[NJFAC] shift to bonuses from salaries: comment from goodjobs member

I think this is a creepy development, for several reasons:

 

1.  It will make it more difficult for employees to budget, since they will not know what their pay will be.

 

2.  Who will define the targets?  The power to define targets will place enormous power in someone's hands.  The only way to avoid a concentration of arbitrary power would be to have the targets be the subject of collective decision-making, whether through unions or through employee ownership.

 

3.  Unless the target is shared and the bonus is awarded to a group that includes all the individuals whose work contributes to the accomplishment of a stated goal, the bonus system will tend to fragment efforts and discourage teamwork.

 

Mr. Leon  also sent comment and links on employment-related stress:

I think this kind of connection is not sufficiently discussed.  Stress underlies a variety of medical conditions and contributes significantly to health care costs.  Some part of the elevated health care bill in the US is attributable to anxiety about health insurance and health care- financial iatrogenesis!

 

Sandy

 

Santiago Leon

Thanks, Sandy. June

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] worker stress affects their health

The Association Between Precarious Employment and Stress Among Working Age Individuals in the United States

This study examines the association between precarious employment and stress among U.S. working-aged individuals using data from waves 4 (2008-2009) and 5 (2016-2018) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Precarious employment (PES) was measured based on factors like low wages, work hours, job instability, and lack of benefits. Higher PES was associated with increased perceived stress and higher levels of C-reactive protein, a biological stress marker. The results suggest that precarious employment, a psychosocial stressor, may contribute to poor mental and physical health. The researchers recommend policies like improved job stability, better wages, and healthcare benefits to mitigate these effects and reduce health disparities.

Job Insecurity and Health and Well-Being: What Happens When You Really Need or Love Your Job?

Thanks to a goodjobs list member for these links.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] AI that could benefit workers

A worker-centered approach to policy in the era of AI, EPI 10/24 

The deployment of AI in the workplace has shined a light on long-standing problems: The deployment of AI-powered technologies in the workplace has been associated with an array of worker experiences and outcomes that warrant concern, including discrimination, unsafe working conditions, loss of privacy, and seemingly arbitrary disciplinary action or discharge, among others.

But these outcomes are not inherent to the use of AI. Employers' use of other technologies and even garden-variety management practices have perpetuated these outcomes for decades. The use of AI has shined a light on the challenges workers with little bargaining power and insufficient on-the-job protections face in our labor market.

Broader solutions are needed to improve worker outcomes in the era of AI: Policymakers should address the negative outcomes experienced by workers today, but they also should look beyond how the use of specific AI systems may degrade job quality and look deeper to the underlying conditions that enable employers to use AI in this manner: the imbalance of power between businesses and their workers.

Workers should have greater protections and a voice in workplace policies: Decades of weakened bargaining power and heavy reliance on employers for life necessities, such as healthcare and retirement, has made it exceedingly difficult for most workers to bargain over how AI technologies are being used in the workplace—let alone opt out of the use of AI-powered management and surveillance at work or walk away from unlawful or poor working conditions.

The objective of worker-centered AI policy: Increase the ability of workers to meaningfully engage their employers in how AI technologies are deployed in the workplace.

To achieve this straightforward objective, policymakers will need to address long-standing imbalances in the labor market; reduce AI-specific barriers to worker voice while banning the most egregious uses of AI; and support workers' ability to find better jobs.

....
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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] shift from salaries to bonus-based pay

The Big Shift From Salaries to Bonus-Based Pay, Fuhrmans, WSJ 9/24

More Americans are in jobs where a chunk of their pay isn't guaranteed.

In incentive pay programs, base salaries are often fleshed out with monthly or quarterly bonuses conditional on hitting certain targets. Twenty-eight percent of more than 300 companies surveyed said they were building incentive pay into new roles, according to a 2024 survey by revenue-management consulting firm Alexander Group.

The practice has long been common for salespeople and top brass. Yet apart from the yearly raise—and for some, an annual bonus—the vast majority of the workforce makes the same amount every payday.

Now, more companies are trying to get the most out of rising payroll costs by making a part of workers' pay contingent on completing prescribed goals.

Employers say the new way to pay professionals from accountants and human-resource managers to marketing assistants can fuel greater productivity. Plenty of overachievers say they are relishing the often-rich upside potential. Yet some workers say they are making less than they bargained for.

"There's absolutely risk, but in my experience there's been more reward," says Hannah Brown, 32, a chief of staff at business-software company WalkMe.....

Jobs close to the sales process, such as marketing and after-sales support, are the most likely to be swept up into pay-for-performance plans. But some firms, such as WalkMe, are using short-term bonuses to shape pay for everyone from accountants to human-resources managers.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] former prisoners find work by composting waste

Recycling the Discarded By Damon Orion, originally published by Resilience.org September 12, 2024

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

The stigma of a criminal conviction can be a major barrier to community reentry for recently released prisoners. A December 2021 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics highlighted the employment barrier faced by the more than 50,000 who were incarcerated, with 33 percent of them being unable to find any employment "over four years" after their release from prison in 2010.

Meanwhile, a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Justice of employers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, found that

"ex-offenders… [were] one-half to one-third as likely to receive initial consideration from employers relative to equivalent applicants without criminal records."

In 2018, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that more than 27 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals were unemployed—a figure "higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression."....

The Compost Co-op, a worker-owned service in Greenfield, Massachusetts, offers formerly incarcerated individuals an alternative to this path. Its workers collect compost from customers' curbsides and bring them to western Massachusetts's largest commercial composting site, Martin's Farm. This enables staff members to earn a living wage through meaningful work.....

Positive Environmental Impact

With 30-40 percent of food in the U.S. going into the trash—nearly 60 million tons per year—the Compost Co-op serves as a model for food waste reduction. It also promotes environmental health. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes, composting reduces greenhouse gas emissions and "improves a community's ability to adapt to adverse climate impacts by helping soil absorb water and prevent runoff of pollutants during floods. It also helps soil hold more water for longer, mitigating the effects of drought."....

link from nakedcapitalism.com

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

Countries can raise $2 trillion by copying Spain's wealth tax, study finds Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

....

The study documents that previous tax reforms targeting the superrich did not result in the superrich relocating to other countries, despite media headlines claiming the contrary. Just 0.01% of the richest households relocated after wealth tax reforms targeting the richest households were implemented in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Crucially, the extreme accumulation of wealth doesn't just create extreme imbalances that have harmful consequences, it renders that accumulated wealth less economically productive – for example by diverting disproportionally more wealth towards speculative derivatives instead of goods and services in the "real" economy.¹⁶ The Tax Justice Network's spokesperson attributes this to "why the world might not feel any richer today despite there being more wealth than ever before."....

"There's this idea that billionaires earn wealth like everybody else, they're just better at it. This is bogus. It's impossible to earn a billion dollars. The average US worker would have to work for a stretch of time 13 times longer than humans have existed to earn as much as wealth as the world's richest man has today. Salaries don't make billionaires, dividends and rent money do. But we tax dividends and rent money much less than we tax salaries, and this is destabilising the earner model our economies are based on....

Read the report

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Meaning of the jobs data revisions--Dean Baker

Mixed Story: What the Revision to the Jobs Data Means

August 21, 2024 Dean Baker

First, the people complaining that this downward revision exposes cooked jobs data in prior months need to get their heads screwed on straight. Let's just try a little logic here.

If the Biden-Harris administration had the ability to cook the job numbers, do we think they are too stupid to realize that they should keep cooking them at least through November? Seriously, do we think they are total morons? If you've been cooking the numbers for twenty months, wouldn't you keep cooking them until Election Day?

Okay, but getting more serious here, the staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a professional outfit that does exactly what we want it to do. They produce the data about the economy as best they can in a completely objective way. And they use methods that are completely transparent.....

Every year the BLS adjusts the data from the survey based on state unemployment insurance (UI) filings which have data from nearly every employer in the country. These UI filings are a near census for all payroll employment. If the UI data gives a different picture than the survey of employers, then the filings are almost certainly right and BLS revises it data accordingly.

For reasons that we can only speculate about, there was an unusually large gap this year. Many economists and statisticians will spend many hours trying to figure out why this is the case. But one thing we should be confident of is that no one cooked the data. BLS did the best they could in structuring their survey of employers. If they can find ways to improve it, they will, as they have in the past.

What Does This Tell Us About the Economy?

Turning briefly to the substance of the revision, I realize many people will be quick to say that this is bad news for our picture of the economy. That is not clear at all.

First, we should be clear that even with the revision the economy still created jobs at a very rapid pace in the period covered, from March 2023 to March 2024. While BLS had previously reported that we created 2.9 million jobs over this period, or 242,000 a month. The revision means we created 2.1 million jobs or 172,000 jobs a month. By comparison, in the three years prior to the onset of the pandemic, we created jobs at a rate of 179,000 a month. Even with the downward revision, we were still creating jobs at a very healthy pace.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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