By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

New York, NY – There was an air of excitement at historic Federal Hall yesterday – a historic setting for President Obama’s “tough love” speech delivered on Wall Street at the place where George Washington took the oath of office. Yes, despite reports in the major newspapers of a grim-faced audience hearing *the President’s words, I was there for the speech with NCL Board member Sam Simon, and we both thought there was an air of hopefulness among the Wall Street audience. There was a sense that we’ve turned a corner and that there are better economic times ahead. The president received sustained applause as he walked in and stood at the podium: as if the audience was saying – “we know you are under attack by the right – and maybe you’re disrespected in other parts of the country – not here in New York City – here we support you!”

The audience included the President’s economic team – Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner, Christina Romer, Paul Volcker and a host of New York officials – Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silvers and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among them, and Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank (D-MA).

This was the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers’ collapse. After chronicling the crisis of a year ago, Obama noted, “We helped to restore capital and confidence… We’re putting people to work, repairing roads and bridges and hospitals. Eight months later this effort continues. We can be confident that the storms of the last few years are beginning to break.” He noted that consumer advocates had played an important role in working for legislative reforms.

But the president also admonished Wall Street not to return to some of their worst practices. “Normalcy cannot lead to complacency. Some are misreading this moment. They are choosing to ignore those lessons at our nation’s peril. I want everyone to hear my words. We won’t go back. . . too many were motivated by an appetite for quick kills. And expect taxpayers to break their fall.”

Ultimately the President wants to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, and consumer groups strongly support such an entity – whose primary function will be to protect consumers against intentionally complex agreements with “gotcha” clauses that bury information about fees while creating uniform regulations so banks and financial firms can’t shop around for the most hands-off regulatiors, as they do today, exploiting loopholes in the system.

The President closed with this message to Wall Street: You don’t have to wait for government to force you to act responsibly, do it on your own! For example, he told them “put your 2009 bonuses up for shareholder vote.”

We thought the President hit all the right points, cajoling Wall Street, while affirming the good things about our economic system when it is working effectively: stimulating competition and spurring innovation. It was important to mark the one-year anniversary of a darker time, and highlight government’s role in protecting companies and consumers from what might have been a more prolonged and far harsher economic toll.

 

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.

By Lauren Perez, NCL Intern

The last in our five-part series about the 2009 Five Worst Job for Teens

As summer is winding to a close, we’ll take a look at the last job on NCL’s *2009 Five Worst Jobs for Teens: landscaping or lawn care, which can include many hazards, ranging from driving to using heavy equipment, exposure to heat and working dangerously unsupervised. Working outside increases a worker’s risk of heat stress, which occurs when *the body is unable to cool itself by sweating. Heat stress can lead to heat exhaustion or heat stroke and can eventually lead even to death. Warning signs includes headaches, dizziness, lightheadedness, weakness and moist skin, confusion, vomiting, dry, hot skin with no sweating, and seizures or convulsions. Heat stress can be prevented by monitoring oneself and others for symptoms, using cooling fans/air-conditioning; rest regularly, drinking lots of water and wearing lightweight, light colored, loose-fitting clothes.

Youth workers in landscaping and grounds keeping also face many of the same hazards of working with machinery as youth in agriculture. A 16-year-old landscape laborer was killed when he was pinned underneath *the front-end loader he was driving. The worker and his supervisor had been trimming and removing trees from a residential property and were returning their equipment into storage. The worker lost control of the front-end loader, causing it to rollover. The equipment did not have a rollover protection system and the worker had not been trained in using the equipment. According to The Fair Labor Standards Act, employed youths under the age of 16 may not operate *“power driving hoisting apparatuses” in nonagricultural jobs.

Young workers in the landscaping and lawn care industry need to be aware of how to protect themselves from heat, pesticides, electrical hazards, noise, cuts, and operating or driving heavy equipment. *Youth over the age of 16 may operate power mowers, chain saws, wood chippers, and trimmers. They may not drive ATVs or tractors for non-agricultural labor if the equipment is used for transporting passengers.

Both teens and their parents should think carefully when choosing a job. Parents and teens need to be aware of potential dangers such as working with equipment or in extreme heat. Youth workers should never hesitate to ask for more training. Young workers and their employers need to be aware of labor laws and it’s up to good employers to abide by them. Being employed can be a safe and rewarding experience for teens and provide them with skills they will use in future jobs, but it’s important that everyone work together to ensure safe working environments for all.

 

 

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.

By Reid Maki, Child Labor Coalition Coordinator, and Lauren Perez, NCL Communications Intern

Next in our five-part series of worst teen jobs is traveling youth crews who sell items—often magazine subscriptions— door-to-door.

When young workers leave the safety of home, family, and friends and hit the open road bad things can happen. Add into the mix selling door-to-door to strangers in unknown neighborhoods and the job can become quite dangerous.

In February 21, 2007 New York Times article about the industry told the story of one young recent high school graduate, Jonathan Pope, who spent six months with a magazine sales crew working 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. His pay was often withheld and he was forced to get by on a meager $10-a-day food stipend much of the time. He witnessed co-workers being beaten by his managers and, when he asked to leave, his manager left him at a train station 1,000 miles from home with $17 cash.

According to Dan Smith, a representative of the National Field Selling Association quoted in the article, at any given time about 2,500 young people aged 18-to-24 years old are selling magazines door-to-door in these traveling crews.

The National Consumers League recently received a call from one stranded young seller. Ricky, 24, said he’d been traveling with crews since he was 18. He’d recently been let go because a crew leader became angry with him. With no money, Ricky was trying to hitch hike 1,000 miles home.

Although it’s not an everyday occurrence, Ricky said he has also witnessed sellers get beaten because crew leaders were unhappy with their performance. “When you’re not getting your sales and not making your quota, the managers get really mad at you,” he said. I’ve seen someone “get jumped straight up and get beat down,” he said, noting that he has been threatened himself.

Ricky agrees with NCL’s advice that young workers should stay away from traveling sales crews. In his years on the road, he’s worked with sales crew members as young as 17 and he thinks that’s “way too young…to be traveling from state to state.”

Traveling youth sales crews are exposed to many hazards. Robbery and assaults, sexual exploitation, and exposure to the elements are all dangers of life on the road. According to Ricky, many of the young sellers engage in a “party lifestyle.” Drug and alcohol abuse are part of the scene, he noted.

One of the greatest dangers is all the driving in vehicles—often older vans that aren’t in the best shape—required by door-to-door sales. In 1999, 7 crew members of a traveling sales crew died in a car crash in Janesville, Wisconsin; five other passengers in the van were seriously injured.  One of the dead was 18-year-old Malinda Turvey from Wisconsin. Since that tragedy, Turvey’s father, Phil Ellenbecker, has crusaded tirelessly to improve safety for young door-to-door sales people and curb the industry’s worst excesses. On *his Web site, he has documented 86 deaths and 300 felony cases involving traveling door-to-door magazine crews.

Ellenbecker’s efforts helped bring about Malinda’s Act, which was signed into law by Wisconsin’s Governor Jim Doyle in March 2009. The law requires at least semi-monthly payment of wages and safety certification of the vehicles used to transport workers. It prohibits an employer from leaving employees stranded or taking away a worker’s money, ID, phone or any other personal property during the course of employment. It also prevents employers from restricting communication between the worker and family or friends and requires criminal background checks of crew members.

Wisconsin’s law is unique, and workers in most states enjoy few protections because they are often classified as independent contractors.

Consumers answering doors should also be careful. In May 2009, The Better Business Bureau said that in the previous 12 months it had received 1,100 complaints of deceptive sales practices from traveling crews working for 50 different companies.  Employees are often not licensed for sales work and can be misleading in their pitches.  The most common complaint was that the customer never received the magazine subscriptions they had purchased.

The National Consumers League offers tips for youth considering joining a sales crew, including questions to ask and warning signs.  Youth considering a traveling crew can also find a list of companies that have had complaints filed against them through the *BBB’s Web site.

Next, we will be covering landscaping, grounds keeping and lawn service jobs.

 

*Links are no longer active as the original sources have removed the content, sometimes due to federal website changes or restructurings.

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director

Consumer advocates are known for leveling biting criticisms against corporations for their various bad acts. But when a company does something truly admirable, such actions also deserve our praise. The first admirable event came this week when Toys “R” Us announced that it would allow parents to trade in used cribs, car seats, and other baby products for discounts on new items in these categories. For each used item consumers bring to Babies “R” Us or Toys “R” Us, they’ll receive a 20 percent discount on a new product from select manufacturers. The list of products includes bassinets, strollers, travel systems, play yards, and high chairs.

Why is Toys “R” Us offering these discounts? For a very important consumer protection reason: CEO Jerry Storch told the Wall Street Journal, “We felt these were categories that were somewhat suspect, either because of the nature of the category or because there have been a large number of recalls in the category….We feel it’s critical to get these older products out of the chain of commerce.” Storch is exactly right; once a children’s product is in the market, the chance of getting it recalled and out of the nursery is extremely low, probably under 10 percent. The safety issue is all the more critical with products that children use every day. By offering this discount, Toys “R” Us is helping to cycle the use of older baby products out of the marketplace and bring in the newer, safer designs. Fewer children will be facing product hazards that can injure and even kill them because of the company’s actions.

Full Disclosure: Toys “R” Us has supported the National Consumers League’s teenage consumer education program, LifeSmarts, making financial contributions for the past several years, though the company didn’t ask us to write this blog post.

The second positive interaction with a corporate entity happened to me personally. In planning travel to Minneapolis to celebrate my father’s 91^st birthday this weekend, I made the mistake of scheduling a plane trip several hours earlier than one member of my family could make. I was scheduled to arrive from another city, but they were coming from Washington, DC and simply couldn’t leave on the earlier flight. So I called the airlines and talked to an agent. She informed me that taking the later flight would cost $150 per-person change fee and a total of $1,000 to change the reservation for them to fly on the same route only two hours later.

I thanked her and asked to talk to a supervisor. She was perfectly pleasant, as was I, but asked me what she ought to tell the supervisor. “Tell her I would like to discuss my options,” I said. A few minutes later, her boss came on the line and I explained. “I screwed up and made reservations for the wrong time. My mother died this year and my father is celebrating his 91^st birthday on Saturday. It would be a shame if his grandson couldn’t be there for the occasion, but I simply cannot spend an additional $1,000 to change these tickets for a flight 2 hours later.” She told me to hang on, and a few minutes later she was back with this news: “I made the change and confirmed your flights for the later time. There will be no extra charge. Enjoy your father’s birthday and thank you for flying with our airline.”

I thanked her profusely and let out a huge sigh of relief. I had despaired that my 13 year-old-son would have to forfeit his ticket and be unable to celebrate with his cousins and grandfather. But here’s the good news: an employee of a big airline was able to hear my story and out of kindness — and perhaps a sense that the rules are often too rigid — bend the rules a bit. No matter, this customer greatly appreciated that companies and their workers can do the right thing by their customers. Whether it’s Toys “R” Us or a big airline, when they do I believe we consumer advocates should commend them for it.