Daily Kos: Labor

Teachers, social workers, firefighters, members of the military, and other government and nonprofit workers are seeing their student debt wiped clean thanks to the Biden administration’s overhaul of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The program was supposed to make public service work more appealing by offering the promise that, after 10 years of payments, people’s student loans would be forgiven. Instead, virtually no one qualified—just over 16,000 people as of fall 2021. That has changed.

Around 70,000 public servants have now gotten nearly $5 billion in relief, and in the end, up to 550,000 of them could get help. 

Staffing shortages have forced more school closures around the country in recent days, and the locations of some of those schools should give pause to the flood of hot-takers wanting to blame it on teachers unions and Democratic lawmakers any time a school closes or goes remote. 

Six elementary schools in Wichita, Kansas, were closing on Tuesday due to coronavirus-related absences. Three of the schools were public, three were private, and two of the private Catholic schools were planning to be closed Wednesday as well. A Wichita high school had to close last Friday. About 10% of students and 8.5% of staff in the district were in quarantine.

At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, essential workers were widely dubbed “heroes.” That didn’t mean they were treated well or protected with adequate safety measures, but people were talking about their contributions. Since then, company after company has rolled back already inadequate safety measures and benefits.

Walmart already slashed the paid time off it gave workers with COVID-19, following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s gift to employers of an isolation period reduced from 10 days to five. Then Walgreens and CVS followed suit.

Workers at a Washington, D.C., Trader Joe’s say their managers have told them not to enforce a District mask mandate. Workers at Red Lobster restaurants say they’ve been pressured to work while they’re sick with no paid sick leave, managers writing them up for absences, and “threats,” Judd Legum reports. The lives and safety of workers are treated with callous disregard—and management is basically hoping that customers who would rather not get sick don’t notice how their own health is being put at risk.

Officials at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts recently made a mistake: They provided an opening for staffers in federal judges’ offices to report that they had “witnessed wrongful conduct in the workplace.” The question was quickly pulled, but not before 34 out of 40 people who responded said that yes, they had.

The question appeared on the registration for a training on “Workplace Conduct Protections & Employment Dispute Resolution,” a training to “explore employment rights in the federal judiciary, the avenues for reporting misconduct and obtaining guidance, the EDR process, and options for resolution,” The Washington Post reports. So it’s possible that the people interested in the subject have disproportionately experienced or witnessed misconduct.

Still.

More than 8,000 grocery workers went on strike in Colorado on Wednesday, after their contract expired and Kroger, the parent company of King Soopers and City Market stores, made an unacceptable “last, best and final” offer.

Contract negotiations have stalled on several fronts, including pay, health care, workplace safety, staffing levels, and reliance on part-time workers. The company is touting an offer that would create a $16 starting wage for workers on the contract—a number that turns out to be 13 cents an hour over the minimum wage in Denver, where several of the stores are located. The minimum wage in the state of Colorado is $12.56 an hour. And Kroger is offering $18 an hour to replacement workers—scabs—during the strike.