https://news.yahoo.com/workers-were-laid-off-theyre-124009675.html
Alana Semuels
,Time•October 15, 2020
Like millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic, Jorge Padilla had hoped to work for many more years before the economic meltdown interrupted his plans. But in March, Padilla was laid off from his job as a banquet server in the Las Vegas area when tourism all but disappeared, and even though his old company has ramped up hiring again, it hasn’t contacted him.
Padilla says that’s because Station Casinos, which owns the Green Valley Ranch Resort Spa and Casino where he worked for nine years, is making anyone who wants a job reapply and is hiring mostly lower-paid workers rather than longtime employees like him. “We worked hard for this company, and we were loyal for many years,” says Padilla, 57, who used to pull in about $13.40 an hour plus tips, which amounted to up to $40 an hour in the busy season. “Now it’s time for them to give us a chance to come back.”
Labor unions agree, and as the bleak U.S. job situation shows no sign of a major revival, they are pushing for legislation to ensure that people who lost jobs in the pandemic get first dibs when those positions reopen. Such ordinances, known as Right to Recall or Right of Recall bills, have passed in both the city and county of Los Angeles, San Diego, Oakland, and Long Beach. Drafts of similar bills are circulating in Honolulu, Providence, R.I., and in Tacoma, Wash. A Baltimore city council committee approved one such bill in September, but it has not yet been signed by the mayor.
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Without legal guarantees, though, older workers like Padilla say they’ll struggle to find jobs in a crowded labor market. “They’re looking for young people, they never think, ‘this old man, he dedicated his life to this company,’” he says. “But I’m ready to go back to work.”
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The Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents some Station Casinos employees, says that 58% of Station Casinos workers in its bargaining unit have lost their jobs and that those who want to return to work are being asked to reapply as new employees and are receiving $3-$4 less per hour than they did previously. It showed TIME a worker’s earnings statement that included a line in all caps saying: “Your hourly rate has been changed from 16.3000 to 13.1000,” indicating a pay cut.
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This is not necessarily surprising; employers often use recessions to pay new workers less because they have such a large pool of potential applicants to choose from, says Ruth Milkman, the Labor Studies Chair at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.
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An Oct. 9 report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis found that Eulen was one of more than a dozen companies that laid off workers despite receiving money from the Payroll Support Program. Eulen received $26 million from the Program, which was part of the CARES Act and which provided aviation companies with financial assistance to cover paychecks of workers to protect their jobs. The report found that the Treasury Department allowed some companies to receive funding and still lay off workers.
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Economic data suggests that when people lose their jobs, they usually cycle through short-term and lower-paid jobs, sometimes even switching fields, before finding something stable. They often end up in jobs that pay less, says Robert E. Hall, a Stanford economics professor who recently co-authored a paper looking at the impact of job losses on individuals. One study showed that men who were laid off when the unemployment rate was above 8% lost out on about 2.8 years of earnings. By contrast, many furloughed workers, who eventually get called back to their jobs, preserve their pay rate.
The disruption that comes from a layoff is one reason that some European governments began paying companies to keep workers on payrolls during the pandemic. The Paycheck Protection Program in the U.S. sought to do a similar thing, but some employers that received government money did not keep people on payrolls.
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