retail workers
7-Eleven workers organize against workplace violence: ‘Convenience store workers deserve to be safe’
kkrisberg | November 20, 2015In February 2015, a group of 7-Eleven night shift workers in Buffalo, New York, filed a complaint with OSHA. Sick of enduring regular bouts of verbal harassment, racial slurs and even death threats from customers — threats they often experienced while working alone with no security guard — they hoped OSHA could help bring about safer working conditions. Unfortunately, the agency decided not to investigate.
With no help from OSHA, the workers sought out guidance at the Western New York Worker Center, a project of the Western New York Council on Occupational Safety and Health (WNYCOSH). There…
kkrisberg | December 12, 2014The week of midterm exams is stressful for any college student. For San Francisco State student Michelle Flores, it was another stress-filled example of the unfair conditions she and millions of other retail workers face on a regular basis.
Flores, a 20-year-old labor studies and public policy undergrad, is a cashier at a national grocery store chain and usually works a 24-hour week, though she’d like to work more. Just before midterms, she found out her supervisor expected her to work 30 hours the same week as her exams — and he gave her just two days notice.
“I said I'd work them,” she said…
lborkowski | December 1, 2014A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic: Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid
Danielle Paquette in The Washington Post: An Obamacare program helped poor kids and saved money. It was also doomed to fail.
Richard Florida at CityLab: This Holiday Season, Let's Turn Retail Jobs Into Middle-Class Ones
Gabrielle Glaser at ProPublica: Twelve Steps to Danger: How Alcoholics Anonymous Can Be a Playground for Violence-Prone Members
Emily Eakin in The New Yorker: The Excrement Experiment: Treating disease with fecal transplants