Walmart has a totally great, in no way open to abuse, new way to compete with Amazon: it’ll just have its in-store workers deliver packages on their way home from work.

“Walmart is uniquely qualified, uniquely positioned, to be able to offer this,” he said, adding that 90 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. “There is really strong overlap between where are associates are already heading after work and where those packages need to go.”

Management claims this is a great new thing for workers:

The company is billing the program as a way for employees to earn extra money, although there were few details on how they would be paid. Jariwala declined to clarify whether employees would be paid based on distance, time, number of deliveries or a combination of those things. [...]

The program is voluntary for Walmart employees, Jariwala said, adding that they can sign up for up to 10 deliveries per day using a company app. They can also set size and weight limits on packages. If there are not enough employees to deliver packages, Jariwala said carriers like UPS and FedEx would fill in.

“This is completely an opt-in program,” he said. “This is not something associates are required to do. They are, first and foremost, always going to finish their shift.”

And no manager ever retaliated against a worker for not participating in a supposedly voluntary program. And we can completely believe that Walmart will make the additional pay for deliveries fair to workers. Walmart has earned our trust like that with its stellar treatment of workers in its stores, right?

Yeah, right. Right now this is a pilot program in three stores, but wait until it becomes a widespread practice—smart money says the abuse stories will start rolling in pretty quickly.

You might think that a standardized test would be a way to eliminate discrimination from job hiring—everyone gets the same questions, and everyone’s answers are graded in the same way. But you’d be wrong. In fact, some standardized tests used widely by employers looking to screen job-seekers can be instruments of discrimination, Will Evans reports. One test alone caused illegal discrimination against more than 1,000 people, according to the Labor Department:

At a California factory for Leprino Foods Co., the world’s largest producer of mozzarella cheese, WorkKeys put 253 Latino, black and Asian applicants at a disadvantage, the department found. Leprino Foods eventually agreed to pay $550,000 and hire 13 of the rejected job seekers.

At a chemical plant in Virginia, an auto parts factory in upstate New York and an engine plant in Alabama, the tests also illegally screened out minority applicants, according to Labor Department records. At a General Electric Lighting plant in Ohio and an aluminum factory near Spokane, Washington, WorkKeys unfairly hurt the chances of female applicants, officials found.

The tests didn’t adequately measure whether an applicant would be good at the job, violating civil rights protections, according to the government. The employers paid a settlement to unsuccessful applicants and scrapped the tests.

But other employers—including local and state governments in many places—continue to use tests that aren’t relevant to the jobs they’re hiring for, potentially screening out people who are qualified for the jobs they’re trying to get.

It’s been 10 years since Congress raised the minimum wage and a raise can seem further away than ever. But congressional Democrats are pushing the issue despite the Republican stranglehold on the federal government that’s blocking any progress for working people. Democrats this week introduced a $15 minimum wage bill:

"Democrats have been working to put together a bold, sharp-edged agenda, and this bill will be a part of our agenda — that will be spoken about and lobbied for and pushed for from one end of the country to another," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at a press conference introducing the bill Thursday.

Schumer later introduced House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as his "comrade in arms."

The bill would raise the federal minimum to $9.25 an hour this year, with additional yearly increases until reaching $15 an hour in 2024. A rule allowing tipped workers to be paid less than the federal minimum would also be phased out over this period, and raises to the minimum would be indexed to inflation beginning in 2025.

Workers across the country put the $15 minimum wage on the agenda, with laws to make it an eventual reality in California, New York, and Washington, D.C. In Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed his colleagues to embrace $15, after Democratic minimum wage goals rose from $9 to $10.10 to $12 before, now, meeting what workers have been organizing for since 2012.

Uber remains evil, and for once it’s not getting away with every nasty trick it pulls. The company has admitted that it underpaid its New York City drivers by around $45 million, and will give back pay averaging $900 per driver:

The ride-hailing company has previously misled drivers about how much they could make and miscalculated fares. In this case, Uber was taking its cut of fares based on the pretax sum, instead of after taxes and fees as stated in its terms of service. The issue was also raised in a lawsuit against San Francisco-based Uber filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In March, Uber acknowledged that it had underestimated drivers’ pay in Philadelphia by millions of dollars. 

But Uber’s wage theft, even just in New York, doesn’t stop at $45 million.

The Taxi Workers Alliance said the payments Uber is offering didn’t go far enough. "While we welcome progress in Uber acknowledging its unlawful deductions, make no mistake: the full amount that they owe to drivers is much more than what it is now claiming," Bhairavi Desai, the Taxi Workers Alliance’s executive director, said in a statement. "Uber hasn’t just wrongly calculated its commission, it has been unlawfully taking the cost of sales tax and an injured worker surcharge right out of driver pay as opposed to charging it on top of the fare as the law requires."

This is a terrible company, and if you think that once Uber has undercut taxis and found a way to screw over public transit it won’t treat you like it currently treats its drivers … think again. Think hard. And think about the fact that companies like Uber want to turn us all into workers they can exploit this brazenly.

It turns out that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos didn’t provide details on the plan to privatize America’s schools during her big speech Monday night. She mostly just insulted people who disagreed with her while offering simplistic, misleading comparisons and platitudes.

If you hear nothing else I say tonight, please hear this – education should not be a partisan issue.

Said the woman who has dedicated millions of her family’s fortune to waging partisan warfare on the public education system.

If we really want to help students, then we need to focus everything about education on individual students – funding, supporting and investing in them. Not in buildings; not in systems.

Apparently DeVos hasn’t heard of economies of scale. Schools can afford math teachers and language teachers and art teachers and science teachers and gym teachers—or could, before Republicans started slashing budgets—because every student’s share of the education budget is pooled together to afford those things, where one student’s share couldn’t cover a full teacher’s salary, let alone teachers for multiple subjects plus classroom supplies plus a building to learn in (we call that a school, Betsy).

Defenders of our current system have regularly been resistant to any meaningful change. In resisting, these 'flat-earthers' have chilled creativity and stopped American kids from competing at the highest levels.

Flat-earthers, said the woman whose display of ignorance at her education secretary confirmation hearing shocked the nation. Quick, someone ask her about climate change.

Betsy DeVos will give a speech Monday evening in which she’s expected to offer details on how she and Donald Trump plan to destroy American public education. DeVos will be speaking at the American Federation for Children’s national policy summit. The American Federation for Children is a school privatization advocacy group that DeVos herself headed right up until Trump nominated her as education secretary, and to which she and her husband contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars, so she’s really completing the circle of corruption here.

She is believed to be preparing to unveil an education tax credit scholarship proposal, which the Trump administration has been considering for some time, according to multiple sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. What DeVos is expected to outline could look different than a bill pushed by Republicans Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rep. Todd Rokita of Indiana. If passed by Congress, the proposal could channel billions of public dollars to working class families to help them pay for private schools, including religious schools.

As the details of this plan come out, keep your eye on that “working class families” thing. Some voucher-type programs create tax cuts for the wealthy or give vouchers to families that were already paying private school tuition, funneling more money than students from public to private (often religious) schools. Such programs often increase segregation and allow discrimination—not that DeVos or Trump would worry about that.

DeVos’s fairly obvious leak to Politico includes the claim that “DeVos is expected to stress that the Trump administration won’t mandate school choice and will emphasize state flexibility, sources say,” but a Washington Post report on the Trump-DeVos education budget suggests that there will be extra money for states that go along with the regime’s privatization priorities, while after-school programs, teacher training programs, funding for class-size reduction, arts education, and more would be slashed.

DeVos’s speech will doubtlessly include a lot of gauzy language about choice, some seriously messed-up comparisons, and whiny self-righteousness. But the devil will be in the details, and there will be a devil.

Friday afternoon, 40,000 AT&T workers in 36 states launched a three-day strike as part of their fight for a fair contract. David Bacon offered some background leading up to the strike:

AT&T has proposed to cut sick time and force long-time workers to pay hundreds of dollars more for basic healthcare, according to CWA. At a huge April rally in Silicon Valley, CWA District 9 vice president Tom Runnion fumed, "The CEO of AT&T just got a raise and now makes over $12,000 an hour. And he doesn't want to give us a raise. He wants to sabotage our healthcare then wants us to pay more for it. Enough is enough!" [...]

The relocation of jobs to call centers in Mexico, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and other countries is one of the main issues in negotiations. A recent CWA report charges that in the Dominican Republic, for instance, where it uses subcontractors, wages are $2.13-$2.77/hour. Workers have been trying to organize a union there and accuse management of firing union leaders and making threats, accusations and intimidating workers. Several members of Congress sent a letter to President Donald Trump this year demanding that he help protect and bring call center jobs back to the United States.

You can follow the strike on Twitter @UnityatMobility and you can find a picket line near you. 

Becoming a parent is one more aspect of life poisoned by economic inequality in the United States, with people who are paid more than $75,000 a year twice as likely to get paid leave as people who are paid less than $30,000. And even companies that have touted their parental leave programs leave many of their workers out, giving paid leave to their salaried staff at corporate headquarters but not to the workers standing behind the cash registers or making the cappuccinos or fried chicken. A new report from Paid Leave for the United States highlights the inequality within major U.S. companies:

• Starbucks has one of the most unequal policies—they provide 18 weeks of fully-paid leave for new mothers and 12 weeks fully paid for new fathers in corporate headquarters, but only six weeks for birth moms who are in-store employees (like baristas) and nothing for dads or adoptive parents in this employment category. Starbucks employs ~5,000 people in its corporate headquarters and ~150,000 in stores; meaning their highly-touted policy affects about 3% of their total U.S. workforce.
• The nation’s largest private employer, Walmart, provides twelve weeks of paid leave for birth mothers who are corporate employees—but only 6-8 weeks at partial pay for birth moms who are among the 1.2 million hourly employees in their stores - if they work full time.
• Yum! Brands offers 18 weeks paid parental leave to birth mothers, and 6 weeks to dads and adoptive parents who work in the corporate office only. Field employees, who work for franchises such as KFC and Pizza Hut, receive no paid family leave.

A few companies do have equal leave policies for their corporate and frontline workers: Ikea, Levi’s, Nordstrom, Nike (though it leaves out part-time employees), Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Hilton, and Apple. 

Just six percent of low-wage workers have any paid leave at all, which is why a quarter of new mothers are back on the job within 10 days. That means that not only are new mothers leaving their newborn babies, they’re working before they are physically recovered from childbirth.