Gap To End On-Call Scheduling For Workers


Gap Inc. announced Wednesday that it would end on-call scheduling for employees at its stores by the end of September, making it the latest retailer to drop a practice increasingly seen as unfriendly to working families. In a post on a company blog, Andi Owen, global president for Banana Republic, said Gap Inc.’s various brands had been reevaluating their scheduling practices over the past year with an eye toward “work-life integration.”

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Court backs Obama on minimum wage, overtime for home health aides

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit handed a victory to the Obama administration on Friday, ruling that the Department of Labor can make home-care providers eligible for the minimum wage and overtime pay.The three-judge panel on the federal court of appeals reversed the decision of a lower court, stating that the administration’s move was within the powers of the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA).

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Rolling in Sackcloth and Ashes

“This morning, I awoke under the watchful eye of that certificate into a living nightmare. Reports about the shooting at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, dominated my social media feed as texts from friends and colleagues poured in. Some expressed sorrow. Others shock. Yet, the most visceral feeling in my gut was rage. Nine bullets pierced the side of nine black bodies and in the process, shattered lives and any remaining illusion that there are spaces where black lives are protected in the United States. They were mothers, grandmothers, fathers and grandfathers crucified at the foot of the cross for embodying the virtue of hospitality. If, as a Christian, rage is absent from your analysis of what happened in Charleston, I am not sure we worship the same God.”

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With victory in L.A., the $15 minimum wage fight goes national

On Labor Day last year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti went to a celebration in a park on the south end of the city and announced what he called “the largest anti-poverty program in the city’s history”: boosting the minimum wage to $13.25 per hour by 2017. It was an ambitious move for a town that hadn’t recovered quite as strongly from the recession as two of its northern neighbors — Seattle and San Francisco. Legislators in those two cities had recently voted to go all the way to $15 an hour. But even L.A.’s more modest proposal still drew howls of resistance from corporate leaders, who predicted businesses would lay people off and flee the city in droves.

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Saqib Bhatti: Chicagoans Need a Financial Plan That Puts Neighborhoods First

On Tuesday night, Chicago voters reelected Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a race that was widely perceived as a showdown between the neoliberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. However, the election outcome should not be seen as a rejection of a real progressive agenda with alternatives to austerity. Emanuel defeated Jesus “Chuy” Garcia at the ballot box by turning the election into a referendum on Garcia’s financial chops. Even though voters were weary of Emanuel’s “tough medicine” approach to the city’s financial problems, Garcia failed to lay out a fundamentally different view of the problems underpinning the city’s budget and the solutions needed to get the city back on a solid financial footing, and voters opted for the devil they knew over the one they didn’t.


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