Labor

Last year, restaurants welcomed and served more than 70 million Americans celebrating Valentine’s Day, the nation’s second most popular holiday for the industry. Unfortunately, under the federal minimum wage for tipped employers, millions of restaurant workers, including waitresses and servers, are only making $2.13 per hour, a mere $4,430 per year.

This year, the National Restaurant Association is forecasting a record-breaking $635 billion in revenue for 2012 – all while the tipped minimum wage has resulted in staggeringly low wages and poverty among tipped employees in the restaurant industry.

In 2007, Congress raised the overall federal minimum wage to $7.25 but relinquished the opportunity to raise the tipped minimum wage under political pressure by the restaurant industry. This missed opportunity to address the tipped minimum wage has ultimately disproportionately affected women. More than five million women help to generate these records in revenue, but suffer from poverty wages primarily because the federal tipped minimum wage has been frozen since 1991.

As founder and CEO of Paycom, one of the largest payroll companies in the United States, I bring a unique and credible voice to the recent and ongoing payroll tax extension debate in Congress. My company provides payroll services for over 11,000 businesses across the nation and processes several million payroll checks every month. This gives me a unique perspective on the challenges facing American businesses.
 
Most importantly, I have no opinion about whether or not the payroll tax cuts should be extended. Those decisions are for our elected representatives to make, if they can be convinced to make them. However, I do have two important questions. Do the members of the House and Senate know enough about how payroll works to understand the way in which their stifling indecision and last-minute changes are unnecessarily adding costs to American businesses, creating anxiety for American workers and adding complexity to our tax system? If they do, shame on them. If they do not, why not ask payroll experts before arbitrarily choosing two months as a timeframe for a decision that impacts Americans’ paychecks?

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce will hold a hearing on the President’s recess appointments to the NLRB – the latest of
a series of wasteful, politically motivated hearings attacking the board since the GOP assumed control of the House in January 2011.

Even in these days of hyper partisanship, it is rare for a party to engage in such rank hypocrisy as has the GOP on the NLRB. Republican criticism of the board falls into three categories: the legitimacy of Obama’s recess appointments, the supposedly biased nature of his nominees, and the NLRB’s “activist agenda” that has enraged the right-wing.

Since 1935, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has administered the federal labor relations law protecting the rights of private sector workers to form unions. The board also promotes the interests of employers by establishing a regulatory environment that rewards cooperative behaviors in the workplace. With his recess appointments to the board, President Obama safeguarded workers and employers alike from the legal limbo that would have resulted had the board being forced to shut down.

In the New Process Steel case, the Supreme Court said that the board needs three members to make decisions, and decisions issued with only two members have no legal effect. The board formerly consisted of three members, but one of those members, Craig Becker, held a recess appointment that expired at the end of 2011. As a result, President Obama’s appointments were necessary to prevent the collapse of board processes and protect employees’ rights on the job. Employers should support these appointments because uncertainty and delay do not benefit anyone — business or workers.

Over the course of the last three years, President Obama has waged a rhetorical campaign against special interests and their influence in Washington DC, while at the same time spearheading an effort to deliver unprecedented giveaways to his largest and most influential campaign contributor, labor bosses.

The heads of unions have been the most frequent visitors to the White House and they have openly bragged about having access to
administration officials every day of the week, including weekends. They have also candidly spoken about using administrative agencies full of unelected bureaucrats to create policies that they have been unable to move forward in the Congress due to their lack of popularity with workers and business owners.

Of the roughly 17.5 million working-age people in the United States living with a disability, nearly 70 percent receive disability benefits. A recent study revealed that 12 percent of all federal spending goes to supporting this population—$357 billion in 2008. Just 33 percent of working-age people with disabilities are employed, compared to 73 percent of those with no disability. This costly system is failing both people with disabilities and taxpayers.

The federal government began offering Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits to older workers no longer able to work because of long-term impairments in 1956. The nation has since expanded SSDI coverage and launched additional programs to support Americans living with significant disabilities. This support system, however, has failed to keep up with the changing needs of Americans or the realities of current economic times. Despite the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act, people with disabilities, as a group, are falling further behind their peers without disabilities and are becoming more—not less—dependent on government programs.

When Newt Gingrich told Mitt Romney to “cut the pious baloney” at the second New Hampshire Republican debate, he wasn’t referring to the baloney
that Romney and others have been talking about the National Labor Relations Board, but he should have been. For the NLRB, 2012 has started just as 2011 ended – with more politically motivated attacks chock full of pious baloney from anti-union Republicans.

First, there’s the over-the-top reaction to the President’s decision to make three recess appointments (2 Democrats, 1 Republican) to the NLRB on January 4. Republicans had been holding pro forma sessions every three days since December 16, at which no business was conducted, and claimed that the Senate was not been in recess and the president could not make appointments. Perhaps the best expression of pious baloney came from Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.), supported by 71 other House Republicans, who announced she would introduce a resolution condemning the appointments when Republicans returned to Washington – i.e., when they were no longer in recess. Not far behind in the baloney stakes was Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, who called the appointments “an affront to the will of the American people.”

With tens of millions of Americans still out of work and searching for jobs this new year, our nation’s elected leaders need to get serious about putting Americans back to work.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing serious about the supposed “job creator” bills that the House of Representatives passed along party lines late last year, unless your goal is to do serious damage to the government’s ability to protect Americans through sensible rules and protections. 

The House bills’ supporters claim that government regulations are holding back the economy, and that by cutting these back, we will see increased hiring. This is nothing but a bait and switch. Accepting cuts in safety and fairness won’t get us more jobs, it will just make the jobs we already have worse.

One question dominates labor politics this New Year: will President Obama make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board? Early last
month, the Administration indicated that appointments were likely, but since then has been silent on the issue. However, if it were to make recess appointments, these could come as early as January 3.

The stakes are high for unions and their adversaries. As of last week, when Craig Becker’s appointment ended, the NLRB was reduced to two members, one Democrat and one Republican. A 2010 Supreme Court decision (New Process Steel) ruled that a two-member Board lacks a quorum and cannot exercise its full authority in a number of critical areas.

In a recent post, John Logan paints the Employee Rights Act (ERA) introduced by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and South Carolina Rep. Tim Scott, as a “disingenuous” bill favoring “the 1%” of America’s workers. Republicans, Logan claims, are out to weaken “already pathetically weak workplace rights.” Instead of creating jobs, the ERA is picking on “Big Labor” while it is “struggling to survive.” 

Logan’s argument is, in fact, the disingenuous one. The scandalous inequalities between unionized workers and their well-heeled union bosses dramatically illustrate the disregard for real workplace rights that Hatch and Scott are working to correct in the first comprehensive attempt to reform our labor laws in over 60 years. 

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