Oh, hey, look: California passed a law saying that
cheerleaders for professional sports teams deserve the same legal rights as other people who do work for profitable businesses.
[Gov. Jerry] Brown announced Wednesday that he signed AB202, requiring that sports teams employ cheerleaders as workers instead of contractors. It provides them with sick leave and overtime pay, as well as other labor protections available to team staff.
The law, which will take effect in 2016, is believed to be the first of its kind in the nation. A similar bill in New York is pending.
NFL teams had faced a series of
lawsuits by cheerleaders who had been paid far below minimum wage while having everything from their weight to their table manners dictated by their employers. After one of those suits, against the Oakland Raiders, California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, a former college cheerleader, introduced the bill.
As it became law:
"We would never tolerate shortchanging of women workers at any other workplace. An NFL game should be no different." Gonzalez said in a statement. "Today we took an important step toward ensuring that multi-billion dollar sports teams treat cheerleaders with the same dignity and respect as every other employee who makes the game-day experience special."
Continue reading below for more of the week's labor and education news.
A fair day's wage
- Which millennials are buying homes and saving enough for retirement? The ones with rich parents.
- Erik Loomis asks is the Obama administration complicit with slavery, and the answer, unfortunately, is yes:
The more one looks into the Obama administration’s reclassification of Malaysia in its human trafficking index, the more disturbed one gets. Malaysia openly engages in widespread human trafficking. This is technically illegal in Malaysia but Kuala Lumpur does nothing to stop it. Meanwhile, the U.S. government does nothing about it in its negotiations with Malaysia because that nation is so key to Obama’s cherished Trans-Pacific Partnership. The situation has not improved. The Obama administration knows this. And yet its response is to know push for a system that would create meaningful regulations or standards for Malaysia to crack down. The response is simply a meaningless change in classification that does absolutely nothing to fight Malaysian slave labor. I understand that all administrations have to balance a number of morally dubious options at times and make tough choices. But with the TPP, Obama has made decisions that hurts workers on three continents in order to assist American corporations. Both the American and Vietnamese labor movements actively oppose the TPP, while workers without voices such as trafficked labor in Malaysia are completely left powerless through this agreement.
- Noam Scheiber takes a look at the "gig economy":
Along with other changes, like declining unionization and advancing globalization, the increasingly arm’s-length nature of employment helps explain why incomes have stagnated and why most Americans remain deeply anxious about their economic prospects six years after the Great Recession ended.
Last year, 23 percent of Americans told Gallup they worried that their working hours would be cut back, up from percentages in the low to midteens in the years leading up to the recession. Twenty-four percent said they worried that their wages would be reduced, up from the mid- to high teens before the recession.
- When we talk about why people aren't working, can we talk about the Fed?
- Some American Federation of Teachers members are upset about the union's decision to endorse Hillary Clinton. See for instance here and here. I'm putting this here to highlight that discussion but am definitely not agreeing with everything there—for example, the "I don't know anyone who was polled" implication that the decision was somehow rigged misses exactly how small a poll sample is as a fraction of a total population.
Education
- Charters widen Ohio's achievement gaps:
Despite making up 8% of all Ohio school buildings, charters represent 13% of the worst-performing math buildings, 31% of the worst-performing reading buildings, and 78% of the buildings with the worst graduation rates.
- Why charter school reform died in Ohio. (And Ohio has some charters that need reforming in the worst way, and I don't just mean poor results.)