Category: Blog

Cold and flu season is just around the corner.  So what do grocery and retail workers have to do with public health? In a nutshell, they handle your food and if they don’t have adequate sick days from their employers, you may be more likely to get sick.

That is why, paid sick leave for grocery and retail workers is so important.

In addition to the common colds and flus that are passed along when an ill cashier touches every item that goes into a customer’s grocery bag, serious illnesses are spread as a result of people working while sick.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that sick food workers cause over half of norovirus outbreaks, and contributed to another 29% of outbreaks.
• During the H1N1 Pandemic in 2009, sick workers may have caused as many as 7 million co-workers to get sick.
• In 2011, 16% of documented foodborne illnesses in Washington were caused by ill food workers.

A lack of paid sick leave can also harm child health and school performance.

No caregiver wants to be in the position of choosing between staying home to care for a sick child and going to work so they can pay the bills. However, without adequate paid sick leave, many families must decide between caring for a sick child at home and losing needed pay or risking their jobs.

• One in five workers in a recent survey we conducted of grocery and supercenter workers live with at least one child and do not have any other adults in their households.
• In Washington, the majority of preschoolers and school-age children live in homes where all parents are employed.

Adequate paid sick days mean fewer children going to school sick. When parents can stay at home with their kids, recovery times are shorter and germs stay home too—ensuring healthier schools, families and communities. For more information read our policy brief on Paid Sick Days on our website.  Also see our article on the results of our examination of paid sick leave for grocery and retail workers.

So be sure to cover your cough with your elbow, AND ask your local supermarket if they offer paid sick days to their employees!

Job quality matters. Growing employment means little to the region’s economic bottom line unless new jobs are quality jobs; they must not only pay well, but be stable, flexible and predictable for workers. When workers can predict their monthly income and work hours, they are able to pay bills on time, provide regular care for their children, maintain stable housing and make investments of both time and money in their communities.  All that leads to economic growth and thriving communities.

However grocery and retail giants are finding new ways to target their workers to drive down their costs and drive up profits. The growing trend? Pass the risk of changing consumer demands on to their employees. Here is how it works. Rather than hiring people into full-time, regular jobs, grocery giants push their employees into part-time, fluctuating schedules. As a result, workers’ hours per week fluctuate and consequently, so does their pay. Walmart, the #1 retailer in the world, has gained attention for denying their workers full-time employment and regular schedules.

At Puget Sound Sage we surveyed grocery and supercenter workers in King County, and found that grocery and supercenter employers frequently create worker schedules that are unstable, unpredictable and inflexible.  Click here to read a copy of our policy brief.

Workers Schedules are Unstable:

Of the workers surveyed, the majority (57%) reported that in the last 3 months, the difference between the most and least weekly hours they were assigned varied by 10 or more hours. This means that the majority of workers experienced changes in hours as severe as being assigned 35 hours one week, but only 25 hours the following week. For workers living paycheck to paycheck, this change is significant. Surveyed workers averaged $12.18/hour. At this hourly rate a 10-hour change in schedule equals a pay cut of $122/week.

As Corporations Drive Down Job Quality, Cost to Tax-Payers May Go Up:

The instability, unpredictability and inflexibility of corporate scheduling practices are one part of a larger pattern of employer actions that are driving down the quality of jobs, especially for workers in the grocery and retail industry. Other such practices include failing to provide paid sick leave and making employees work through breaks. Additionally, part-time employees in the retail sector are at risk of losing work hours as more and more profitable corporations seek to get around the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

For more information on how scheduling can affect workers’ access to health insurance read our report on Washington’s Changing Workforce. Stay tuned to Sound Progress to read the next in our series on the survey regarding paid sick leave and missed breaks.

Recent analysis of Washington’s Changing Workforce shows that service industry employers are heavily reliant on part-time (PT) workers in order to do business. The trend sheds some light into the proliferation of non-standard employment in Washington State which has reached its highest point in a decade. It also represents a growing concern over the quality of jobs in the State’s economy, given that an increasing share of workers in Washington work part-time involuntarily, because they cannot find full-time (FT) jobs.

Six industry sectors hold the largest shares of private sector PT employees and/or rely the most heavily on PT labor. In fact, nearly two thirds of all PT jobs are in these industry sectors. The table below calculates a “part-time reliance quotient.” This number is the industry’s share of private sector PT workers divided by its share of the total workforce at the US level. It also gives the average annual earnings for industry workers in Washington.

Retail, Food Services, and Health Services together account for nearly 52% of PT workers in the US. Educational Services, Social Assistance, and Arts/Entertainment/Recreation make up another 12.4%. Among the top three sectors, the PT reliance quotient is slightly above average in Health Services (112%), high in Retail Trade (156%), and extremely high in Food Services (227%). Rates of PT worker utilization vary within each of these sectors.

So why do service industry employers rely so heavily on part-time workers? They are overall less expensive to employ and their work hours are easy to cut. Some employers are executing a maneuver increasingly being referred to as the Walmart Effect. As the implementation of the Affordable Care Act approaches, some large corporate employers are dropping part-time workers from health insurance and shifting the cost for coverage onto the federally subsidized state health care exchange and state and federally funded Medicaid. See our post next week on the workers most likely to have their hours cut.

There is also increasing evidence that many service sector employers manipulate and fluctuate worker hours to offload the risk associated with fluctuating consumer demand. See our post tomorrow on scheduling in the grocery industry for more information.

For more information about part-time and contingent work in Washington State, read the full report online.

Puget Sound Sage has just released a new analysis of state labor trends show that private sector businesses are increasingly transforming regular, full-time jobs into part-time, temporary or contract positions.  The full report, Washington’s Changing Workforce is available on our website.

The report finds that nonstandard work now accounts for nearly a third of private sector employment in Washington, or about 916,000 workers according to an analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data. Although this figure likely under-counts the share of jobs that are nonstandard, a conservative estimate shows an increase from 27.8% in 2007 to 31.7% in 2010, the latter figure exceeding the late peak of 29.6% in 2004.

One of the greatest drivers of this trend is that a growing number of workers can only find part-time work.  In the past, most people who worked PT did so voluntarily because of care giving, work obligations, school, and—in the case of retirement-age workers—because of Social Security limits on earnings.

However, as private sector employers seek to cut labor costs, workers are not arriving at PT work arrangements by choice, but are pushed into these forms of employment because they are unable to find FT employment. In fact the share of prime working age adults (25-64) who are working PT involuntarily has more than doubled since onset of the recession. In 2009, for the first time the rate of prime working age adults who are working PT involuntarily exceeded those working PT by choice.

What does this mean for Washington workers? Less income, less stability and increased pressure to work more than one job to make ends meet! It also means that as more corporations are becoming dependent on part-time, temporary and contract workers, they are effectively cut their workers off employer-based health care. For more information about how the increase in nonstandard employment in Washington affects access to quality health care read our report Washington’s Changing Workforce.

Seattle’s real estate market is back, which means big projects in downtown.  But as developers begin to sell the public and local government on the merits of their projects, community members in the downtown area are skeptical. Will big projects provide real benefits for Seattle residents, or create more problems?

After sitting on the land for years, Seattle’s R.C. Hedreen Company has launched plans to build a mega hotel in the heart of downtown Seattle.  The project will sit on the old greyhound bus site at 9^th and Stewart and will reach the highest allowable height in downtown at 400ft tall.  The plans include 1620 hotel rooms, and 150,000 net sq. ft. of convention space. To give you a sense of the scale, the total proposed amount of meeting space is greater than the combined meeting space in Seattle’s Sheraton, Westin, Hyatt and Hilton hotels.

The project will employ over 1,000 workers (over 700 will work in the hotel). However, the jobs will likely be low-wage, no benefit jobs with unsafe working conditions.  Because of these characteristics hotel jobs have historically put significant pressure on tax-payer funded public services. For example, from 2006 to 2010, the State of Washington spent at least $44 million to cover an average of 4,224 uninsured hotel workers per year.

Existing area tenants, home owners and congregation members have begun to raise concerns about the impacts of the project.  Given the scale of the project, leaders argue that this project warrants an environmental impact statement (EIS) and increased attention to traffic impacts and pedestrian safety.

Local elected officials and public servants overseeing the design aspects of the project should follow the community’s lead. An EIS, typically required on large projects, would not only uncover potential environmental impacts, it will also examine the project’s impact on public services.  If hotel workers do not earn living wages and have opportunities to live close to work, will the project lead to higher burdens on city, county and state budget in terms of social, health and transportation services? These are important questions that must be investigated in a public process, with input from residents and other community stakeholders.

Community members know the potential impacts and envision a different reality for this project.  Their efforts hinge on making the project stronger, with an eye towards the experience of project neighbors, the environment and the impact to our local economy.

The Greyhound hotel project is currently under design review.  Before it goes forward, the project will go to the Seattle Design Commission and to City Council for an alley-vacation approval – a process to privatize the publicly owned alleyway that will allow for the 150,000 square feet of convention space.  This process requires process requires an in-depth review of community benefits provided by the projects, look for a future post on the process and what the community benefits packages need to include.

Gentrification is in full swing in Rainier Valley.

Over the last 10 years, demographic data reveals a clear trend of gentrification in Southeast Seattle. In King County, people of color populations grew 47%, while the white population shrank 2%. However, in Rainier Valley people of color populations only grew 5%, while the white population increased 17 %.

The presence of light rail in Rainier Valley is likely perpetuating gentrification in the coming years. Since construction of the light rail, land values and rents around the stations have increased dramatically. Accessed land values surrounding the Othello station increased by an average of 513% since 1999. Additionally, the presence of new buildings around the light rail stations helped increase the average monthly rent in Rainier Valley from $700 in 2008 to $1,000 this year for apartment buildings with 20 or more units . The acceleration of gentrification with light rail is a trend that has been seen in other major urban areas .

What does this mean for South Seattle residents? To answer that question it is important to consider that gentrification in and of itself does not necessarily lead to current residents being pushed out of neighborhoods, or the rise of racial homogeneity. It is when gentrification is mixed with other destabilizing factors that displacement occurs (read our post on gentrification and displacement.)

It also means that it will be critical for policy-makers to take proactive steps to ensure that transit-oriented development (TOD) takes race into account, and prioritizes the needs of families and communities of color. For more information on policy solutions that help address displacement see our article on the Five Ways Seattle Policy Makers Can Promote Racial Equity in Southeast Seattle.

For more information, read the full report Transit Oriented Development that’s Healthy, Green & Just.