmacists also described being held to increasingly strict performance metrics, such as how quickly they answered the phone, the portion of prescriptions that are filled for 90 days rather than 30 or 60 days (longer prescriptions mean more money up front) and calls made urging people to fill or pick up prescriptions.For years, Walgreens and CVS pharmacists could largely ignore these narrower metrics so long as overall profits and customer satisfaction stayed high. But in the early to mid-2010s, both companies elevated the importance of these indicators, several pharmacists said.At Walgreens, many pharmacy managers began reporting to a districtwide retail supervisor rather than a supervisor trained as a pharmacist. “It coincided with more pushing of the metrics,” said Dr. Sarah Knolhoff, a Walgreens pharmacist from 2009 to 2022.“Never having been a pharmacist, they would push the pharmacy the same way they would push the front end,” Dr. Knolhoff added, alluding to the rest of the store.CVS said that performance metrics were needed to ensure safety and efficiency for patients but that in recent years it had reduced the number of metrics it tracked. Walgreens announced last year that it would no longer rely on “task-based metrics” in performance reviews for pharmacy staff members, though it still used them to track store-level performance.‘Corporate tells you how to manage your patient.’At health systems like Allina, doctors have incentives to talk to patients about conditions that may not be relevant to their immediate care. Health experts say it can help ensure that high-risk conditions are attended to.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesThe transition for doctors and nurses came around the same time. As independent medical practices found they had lost leverage in negotiating reimbursement rates with insurers, many doctors went in house at larger health systems, which could use their size to secure better deals.The passing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, along with federal rule-making efforts, rewarded bigness by tying reimbursement to certain health outcomes, like the portion of patients who must be readmitted. Getting bigger helped a hospital system diversify its patient population, the way an insurer does, so that certain groups of high-risk patients weren’t financially ruinous.Administrators increasingly evaluated their medical staff according to similar metrics tied to patients’ health and put a variety of incentives and mandates in place.Doctors and nurses chafed at the changes. “Corporate tells you how to manage your patient,” said Dr. Frances Quee, president of the Doctors Council, which represents about 3,000 doctors, most of them at public hospitals. “You know that’s not how you’re supposed to manage your patient, but you can’t say anything because you’re scared you’re going to be fired.”At Allina, primary care doctors are given incentives to talk to patients about their high-risk or chronic medical conditions, even if those conditions are well managed and aren’t relevant to a visit.“Is that a valuable use of our 25 minutes together?” said Dr. Matt Hoffman, a primary care doctor at an Allina clinic that unionized in October. “No, but it means Allina gets more money from Medicare.”Dr. Wust said hospital administrators increasingly relied on management theories borrowed from other industries, like manufacturing, that sought to minimize excess capacity.For example, he said, obstetricians at Allina had one or two hold spots a day of 15 minutes each, in case of a patient emergency, when he began working at the system. Several years ago, Allina took away these buffers, instructing obstetricians to double book instead.Asked about the hold spots, Allina said, “We’re always looking at how we’re using our resources to deliver high-quality care.” It said the incentives tied to high-risk conditions could still be achieved if a doctor stated that the problem was no longer relevant. Dr. Josh Scheck, another Allina primary care doctor, said he found the nudge helpful and not very time consuming to address. He said the health system had allowed his clinic to experiment with ways to make its work flow more efficient.Other health workers complained that some of the metrics they’re evaluated on, like patient satisfaction, made them feel like retail clerks or dining employees rather than medical professionals.Adam Higman, an expert on hospital operations at the consulting firm Press Ganey, said consolidation and the increased use of metrics had arisen in response to a need to lower U.S. health care costs, long the world’s highest per capita, and ensure that the spending actually benefits patients.He pointed to data showing that more empathetic and communicative doctors and nurses — factors that affect patients’ experience — lead to healthier patients.But Mr. Higman acknowledged that many health systems had increased tensions with doctors and nurses by failing to involve them more in developing and putting in place the system of metrics on which they are judged. “The progressive, smart health systems and medical groups are listening to physicians, looking at their experience and turnover and creating venues to have discussions,” he said. “If not, that’s one of the contributing factors to organizing.”‘I would not have put unions and physicians in the same mind.’Nurses went on strike for three days in January at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to protest understaffing.Gregg Vigliotti for The New York TimesThe pandemic magnified these strains.As retail chains rolled out Covid-19 vaccines, pharmacists complained of being overworked to the point of skipping bathroom breaks and said they worried constantly about making mistakes that could harm patients. (CVS said it began closing most pharmacies for 30 minutes each afternoon last year to give pharmacists a consistent break. Walgreens said “dedicated pharmacist meal breaks” began in all stores in 2020.)Doctors and nurses found that their already backed-up inboxes were suddenly bursting, as frightened patients clamored for medical advice. Administrators sought to squeeze more patients into overloaded hospitals and clinics.The breaking point came when the height of the pandemic passed, but conditions barely improved, according to many workers. Although health systems had promised to add staffing, many found themselves running deficits amid inflation and a shortage of doctors and nurses.Professionals who had never considered themselves candidates for union membership began to organize. When she started at Allina in 2009, Dr. Sharif said, “I would not have put unions and physicians in the same mind — it would have been a totally alien concept.” She reached out to the Doctors Council last year for help unionizing her colleagues.Dr. Quee, the union president, said that inquiries from doctors were up more than threefold since the second group of Allina doctors unionized last month — and that as a result, the Doctors Council was hiring more organizers. (Allina is appealing the outcome of the union vote at the hospital but not at its clinics.) Even pharmacists are reaching out. “Two days ago, pharmacists called me from Florida,” she said. “We’ve never done pharmacists before.”In September, Dr. Smith, who long ago shifted from CVS district manager to frontline pharmacist, took on an additional role: labor organizer. After CVS fired a district manager who had refused to close some stores on weekends to address understaffing, Dr. Smith helped organize a series of coordinated sick days and walkouts in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where he has worked for the company in recent years.The walkouts affected roughly 20 locations and drew the company’s chief pharmacy officer and a top human resources official to town for a meeting with the renegades. A few weeks later, CVS said it would rein in vaccination appointments and add work hours for pharmacy technicians, though it had not increased their pay.CVS said several Kansas City-area pharmacists had called in sick on certain days in September, “resulting in about 10 unexpected pharmacy closures” on one day and part of another. In response, it said, executives met with pharmacists to listen to and address their concerns.During an interview in October, while Dr. Smith and his colleagues were still awaiting the company’s response, he made clear that his patience had run out. “I’ve been asking and asking and asking for improvements for years,” he said. “Now we’re not asking any more — we’re demanding it.” More

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    The ‘Great Resignation’ Is Over. Can Workers’ Power Endure?

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    The furious pace of job-switching in recent years has led to big gains for low-wage workers. But the pendulum could be swinging back toward employers.Tens of millions of Americans have changed jobs over the past two years, a tidal wave of quitting that reflected — and helped create — a rare moment of worker power as employees demanded higher pay, and as employers, short on staff, often gave it to them.But the “great resignation,” as it came to be known, appears to be ending. The rate at which workers voluntarily quit their jobs has fallen sharply in recent months — though it edged up in May — and is only modestly above where it was before the pandemic disrupted the U.S. labor market. In some industries where turnover was highest, like hospitality and retail businesses, quitting has fallen back to prepandemic levels.Quits Are High, But Falling

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    Voluntary quits per 100 workers
    Note: Data is seasonally adjustedSource: Labor DepartmentBy The New York TimesNow the question is whether the gains that workers made during the great resignation will outlive the moment — or whether employers will regain leverage, particularly if, as many forecasters expect, the economy slips into a recession sometime in the next year.Already, the pendulum may be swinging back toward employers. Wage growth has slowed, especially in the low-paying service jobs where it surged as turnover peaked in late 2021 and early 2022. Employers, though still complaining of labor shortages, report that it has gotten easier to hire and retain workers. And those who do change jobs are no longer receiving the supersize raises that became the norm in recent years, according to data from the payroll processing firm ADP.“You don’t see the signs saying $1,000 signing bonus anymore,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist.Ms. Richardson compared the labor market to a game of musical chairs: When the economy began to recover from pandemic shutdowns, workers were able to move between jobs freely. But with recession warnings in the air, they are becoming nervous about getting caught without a job when fewer are available.“Everyone knows the music is about to stop,” Ms. Richardson said. “That is going to lead people to stay put a bit longer.”Aubrey Moya joined the great resignation about a year and a half ago, when she decided she had had enough of the low wages and backbreaking work of waiting tables. Her husband, a welder, was making good money — he, too, had changed jobs in search of better pay — and they decided it was time for her to start the photography business she had long dreamed of. Ms. Moya, 38, became one of the millions of Americans to start a small business during the pandemic.Today, though, Ms. Moya is questioning whether her dream is sustainable. Her husband is making less money, and living costs have risen. Her customers, stung by inflation, aren’t splurging on the boudoir photo sessions she specializes in. She is nervous about making payments on her Fort Worth studio.“There was a moment of empowerment,” she said. “There was a moment of ‘We’re not going back, and we’re not going to take this anymore,’ but the truth is yes, we are, because how else are we going to pay the bills?”But Ms. Moya isn’t going back to waiting tables just yet. And some economists think workers are likely to hold on to some of the gains they have made in recent years.“There are good reasons to think that at least a chunk of the changes that we’ve seen in the low-wage labor market will prove lasting,” said Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts professor who has studied the pandemic economy.The great resignation was often portrayed as a phenomenon of people quitting work altogether, but the data tells a different story. Most of them quit to take other, typically better-paying jobs — or, like Ms. Moya, to start businesses. And while turnover increased in virtually all industries, it was concentrated in low-wage services, where workers have generally had little leverage.For those workers, the rapid reopening of the in-person economy in 2021 provided a rare opportunity: Restaurants, hotels and stores needed tens of thousands of employees when many people still shunned jobs requiring face-to-face interaction with the public. And even as concerns about the coronavirus faded, demand for workers continued to outstrip supply, partly because many people who had left the service industry weren’t eager to return.The result was a surge in wages for workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder. Average hourly earnings for rank-and-file restaurant and hotel workers rose 28 percent from the end of 2020 to the end of 2022, far outpacing both inflation and overall wage growth.In a recent paper, Mr. Dube and two co-authors found that the earnings gap between workers at the top of the income scale and those at the bottom, after widening for four decades, began to narrow: In just two years, the economy undid about a quarter of the increase in inequality since 1980. Much of that progress, they found, came from workers’ increased ability — and willingness — to change jobs.Pay is no longer rising faster for low-wage workers than for other groups. But importantly in Mr. Dube’s view, low-wage workers have not lost ground over the past two years, making wage gains that more or less keep up with inflation and higher earners. That suggests that turnover could be declining not only because workers are becoming more cautious but also because employers have had to raise pay and improve conditions enough that their workers aren’t desperate to leave.The strong labor market gave Danny Cron, a restaurant server, the confidence to keep changing jobs until he found one that worked for him.Yasara Gunawardena for The New York TimesDanny Cron, a restaurant server in Los Angeles, has changed jobs twice since going back to work after pandemic restrictions lifted. He initially went to work at a dive bar, where his hours were “brutal” and the most lucrative shifts were reserved for servers who sold the most margaritas. He quit to work at a large chain restaurant, which offered better hours but little scheduling flexibility — a problem for Mr. Cron, an aspiring actor.So last year, Mr. Cron, 28, quit again, for a job at Blue Ribbon, an upscale sushi restaurant, where he makes more money and which is more accommodating of his acting schedule. The strong postpandemic labor market, he said, gave him the confidence to keep changing jobs until he found one that worked for him.“I knew there were a plethora of other jobs to be had, so I felt less attached to any one job out of necessity,” Mr. Cron wrote in an email.But now that he has a job he likes, he said, he feels little urge to keep searching — partly because he senses that the job market has softened, but mostly because he is happy where he is.“Looking for a new job is a lot of work, and training for a new job is a lot of work,” he said. “So when you find a good serving job, you’re not going to give that up.”The labor market remains strong, with unemployment below 4 percent and job growth continuing, albeit more slowly than in 2021 or 2022. But even optimists like Mr. Dube concede that workers like Mr. Cron could lose leverage if companies start cutting jobs en masse.“It’s very tenuous,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy consultant who has studied the role of quitting in wage growth. A recession, she said, could wipe away gains made by hourly workers over the past few years.Still, some workers say one thing has changed in a more lasting way: their behavior. After being lauded as “essential workers” early in the pandemic — and given bonuses, paid sick time and other perks — many people in hospitality, retail and similar jobs say they were disappointed to see companies roll back benefits as the emergency abated. The great resignation, they say, was partly a reaction to that experience: They were no longer willing to work for companies that didn’t value them.Amanda Shealer, who manages a store near Hickory, N.C., said her boss had recently told her that she needed to find more ways to accommodate hourly workers because they would otherwise leave for jobs elsewhere. Her response: “So will I.”“If I don’t feel like I’m being supported and I don’t feel like you’re taking my concerns seriously and you guys just continue to dump more and more to me, I can do the same thing,” Ms. Shealer, 40, said. “You don’t have the loyalty to a company anymore, because the companies don’t have the loyalty to you.” More

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    UPS Workers Authorize Teamsters Union to Call Strike

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    A walkout is possible after the contract for more than 325,000 workers expires this summer. Negotiations began in April but have yet to resolve pay.United Parcel Service workers have authorized their union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to call a strike as soon as Aug. 1, after the current contract expires, the Teamsters announced Friday.The Teamsters represent more than 325,000 UPS employees in the United States, where the company has nearly 450,000 employees overall. The union said 97 percent had voted in favor of strike authorization.Many unions hold such votes to create leverage at the bargaining table, but a much smaller percentage end up following through. “The results do not mean a strike is imminent and do not impact our current business operations in any way,” UPS said in a statement, adding that it was “confident that we will reach an agreement.”A UPS strike could have significant economic fallout. The company handles about one-quarter of the tens of millions of parcels shipped each day in the United States, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. And while UPS’s competition has grown in recent years, rivals would be hard-pressed to replace that lost capacity quickly, leaving some customers in the lurch and others facing higher costs.“What happens when you try to stuff 25 percent more food into a stomach that’s 90 percent full?” said Alan Amling, a fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute and a former UPS executive.The two sides have reached tentative agreements on a number of issues since they began negotiating a national contract in April, most recently on heat safety, including a requirement for air conditioning in new trucks beginning in January and additional fans and venting for existing trucks.But the negotiators have yet to tackle pay increases, which the Teamsters say are overdue amid the company’s strong pandemic-era performance. The company’s adjusted net income increased by more than 70 percent from 2019 to last year.The union has also focused on revisiting pay disparities for a category of driver who typically works on weekends.The UPS chief executive, Carol Tomé, who started in that position in 2020, said on a recent earnings call that UPS was aligned with the union on “several key issues.” She added that outsiders should not put too much stock in the “great deal of noise” that was likely to arise during the negotiation.Looming over the talks is the political standing of the Teamsters’ leader, Sean O’Brien, who during his campaign for the union’s presidency in 2021 repeatedly accused his predecessor, James P. Hoffa, of being overly conciliatory toward employers.Mr. O’Brien complained that Mr. Hoffa had essentially forced a concessionary contract onto UPS workers in 2018 after union members voted down the deal. He criticized his opponent for the presidency, a Hoffa-aligned candidate, for being unlikely to strike.“You already conceded that in your 25-year career, you only struck six times, so UPS knows you’re not going to strike,” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidates’ debate.Mr. O’Brien has largely maintained his aggressive stance on UPS since taking over as president last year. Speaking in October to activists with Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reformist group that backed his candidacy, Mr. O’Brien vowed that “this UPS agreement is going to be the defining moment in organized labor.”Compensation for UPS drivers is generally higher than pay at the company’s competitors. UPS said that the average full-time delivery driver with four years’ experience makes $42 an hour, and that part-time workers who sort packages make $20 an hour on average after 30 days.The groups receive the same benefits package, which includes health care and pension contributions and is worth about $50,000 a year for full-time drivers, the company says.Beyond overall pay levels, the union has said it wants to eliminate a category of driver created under the 2018 contract.The company said the category was intended for hybrid workers who performed jobs like sorting packages on some days while driving on other days, especially Saturdays, to address the growing demand for weekend delivery.But the Teamsters said these workers never followed the hybrid arrangement and simply drove full time from Tuesday to Saturday, for less pay than other full-time drivers. The company says that the weekend drivers make about 87 percent of the base pay of regular full-time drivers, and that some employees have worked under a hybrid arrangement.In the event of a strike, deliveries to consumers, such as e-commerce orders, would probably be among the first to be disrupted. But experts said the supply chain could suffer, too. Some suppliers would struggle to quickly ship goods like automotive parts to manufacturers, potentially causing production slowdowns.Even a short strike could take a toll on UPS. Many customers long relied exclusively on the company, but that started to change after the Teamsters last went on strike in 1997, Mr. Amling said. After that strike, which lasted just over two weeks, more customers began to work with multiple carriers. The consequences were masked by gains from the rise of e-commerce and fewer competitors to choose from, but the company may not be so fortunate today.Niraj Chokshi More

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    Remote Work Gives Amazon Workers a Common Cause

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    At Amazon, warehouse workers have shown support for corporate colleagues, noting they have nothing to gain if office workers lose flexibility that the pandemic proved possible.Eric Deshawn Lerma felt waves of anxiety when he sat down to tally the new costs in his routine since Amazon’s return to the office this spring. There’s parking. There’s fuel. There’s lunch. They add up to at least $200 extra a month, all to support a policy whose justification he can’t fully understand — after three years in which he and his teammates have been doing their jobs from home.Still, when Mr. Lerma heard that some of his colleagues were organizing a walkout to protest the return-to-office policy, which asks employees to come in at least three days a week, he initially wavered on whether to participate. After all, he realizes that thousands of Amazon workers have no flexibility to work from home. Their jobs require them to go into warehouses to do physically taxing labor each day.“It really provided me with a sense of internal conflict about working from home being a luxury or a right,” said Mr. Lerma, 27, who is an executive assistant in Seattle and joined the company, where he feels he has grown personally and professionally, in 2022. “There are different rights and amenities afforded to my role.”He ultimately decided, though, that he would probably join virtually. “While warehouse workers have much harsher working conditions than I do,” he said, “I should still be able to reserve the right to protect my autonomy as an employee.”Thousands of corporate employees, across industries, who remain adamant that they do not want to return to the office are now confronting a tension: How do their demands compare with those of the millions of workers whose jobs have never permitted them the ease of remote work? And can a corporate employee’s advocacy be of use to workers, including those trying to unionize, outside the corporate sphere?This tension follows a pandemic that exacerbated the divide between white-collar workers who could do their jobs from the safety of their homes and workers who often could not and were exposed to higher Covid risks.Simultaneously, workers in both the corporate and noncorporate realms have re-evaluated their working conditions, quit their jobs in waves and called for higher wages, amid a tight labor market at one point called a “workers economy.” The unemployment rate this spring has remained low, at 3.4 percent, with wages rising.Most Amazon workers have been working at company facilities throughout the pandemic.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAt Amazon, hundreds of corporate employees plan to walk off the job on Wednesday, for one hour during lunchtime, in protest of the company’s return-to-office rule, among other issues including layoffs and the company’s impact on the climate. Weeks earlier, employees voiced their frustrations with the R.T.O. policy in a Remote Advocacy channel, with over 30,000 members, on the Slack workplace messaging system.The company has more than 350,000 corporate and tech employees globally. More than 800 in Seattle and 1,600 globally have pledged to participate in the walkout. Some employees, particularly working parents, pin some of their frustration to the financial toll of returning to the office, especially the cost and pressures of child care.The vast majority of Amazon’s more than one million workers, including those who formed a union at a Staten Island warehouse, have been working in person throughout the pandemic.Apple, where employees issued open letters protesting in-person work, and at the Gap have encountered a similar dynamic. At Starbucks, more than 70 named employees, along with others who remained anonymous, released a petition this year urging the company to permit them to keep working remotely. Members of the union representing Starbucks baristas have been supportive of these corporate workers, even though most of the company’s roughly 250,000 U.S. employees, including those across more than 300 unionized stores, cannot work from home.Indeed, many workers in warehouses and stores have been quick to show support for their corporate colleagues, noting that they have nothing to gain from seeing office workers lose out on the flexibility that the pandemic proved was possible.“The work that we’re doing is in two separate fields,” said Anna Ortega, 23, who is active in Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, a group of warehouse workers, and has been working at an Amazon facility in San Bernardino, Calif., for almost two years. “It’s just showing us that Amazon has a problem with workers and listening to us.”Ms. Ortega spends her days lifting 50-pound packages — a task she could never do from home. But she said she supported the Amazon workers who were asking for the flexibility to keep working remotely.“If your employees are happy and are able to work productively from home, I think they would be able to bring better results,” Ms. Ortega said.An Amazon spokesman, Brad Glasser, said that the company respected “employees’ rights to express their opinions and peacefully assemble,” but that it had felt “good energy” since more employees returned to the office.Members of a union representing Starbucks store staff have offered support to corporate employees who petitioned in favor of remote work.Audra Melton for The New York TimesAt Starbucks, members of the union representing store workers have corresponded with corporate employees on Discord and other platforms, offering their support. And when corporate employees released their petition, they asked the company both to reverse its return-to-office policy and to allow free and fair union elections across stores.Jake Sklarew, 34, a software engineer at Starbucks who signed the petition, was frustrated by the return-to-office policy because during the pandemic he had bought a home in an affordable area, 30 miles from the office, thinking he’d be able to keep working remotely. Earlier in his career, when he worked in restaurants, he commuted as much as three hours a day, and he sees his current calls for fairer company policies as connected to the struggles of baristas demanding workplace respect.“The people that are working in stores, when you talk to them, they’re not asking for other people to have to work in person,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t make sense for Starbucks to end remote work for some just because not everyone can do it. “It feels to me like kind of an eye-for-an-eye situation: You’re not helping anyone — you’re just hurting everyone.”Starbucks has suggested that its policy, which requires its 3,750 corporate workers to come in three days a week, contains an element of equity for its employees, or “partners,” because “many partners didn’t have the privilege of working remotely.” But some union members have rejected this logic.To Sarah Pappin, 32, a Starbucks shift supervisor in Seattle, what corporate employees are asking for is directly related to what store employees are demanding, such as increased Covid safety protections.“Even jobs that you might think of as dream jobs can be exploited,” she said. “I think there is a growing understanding that we’re all workers.”But that sense of solidarity doesn’t erase the guilt that some office workers feel as they ask to hold on to the freedom of a workday in their living room. Many office workers have realized, too, all the advantages they have even in their organizing efforts.“We’re so much closer to leadership,” Mr. Lerma said. “I have access to a work-issued laptop that has provided me with the complete address book of everyone within Amazon. I have access to Slack, which can give me any contact I want. A warehouse employee doesn’t have that luxury.” More

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    Broadcast News Is at Center of Fight Over Noncompete Clauses

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    Job-switching barriers are routine at TV stations, even for workers not on the air. A proposed federal rule would curb the practice across all fields.Of all the professions, perhaps none is more commonly bound by contracts that define where else an employee can go work than local television news.The restrictions, known as noncompete clauses, have been a condition of the job for reporters, anchors, sportscasters and meteorologists for decades. More recently, they’ve spread to off-air roles like producers and editors — positions that often pay just barely above the poverty line — and they keep employees from moving to other stations in the same market for up to a year after their contract ends.For that reason, there’s probably no industry that could change as much as a result of the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to severely limit noncompete clauses — if the proposed rule is not derailed before being finalized. Business trade associations are lobbying fiercely against it.“The vast majority of people who work in this country, if they find themselves in a bad situation and they don’t like it, they have options to leave, and they don’t have to move,” said Rick Carr, an agent who represents broadcast workers. “And TV doesn’t allow that.”The pending rule would most likely help people like Leah Rivard, who produces the 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts at WKBT in La Crosse, Wis.She was hired in the summer of 2021, at an hourly rate of $15. A year later, the station brought on a cohort of recent journalism school graduates as part of a new training program that promised to pay off a chunk of their student loans. Several longer-tenured producers left, and Ms. Rivard wanted to leave, too, since she ended up having to teach a bunch of inexperienced young people how to write scripts and edit video.When Ms. Rivard spoke to her managers, she was told that if she left for another station anywhere in the country before her contract expired this year, they could sue her. So she has continued to work for the station, an experience she’s called “absolute hell.” But even after her contract ends in June, a noncompete clause will prevent her from working for any of the other stations in La Crosse or Eau Claire, an hour and a half north, for a year after that.Ms. Rivard plans to look for work in Milwaukee, and since she doesn’t have much to tie her down in La Crosse, she’s eager to leave. But for plenty of older employees with children in school and mortgages to pay, a noncompete means there’s no easy way out.“If your station is so toxic that it’s affecting you, and you want to leave, you have to leave news altogether and find a public relations job,” Ms. Rivard said. “It leaves no accountability for the company to be a good company for employees.”Chris Palmer, WKBT’s general manager, said he believed noncompetes benefited both employers and employees.“We invest a lot of time and money training and publicly marketing an individual journalist, which, in turn, increases the value of that journalist in the local market,” he said. “These employees also have access to proprietary local research and strategic investments. It would be unfair for that to benefit a direct competitor without protection.”Noncompete clauses have become standard in many workplaces and cover about 18 percent of the U.S. labor force, according to research by economists at the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan.In broadcasting, though, noncompetes are ubiquitous. According to a survey of TV news directors by Bob Papper, an adjunct professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, about 90 percent of news anchors, 78 percent of reporters and 87 percent of weathercasters were bound by noncompetes in 2022. Those numbers have been fairly stable for decades.Amy DuPont quit her job as an anchor at WKBT and went to work in public relations, knowing that she wouldn’t be allowed to work locally in broadcasting for another year.Narayan Mahon for The New York TimesIn recent years, however, noncompetes have grown to cover a far wider swath of the newsroom. About half of digital writers and content managers, 71 percent of producers and 86 percent of multimedia journalists have clauses restricting their ability to work elsewhere in the market after their contracts end. That’s up significantly from when Mr. Papper started tracking contract provisions in depth two decades ago.That growth has occurred despite a campaign by the one of the biggest labor unions in television, SAG-AFTRA, to limit noncompetes for broadcast employees. Since the mid-90s, the group has been successful in a handful of states — like Massachusetts and Illinois — while failing in others, like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Some states, most notably California, decline to enforce most noncompetes, regardless of the industry.In states that circumscribe noncompetes, where SAG-AFTRA also tends to have the most members, the union says workers enjoy higher wages and more freedom to escape bad workplace conditions — particularly important for women, in a field notorious for sexual harassment.“We have seen more flexibility within our membership, and also nonunion shops, for employees who decide at the end of their contract that they’d like to move on,” said Mary Cavallaro, the chief broadcast officer for SAG-AFTRA. But the National Association of Broadcasters — which signed on to a multiindustry letter opposing the federal government’s proposed ban — says that because stations promote their reporters and anchors to develop their local brand recognition, they should be able to prevent them from “crossing the street,” in industry parlance.“While there are certainly some cases where noncompete clauses are overly restrictive, we believe a categorical ban goes too far and that broadcasting presents a unique case for the use of reasonable noncompete clauses for on-air talent,” said Alex Siciliano, a spokesman for the association.Mr. Siciliano did not respond to a further inquiry about why noncompetes were needed for employees not appearing on air.To many broadcasting veterans, the main reason that stations impose noncompetes is clear: There’s a recruiting crunch in broadcast news, particularly for producers. It’s a difficult job, with either very early or very late hours and tight deadlines. It requires a college degree and sometimes a master’s degree in journalism, and pay is no longer competitive for people with media skills. The median salary for a producer is $38,000, according to Mr. Papper’s survey.“There is a belief on the part of non-news executives that working in TV news is still glamorous enough that people are lining up to go into the business,” Mr. Papper said. “But what I’m hearing is that they’re not lining up anymore. And the fact is that the skill set you learn in college that allows you to start in TV news also allows you entry into a whole lot of other, better-paying jobs.”The apparent disconnect between television news management and the pool of available talent has meant that job postings stay open longer. When an offer is extended, it comes with an almost inescapable time commitment.Beth Johnson, a television talent agent, says she had to move from exclusively representing clients to more training and consulting, since newsroom employees were no longer able to move around enough to negotiate significant pay raises. The rapid consolidation in local news, with major companies like Nexstar and Sinclair buying out smaller ownership groups, has further diminished the employees’ options.“It’s really hard for these journalists to make a good living, and it’s getting harder to leverage to make sure they can,” Ms. Johnson said. “So we wanted to pivot to say to journalists, ‘It doesn’t make sense for you to pay me for three years, because you’re not going to make enough to keep me for three years, but you’re really going to need help with that promotion for a year.’”Although reporters and anchors are paid slightly better than producers, they are routinely forced to move if they need to earn more. If they can’t leave town, they often leave the business. The docket for the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed noncompete ban is peppered with examples of reporters and producers whose careers had been constrained or cut short by the inability to leave their employer for similar work nearby.Take Amy DuPont, one of Ms. Rivard’s former colleagues at WKBT. After working as an anchor in San Diego and Milwaukee, she moved with her husband to La Crosse, her hometown, after he retired from the military. When Ms. DuPont felt she had reached a breaking point at the station, she quit for a job in public relations. Other stations in town asked if she was interested in switching over, but she didn’t even try.“Even if I wanted to, I’m not legally able to go there,” said Ms. DuPont, who now represents Kwik Trip, the Midwestern gas station chain. “For someone like me, who’s married and 43 years old with two children, and I own my home, it prevents me from doing my career, something I’ve spent 22 years doing.”Ultimately, when journalists have to switch cities to earn enough to keep up with the cost of living, local residents lose a trusted source of reporting.David Jones worked in broadcast news for 23 years, mostly in management roles that required him to recruit and hire. He quit in 2021 to join a public relations firm, and posted a long meditation on LinkedIn about how inhospitable the industry had grown for employees.Not mentioned, but under the surface, were noncompetes, which hurt the public as well as the people bound by them, he said in an interview.“You really want someone with market knowledge,” Mr. Jones said, “which isn’t to say that someone can’t come in and learn the market quickly, but there’s so much benefit to the community when you’re able to do that. With noncompetes, you almost never get to do that.” More

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    Do We Know How Many People Are Working From Home?

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    New Labor Department numbers indicate that fewer Americans worked remotely last year. But many experts criticize the government’s data collection.Millions of workers, employers, square feet of real estate and dollars of downtown economic retail are wrapped up in the question of how many people are working from home — yet there remain large discrepancies in how remote work is measured.The Labor Department, last week, released data indicating a decline in remote work: 72.5 percent of businesses said their employees rarely or never teleworked last year, up from 60.1 percent in 2021 and quite close to the 76.7 percent that had no such work before the pandemic. But while the Labor Department found that remote work was almost back to prepandemic levels, many other surveys show it is up four- to fivefold.Outside research, including a monthly survey of workers from researchers at Stanford University and the Census Bureau’s household survey, indicate that remote work remains prevalent, with Stanford’s finding that it accounts for over a quarter of paid full-time workdays in the United States, just slightly down from 33 percent in 2021. Some scholars suggested that the Labor Department’s survey may overcount fully in-person work, though the comparisons among the various surveys aren’t direct.“I see this survey as an outlier and not the most reliable measure,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist of the Economic Innovation Group, a public policy organization, describing the Labor Department’s survey. “We need to think hard as we try to develop better measures of working from home.”Remote work is having profound effects on nearly every dimension of the economy: foot traffic to downtown businesses, housing markets in big cities and far-flung areas, methods of assessing productivity and child care. Public transportation ridership sank during the pandemic, and suburban real estate values rose.Nearly one billion square feet of office real estate was available but in search of a tenant at the end of 2022. People refashioned their lives and routines, working 28 percent more after traditional hours, according to Microsoft.The stakes of measuring remote work’s prevalence are high. And researchers said the wording of the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on remote work, which was distributed to businesses, might have caused some confusion among respondents.“Telework is a work arrangement that allows an employee to work at home, or from another remote location, by using the internet or a computer linked to one’s place of employment, as well as digital communications, such as email and phone,” the survey read. “Do any employees at this location CURRENTLY telework in any amount?”By defining telework so broadly — as any worker sending an email or making a call outside the office — the Labor Department’s survey question should most likely have turned up a fully in-person figure lower than the one released last week, said Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford, suggesting that some businesses may have been confused by the question.This particular Labor Department figure on telework also combines fully remote work with hybrid arrangements. But hybrid work has eclipsed fully remote policies, with just over half of the workers who can do their jobs from home combining in-person and remote work, according to Gallup.A spokeswoman for the Labor Department said the survey most likely did not reflect informal work-from-home arrangements.“Taking into account that the self-employed and the public sector are not included in the sample, and that this is a survey of establishments rather than individuals, our estimates do not appear out of line with other estimates,” the spokeswoman said.Stanford’s monthly study on working from home, which surveys 10,000 workers across cities and industries, found that 27 percent of paid full-time days were worked from home in early 2023.Much of that remote work came from hybrid setups. Last month, the survey found that 12 percent of workers were fully remote, roughly 60 percent fully in person and 28 percent hybrid.Other sources of data confirm that working-from-home patterns remain entrenched in certain industries. The building security firm Kastle, for example, tracks data on office badge swipes and reported this month that offices remained at roughly 48 percent of their prepandemic occupancy.A closer look at New York, from the Partnership for New York City, found that 52 percent of Manhattan office workers were working in person on an average day at the start of this year, up from 49 percent in September. But only 9 percent of employees were in the office five days a week, underscoring the reach of hybrid arrangements. And Square, the retail technology company, which tracks payments at food and drink establishments, found that sales growth at bars and restaurants in Brooklyn had recently outpaced growth of those in Manhattan.“It’s clear that the work-from-home trends induced by the pandemic have transformed the food and drink scene in the city,” said Ara Kharazian, an economist at Square.The Partnership for New York City’s data indicated that financial service firms were back in the office in greater numbers than many other companies. Financial service firms reported 59 percent daily office attendance in late January, according to the partnership. The tech industry, by contrast, was at 43 percent.All this data is emerging as hundreds of companies formalize their policies on hybrid work, with many trying to persuade their employees to spend more time at the office.Amazon told corporate workers last month that they had to be in the office three days a week starting in May, and Starbucks called its 3,750 corporate workers back three days a week as well. Disney asked employees to return to the office four days a week. Its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, cited the need for in-person creative collaborations.Other chief executives have also begun to question the merits of remote work. Even Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, which told all its employees that they could go permanently remote, began voicing concern this year that productivity among some employees has been lower.As executives clamp down on in-person work, worker resistance has become more vocal. At Amazon, more than 29,000 employees joined a Slack channel, called Remote Advocacy, protesting the shift to in-person work. At Starbucks, more than 40 corporate employees signed an open letter opposing the new return-to-office policy.Wherever people are doing the jobs they already have, mostly in person per the Labor Department or over a quarter of the time at home per others, one metric does indicate that hybrid work is here to stay: job postings.A study from researchers at Stanford, Harvard and other institutions analyzing over 50 million job postings last month found that postings explicitly mentioning remote work are at 12.2 percent — a fourfold increase since before the pandemic. More