COVID-19
Vaccination Mandate – Information is emerging that appears to indicate that the Biden administration’s highly anticipated vaccine mandate rule for private-sector employers will allow businesses to force workers who refuse to get the Covid-19 shot to pay for required weekly tests and masks. The emergency rule, which will apply to companies with at least 100 employees and is expected to be released next week, will give employers the option of paying for testing and masks for unvaccinated workers or compelling those employees to foot the bill themselves. Employers will be required to absorb testing and mask costs in cases where a worker qualifies for an exemption to vaccination under federal law. More details.
Vaccine Passports – Ten more states are making plans to adopt digital COVID-19 vaccine credentials, potentially bringing the country closer to a de facto national standard. Kentucky, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Connecticut, Delaware, Utah, New Jersey, Washington, Nevada, and Colorado are now in line to dole out SMART Health Cards containing vaccination histories and test results with scannable QR codes. They’d join California, New York, Louisiana, Hawaii, and Virginia which have already made the credentials available for free to their residents. The digital certificates are now available to more than 150 million people. More details.
San Diego, CA – The city council made permanent allowances for outdoor dining, previously envisioned as temporary during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ordinance originally proposed limited “streetaries,” or outside dining establishments on streets with a speed limit of 25 mph or less. Six council members voted to amend that ordinance to allow streetaries on streets with limits up to 30 mph. More details.
Wages
Pennsylvania – The governor signed an executive order imposing new requirements for companies that accept incentives from the state government. The order calls for safer workplaces, increasing the minimum wage, and ensuring paid sick leave. Under the executive order, companies receiving incentives must pay $13.50/hr, rising to $15/hr on July 1, 2024. The sick pay requirement had no time frame attached to it. More details.
Costco – The company raised its starting wage for hourly store workers in the U.S. for the second time this year, increasing its minimum wage from $16/hr to $17/hr. Costco had previously raised its minimum wage to $14/hr in 2018, to $15/hr in 2019, and to $16/hr earlier this year. More details.
Raising Canes – The company is raising its hourly wages to an average of $14/hr, part of a $100 million investment in wages for both hourly employees and shift managers that will impact more than 90 percent of the company’s hourly workers. The majority of the raises have already taken effect in recent weeks, with the final round kicking in on Nov. 10. Raising Cane’s has also given out about $17 million in employee bonuses so far this year, with the average worker receiving $200. More details.
Starbucks – The company announced all hourly workers will make at least $15/hr and average nearly $17/hr by summer 2022. Some of the pay increases may start earlier. Additionally, starting in late Jan. 2022, employees with two or more years of service could receive up to a 5 percent raise and those with five or more years could receive up to a 10 percent raise. More details.
Paid Leave
Build Back Better – In order to get support of all 50 Democratic senators, the White House and Senate leaders stripped the pending paid leave provisions out of the President’s economic package. The plan’s survival has been in question for several days due to objections from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Biden’s initial 12-week proposal was scaled back to four weeks in an effort to secure Manchin’s support but that was rejected, leading to an effort by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) to find a compromise with Manchin. That did not succeed either, prompting Democrats to remove it from the package as they sought to scale back the proposal’s overall cost and programs to meet his demands. Negotiations with the Progressive Caucus in the U.S. House continue. More details.
Labor Policy
Labor Department – The agency released their final 80/20 rule returning to a standard similar to the one implemented under the Obama Administration (but later significantly altered by the Trump labor department). Under the changes, employees earning the sub-minimum tipped wage of $2.13/hr can only conduct work that “directly supports” their tip-producing work. The final rule will require employers to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage of $7.25/hr instead of the sub-minimum of $2.13/hr if they spend a “substantial” amount of time doing side work. Other provisions of the final rule include: clarifying that work such as “preparing food” and “cleaning the kitchen or bathrooms” is not considered part of the tipped occupation of a server because “the work does not provide service to customers for which tipped employees receive tips”; mandating employees earning the lower tipped wage cannot spend more than 20 percent of their hours in a week doing tasks where they can’t earn tips, and; mandating employers also cannot pay the sub-minimum wage to workers who spend more than 30 minutes continuously doing side work, even if it directly supports their tip-earning work. The changes are effective Dec. 28. More details.
OSHA – The U.S. Senate confirmed Doug Parker to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, bringing permanent leadership to the agency for the first time in five years. Parker will leave his current post as the head of CalOSHA, California’s workplace safety agency. His first order of business will likely be defending in court the Administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for private employers which is expected to be finalized soon. More details.
OSHA – The Occupational Health and Safety Administration published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, the initial step in the process of developing the first-ever national rules to protect workers from heat exposure on the job. The agency is requesting input from stakeholders and experts on the types of measures that could help protect workers from heat, including “heat-stress thresholds, heat-acclimatization planning and exposure monitoring,” in order to help the agency craft the rules. The notice includes more than 100 questions to help guide stakeholder comments. More details.
Federal Task Force – The task force, co-chaired by Vice-President Harris and Labor Secretary Walsh, released its first set of recommendations targeting federal workers. The group, created by a Biden executive order last April to “encourage worker organizing and collective bargaining” in workplaces, has empowered the Office of Personnel Management (OMB) to order agencies to highlight information about the existence of unions and labor rights in the federal workplace to current, prospective, and incoming employees. It stops just short of explicitly recommending that employees become dues-paying union members. Additional recommendations, including those targeting the private sector, are expected in the coming weeks. More details.
Activism
Amazon – Workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York City’s Staten Island borough officially filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to begin the process of forming a union. The organizing effort involves more than 2,000 workers across four Staten Island Amazon locations. The group’s stated goals are to achieve higher wages, create safer working conditions, and increase paid time off, breaks, and medical-leave options, among other goals. This labor effort stands out for being unaffiliated with any national union. It’s a product of a self-organized, grassroots worker group called the Amazon Labor Union, financed via GoFundMe. Earlier this year, the company prevailed in a highly-publicized unionization effort in Alabama that was engineered by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. More details.
Fight for $15 – The union-backed group staged protests in a dozen cities across the country demanding more accountability regarding sexual harassment reports and higher wages for all employees. Over the past five years, dozens of workers have filed charges against the company alleging harassment. In April, McDonald’s announced new global guidelines focused on several areas, including the prevention of harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and job site violence. Starting in Jan., restaurants will be evaluated based on whether they conduct required training on those issues, set up procedures for workers to make complaints, and other measures. The protests this week and much of the legal action have been orchestrated by the Fight for $15 campaign. More details.
Starbucks – The National Labor Relations Board authorized a mail-in election ending Dec. 8 for three Buffalo-area stores seeking union representation. In a win for the union organizers, the three stores will vote in separate elections, meaning that workers need only a majority of votes cast at a single location to form a union. The company had argued that employees at all 20 Buffalo-area stores should vote in a single election. More details.
Key Takeaways
- The removal of federal paid leave provisions from the Democrats’ economic package could be seen as a mixed blessing for the industry. While most operators are still dealing with the economic repercussions of the pandemic, the removal of the paid leave provisions gives them some needed breathing space from further disruption to their business model. However, many smaller businesses looked at a federal law as a way to bridge the gap as they compete for employees against larger industry players with the resources to offer more robust benefit packages. Additionally, the issue isn’t going away – it will just shift back to the state level where there will be new, invigorated efforts to enact or expand paid leave laws. Clearly, the industry dodged a big bullet with this week’s development but the issue will still be front-and-center going forward.
- The decision by the NLRB this week to minimize the size of the bargaining unit involved in the unionization election in Buffalo should be noted by all employers. The NLRB basically sided with the union on every argument and the process is proceeding just as the union would prefer. This should clearly demonstrate that, in the current environment, it will be rare if union priorities aren’t affirmed by the NLRB and operators will rarely get the benefit of the doubt going forward. Brands should prepare accordingly.
Podcast
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