Walmart Black Friday Protests Hit Major Cities With Calls For '$15 And Full Time'

WASHINGTON -- Dirk Rasmussen had Friday off and could have slept in if he wanted to. Instead, the Maryland resident and Teamster rose early and drove to downtown Washington, eager to join a post-Thanksgiving protest against Walmart.

"Our local [union] president encouraged us to take part," said Rasmussen, 58, who works in a lumber and building-supply warehouse. "I raised eight children on a Teamsters benefit package and Teamsters wage. I'm a firm believer in collective bargaining, and I'm very concerned about the security of this next generation."

Black Friday may be most famous for doorbuster shopping deals, but among progressives it's becoming a regular holiday for labor demonstrations. Friday marked the third consecutive year of scattered but highly visible protests against Walmart. Demonstrators, along with an unknown number of Walmart strikers, are calling for better pay and scheduling practices from the world's largest retailer.

On Thursday and Friday, photos on Twitter tagged with #walmartstrikers showed sizable protests in D.C., Pittsburgh, Northern New Jersey, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., and St. Paul, Minn., among other areas. The protests were led by OUR Walmart, a union-backed worker group, alongside community and labor groups in different cities.

100+ stand in solidarity w #WalmartStrikers on thanksgiving in DC pic.twitter.com/Spqc8rsooQ

-- DC Jobs With Justice (@DCJWJ) November 28, 2014

Dan Schlademan, campaign director of Making Change at Walmart, a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said on a call with reporters Friday that he expects the number of strikers to be in the hundreds by the end of the day, though the group could not provide a specific number of workers who'd submitted strike notices to their bosses.

"All the signs that we're seeing is that this is going to be the biggest day ever," Schlademan said.

Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Walmart, told HuffPost that the retailer was more concerned with serving its customers than with protests it views as union stunts. According to Buchanan, more than 22 million shoppers came to Walmart stores on Thanksgiving alone this year.

"We're really focused on our customers," Buchanan said. "We've got millions of customers coming in [on Thanksgiving] and Friday, and we're making sure they have a safe and exciting shopping experience."

In D.C., a crowd estimated at 200 to 400 people assembled outside the Walmart store on H Street Northwest, calling on the retailer to commit to "$15 and full time" -- a wage of $15 per hour, the same rate demanded by fast-food strikers, and a full-time schedule for those who want it. One of OUR Walmart's top criticisms of the retailer is that part-time workers don't get enough hours.

The protest was large enough to draw the D.C. police, who stood at the store's doors and dispersed the crowd after about an hour.

Melinda Gaino, an employee at the store, said she would be missing three shifts this week while on strike. Gaino took part in a sit-down strike on Wednesday inside the H Street store, where she and other protesters sat on the floor with tape over their mouths, calling on Walmart to end what they called the silencing of workers.

Gaino, a 45-year-old mother of four, said she joined OUR Walmart in August out of concern with some of the challenges faced by her colleagues. Many workers, she said, don't get enough hours to support their families.

"This has given me more confidence," Gaino, who earns $9.90 per hour, said of going on strike. "I said I've come this far, so I may as well go all in."

Correction: This item originally misstated the number of Walmart shoppers on Thanksgiving.

Nice of @walmart to set up a lovely tableau for #WalmartStrikers! Roll back? Fight back! #BlackFridayWOA pic.twitter.com/XR0y85co5o

-- Jess Banks (@ProfBanks) November 28, 2014

Solving The Tech Worker 'Shortage' Is Easy: Just Pay Them More

American tech CEOs love to complain that they can't find enough skilled workers, and they want the U.S. government to change its immigration policies to fix the problem. But it's a problem that doesn’t exist.

The real problem is not that there aren’t enough qualified workers to do tech jobs, but that tech companies simply don’t want to pay people enough money to do them, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Josh Eidelson pointed out on Monday, citing academic research.

Specifically, Eidelson quoted Rutgers professor of public policy Hal Salzman saying that tech companies looking for new hires “may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

Salzman’s research found that 50 percent of computer-science college students don’t enter the tech industry after graduation. Thirty-two percent of the students Salzman surveyed said there weren't enough tech jobs available -- countering any idea of a worker shortage. Fifty-three percent of students said they “found better job opportunities outside of IT occupations." That suggests the relative pay of tech is the real problem.

Tech companies do pay well compared to the median U.S. income of $53,000. A few years ago, Business Insider reported that starting median salaries at big companies ranged from $55,000 to $87,000. But these companies are not competing to employ the median U.S. worker; by their own admission, they want highly skilled workers. Those 53 percent of tech grads who found better offers elsewhere suggest that tech companies pay less than some companies they are competing against for talent.

Add to this Salzman's finding that inflation-adjusted tech pay hasn't risen since 1999, and you don't get a picture of an industry that is, overall, offering best-in-class pay.

Even if there were in fact a shortage of tech workers, tech CEOs could fix it by simply paying workers more. It’s the same solution The New York Times’ Neil Irwin called for when the trucking industry bemoaned a lack of truckers: Pay them more, and they will come.

Instead of taking a free-market approach to attracting workers -– raising pay to increase the supply of workers -– the tech industry has focused on lobbying politicians to increase the number of temporary H1-B visas for high-skilled workers, to let a greater number of workers enter the country. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created an entire organization, called FWD, to push for immigration reform that included more H1-B visas.

It's no accident that these H1-B workers are cheaper. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 80 percent of H1-B visa workers make less than Americans in similar jobs.

In arguing to bring in more of these workers, tech CEOs claim their industry is unique. Tech workers are nothing like truckers, they would say. Tech jobs are specialized and talent-based, with top performers that are vastly more productive than other employees.

But the same can be said of many white-collar occupations. Technology companies are not unicorns. Other industries deal with the same issues tech companies are constantly decrying, including global competition for talent and a sub-standard U.S. education system, and seem to do just fine.

For instance, look at finance. Wages are high enough that there are plenty of people willing to do complicated, skilled work for more than 80 hours a week.

As a result, no one ever talks about a banker shortage. Quite the opposite: There are semi-regular columns imploring young and impressionable college graduates to ignore the allure of high pay in the financial sector -- and instead try working in tech, maybe. And some of those grads do. But you will never hear a bank or hedge fund complain that they just can’t hire enough people.

FWD, the group founded by Zuckerberg, did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did representatives from Apple, Google and Facebook.

Obamacare Sign-Ups Near 500,000 After First Week

More than 460,000 people enrolled in a private health insurance plan on the federally run Obamacare exchanges in 37 states during the first week of the sign-up period for 2015 coverage, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday.

These enrollments are almost evenly split between renewals of existing customers and new sign-ups, according to a report issued by the department. More than 1 million people have submitted applications for financial assistance and coverage and almost 1.6 million have reviewed prices for insurance using HealthCare.gov's window-shopping feature between Nov. 15, the opening day of the three-month health insurance exchange enrollment period, and Nov. 21, the department disclosed.

President Barack Obama's administration aims to sign up more than 9 million people for private health insurance via these exchange marketplaces by the close of the enrollment period on Feb. 15, including renewing most of the approximately 7 million people who already have insurance policies obtained through the federally operated exchanges and those run by 13 states and the District of Columbia.

"We had a solid start, but we have a lot of work to do every day between now and February 15," Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell said in a press release.

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services was forced to acknowledge it overcounted Obamacare health insurance enrollments for this year by hundreds of thousands by including people who purchased dental plans, after a report by Bloomberg News revealed the error, which was uncovered by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

During a conference call Wednesday with reporters, Burwell pledged greater transparency about the Obamacare exchanges. The Department of Health and Human Services will issue weekly and monthly reports on health insurance exchange enrollment, Burwell said.

The number of enrollees during the first week of the current sign-up push is more than four times the number who selected health insurance plans during all of October 2013, when the exchanges launched amid crippling technical problems.

States including Kentucky, Maryland and California that have their own exchanges also have reported strong enrollments so far.

Half a million enrollees in a week puts federal Obamacare officials on pace to sign up close to 1.8 million people during the first month, but the system remains far from the 9.1 million target for 2015 enrollees, which Burwell established earlier this month. The administration is standing by that aspiration, however, she said.

"We are staying with that number," Burwell said. "We have a lot of work before us, and we're going to continue focusing on that."

As of last month, nearly 7 million people had health insurance policies purchased through an exchange. The federal marketplaces and most state-run exchanges will automatically renew customers into their same plans for next year if they don't choose a different one. But with health insurance premium increases and decreases varying widely across the nation -- especially for the least costly and most popular policies on the market in 2014 -- consumers who fail to shop around could wind up paying much more by standing pat instead of seeking more affordable plans for next year.

"We are strongly urging and encouraging everyone to come back, make sure your information is the most up-to-date," Burwell said. "For many, many people it is very important to come back and shop."

The deadline to choose a health insurance plan that will be in place on Jan. 1 is Dec. 15. Current enrollees who automatically are renewed into their policies can still switch to a new one for the rest of next year after that date, up to the final deadline for 2015 coverage on Feb. 15.

This post has been updated with details from a conference call Burwell had with reporters.

A Landmark Retail Workers 'Bill of Rights' Passes Unanimously In San Francisco

Amid growing concern over erratic work schedules, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday passed a first-of-its-kind law aimed at securing more stable hours for retail workers.

Dubbed "the retail workers bill of rights," the law, which passed the 11-member, all-Democratic board unanimously, requires the city's large chain retailers to post workers' schedules at least two weeks ahead of time. Workers will be owed supplemental pay if unexpected changes are made to their schedules, or if they're required to be "on call" and their shifts are suddenly canceled.

The law, championed by Supervisor David Chiu, also requires that the employers offer any extra hours they have to their current workforces, rather than bringing on more part-time or temporary workers.

Passed as a set of two bills -- the first sailed through last week, the second on Tuesday -- the law marks a significant victory for labor groups and other advocates for retail and low-wage workers.

At a time when minimum wage and sick leave proposals are proving extremely popular, backers of the San Francisco legislation hope similar measures will now pop up in other cities and perhaps even states. California and its cities often find themselves on the leading edge of progressive labor policies.

Ann O'Leary, head of the children and families program at Next Generation, a San Francisco nonprofit that pushed for the legislation, said the law was fashioned partly in response to retailers' use of on-call and just-in-time scheduling. Modern scheduling technology may help retailers cut costs and become more efficient, but it also makes workers' hours less reliable, she said.

"It's not the manager thinking about people's needs -- it's a computer looking at the data," O'Leary said. "In San Francisco there's a higher minimum wage, but some weeks you're getting 10 hours and others you're getting 25. It's very hard to figure out what you're doing in terms of family income."

O'Leary also said the legislation was meant to address recent economic trends. With the high unemployment rates of the recession and recovery, many more workers than usual found themselves underemployed, working part-time but wanting more hours. The number of these so-called "involuntary part-time" workers has gradually dropped as the economy has rebounded, but it's still far from from its pre-recession levels.

Although popular among city supervisors, the San Francisco measures were opposed by the city's chamber of commerce. As Politico reported, the lobby sent a letter to the board last week criticizing the crafting of the law as opaque.

"These ordinances were drafted in large part behind closed doors, with last minute changes that brought numerous other employers within the scope of the ordinances, without notice or outreach," the letter stated.

Backers of the legislation tried to make it more palatable to the San Francisco business community by carving out smaller employers. The law only applies to what city law considers "formula retail" companies, which are retail and food chains with 11 or more locations nationally. So while companies like Target and McDonald's will have to follow the law, the local corner store and mom-and-pop boutique will get a pass.

Despite the chamber's concerns, O'Leary said advocates didn't encounter much opposition to the proposal, probably because of how it was limited to larger companies.

"Since we moved from something that would cover the entire workforce to more formula retail chains, we haven't seen big resistance from the employer community," she said.

The coalition of groups supporting the law was hoping to raise standards in general at large chains, according to Michelle Lim, an organizer with the San Francisco office of Jobs with Justice, a non-union labor group focused on low-wage industries. Groups like Lim's have been instrumental in winning labor-friendly measures like San Francisco's through city councils as well as the ballot box.

"What a retail worker bill of rights could do is really lift the floor not just for retail workers but for chain businesses," said Lim. "It's also creating lot of opportunities for organizing."

The San Francisco bill already has a federal companion of sorts in Congress: the Schedules that Work Act. The legislation would require businesses to compensate workers who show up for their scheduled shift but are turned away, as well as workers whose schedules are changed without at least 24 hours' notice. Sponsored by House Democrats, the bill has virtually no chance of passing the GOP-controlled House or the soon-to-be-GOP-controlled Senate.

With Congressional Republicans opposing a minimum wage hike and other legislation aimed at low-wage work, labor unions and their progressive allies have found much more success on the local level. Despite the drubbing that Democrats took in the midterm elections earlier this month, binding ballot initiatives on the minimum wage passed easily in four red states. A measure that will require many employers to provide their workers with paid sick days also passed in Massachusetts.

Polling shows that voters are highly sympathetic to minimum wage raises and sick-leave mandates. O'Leary said she suspects scheduling rights for retail workers will prove popular as well, even in cities that aren't as famously liberal as her own.

"There are a lot of eyes on San Francisco now," she said. "People are wondering if we can bring this citywide, and then to the state level, and then around the country."

You're More Likely To Inherit Your Dad's Social Status Than His Height

Social mobility is a myth.

That is the depressing conclusion -- or, if you're already part of the social elite, the great news -- of a new study by economists Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, and Neil Cummins of the London School of Economics. The hope that we can claw our way up from our low station to someplace fancier is a delusion for most of us, according to this study. We inherit social status from our parents just as much as, if not more than, our physical traits.

And this social status often persists across many, many generations. The title of the study -- "Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170–2012" -- gives you some idea of just how many generations we're talking about here: 28 generations of 30 years each. The study looked at centuries of data on the social statuses of English families. It found that many of the families who were socially elite landowners in 1170 -- your Montgomerys, Nevilles, and Percys -- were still socially elite in 2012.

"Strong forces of familial culture, social connections, and genetics must connect the generations," the authors wrote. "There really are quasi-physical 'Laws of Inheritance.'"

The study used attendance at Oxford and Cambridge Universities ("Oxbridge") as a proxy for high social status; typically only elite students go to those schools. Across generations, the "correlation coefficient" -- a number that shows the strength of the correlation between two things, with a 0 meaning not correlated at all and 1 meaning perfect positive correlation -- was between 0.7 and 0.9 for generations of the same family going to Oxbridge. In comparison, the correlation coefficient for height between generations is just 0.64, according to one study cited by the researchers.

Hang on, you might be saying, isn't England notorious for low social mobility? Isn't it the land of Downton Abbey-style snooty inherited wealth? Sure. But guess what? The United States is really not much better. A 2013 study by Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa found that the U.K. and U.S. were two of the least socially mobile countries in the developed world. Here's a chart that puts this in perspective:

Note that, according to Corak's study, low levels of social mobility -- meaning it's hard to move from one social level to a higher one -- are also associated with high levels of income inequality.

This is the kind of world that French economist Thomas Piketty warns could become increasingly common -- one in which inherited wealth just keeps growing while incomes stagnate. It's the sort of the world we're living in today, come to think of it.

Most worryingly, the Clark-Cummins study found that social mobility hasn't really improved significantly in recent decades, despite social programs aimed at boosting it, such as higher tax rates on wealth and programs to help lower-class students get into Oxbridge.

Maybe we just haven't given such programs enough time to work, though. And given the many economic risks created by widening inequality, we shouldn't stop trying to boost social mobility.

How FDR Commercialized Thanksgiving

For those who deride America's biggest retail companies for ruining Thanksgiving by offering Black Friday "doorbusters" smack dab in the middle of the holiday, that's hardly the worst of it.

Many decades ago retailers actually managed to convince the president to change the date of the holiday in order to get people to shop more.

In 1939 during the Great Depression, then President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving Day a week earlier to give Americans an extra week to do their Christmas shopping.

That year, Thanksgiving would have fallen on November 30, the last day of the month. That meant there were fewer days than usual between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fearing that the shortened holiday shopping season might further crimp the economy, FDR simply moved the date.

At the time, the president said that retailers had pushed him to move Thanksgiving because the holiday fell too close to Christmas. He justified his decision by acknowledging "there was nothing sacred about the date," according to an Associated Press story that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 15, 1939.

FDR moved Thanksgiving in 1939.

There was, of course, much opposition. According to the AP story, the town of Plymouth, Mass., where the first Thanksgiving holiday was celebrated, was staunchly opposed. The move also "provided a headache... for football schedule makers," who had already scheduled games to be played on the day they thought would be Thanksgiving. Sixteen states refused to accept the president's proclamation, and kept Thanksgiving on its normal day. Overall 59 percent of Americans objected to it, according to a Gallup poll.

The change was so unpopular FDR reversed his plan less than two years later, admitting that his Thanksgiving experiment didn't do much to help the retail industry.

In 1942, Thanksgiving went back to being on the last Thursday of November, as President Abraham Lincoln had originally intended in 1863.

"Some people never forgave him,” Geoffrey C. Ward, author of "The Roosevelts," told The Huffington Post.

FDR announced in 1941 that he was moving Thanksgiving back to its original date.

Though today, there's no talk of moving Thanksgiving earlier in the month to satisfy corporate America, the effort to make the holiday shopping season longer is still alive and well.

Last year, Thanksgiving once again fell late in the month, a "glitch" that retailers worried would cost them billions. In response, many stores opened for the first time on Thanksgiving Day and holiday spending actually increased over the previous year.

So in a way, Roosevelt was right. Even though his experiment didn't totally pan out, it was only a matter of time before retailers got their stranglehold on Thanksgiving once again.

Doritos-Flavored Mountain Dew Is Real, PepsiCo Confirms

PepsiCo Inc. is concocting a version of its Mountain Dew soda flavored to taste like cheesy Doritos chips, the company stated Friday.

The soda and snack giant said it tested the new flavor, dubbed “Dewitos,” on college students. The company did not reveal which colleges participated in the test, but at least one Reddit user, who goes by the username joes_nipples, posted a photo of the taste test on Friday, saying the soda did, in fact, taste like Doritos.

“We are always testing out new flavors of Mountain Dew, and giving our fans a voice in helping decide on the next new product has always been important to us,” a spokeswoman for PepsiCo said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “We opened up the DEW flavor vault and gave students a chance to try this Doritos-inspired flavor as part of a small program at colleges and universities.”

This isn't the first time PepsiCo has combined the highly caffeinated soda and the cheese-dusted nacho chips. PepsiCo also owns Frito-Lay, which makes Doritos, and the company has a long history of linking the two brands through new flavors or joint promotions. In 2008, PepsiCo released Doritos Quest, a sweet chip with a mystery flavor that was later identified as Mountain Dew.

The company has also long promoted Doritos and Mountain Dew, together enshrined in video gaming culture as the ultimate snacking cuisine, in marketing campaigns promoting the release of games on Microsoft’s Xbox.

Earlier this year, PepsiCo began printing special codes on bottles of Mountain Dew and bags of Doritos that can be used to unlock gear and increase experience points in “Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare,” which was released this week.

It’s unclear whether the Doritos-flavored soda will ever reach store shelves. But there's evidence to suggest that the Doritos and Mountain Dew combination is popular: In June, YouTube chef Rosanna Pansino introduced the world to Mountain Dew-flavored cupcakes topped with a Doritos crumble. And interest in the two brands, as shown by this Google Trends graph, seems to be on the rise:

This story has been updated.