While one of the central tenets of repeated calls for major changes to New Jersey’s public pension system is the claim that public employee pensions are overly generous, retirement benefits for the state’s public workers are already among the least generous of all large public-sector pensions in the country, in part because of cuts enacted in the pension reforms of 2011. In fact, New Jersey ranks 95th in pension generosity among the country’s 100 largest plans.
Governments across the U.S. and around the world are investing billions of dollars in the film and television industry in an effort to create and retain the high-quality jobs attached to the industry. Yet musicians – the highly-trained and highly-talented women and men who record the scores for movies and television shows – are being left behind. This report shines a light on this oft-overlooked segment of the industry by examining the trends and forces contributing to a dramatic decline in domestic employment for recording musicians working at the industry standard.
This report concludes that by increasingly offshoring recording work, Hollywood studios and production companies are saving relatively small amounts of money. These savings, however, have disproportionate costs for musicians, taxpayers, and the broader economy. Hollywood can easily afford to meet the top employment standards for musicians, thereby not only providing ample quality employment, but strengthening domestic economies.
In 2008, a coalition of community members, faith leaders, workers, and labor leaders passed the nation’s first Construction Careers Policy. This policy approach aimed to increase workplace standards in publicly-funded construction projects and increase access to quality construction careers for communities struggling under the weight of poverty and chronic unemployment. The policy met these goals by coupling a Project Labor Agreement with a targeted hire program.
Six years and six victories later, the success of the Construction Careers Coalition represents a new way forward in public investment and accountability. This report will outline the successful Construction Careers approach, the groundbreaking victories of this partnership, and the benefits to workers, community members, and taxpayers.
Our research found the dire working conditions of port truck drivers to have flowed from the practice of treating employees as if they were ‘independent contractors,’ an illegal practice called misclassification. At the time of our first report, there were practically no official government investigations to verify our findings despite a host of enforcement agencies being responsible for preventing misclassification.
That has now changed. Our findings match those coming from recent investigations of employment practices common in the industry by the United States Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Labor Relations Board, and various state agencies. More importantly, these investigations signal a new dynamic, one with practical ramifications for the organization of work in the industry as well as for broader discussions of inequality in this country.