A Second Chance at the American Dream

“There are only three ways to create wealth: You either make it, you mine it or you grow it,” says Robert Trouskie, director of field services for the Workforce Development Institute, a New York nonprofit focused on growing and retaining well-paying jobs in the state. “The one that’s really lagged behind in the last two or three decades has been the making of things, but I think the pendulum is starting to [swing].”
Indeed, the U.S. saw about 5 million manufacturing jobs disappear between 2000 and 2014. But despite the loss, 400,000 positions still sit unfilled across the country. Most are for jobs that require special training — a need WDI has been addressing since 2003 by working with other organizations and unions to connect willing workers to available positions.
One such worker is Todd Holmquist, a recent graduate of WDI’s Accelerated Machinist Partnership, which combines classroom education with hands-on training in factories. After the aircraft plant where he worked closed in 2013, Holmquist’s income plummeted from about $80,000 a year to $20,000. He enrolled in the program just a week before his wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Watch the video above to see how WDI helped turned Holmquist’s life, and employment prospects, around.

Is the U.S. Ready for Universal Basic Income?

It used to be considered radical. But the idea that a society could ease poverty and increase productivity by giving every one of its citizens a monthly or annual stipend, no strings attached, is no longer a far-fetched one in other parts of the world. And now some progressive leaders in the U.S. are pointing to the economic model’s alleged success in Europe in the hope that the notion takes root here, too.
The concept, known as a universal basic income (or UBI for short), is simple enough: Give citizens enough money every year, gratis, so that they can pay for necessary living expenses, like housing and food. In return, people will have the bandwidth to flex their creativity, become more productive and enjoy a better quality of life.
Not surprisingly, fiscal hawks and critics of entitlement programs are not on board.
“Unfortunately, a welfare state by any other name is still a welfare state. And a [UBI] is just replacing one pricey system for another,” writes Brittany Hunter, an editor with the Foundation for Economic Education. “Unlike the current welfare state, which has standards for determining who qualifies for certain aid, a UBI would be given to everyone. This would dramatically increase the pool of citizens receiving benefits from the state and inflict massive expenses across the board.”
Hunter’s critique came on the heels of a study conducted by the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute, which found that providing $12,000 each year to Americans would increase jobs by 2 percent and grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025.   
Though the idea of a universal basic income in the U.S. has been tossed around for decades, the rise in automation has put the idea at the forefront of current economic arguments in developed countries, where robots are poised to take over more jobs and provide less opportunities in the future.

THE VIEW ACROSS THE POND

In mid-September, the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research found that nearly half of Britons would welcome a basic level of income to cover essential needs, with only 26 percent of those surveyed opposing its introduction. The reactions aren’t necessarily surprising, as the Scottish government recently announced plans to test a UBI system by giving citizens £150, or about $200, per week.
Though the move is revolutionary in the United Kingdom, it’s not unheard of in other parts of Europe. Last year, several European countries introduced the idea of trying out basic income, ranging from giving a modest €560 a month to 2,000 unemployed adults in Finland (the equivalent of about $660) to doling out 2,500 Swiss francs ($2,573) each month in Switzerland.
The Swiss held a vote for the monthly stipend in June 2016 — the first time a country has ever put the proposal on a ballot — but it was overwhelmingly voted against by nearly 3 to 1. Opposition groups claimed that the country’s high living standard, combined with its open borders, would make for complications.
Finland, meanwhile, has boasted anecdotal evidence of success, with residents reporting that the basic income has allowed them to start their own businesses and has reduced stress. But some economists argue that the Finnish program, which was implemented to replace unemployment benefits (though recipients are still awarded the monthly stipend even after they secure work), has only pushed people to lower-paying jobs with lower productivity.
“Universal basic income can only succeed if the effort is sustained and widespread — and not available only to the unemployed,” wrote economists Antti Jauhiainen and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen in The New York Times. “The program should not be intended to force people into low-paying jobs.”

ONE NATION, UNDER UBI

So can a UBI model work in America?
In a way, it’s already here, to some extent. Alaskan residents have gotten a portion of the state’s $55 billion oil fund each year for the past four decades. Last year, the dividend from the fund was $2,052 each for 643,000 Alaskans, before Gov. Bill Walker axed that amount by half.
Farther south in Silicon Valley, the tech incubator Y Combinator has launched a UBl study that aims to provide roughly 1,000 Oakland families with up to $2,000 a month.
“I think it’s good to start studying this early,” wrote Y Combinator President Sam Altman in a blog post. “I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”
The reality is that automation in America will reduce jobs for low- and even middle-wage workers by close to 50 percent, according to some estimates, and there is a worry that cashiers who are put out of work won’t exactly be in the position to become engineers overnight. The U.S. has already started to feel the squeeze, with about 5 million jobs lost as a result of automation.
American business leaders and progressive politicians have taken notice. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among others, have all endorsed the idea of a UBI.
“There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better,” echoed Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, earlier this year. “And if my assessment is correct and [jobs are lost to automation], then we have to think about: What are we going to do about it? I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary.”
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Creating Big-City Jobs in Small-Town America

New Mexico is well known for its long stretches of fiery deserts, rich Native American culture and spicy food that can make people tough-as-nails drop to their knees and cry. What it isn’t known for: its startup scene, at least not in the same way as tech-heavy metropolises like San Francisco and New York.
That doesn’t mean, though, that people who live there don’t want to be a part of it.
“This is the kind of place where I want to raise my child, and with my wife finishing [school], it became more apparent that I needed to stay in Albuquerque. But there weren’t really that many options for tech work,” says Jackson Stakeman, 36, who left the California coast five years ago to be close to his parents, both of whom retired in Albuquerque. “I was getting pulled back to California, and it’s just not what I wanted.”
Stakeman eventually found work locally as a programming analyst and is now a senior consultant at Rural Sourcing Inc. (RSI), which provides IT resources in second- and third-tier cities around the country. But his plight to find a tech gig in a tech desert — no pun intended — is not anecdotal.  
In 2015, close to 60,000 computer science degree-holders graduated from American colleges. Many of them live in what’s derisively called “flyover country” and have had to choose between leaving their cities or finding different work. With the concentration of tech companies located on the coasts, hiring managers have historically been forced to either recruit workers to relocate to these tech hubs or hire abroad.
All that has started to change, though, as both uncertain immigration policies and an increasingly expensive offshore workforce have pushed companies to seek talent in less-known U.S. cities.
Though some major companies, such as IBM, have pushed for hiring Americans in the wake of the current administration’s call for keeping jobs at home, others, like General Electric and Walmart, caught on years ago and began refocusing on “reshoring,” also known as domestic outsourcing, well before the modern rallying cry from the White House.
Between 2009 and 2011, 26 percent of American companies were looking to use offshore services. Two years later, that number dropped three points while interest in reshoring increased by 10 percentage points, according to a report by The Economist.
Much of the shift has to do with the costs associated with offshore work, which has increased in the past decade.
The internet initially made India and China prosperous for their ability to provide cheap labor to help design and build websites. But companies have become frustrated with the offshoring model, particularly as technology has advanced well beyond simple click-and-scroll websites to more interactive and complex ones — all of which require increased communication and response times from programmers.
“It takes so much overhead to manage a team offshore so that you can get over all the societal differences and language barriers. The reality is you can do it a lot better and faster if you just pick up a phone and talk with someone,” says Heather Terenzio, CEO of Techtonic Group, an outsourcing software development company in Boulder, Colo. “Everybody has a horror story about offshore outsourcing.”
That frustration isn’t uncommon, according to Monty Hamilton, CEO of RSI, where Stakeman works. With headquarters in Atlanta and four development centers elsewhere, including Albuquerque, RSI provides domestic outsourcing for larger companies by hiring programmers to work remotely from wherever they happen to live, whether that be the Midwest or the Mountain West.  
“Offshoring was very good when it was a prescriptive solution,” Hamilton tells NationSwell. “But when it’s a more creative idea, now you have to add some people who can ask critical questions.”
Those critical questions often go unanswered when outsourcing to foreign workers who are more rote in their objectives, says Hamilton. He adds that the costs that come with hiring American aren’t significant enough to merit continuing an offshore practice.
“What used to be a 5-to-1 pay gap [between domestic and offshore workers] for professional development is now a 2-to-1 gap,” he says. “The gap is not worth the inconvenience factor.”
Indeed, the costs of offshore outsourcing have risen, with wages increasing nearly 72 percent each year between 2000 and 2008 in emerging countries, according to a 2013 report by the International Labour Organization (though that trend has reversed in some Asian countries).
Anecdotally, Terenzio agrees, telling NationSwell that while Techtonic hired offshore workers in Eastern Europe for 10 years, it experienced its own set of difficulties.  
“We were finding that we had to write up every instruction with so much level of detail that we realized we could just train a junior developer in the U.S. with much more ease,” she says. “We’ve seen firsthand our productivity and efficiency go up, and our headaches go down.”
By hiring domestically for their IT and other tech needs, U.S. companies seem to be catching on.
“What we’ve seen is that people in tertiary cities would really like to make $50,000 to $60,000 as a programmer,” Terenzio says. Though that stands in stark contrast to the high six-figure incomes that developers in Silicon Valley can command, the cost of living in the Bay Area dwarfs most other places. Hiring workers in small towns is a win-win, she adds: “Wages there are lower, and people there are dying for those jobs. If you can outsource to India, you can outsource to somewhere in the U.S.”
And there’s a community benefit, as more people in smaller cities want to get in on the higher salaries that tech offers and keep those dollars in the local economy.
“Denver is my home, and I felt like I could navigate myself here in any path that I took,” says Barry Maldonado, a project manager at Techtonic, speaking of his time figuring out a career move from the nonprofit world to tech. “There were guys I knew who were younger than me and really succeeding not only in their positions but also in the financial side of life, which was one thing I still needed to work on.”
Maldonado enrolled in a coding bootcamp and was hired by Techtonic as a junior developer. His financial situation has “changed drastically,” he says.
Stakeman, the Albuquerque analyst, says that even though he no longer commands a West Coast salary, what he pays in New Mexico for his two-story home with a three-car garage is about the same as he did when living in a studio apartment in Southern California.
When asked if he was living comfortably, despite forgoing a six-figure salary, Stakeman was succinct: “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”
Continue reading “Creating Big-City Jobs in Small-Town America”

This Nonprofit Has Hit on the Way to Keep Ex-Offenders Out of Prison

On a gray morning earlier this year, former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey was talking with Omari Atiba, a convicted felon, in Newark when they were interrupted by Atiba’s phone. As the recently released prisoner’s cell blasted the ’70s disco staple “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now,” McGreevey couldn’t help but nod along, full white-man-overbite style.
Few could blame the former politician for feeling upbeat. For the past three years, McGreevey — no stranger himself to controversy, having resigned his governorship in 2004 — has been working to remove the obstacles that face ex-inmates once they’re released. On the morning they met, Atiba was just two days out of a New Jersey state prison, where he served 30 years for murder.
Transforming ex-convicts like Atiba into responsible, engaged civilians is a project that has earned McGreevey the support of Chris Christie and four other former Garden State governors. It also led him to John Koufos, a former criminal defense lawyer whose own fall from grace after a drunken hit-and-run accident in 2012 resulted in disbarment and 16 months in prison. Today, Koufos is second-in-command at New Jersey Reentry Corporation (NJRC), the nonprofit founded by McGreevey in 2014.
NJRC has five outposts in the state, including Jersey City, Kearney, Newark, Paterson and Toms River. Its mission is to overhaul onetime prisoners’ lives by overseeing their sobriety, and training and placing them in meaningful jobs. The ambitious project carries an annual price tag of $3 million, which is funded largely by the state.
With a roster of around 1,600 clients, NJRC’s success rate has been praised by the Manhattan Institute as among the best of the New York City–area reentry prison programs. According to a recent analysis by the think tank, U.S. prisons release approximately 650,000 inmates every year. Within the first 12 months, more than half are unable to secure identification and jobs that earn them enough legal income to survive.
But certain programs, like NJRC’s, are proving successful in preventing such scenarios. From January to July 2016, NJRC placed around 1,000 former prisoners in jobs spanning sales, transportation, food services, manufacturing and public works, many with on-ramps to more lucrative positions with building-trade unions.

Omari Atiba (right), pictured here with former Gov. Jim McGreevey, worked with the New Jersey Reentry Corporation to find employment after being released from prison.

That 62 percent job-placement rate likely helped NJRC achieve its low 19.7 percent recidivism. Though that figure is impressive, it spans just six months; the true measure of success will be where these former inmates are five years from now. As the most recent national survey by the Department of Justice found, an estimated three-quarters of ex-offenders are arrested for a new crime within five years of release.
Understanding McGreevey’s and Koufos’ backgrounds helps explain their strategy. McGreevey, as former governor, knows New Jersey influencers, like the chair of the state DMV, and has persuaded them to do things like untangle knotty driver’s records to clear a path toward regaining the right to drive, often essential to maintaining a job. And Koufos, who handled hundreds of pro bono cases for the NAACP before he went to prison, has recruited close to 70 young lawyers to clear up unresolved past infractions such as traffic tickets that can, and often do, return former inmates to their cells.
“It’s incredibly sad,” McGreevey said. “So many of our clients have a sense that catastrophe is right around the corner.”
Sadder still is that often they’re right. Koufos says missteps like missed child support payments can easily secure ex-offenders a return ticket to prison. “A lot of times folks don’t participate in family court” because they’re scared of the outcome, which may include fines. “When they have a lawyer holding their hand, they’re no longer afraid.”
Though they are both the heroes of their own second acts, Koufos and McGreevey are an odd couple. McGreevey studied to be a priest after resigning his Trenton post. Koufos’ wobbly relationship with religion surfaces only at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. “More jobs, less Jesus,” Koufos often reminds McGreevey when they’re talking to clients. But ultimately McGreevey is less concerned with helping clients find God than with helping them find footing in a social landscape built to topple them.
He meets weekly with prisoners across New Jersey to explain NJRC’s mission as well as his own rocky road to redemption. He was the closeted gay governor who left in disgrace, he reminds prisoners. What if it had taken him until his deathbed to come to the realizations that have helped him move forward?
Both men see every day as a chance to stub out others’ doomsday narratives. Atiba, the convicted murderer, now weighs fish in the seafood department at Newark’s ShopRite.
And Patrick D’Aiuto, who once lived in the cell across from Koufos and was released from prison in 2013 after 18 years for armed robbery, is now a commercial roofer with a union. He makes in the high $20s per hour and recently bought a condo.
“I spent pretty much my whole adult life in prison, and I knew that a lot of these programs can be tongue-in-cheek. I always wondered, Why doesn’t the media go to these people who claim to run these great programs and say, ‘If you actually helped someone get a good job, produce that person.’ They’d never be able to produce anybody.”
NJRC, D’Aiuto says, is different: “They’re not just getting guys jobs at Burger King. They’re getting them jobs with benefits that will get them a middle-class existence, so they can lead a productive life.”
Not that they succeed every time. A healthy percentage of clients, most of whom are addicts being treated through NJRC’s recovery channels, relapse. If a client is using, he gets a warning. If there is a second infraction, he’s out. Koufos is generally the one who does the kicking out.
He doesn’t mind, though.
“I dedicated myself to a life of service because of the pain I caused when I was addicted,” Koufos says. “If we can help the next guy recover, we stop the next victim from happening.”
Continue reading “This Nonprofit Has Hit on the Way to Keep Ex-Offenders Out of Prison”

6 Ways Every Boss Can Bring Diversity to the Workplace

As tech companies continue to receive heat over their lack of inclusivity of women and people of color, more studies are showing that there is a measurable benefit to focusing on diversity in the workplace.
Through a mix of civic action on tax reform, altering hiring practices and recognizing religious differences, here are six examples of how to push for more inclusivity in your own workplace.

1. Attract More Women With Different Incentives

When Netflix announced a revision to its parental leave policy to include a minimum of three months’ full pay for hourly employees and up to 12 months for salaried workers, the internet was abuzz with how much progress American companies were making when it came to the new moms in their ranks.
But Netflix is an exception to standard policy. Currently, federal law only requires large and medium-sized companies to provide 16 weeks of parental leave, all unpaid. And there is even less support for working mothers, as federal subsidies for childcare are at a 12-year low.  
To improve the landscape for working women, look to Canada. After our northern neighbors altered their tax system in the 1980s and ’90s to allow for childcare subsidies and mandatory paid maternity leave, more women joined the workforce. Today, there are about 8 percent more women working in Canada than in the U.S.

2. Embrace Global Workers — And Their Customs

All companies want to grow their business and increase their bottom line. One way to do that: Sponsor international workers.
Yet when it comes to bringing in new people from across the globe, most industries rely on old hiring tactics, using generic language in job listings or posting to job sites that aren’t used in other countries.
“There has been an idea for some time that you could standardize the [human resources] function globally,” said a 2012 report from KPMG International. “Many markets today, though, are so distinct that [HR] needs to focus on understanding local needs.”
In the same study, leaders from multiple companies found that international workers were essential to their business. For those pushing to hire people from other countries, the process was found to be the most successful when HR departments accommodated the worker’s local customs and culture.

3. Include More Holidays on the Company Calendar

New York is one of only a handful of cities that observe holy days of multiple religions. In 2015, the city’s school system added two Muslim holidays to its number of days off and have also designated times during which students of certain Christian denominations can leave school one hour early for religious study.
For businesses that want to do the same, the website Diversity Best Practices has a full list of religious and cultural holidays, including the Indian feast holiday Makar Sankranti (Jan. 14) and Native American Citizenship Day (June 15). Some companies have taken up the trend; UPS, for example, recognizes a number of cultural holidays such as Passover and the Chinese New Year.
“The key … is to make sure no one feels excluded or forced to participate in workplace festivities,” according to a post by the Society for Human Resource Management.

4. Use Technology as a Guard Against Implicit Bias

Despite a hiring manager’s best efforts to avoid discrimination in interviews, it’s completely natural to have biases — and it’s even harder to recognize them. To best diversify a workforce, it’s crucial to take a look at the technology that’s being used to communicate with potential hires, from how the job is posted to the method used to extend an offer of employment.
When the social media developer Buffer changed job descriptions from “hackers” to “developers,” they found women applied to the jobs more often. “It was eye-opening for us to realize the ways we had perhaps been implicitly biased without realizing it,” wrote one employee for the company’s blog.
Companies can utilize software that analyzes internal emails, documents and job postings in real time to avoid bias. Joonko, for example, “can identify events of conscious and unconscious bias,” says cofounder Ilit Raz. “The point isn’t just to hire more diverse people, but the right people for your company.”
Gapjumpers and Blendoor are two companies whose software removes a candidate’s name and any data not relevant to the job descriptions so managers can base hiring decisions solely on merit. The Google Chrome extension Unbias also blurs out LinkedIn images and names to reduce unconscious bias. Think of it as hiring à la “The Voice,” where judges hear singers before they see them.

5. Dish Out Diversity in Lunchrooms

Outside of benefiting a business’s bottom line, having a diverse work environment also introduces other people to cultures they might not otherwise interact with.
Communities are better strengthened when the people in them socialize with one another, says Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. As the Houston Chronicle put it, “When a variety of viewpoints are thrown into the problem-solving mix, new and innovative solutions can be reached.”
Encouraging social diversity can be as easy as mixing up the menu. In Australia, for example, companies are encouraged to participate in A Taste of Harmony, a program that introduces employees to new cultures through food. And if you have a fairly diverse workforce already, try organizing a potluck where staffers bring in their favorite cultural dish to share.

6. Enlist Outside Expert Help

More companies are starting to beef up diversity by hiring outside help, such as diversity consultants, to oversee their company strategy.
Organizations like Paradigm and Project Include, cofounded by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao and other high-profile female techies, help startups analyze their company’s needs, and then hire and retain diverse talent.
“We convened as a group of tech women to strategize and try to move diversity forward by having hard conversations and redirecting efforts,” reads Project Include’s manifesto. “We want to provide our perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion. We know how hard change is from our own experiences.”

A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course

Since 2014 the New York City–based Drive Change has been operating a food truck, called Snowday, as a way of reducing recidivism rates among young people. The organization hires and mentors formerly jailed young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. And so far, it has ushered more than 20 of them through its paid fellowship program, which provides both specific training in the culinary arts as well as broader professional-development skills. Graduates of the program have gone on to work as line cooks in upscale restaurants and catering companies.
Now Drive Change is ready to scale its operations for greater impact as other cities, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, have expressed interest in launching similar programs. With a commissary set to open in 2018, Drive Change hopes to increase the number of fellows from roughly eight a year to 40.
Also on the menu for the nonprofit: a re-branding and a new look. Beginning in July, the award-winning Snowday will be called Drive Change, though it will still feature a seasonal menu with locally sourced food. In addition, the company is adopting an affiliate model where other food trucks that hire young adults coming home from prison can get Drive Change–Certified.
Founded by 31-year-old Jordyn Lexton, Snowday was originally conceived as the first in a fleet of food trucks. But the re-branding was necessary, Lexton says, because marketing different trucks while still promoting the organization’s social-impact mission proved too resource-intensive.
“We were constantly trying to figure out how to put our resources behind one brand versus the other,” says Lexton. “We recognized it caused more confusion than we had originally envisioned.” There was also a concern that Drive Change could be perceived as exploiting the very group of people it aims to help, adds Lexton. “We’ve been able to have young people we work with take ownership of our mission and what we stand for, and that’ll be forefront in our [new] brand identity.”
As Drive Change transitions, it is only accepting event bookings from organizations working directly in the field of social or racial justice, including re-entry from the criminal justice system. Says Lexton, “We’re really trying to raise awareness around those issues so change can happen.”
Homepage photo via Drive Change.
Continue reading “A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course”

Raising the Minimum Wage to $15

Seattle and San Francisco began raising their hourly minimum wage to $15 in 2015. Now Washington, D.C., and New York City are following their lead, and Democratic leaders in Congress have endorsed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024.  
But even as the fight for $15 gains new support in major cities around the country, many state-level congressional leaders are pushing back. In Minnesota, for example, lawmakers are trying to pass a measure that would prevent Minneapolis from paying its workers $15 an hour. A similar challenge is underway in Missouri, even while 10 other states reportedly have bills under consideration (and under challenge) to raise state hourly rates to $12 or $15.
Why the concern? While cities that pay workers more say that it’s sustainable, some economists predict people will lose their jobs en mass.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

Multiple private and public studies show that an hourly boost of a couple bucks gives workers thousands of dollars more each year. In some cases, the bigger paycheck has taken them out of poverty. But in others, it can leave them without a job.
“We have not seen evidence of any substantial negative effect to date,” says Dean Baker, co-director at the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research. “These increases have had large payoffs for low wage workers.”
A 2014 Congressional Budget Office study found that boosting the minimum wage to $10.10 nationwide would add $31 billion to the pockets of low-income American workers. (Money that would likely be spent on necessities like food, diapers, gasoline and clothing, not socked away for a rainy day.) But it also acknowledged that doing so would cause half a million jobs to disappear.
MORE: The Jobs Robots Won’t Take
Fiscal conservatives claim that the number of people who become unemployed could be even greater. A 2015 study conducted by the American Action Forum, a right-leaning policy research group, found that raising the hourly minimum wage to $15 would cause unemployment to skyrocket, with 6.6 million jobs lost nationwide. Plus, only 6.7 percent in added wages would reach the people that need it — those living below the poverty line.

A CASE STUDY

Currently, Seattle is the only city paying a $15 minimum wage for workers in large companies. Other cities are still phasing in their increases, so there’s little actual data on the long-term impact of raising wages this significantly.
“This is getting into untested areas for minimum wage increases,” Baker says. “We just don’t have much basis for knowing at this point.”
But the trends in cities that have boosted their minimum wage levels above the federally-mandated $7.25 an hour: a decrease in the number of new businesses setting up shop, workers’ hours being cut and an improvement in the standard of living for large segments of the workforce.  
“If you’re working less hours and still making more money, it’s a win-win,” argues Ken Rogers, chair of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

OTHER TRADEOFFS

In cities that have already increased their minimum wage, it’s noticeable that people aren’t hopping from job to job in an effort to earn a higher paycheck. For instance, the Center for Labor Research and Education found that when San Francisco’s airport raised employee wages in 2001, fewer workers quit their jobs, saving $6.6 million annually in recruiting and training costs. And a Harvard Business Review study revealed that when comparing wages between employees at two warehouse clubs, the company that paid higher salaries had a significantly lower turnover rate: 17 percent versus 44 percent.
Big picture, if more people earn a living wage, the number relying on Medicaid and food stamps could decline. According to a report by the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, for every dollar the minimum wage goes up, government spending drops $5.2 billion.
That being said, more than 9.2 million minimum wage workers were employed by all levels of government in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. So any money saved by Uncle Sam in welfare assistance would possibly be canceled out by higher paychecks to these folks.

MORE HELPFUL READING ABOUT THE MINIMUM WAGE:

As Cities Raise Wages, States Push Back, The New York Times
Poll: Bipartisan Majority Supports Raising Minimum Wage, The Hill
Democrats’ $15 Minimum Wage Push Faces Tough Political Reality, Delaware Online
Eyeing the Trump Voter, ‘Fight for $15’ Widens Its Focus, The New York Times
Homepage photo by David McNew/Getty Images

With Just a Cellphone, Factory Workers Are Being Heard

Heather Franzese, the co-founder and executive director of Good World Solutions, has toured hundreds of factories around the world since the time she first started working in the apparel industry a decade ago. “I have seen workers being exposed to toxic chemicals, workers being demeaned and not paid on time,” she says.
The poor working conditions in the factories Franzese visited were impossible to ignore in person. The flipside, of course, is that they’re all too easy to overlook from a distance. “Why do I get to see these conditions,” Franzese started to wonder, “and they’re invisible to the average consumer?” There wa­s something else Franzese began to notice too: more and more of the workers on production lines had cellphones. She started to think that, “there must be a way that we can use this technology to bridge this gap and actually establish two-way communication in real time,” she says.
That idea for two-way communication became Good World Solutions, a Bay Area nonprofit that uses widely available technology to amplify workers’ voices and address their concerns. The organization’s Laborlink platform lets workers take anonymous surveys about their working conditions using their cellphones. Companies and factories can then take action to respond to issues of concern, and ‘push’ information and communication back to workers through their cell phones.
The Laborlink platform launched in 2010 with just 100 workers in Peru. Today, it’s reached over 750,000 workers in 16 countries, collecting 4 million data points along the way. Through Laborlink, Good World Solutions aims to reach 1 million workers by 2018. Cisco has invested in Laborlink since the start and has supported the platform throughout its efforts to become financially sustainable. Cisco has also used Laborlink with its own supply chain.
The platform is highly adaptable. “We can survey workers directly in any language in any country, and all they have to have is a simple feature phone,” Franzese says. “They don’t have to have a smartphone. They don’t even have to be literate.” But the platform can also accommodate the technologies workers are most familiar with. For instance in China, where most workers do own smartphones, surveys are conducted over the popular messaging app WeChat. “We use a number of different technologies, whatever makes sense for the purpose and the local context,” says Franzese.
In the past, companies that wanted visibility of their supply chain relied solely on social audits. Inspectors would visit a factory for a day or two, observe the conditions, and conduct in-person interviews with selected workers. “The information that comes out of those worker interviews is often incomplete or unreliable,” says Franzese. Employees interviewed in front of their colleagues or supervisors may not feel comfortable making complaints. Plus, “it’s well known that in a lot of countries workers are coached on how to answer these questions,” she says.
Because it’s anonymous, Laborlink identifies problems that traditional audits don’t. At one factory where both an audit and a mobile survey were conducted, for example, 41 percent of those surveyed reported verbal harassment on the job. But not a single worker interviewed during the audit said anything about harassment. “What we’re offering is a way to surface more reliable information about sensitive issues,” Franzese says.
The potential benefits for workers are obvious. Beyond the mobile two-way communication, digitizing this type of data means it can be easily analyzed, and insights can be put into action. “Our purpose is to use this data to create safe and respectful workplaces,” says Franzese. Risk-based data visualization and predictive analytics can help identify the reasons for high turnover, bring to light information about critical safety issues, compare different factories, countries or regions, get a 360-degree view of the factory floor by surveying both factory workers and management and measure whether or not conditions are improving over time. For example, Franzese says, if a large number of workers claim they don’t feel safe, a company can dig into the responses and see if they differ by gender or by length of service, helping them determine the best way to handle the problem. And when those surveys do uncover problems, Good World Solutions has partners who can step in with education and training. If workers don’t understand how their pay is calculated, educational materials can be pushed out to their mobile phones. If the issue is more serious, a longer-term change may be implemented.
The system benefits factories and their managers as well. Employee turnover has been increasing in China over the past few years, says Deepak Telang, general manager of Mattel’s factory in Foshan, China. “That’s why I think it’s important for us to engage employees,” he says. “Connected, well-trained employees always give you the best results in terms of quality and productivity.”
Global brands are also starting to see the advantages of uncovering this kind of information about their supply chains, Franzese says. “Aligning business with worker needs is a huge potential win-win for business,” she says, adding that Accenture has calculated that severe supply-chain disruptions can cause a 7 percent drop in stock prices. Plus, companies are now very aware of the reputational risk they face from poor working conditions becoming widely known. “Employees have the best suggestions for how to improve. We just need to surface those voices,” she says.
Ultimately, consumers want ethical products they can feel good about buying, says Franzese. “The average consumer does not want to be associated with or know that the clothes that they’re wearing or the phone that they love was made in sweatshop conditions,” she says. “There’s obviously interest by consumers; the question is just how to tell that story in a way that consumers can understand.”
The very first company that Good World Solutions ever worked with, Indigenous Designs, a sweater company based in Peru, now puts QR codes on its price tags. Customers can scan the codes and immediately see what the workers who made the sweater have to say about their lives, their work and their hopes for the future. Lifting up factory workers’ voices, says Franzese, “is an opportunity for companies to do more to engage consumers on these issues.”
This article was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver — to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur and act as a social change agent.

3 Cities Where Job Growth Is Happening

There were significantly fewer jobs added to the U.S. economy in March 2017, just 98,000, the smallest increase since May 2016.  While the unemployment rate is 4.5 percent, underemployment continues to plague Americans, hovering around 14 percent in 2017.  But there are a few bright spots where some people are getting back to work.

Beckley, W.Va.

The loss of 127,000 mining jobs has devastated the Appalachian region, but Beckley, W.Va., is proving that there’s employment opportunities post-coal.
Over the last 12 months, Beckley reduced its unemployment rate by 2.5 percent, the largest year-over-year decrease nationwide, according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Beckley is relying on strategic partnerships between development agencies, schools and businesses to create jobs. One such initiative, the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority, provides relevant employment training in forestry, agribusiness and manufacturing and funnels workers directly into jobs upon completion — often without the need to submit a resume.
WorkForce West Virginia, a state-run agency, also has a branch in Beckley. Paid, on-the-job training in high-growth fields like welding, electrical engineering and diesel technology is available to unemployed coal workers and displaced homemakers entering the workforce for the first time.
“It’s like the old saying: ‘As one door closes, another one opens.’ As a state, we have to work together to identify those doors and open them,” says Dr. John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

Ames, Iowa

Higher education does more than just improve one’s employment prospects. It’s also a job creator.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Ames, Iowa, has lowest unemployment rate in the nation: 2.1 percent. It’s held this designation 12 times in the past 24 months.
The key to Ames’s workforce boom? A longstanding employer.
What cant be understated in the Ames region is the presence of a large number of public sector employment opportunities with the presence of Iowa State University, where there has been considerable [job] growth over the last 36 months,says Dan Culhane, CEO of the Ames Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Commission.
Fueling the college’s employment numbers is a 40 percent increase in enrollment during the past decade.
Culhane predicts this enrollment surge will cool within the next few years. To counteract it, the city is creating an internship program that will serve as an employment pipeline to retain recent university grads. It’s also making long-term investments by connecting industry leaders with local school districts to introduce students to employment opportunities in Ames.

Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City successfully conquered homelessness, and now it’s doing the same for unemployment.
Tied with Denver for lowest unemployment rate in a city with more than 1 million residents (3.2 percent), Salt Lake City is taking a creative approach to jobs. Literally.
When Mayor Jackie Biskupski took office in January 2016, she elevated the city’s economic development division to its own department, creating an umbrella over business development, redevelopment, and interestingly enough, the arts council.
Generally you dont think of arts as economic development, but it is. People want to live in cool places,says City Economic Development Director Lara Fritts. As part of its Cultural Core Action Plan, the city is incorporating public art into all development projects, creating jobs for local artists. Salt Lake City’s investment in arts and culture is paying off — the city was recently named the top U.S. city for millennials. And statewide, Utah is experiencing impressive growth in creative jobs: 3.7 percent compared to 2.9 percent in the other sectors.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT JOB CREATION, CHECK OUT THIS ADDITIONAL READING:
What the Unemployment Rate Does — and Doesn’t — Say About the Economy, Pew Research Center
Tech Jobs Are Thriving Nationwide — Up 7.3 million, USA Today
Series: Coal Is Dying — Coal Country Doesn’t Have to: Creating the Post-Coal Economy in Appalachia, Fast Company
Factors for Enabling the Creative Economy, World Economic Forum

On the Docket: Workers’ Rights

As the Senate begins confirmation hearings for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, the administration’s embattled travel ban is top of mind. Twice, federal judges struck down portions of its latest version. Now, the Justice Department is appealing. Will the fight go all the way to the Supreme Court as the president has vowed? Quite possibly.
Meanwhile, another case that could weaken the rights of American workers has (relatively) quietly made its way onto the Court’s fall docket.
The case, Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris (which is combined with two other cases), questions whether businesses can prohibit their employees from taking collective, legal action over workplace issues, such as unpaid wages and discrimination. A ruling in favor of the defendant, “potentially guts many of the core protections that most workers in this country think they have,” says Paul Schiff Berman, professor of law at George Washington University.
Here’s the situation: Big corporations, as well as startups, have increasingly asked new-hires to sign employment contracts containing waivers that forfeit the employees’ rights to pursue class-action lawsuits against their employers. Instead, individual employees are required to use arbitration to settle disputes.
Class-action lawsuits are typically more costly in terms of legal fees and time, compared to out-of-court settlements, which can be more appealing to both companies and employees.
“If an employer engages in unlawful activity that affects its workforce broadly, those claims are often too small to be brought by one person,” says Anne B. Shaver, an attorney with Lieff Cabraser Heimann and Bernstein, a firm that’s represented workers in landmark class-action lawsuits against numerous top Silicon Valley companies.
During the Obama administration, the National Labor Relations Board consistently ruled that these class-action waivers in employees’ contracts were invalid. But conflicting rulings in three circuit courts have pushed the issue up to the Supreme Court.
To be clear, this lawsuit does not pertain to most members of the ever-growing gig economy. Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts and the like operate as freelancers, not traditional employees.  
How would the Supreme Court rule with Gorsuch on the bench? In the past, it backed arbitration. With a fifth conservative judge whose judicial philosophy is similar to the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s, businesses may prevail again.
Homepage photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
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