Publication
As of 2018, at least 18 states have enacted joint-employer shield laws specifically designed to protect one very wealthy special interest group: corporate franchisers. Corporate franchisers are the big companies—like McDonalds, or Marriott, or Carl’s Junior—that use the franchise business model, in which oftentimes small-business owners (the franchisees) pay for the rights to use the company’s trademarks, services, and products. These state joint-employer laws are intended to shield the corporate owners of the franchise from bearing joint responsibility with their franchisees for complying with minimum wage, overtime, health and safety, and other laws applicable to the employees who work at the franchisee’s stores. In simple terms, the joint-employer shield laws preclude applying the joint-employer legal doctrine to hold franchisers jointly responsible for violations of employee rights.
Kentucky’s workforce development conversations focus almost exclusively on employers’ needs and perspectives and ask how public dollars can improve perceived deficiencies in the workforce. Such an approach ignores the increasingly difficult conditions employees face in the labor market, and the responsibilities employers should have to provide jobs that meet acceptable community standards.
Media
From PRI:
Last week it was reported that average hourly wages of American workers grew 2.9 percent over the past 12 months. It’s a good sign, but American workers still have a lot of catching up to do and income inequality and wage stagnation remain major concerns…Yes, national wages inched up last year. But consider this statistic from Michelle Webster with the Colorado Center on Law & Policy: “In 2016, median earnings for workers in the state were 2 percent less than what they earned in 2000″ when adjusted for inflation.
Media
Recent signs suggest worker pay is finally rising after years of stagnation despite an economy that has been steadily chugging along since 2009. The latest jobs report from the Labor Department shows that low unemployment is pushing up wages a bit. Employers added 200,000 jobs in January and private-sector workers, on average, saw their paychecks increase nearly 3 percent, compared to a year earlier.
The change was a long time coming, and no doubt most workers won’t find the modest bump much to crow about. Policy makers and good corporate citizens still have a lot of ground left to recover. For starters, the great bulk of hourly workers averaged only a 2.4 percent gain, as the increases for the salaries of managers contributed to the overall findings.
And our readers might remember that under a December editorial headline “Shame on Grinch America for workers’ stagnant wages,” we bemoaned the findings from the Colorado Center on Law & Policy that Colorado’s median hourly wages were $18.92, which was about 4 percent lower when adjusted for inflation than in 2007, the last year before the horrors of the Great Recession.
The center went on to note that 2016’s median pay was 2 percent lower, after accounting for inflation, than in it had been 2000.
Michelle Webster, the center’s manager of research and policy analysis, tells us the recent gains, while encouraging, have a long way to go to make up for years of lethargy.