Labor

The members of a group of over 200 coders, computer scientists, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs calling themselves the Maria Tech Brigade believe that relief efforts after Hurricane Maria need to be approached from a different perspective. Namely, by developing technologies for people connected to Puerto Rico. The Brigade does eventually want to extend these technologies to people in Puerto Rico. For instance, member Jesús Luzon is working on developing low-cost solar panels for people without power. But initiatives like these are in their beginning stages, and the Brigade's most notable success so far might be its community.

Newsroom employees at The Los Angeles Times are trying to form a union, setting up a potential clash with the newspaper’s parent company, Tronc. After months of organizing, the committee behind the push for a union drafted a one-page letter laying out its reasoning and left printouts on employees’ desks the night of Oct 3.The unsigned letter calls for improved working conditions, higher pay, more generous benefits and protections for staff members against “unilateral change by Tronc.” The letter also says “a majority of the newsroom” had signed union cards supporting representation by the NewsGuild, which represents 25,000 reporters, editors, photojournalists and other media workers at news organizations across the United States.

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have the potential to automate a wide range of human activities and to dramatically reshape the way that Americans live and work in the coming decades. The public generally expresses more worry than enthusiasm about emerging automation technologies – especially when it comes to jobs. US adults are roughly twice as likely to express worry (72%) as enthusiasm (33%) about a future in which robots and computers are capable of doing many jobs that are currently done by humans.

The public supports policies that would limit the scope of automation technologies: The vast majority of Americans (87%) would favor a requirement that all driverless vehicles have a human in the driver’s seat who can take control of the vehicle in the event of an emergency, with 53% favoring this policy strongly. And in the event that robots and computers are able to do most of the jobs that are done by humans today, 85% of Americans are in favor of limiting machines to performing primarily those jobs that are dangerous or unhealthy for humans.

Black and Latino representation has declined in Silicon Valley, and although Asians are the most likely to be hired, they are the least likely to be promoted, according to a new study exposing persistent racial prejudice in the tech industry.

The research from not-for-profit organization Ascend Foundation, which examined official employment data from 2007 to 2015, suggests that people of color are widely marginalized and denied career opportunities in tech – and that the millennial generation is unlikely to crack the glass ceiling for minorities. “There have been no changes for Asians or any other minority over time – men or women,” said Buck Gee, the study’s co-author and an executive adviser to Ascend, a US-based research group that advocates for Asian representation in businesses. For some groups, he added, “It’s actually worse.”

While women and people of color are employed at tech companies in larger numbers than they used to be, their upward mobility at those companies has stagnated. From 2007 to 2015, white men consistently composed a higher share of executive roles than professional roles at tech companies, the study found. It’s the reverse for Asians, Hispanics and blacks, especially if they’re women.

Women and minorities have seen significant gains among first-time directors in episodic television, a new study from the Directors Guild of America shows. The study of the just-concluded 2016-17 season, released Sept 27, shows the percentage of ethnic minority first-time TV directors more than doubling since 2009-10 and the percentage of women nearly tripling.

“Finally, after years of our efforts to educate the industry, hold employers accountable through our contracts, and push them to do better, we’re seeing signs of meaningful improvement,” said DGA president Thomas Schlamme. The DGA has been studying first-time hires since the 2009-10 season. The new report shows that 56 (or 25%) of all first-time hires in the 2016-17 season were ethnic minorities, up from 24 in the 2015-16 season; 73 (or 32%) were women, up from 38 in the prior season; and 18 (or 8%) were female minorities, up from six.

The White House will put at least $200 million in grant funding towards bolstering STEM and Computer Science education “particularly among historically underserved groups,” the administration announced. The minimum $200 million commitment from the Department of Education is supposed to bolstered by private sector contributions that senior administration officials say will be announced later the week of Sept 25. The money will be available to schools across the country to bolster their science and technology programs, at the start of the 2018 fiscal year. A senior administration official said that the White House had been having conversations with school superintendents and governors across the country, encouraging them to take advantage of the funding.

A majority of high schools in the US do not currently offer computer science courses and 40 percent do not offer physics courses. The administration’s push comes amid continued calls from technology companies for more skills training and reformed worker visas to fill high-demand technology and engineering roles. A senior administration official told reporters on a call that the initiative was born out of input from such companies seeking more STEM workers.

For the last 20 years, Boxed In has tracked women’s representation in prime-time television. The project provides the most comprehensive historical record of women’s onscreen portrayals and behind-the-scenes employment available. The study examines dramas, comedies, and reality programs appearing on the broadcast networks, basic and premium cable channels, and streaming services.
Overall, 68% of the programs considered featured casts with more male than female characters.
Across platforms, females comprised 42% of all speaking characters.
Females accounted for 42% of major characters on broadcast network, cable and streaming programs.
The percentage of female characters featured on broadcast network programs was the same in 2016-17 as it was nearly a decade earlier in 2007-08.
Across platforms, programs are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse.
Regardless of platform, gender stereotypes on television programs abound.

AT&T workers are planning a demonstration outside Apple headquarters on Sept 12 during the highly anticipated iPhone 8 launch to draw attention to their ongoing contract dispute. Members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) say that AT&T has been cutting pay, laying off workers and offshoring jobs at an alarming rate. Hundreds of workers are expected to show up and demonstrators plan to chant and display signs that read “iMay get outsourced by AT&T.” AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said the new contract would offer employees competitive salaries averaging nearly $70,000 a year and that the company is confident the workers will “be better off financially in their new contract.” “As in all of our contract negotiations, we’re committed to working together with the union to reach a fair agreement that will allow us to continue to provide solid union careers with excellent wages and benefits,” Richter said.

[Commentary] A politically awakened Silicon Valley, buttressed by the tech industry’s growing economic power, could potentially alter politics long after President Trump has left the scene. A new survey by political scientists at Stanford University suggests a mostly straightforward answer for the politics of Silicon Valley — with one glaring twist.

The survey suggests a novel but paradoxical vision of the future of American politics: Technologists could help push lawmakers, especially Democrats, further to the left on many social and economic issues. But they may also undermine the influence of some of the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters, including labor unions. And they may strive to push Democrats away from regulation on business — including the growing calls for greater rules around the tech industry. Over all, the study showed that tech entrepreneurs are very liberal — among some of the most left-leaning Democrats you can find. They are overwhelmingly in favor of economic policies that redistribute wealth, including higher taxes on rich people and lots of social services for the poor, including universal health care. The study found one area where tech entrepreneurs strongly deviate from Democratic orthodoxy and are closer to most Republicans: They are deeply suspicious of the government’s efforts to regulate business, especially when it comes to labor. They said that it was too difficult for companies to fire people, and that the government should make it easier to do so. They also hope to see the influence of both private and public-sector unions decline.

When the Obama administration was designing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), privacy was a chief concern for immigration advocates, who worried about having undocumented immigrants identify themselves to the government. So US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) vowed it would wall off that data, protecting it from other agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that wanted to use it for deportation purposes. But because DACA was merely a policy, not a law, even the framers of this process knew full well that that promise to Dreamers was not binding. Even if the Dreamer data remains confidential, however, immigration advocates fear that ICE already has all the information it needs to target Dreamers where they work.

One reason many Dreamers applied for the program, after all, is to receive a work permit. Many employers use a system called e-verify to keep tabs on their employees’ immigration statuses. If President Donald Trump reverses DACA protections and stops renewing those permits, there’s not much stopping ICE from showing up at an employer's office the day after an employee's DACA permit expires.