This week in the War on Workers: Minnesota's minimum wage is going up

Laura Clawson for Daily Kos Labor

Daily Kos Staff

Saturday April 12, 2014 · 10:55 AM PDT

2014/04/12 · 10:55

Infographic on Minnesota's minimum wage increase for large businesses.

The Minnesota state House followed the state Senate's lead in passing a minimum wage increase that includes:

-- Raising minimum wage for businesses with gross sales of more than $500,000 to $8.00 in August 2014, $9.00 in August 2015 and $9.50 in 2016.
-- Raising wage for businesses under $500,000 in gross sales over three years to $7.75 by 2016.

-- Requiring large employers to pay $7.75 by 2016 to workers under age 18, as a 90-day training wage for 18- and 19-year-olds, and to certain international workers at summer resorts.

-- Starting in 2018, increasing wages annually by inflation capped at 2.5 percent.

-- Giving state Department of Labor and Industry commissioner authority to suspend the inflation increase if indicators forecast an economic downturn. Suspended increases could be restored in better economic times.

It's another imperfect minimum wage increase, but more than 350,000 workers should get a raise. Gov. Mark Dayton is expected to sign the bill Monday.

Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.

A fair day's wage

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The National Labor Relations Board has consolidated several intimidation and retaliation complaints against T-Mobile, but when news broke that a manager refused to give pro-union workers a high-five, the AFL-CIO had to act. And act it did, with a list of 10 suggested ways T-Mobile can further punish pro-union employees.
After 250 workers walked out to protest a longtime driver being fired, UPS fired all of them. But now, under pressure, it's rehired them all, though they'll get an unpaid suspension.
What's not to like about a "Labor Action Plan" between the U.S. and Colombia under which 73 trade unionists have been murdered?
LinkedIn has a post up from Barbara Corcoran, an employer and judge on the television show Shark Tank, explaining her theory of firing people:

To start off, I established a firm policy at the Corcoran Group to clean out the bottom 25 percent of our commissioned sales force each year. Firing people is the worst part of running any business, and the people best at hiring are never good at firing and tend to put it off too long. But I knew if the bottom quarter of the sales force wasn’t earning its keep, I wouldn’t be able to support the top salespeople who were making all the money. Moving our least productive people out and on their way to new careers was as important a part of my job as recruiting new talent, and I knew the faster I did it the better it was for everyone.
Right! So it's not that she's kind of a sociopath, it's that firing 25 percent of her employees every year is the nice thing to do. And this is the kind of employer that gets the TV gigs.
What's a sip-in, you ask? Jake Blumgart has the answer.

Education

In the context of California's very scary Vergara case, education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond explains to Josh Eidelson why all the furor about getting rid of bad teachers is looking at the issue wrong:

It is extremely easy to get rid of teachers. You can dismiss a teacher for no reason at all in the first two years of their employment. And so there is no reason for a district ever to tenure a “grossly ineffective” teacher — as the language of the lawsuit goes — because you know if a teacher is grossly ineffective pretty quickly, and it’s negligence on the part of the school district if they continue to employ somebody who falls into that classification when they have no barriers to [firing them]. And districts that are well-run, and have good teacher evaluation systems in place, can get rid of veteran teachers that don’t meet a standard and [don’t] improve after that point.
But in fact, the ability to keep teachers and develop them into excellent teachers is the more important goal and strategy for getting a high-quality teaching force. Because if what you’re really running is a churn factory, where you’re just bringing people in and, you know, firing them, good people don’t want to work in a place like that. So it’s going to be hard for you to recruit. Second of all, you’re likely not paying enough attention to developing good teachers into great teachers, and reasonable teachers into good teachers.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t get rid of a bad teacher if you get one. But you ought to be very careful about hiring and development – that makes that a rare occurrence.

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