(NEW YORK) — Some states are pressing ahead in an attempt to relieve the pain at the pump many Americans are feeling these days by temporarily suspending gas taxes to help lower high prices.
Maryland on Friday became the first state in the nation to suspend its gas tax after Gov. Larry Hogan signed legislation which waives the 36.1 cents per gallon tax on gasoline and its 36.85 cents per gallon tax on diesel, effective immediately, for the next 30 days.
“This is, of course, not a cure-all, and market instability will continue to lead to fluctuations in prices, but we will continue to use every tool at our disposal to provide relief for Marylanders,” the Republican governor said in a statement.
Also on Friday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a similar bill that would eliminate the state’s roughly 29 cents per gallon tax on gasoline through the end of May.
Kemp made a similar move in 2021 when he temporarily waived state taxes on motor fuels to offset prices after a key pipeline that carries fuel to much of Georgia and the East Coast, shut down following a cybersecurity attack involving ransomware.
The closure at Colonial Pipeline in May, which transports approximately 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast, had raised prices and gas stations throughout the Southeast and caused reported fuel outages as motorists rushed to the pump.
Gas prices overall were already gradually on the rise last year due to several factors as the country began to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic and fuel demand increased among Americans and businesses.
The current spike in gas prices is due in part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month and the U.S. ban on imports of Russian oil and other energy products that followed. About 8% of U.S. imports of crude oil and petroleum products came from Russia last year, according to preliminary U.S. government data; 3% of U.S. oil came from Russia.
The average U.S. price of regular-grade gasoline soared to record-highs last week, peaking at $4.326 per gallon, according to AAA — levels not seen since July 2008.
As of Friday, the national average price of regular-grade gasoline was at $4.262 per gallon.
And it’s not just Maryland and Georgia looking to suspend state gasoline taxes.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer also called on a temporary suspension of its tax on fuel — a move she said “will provide drivers relief at the pump right now — not next year.”
“I’m ready to work across the aisle with the legislature to negotiate a bipartisan solution that cuts taxes and lowers costs for drivers, seniors, and working families,” Whitmer said in a statement.
In California, state lawmakers proposed a $400 gas rebate to help drivers with the soaring gasoline prices.
A group of 10 California Democrats brought the proposal forward Thursday, saying that they would use $9 billion of the state’s budget surplus to provide a $400 rebate to every California taxpayer. The rebate would cover the state’s current gas tax for an entire year for cars with 15-gallon tanks, ABC-owned Los Angeles station, KABC reported.
Evidence of the need for relief at the pump couldn’t have been more visually apparent than the scenes that played out in the Chicago area this week.
Traffic was backed up at various gas stations across the city Thursday as drivers vied for $50 in free gas.
Former Chicago mayoral candidate and businessman Dr. Willie Wilson donated $200,000 worth of gas to participating gas stations “to alleviate some of the pain that Chicagoans are experiencing because of the highest fuel prices in 14 years,” he said.
On Friday, Wilson announced another giveaway planned for March 24 worth $1 million and expanded to include 50 participating locations in Chicago and suburban Cook County.
Local carpenter Ricky Kimmons who participated in the giveaway, told ABC owned Chicago station WLS it costs him $147 to fill up SUV due to the high prices.
“I was like, ‘Is this for real?’ And then I seen it on the news, so I started trying to find out the locations, and I was like ‘oh, there’s one right here by the house five minutes away.’ Got right up, came right over here,” Kimmons said.
“It helps me tremendously, a whole lot, just don’t know how much I appreciate free gas right now.”
(NEW YORK) — Citigroup, one of the largest financial institutions in the United States, has begun offering to pay for travel expenses for employees who travel out of state to access reproductive health care.
The new policy, which went into place this year, is “in response to changes in reproductive healthcare laws in certain states in the U.S.,” the bank said Tuesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
According to the filing, Citi now provides “travel benefits to facilitate access to adequate resources.”
The bank, which is headquartered in New York City, has offices in states across the country, including Idaho, Texas and Florida, states that have recently passed legislation restricting access to reproductive health care, specifically abortion.
Citi did not specifically mention abortion in its filing. The bank did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Citi’s action on reproductive health care comes at a time of heightened activity on the issue across the country.
That total includes both restrictions and proactive measures, according to Guttmacher.
The activity at the state level comes as the Supreme Court is expected to rule in May or June on a consequential abortion case, Mississippi, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.
In the case, the state of Mississippi is arguing to uphold a law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, while Jackson Women’s Health, Mississippi’s lone abortion clinic, argues the Supreme Court’s protection of a woman’s right to choose is well-established and should be respected.
Since the Roe v. Wade ruling and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling that affirmed the decision, the court has never allowed states to prohibit the termination of pregnancies prior to fetal viability outside the womb, roughly 24 weeks, according to medical experts.
If the Supreme Court rules in Mississippi’s favor and upholds the law — as is expected because of the court’s current makeup — the focus will again turn to states.
“We’ll be watching what the details are because that could matter to in terms of whether the court seems open to arguments that abortion is unconstitutional, and states should be disallowed from having abortion be legal within their borders or not,” Mary Ziegler, a visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and author of “Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present,” told ABC News in January. “That will tell us a lot about what states are actually going to be able to do.”
(NEW YORK) — The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter percent on Wednesday, marking the first interest rate hike since 2018.
The move is intended to help curb rising inflation, and it’s anticipated that the fed will do this another six times this year.
“Meaning that, by the end of the year, interest rates could be around 2%, if they stay the course,” says ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis.
So what does this interest rate hike mean for you?
“The most immediate impact on you is the cost of borrowing,” says Jarvis. “The ability to borrow money gets more expensive — everything from new mortgages, to car loans, to credit card debt. If you look at the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage this morning, it’s already reflecting all of this, at four-and-a-half percent.”
(NEW YORK) — Oil prices are dropping and are now back to levels not seen since before Russia invaded Ukraine. So why aren’t gas prices going down, too?
The trend is called “rocketing and feathering,” according to oil industry analysts. Gas prices rocket up and then they come down slowly like a feather in the wind.
Tom Kloza, the global head of energy analysis at OPIS, says the speed of price drops often is determined by the frequency of deliveries.
“You have companies that sell gasoline that vary from somebody that gets one delivery every week to companies that get seven deliveries every day if they’re a big box,” Kloza tells ABC News Radio. “So there are some people that immediately get the price decreases, but there’s others that have to wait a week.”
He adds that markets are also still rattled by recent price swings caused by a Covid lockdown in China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“People are afraid. They’re afraid to trade. And if you’re a retailer, you’re probably afraid to drop your price because you might have to raise it by 25 or 30 cents this weekend,” Kloza says.
(SEATTLE) — Starbucks says green isn’t just a bold color for its logo or signage, but an aspiration and reminder to be a resource positive company that helps the planet in proactive ways.
Ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday and the announced retirement of CEO Kevin Johnson, Starbucks is sharing some of its efforts to help the company reduce waste by 50% by 2030.
The efforts will include reusable cup programs and a new app to help employees better sort where waste and recycling should go at a specific location, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
Over the last few years the Seattle-based coffee company has tested and prepared to scale various sustainability initiatives including a pilot program for reusable cups.
“We have a bold long-term sustainability vision and ambitious goals for 2030,” Johnson said in a statement. “Starbucks partners around the world are passionate about protecting our planet and are at the very center of driving the innovation that enables us to give more than we take from the planet.”
To help reach its goal, Starbucks says it will shift away from single-use plastics and pilot more of the reusable cup programs in six markets around the world.
By the end of 2023, customers will be able to use their own personal reusable cups at U.S. and Canada locations for both in-store and drive-thru or mobile orders, the company says.
“Our goal, by 2025, is to create a cultural movement towards reusables by giving customers easy access to a personal or Starbucks provided reusable to-go cup for every visit, making it convenient and delightful to reuse wherever customers are enjoying their Starbucks Experience,” the company said.
The company announced Wednesday that Johnson will be step down and remain a special consultant to the board through September. Howard Schultz will serve as interim CEO and help with the search process and onboarding of the company’s next leader.
(NEW YORK) — For months after its doors were shut in March 2020, preschool teacher Rachel Shelton’s old classroom sat as though stuck in a time warp.
Decorations for spring and St. Patrick’s Day still hung on the walls even though the kids — abruptly sent home amid concerns of a new deadly virus — had moved on.
Now, two years after the nation’s schools closed and businesses began laying off workers, Shelton is still out of work, hesitant to return to the classroom because of the high stress and lack of flexibility.
“One runny nose for the little one was like a week out of school, and that happened multiple times … My husband and I — one of us needed to always be on call basically, because there were so many sick days,” she told ABC News.
Last month, a triumphant President Joe Biden declared “America is back to work.”
But, as it turns out, not everyone is.
Most of the nation’s 6.6 million jobs gained since Biden took office have gone to men, according to the Labor Department. As of early February, there were still 1.4 million fewer employed adult woman in the workforce compared to 500,000 fewer adult men.
Simply put, women left the workforce early on in the pandemic at greater rates than men, and they have been more reluctant to return.
Not surprisingly, hardest hit were women in high-stress, low-pay service jobs such as child care and nursing.
“The pandemic whacked women, especially the lesser educated. They’re the ones that took the brunt,” said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
“When you go into you look among the lesser educated portions of the labor force, it’s clear that women have taken a much bigger hit than less-educated men,” Fry said.
Particularly vulnerable were Black women. According to the National Women’s Law Center, unemployment rates dropped or remained the same for almost every race or ethnicity except Black women, with an unemployment rate of almost double that of white Americans. Meanwhile, while many other groups were joining the labor force last month, 31,000 Black women left.
Parenting appears to be a factor, too. According to one analysis, women with children were three times as likely to lose their jobs early on in the pandemic compared to fathers.
Mandee LaCroix, a mom of two girls in Concord, North Carolina, said none of this surprises her. LaCroix ran a child care center during the pandemic before she burned out and quit. At about $10 an hour, her employees earned less than workers at fast-food restaurants and were not offered insurance or retirement benefits. Eventually, she quit and has since gotten a job working with special needs students at a public school.
“It was a lot of stress on my family. I was working a million hours … I was so worn out that it really had stolen any of the joy” of my job, she said.
While there’s no doubt that female caregivers have been hit harder in the pandemic, the current job market also is a golden opportunity for many higher-skilled women, according to Emily Dickens, chief of staff and head of government affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management.
Faced with a worker shortage, many employers are scrambling to find skilled employees and are willing to entertain flexibility they weren’t before.
Dickens says women should jump now if they are considering getting a new job.
“You’ve got to voice what your demands are on the front end and this is the opportunity to do it. This window is going to close,” she said.
Shelton said she’s finally looking for a job again, although she doesn’t want to return to the classroom because of the high stress and inflexibility. It frustrates her that no one has found a solution.
“We’re just not valuing the people who take care of other people, either professionally or in their personal lives,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — By the end of International Women’s Day this year, a Twitter account that sent out hundreds of tweets calling out companies for their gender pay gap had gone viral.
The Twitter account, @PayGapApp, is the brainchild of Francesca Lawson and her partner, Ali Fensome, of Manchester, England, who said they wanted to see companies pay up, literally, to the women they were celebrating.
“It came from a place of frustration of seeing all these lovely messages of empowerment and celebration and inspiration, but without actually knowing whether they were true or not,” Lawson, a 27-year-old copywriter and social media manager, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “If companies are so keen to promote themselves as celebrating women and equality, then that really needs to come through in their actions as well.”
Lawson and Fensome, a software developer, built their pay gap bot using public data thanks to a pay transparency law in place in the United Kingdom since 2017. The U.K. government requires that companies with over 250 employees submit annual reports on their gender pay gaps based on payroll data.
Fensome said the fact that tweets from the @PayGapApp went viral, shows that people want more transparency when it comes to pay.
“It shows that there’s such a demand for data, for transparency, for accountability,” Fensome, adding that she hopes other similar efforts are started around the world, told GMA. “What we want is for the data to make a difference, and the way that’s going to happen is if it stays in the public eye and people maintain pressure.”
There is no such federal law in the United States calling for pay transparency from companies, although a growing number of cities and states have enacted regulations.
As the country marks Equal Pay Day and as women remain far behind in the workforce amid the coronavirus pandemic, pay transparency is being called upon as a leading solution to close the gender pay gap.
“One of the problems with challenging pay discrimination right now is that it is really easy to be paid less than your male counterpart for years and have no idea that that is the case because most employers keep pay secret,” said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a policy organization that fights for gender justice. “What pay transparency means, fundamentally, is dismantling the secrecy of pay.”
On average, women working full time, year-round are paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, according to the NWLC. That makes Equal Pay Day, March 15, the day that women had to work into 2022 to make what white, non-Hispanic men earned in 2020 alone.
The numbers are even starker for women of color, with Latinas typically earning only 57 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men, and Black women typically making 61 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the NWLC.
When Victoria Walker, a freelance travel reporter, quit her New York City-based job in February as a writer for a travel website, she said she wanted to make sure the person coming in after her made what they deserved.
Because her job salary was not listed publicly, Walker, 29, tweeted her salary advice when she announced her job move on Twitter.
“Before I forget — if you apply for my old job as Senior Travel Reporter, you should ask for no less than 115k, a signing bonus & a relocation bonus if you’re moving to NYC,” she wrote in a tweet that went viral. “In full transparency, I was at 107k.”
Walker said she sent the tweet in hopes that people who applied for the job would not “inadvertently lowball themselves” when it came to their pay. She said she was really surprised by the viral response to the tweet.
“A lot of people who weren’t even applying for the job were like, ‘Wait, this is what travel reporters can make,'” said Walker. “They told me they found they’ve been underpaid and undervalued, and a lot of people didn’t know about signing bonuses and relocations.”
Starting in May in New York City, employers, like Walker’s former company, will be required to include a minimum and maximum salary with job listings under a bill passed in December by the New York City Council.
At least eight states, including Colorado, California, Maryland, Washington and Nevada, and cities already have laws in place that implement some degree of pay transparency, according to Martin.
“The laws vary from state to state, but they all are building on that idea of the importance of giving people who are applying for jobs more transparency, more information about the salary for the job,” said Martin. “And sort of shifting the power dynamics around who controls that information in a way that they can really make a difference.”
Many of the state laws already in effect also have another bonus for women in that they prohibit employers from setting a person’s salary based on their salary in their previous job, according to Martin.
“Those salary history prohibitions are important for ensuring that pay discrimination doesn’t follow someone from job to job through their career,” she said. “When you put these things together, it has the effect of giving the job applicant more power over information and ensuring that the employer doesn’t hold all the cards.”
Because pay transparency laws have been in effect in various states, enough real-world data exists to show that it makes a difference in lowering the wage gap, according to Martin. Public sector employees, like at federal agencies, have also for decades been following a formal grade and steps system that makes salary ranges and information public.
One 2019 study from PayScale, a compensation data and software firm, found that among companies whose female employees described a transparent pay process, women were estimated to earn between $1 and $1.01 for every dollar earned by men.
Tips for women when asking for pay
Katie Donovan, a pay equity expert, has been leading the fight for equal pay for women since 2011, when, while out to dinner, a friend revealed she was being paid $30,000 less than a male colleague whom she had trained.
Donovan, the founder of Equal Pay Negotiations, a pay equality consultancy, said she immediately thought of being underpaid as a woman herself and remembers thinking at the time, “I don’t want my nieces 20 years from now having the same, exact conversation.”
“At the end of the day, our jobs are a financial decision for 99.9% of us that decides every other financial decision, like can we rent, can we buy a house, can we get a car,” she said. “And it’s the financial decision that we have the blinders on, and that’s by design, and that exhausts me.”
Donovan went on to lead the movement to ban employers from asking about salary history in job interviews. She said she sees the next fight in the equal pay battle as making sure that companies offer salaries that are not the median, which incorporates women’s already low pay, but above, which incorporates what white men are getting paid.
“If we really want to finally get a chance of achieving closing the pay gaps, we need to start with changing the data we’ve looked at,” she said. “If we’re aiming for the median of everyone, it’s mathematically less than the median of white men.”
Here are four tips for women from Donovan and Martin:
1. Do your research on salaries beforehand: “In part because of the internet and in part because of these policy changes, we are living in a moment where you can find more information about pay in particular roles and particular companies than you could 10 or 15 years ago, and that is a source of power for workers,” said Martin.
“It always of course is a good idea to do your research in these situations and to learn as much as you can about what is publicly available or what the law requires an employer to provide in terms of pay information,” she said.
2. Be comfortable asking about salary: “There’s a little bit of culture shift happening with employers where there is more of an understanding that posting a salary range is a good equity practice, so we’re seeing more employers do it even where the law doesn’t require it,” Martin said. “That in turn means that it is a more reasonable question for job applicants to ask of employers, even if employer hasn’t posted it, to ask whether that information is available.”
3. In most cases, you’re protected against giving your salary history: “Under the Federal Equal Pay Act, a lot of courts have held that salary history isn’t legal justification for paying a woman less than a man in the same role, so you do actually have some protection against pay discrimination based on salary history,” Martin said.
“That’s one reason why if I were in that position, I would try to gently deflect an interviewer by saying something like, ‘It sounds like what you really want to understand is the salary that I’m looking for in this job, and this is what it is,'” she said. “And hopefully that is informed by some data that you’ve been able to find in the world through sites like Glassdoor and the like about what the market rate is for the position.”
4. Ask for more than the median salary range: “As a candidate, when you’re given a job offer, you say, ‘I’m not accepting median. That’s low,'” said Donovan. “You aim for 75 percentile or higher, because that’s where the white guys are hanging.”
(NEW YORK) — As we celebrate Women’s History Month, ABC News’ Good Morning America is taking a closer look at the gender pay gap.
The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor show that women make 82 cents on the dollar compared to men. And for women of color, the pay is even lower: Black women make 63 cents on the dollar while Latina women make 53 cents.
So what can women do to advocate for themselves and make sure they are being paid fairly?
GMA spoke to TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett, who shared some strategies that can help bridge the gap:
(NEW YORK) — Volkswagen has pulled the wraps off its ID Buzz: a van the company is billing as a spiritual successor to its iconic Microbus. But while the original “hippie bus” was powered by a tiny four-cylinder engine behind the rear axle, the new one runs entirely on electric power.
Chad Kirchner, editor-in-chief EV Pulse, says despite the retro looks and EV powertrain, the Buzz’s main focus is practicality.
“It’s designed to be kind of a mainstream people-hauler first. Just with cues to play into that retro appeal of the Microbus,” Kirchner said.
Volkswagen introduced the first Microbus, the T1, in 1950. Over the next few decades, the vehicle became synonymous with the “counterculture” movement. Microbuses were often given bright, psychedelic paint jobs, replete with flowers and peace symbols. Type 2s are featured prominently on album covers from Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys, and can easily be spotted in footage from Woodstock. Early Microbuses shared an engine with the VW Beetle of the era. The new Buzz, similarly, shares a powertrain with another VW stablemate.
The Buzz sits on VW’s “MEB” electric architecture, which also underpins the brand’s electric crossover, the ID4. The company hasn’t yet released specifications for the American-market Buzz, but did reveal the European model will come with a 201-horsepower electric motor powering the rear wheels. As for electric range, Kirchner says he’s expecting it to be close to the ID4’s 268-mile figure. The Buzz is about five inches longer than the ID4, and according to VW, the European version has 138 cubic feet of cargo area.
“If you want a little more space you’re going to want the ID Buzz,” said Kirchner.
Numbers aside, Kirchner says car buyers’ fond memories of classic VW buses could prove to be the Buzz’s main selling point.
“There is definitely a large group of people out there who are nostalgic for the old Microbus,” he added.
Todd Olson is the co-founder of Buses By The Beach, a car club for Microbus enthusiasts. He says he first became interested in buses after attending a Grateful Dead concert in 1992.
“That’s when it all made sense,” he told ABC Audio. “I saw all these Volkswagen vans, where people can live in them… so that started the bug.”
Olson says he’s now owned, restored, and sold over fifty different Volkswagen buses, and says he’s discovered a vibrant enthusiast community in the process.
“Buyers of Volkswagen [buses], they’re counterculture people, they’re a little different,” he says. “They dance to a different beat.”
As for whether the new Buzz can dance to that rhythm, Olson says his initial impressions are positive.
“I think it’s a very cool concept,” said Olsen. “I’m excited to see the vehicle.”
But he has concerns that the limited range of an electric vehicle could put a damper on its appeal.
“The owners of those vans — they want to roll, they want to travel and follow the Grateful Dead … follow Phish,” said Olson. “That pure-EV vehicle unfortunately just doesn’t have the range yet.”
The Buzz is set to go on sale in Europe later this year. It hits US dealerships in 2024. Olson says despite his reservations, he still wants to take it for a test drive.
“When the new one hits the showroom floors, we’re definitely going to go give it a try,” he said.
(NEW YORK) — As the world aims to figure out ways to live and shop more sustainably, Target is adding to those efforts with one of its latest initiatives.
The brand announced Target Zero this week, which essentially gives shoppers a better idea of which products help to reduce waste.
Throughout the store as well as online, there will be icons that display which items are designed to be refillable, reusable or compostable, made from recycled content, or made from materials that reduce the use of plastic.
“By making it easier for our guests to identify which products are designed to reduce waste, Target Zero helps them make informed decisions about what they purchase and advances a collective impact across our brand partners, our product shelves, and within our homes and communities,” Amanda Nusz, the senior vice president of corporate responsibility and president of the Target Foundation, said in a statement.
The assortment of offerings that will be tagged under Target Zero includes hundreds of new and existing products across beauty, personal care and home. There are also plans to expand into other categories in the future.
Target’s latest initiative falls in line with its commitments to the company’s sustainability strategy, Target Forward, which aims to collaboratively work with shoppers to elevate sustainable brands while also pushing to eliminate waste.
“We can’t wait to introduce our guests to Target Zero because we recognize their growing calls to find products that fit within their lifestyle, designed with sustainability in mind,” Jill Sando, Target’s executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, said in a statement.
She continued, “Our aim with Target Zero is to keep delivering on their needs through our ever-evolving product assortment, as well as to give brands investing in reduced waste products and packaging an opportunity to have those products highlighted by Target.”
Target fans looking to consciously shop can look forward to zero-waste innovations from brands such as Burt’s Bees which uses recyclable metal tins for its lip balms without single-use plastics, as well as PLUS which is a body wash created to eliminate excess water and waste by using a dehydrated, dissolvable square that transforms when wet.
The company said it has a goal of becoming a market leader for curating inclusive, sustainable brands and experiences by 2030 as well as aims to make 100% of its owned brand plastic packaging be recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025.
