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In a correctional facility just outside of Silicon Valley, a Goodwill store operates inside the prison walls. And the women who are incarcerated there are both the employees and the customers. This Goodwill store, which opened in October 2024, is the first of its kind, and the team behind it hopes that the program will help incarcerated women get back on their feetwhether it’s with a new job or new clothesas quickly and easily as possible. [Photo: Santa Clara County Sheriffs Department] The shoppers are women who are about to get released; typically about three people come in each day. Traditionally, when a woman is released from Elmwood Facility, she is given only the clothes she was arrested in. We’re really here to try and help people get back into the community, says Chris Baker, CEO of Goodwill of Silicon Valley. Nearly 75% of formerly incarcerated people remain unemployed a year after release despite looking for work, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. A new California law passed last year allows formerly incarcerated people to ask for their records to be cleared after completing a sentence. There are over 600 incarcerated women at Elmwood Facility, and eight operate the store at one time. The store is open three days a week for a few hours each day. Some participants had never had a job before, some had jobs that werent in the retail industry, and some had previously worked at Goodwill in e-commerce roles. Each woman works in the store for 60 hours total before completing the program with Goodwill. At the store, they take turns working behind the register and performing other tasks, like running inventory or logistics. This can be valuable career training for incarcerated women, who may face significant barriers to employment after leaving prison, according to Steve Preston, the CEO of Goodwill Industries International. It builds skills, it builds competence, it builds dignity, it prepares people, and it gives them a smoother path when they leave, says Preston. He says many business leaders and HR professionals across the country are unwilling to hire formerly incarcerated individuals and dont recognize their potential. [Photo: Santa Clara County Sheriffs Department] Prison employment The women who work in the Elmwood Facility Goodwill aren’t paid for their labor (most prison jobs in California pay only pennies per hour). Many prison rights activists have criticized prison work at large as exploitative, but the Goodwill program is entirely optional and the team behind it believes it prepares the participants for success outside prison. [Goodwill] doesnt get anything monetarily out of it. What we get is knowing that we are providing training to individuals so that they can enter our community and better our community as a whole, says Castello. She adds that if the women want to work at a Goodwill after release, they would already be mostly trained, which results in less training responsibilities for a store manager. Working at the Elmwood Facility Goodwill doesnt automatically guarantee employment after release, but participants can find employment through a separate Silicon Valley Goodwill reentry program called NOW, which has been operating for 12 years. Participants in the NOW Program work at a Goodwill retail shop for 90 days and have access to job readiness workshops. Goodwill declined to make any participants available to Fast Company, citing privacy concerns, but it shared one emailed comment from a woman who had both worked and shopped at the Elmwood Goodwill, who said: This program was designed to serve someone like me. Released with no clothes The Elmwood Goodwill operates similarly to Goodwills retail stores across the country, but swaps out cash and credit for pre-loaded gift cards, which Goodwill provides. The shoppers use gift cards to buy themselves two complete new outfits and a backpack for their release. Everything in the store is priced the same and comes in via regular donations to Goodwill dropoff facilities. Providing incarcerated women with new clothes can be just as powerful as providing them with jobs, says Trish Dorsey, VP of mission services at Goodwill of Silicon Valley. She told Fast Company how shes seen the impact firsthand. In one instance, a woman was arrested inside a hospital, and so she was checked into prison with only a hospital gown, according to Dorsey. The only options she had for release were wearing that same hospital gown or exiting prison in a paper jumpsuit. But after visiting the Elmwood Goodwill, she was able to leave with two complete outfitsas well as shoes, socks, and a backpack, says Dorsey. The training part is really impactful because it gets [the women] ready to work, says Dorsey. But I think just as impactful, if not more so, is the way they now are able to leave the county jail system with dignity.
Category:
E-Commerce
A heated debate has recently erupted between two groups of supporters of President Donald Trump. The dispute concerns the H-1B visa system, the program that allows U.S. employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupationsmostly in the tech industry. On the one hand, there are people like Trumps former strategist Steve Bannon, who has called the H-1B program a total and complete scam. On the other, there are tech tycoons like Elon Musk who think skilled foreign workers are crucial to the U.S. tech sector. The H-1B visa program is subject to an annual limit of new visas it can issue, which sits at 65,000 per fiscal year. There is also an additional annual quota of 20,000 H-1B visas for highly skilled international students who have a proven ability to succeed academically in the U.S. The H-1B program is the primary vehicle for international graduate students at U.S. universities to stay and work in the United States after graduation. At Rice University, where I work, much of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research is carried out by international graduate students. The same goes for most American research-intensive universities. As a computer science professorand an immigrantwho studies the interaction between computing and society, I believe the debate over H-1B overlooks some important questions: Why does the U.S. rely so heavily on foreign workers for the tech industry, and why is it not able to develop a homegrown tech workforce? The U.S. as a global talent magnet The U.S. has been a magnet for global scientific talent since before World War II. Many of the scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb were European refugees. After World War II, U.S. policies such as the Fulbright Program expanded opportunities for international educational exchange. Attracting international students to the U.S. has had positive results. Among Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, medicine or physics since 2000, 40% have been immigrants. Tech industry giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google were all founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Furthermore, immigrants have founded more than half of the nations billion-dollar startups since 2018. Stemming the inflow of students Restricting foreign graduate students path to U.S. employment, as some prominent Trump supporters have called for, could significantly reduce the number of international graduate students in U.S. universities. About 80% of graduate students in American computer science and engineering programs (roughly 18,000 students in 2023) are international students. The loss of international doctoral students would significantly diminish the research capability of graduate programs in science and engineering. After all, doctoral students, supervised by principal investigators, carry out the bulk of research in science and engineering in U.S. universities. It must be emphasized that international students make a significant contribution to U.S. research output. For example, scientists born outside the U.S. played key roles in the development of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. So making the U.S. less attractive to international graduate students in science and engineering would hurt U.S. research competitiveness. Computing PhD graduates are in high demand. The economy needs them, so the lack of an adequate domestic pipeline seems puzzling. Where have U.S. students gone? So, why is there such a reliance on foreign students for U.S. science and engineering? And why hasnt America created an adequate pipeline of U.S.-born students for its technical workforce? After discussions with many colleagues, I have found that there are simply not enough qualified domestic doctoral applicants to fill the needs of their doctoral programs. In 2023, for example, U.S. computer science doctoral programs admitted about 3,400 new students, 63% of whom were foreign. It seems as if the doctoral career track is simply not attractive enough to many U.S. undergrad computer science students. But why? The top annual salary in Silicon Valley for new computer science graduates can reach $115,000. Bachelors degree holders in computing from Rice University have told me that until recentlybefore economic uncertainty shook the industrythey were getting starting annual salaries as high as $150,000 in Silicon Valley. Doctoral students in research universities, in contrast, do not receive a salary. Instead, they get a stipend. These vary slightly from school to school, but they typically pay less than $40,000 annually. The opportunity cost of pursuing a doctorate is, thus, up to $100,000 per year. And obtaining a doctorate typically takes six years. So, pursuing a doctorate is not an economically viable decision for many Americans. The reality is that a doctoral degree opens new career options to its holder, but most bachelors degree holders do not see beyond the econmics. Yet academic computing research is crucial to the success of Silicon Valley. A 2016 analysis of the information technology sectors with a large economic impact shows that academic research plays an instrumental role in their development. Why so little? The U.S. is locked in a cold war with China focused mostly on technological dominance. So maintaining its R&D edge is in the national interest. Yet the U.S. has declined to make the requisite investment in research. For example, the National Science Foundations annual budget for computer and information science and engineering is around $1 billion. In contrast, annual R&D expenses for Alphabet, Googles parent company, have been close to $50 billion for the past decade. Universities are paying doctoral students so little because they cannot afford to pay more. But instead of acknowledging the existence of this problem and trying to address it, the U.S. has found a way to meet its academic research needs by recruiting and admitting international students. The steady stream of highly qualified international applicants has allowed the U.S. to ignore the inadequacy of the domestic doctoral pipeline. The current debate about the H-1B visa system provides the U.S. with an opportunity for introspection. Yet the news from Washington, D.C., about massive budget cuts coming to the National Science Foundation seems to suggest the federal government is about to take an acute problem and turn it into a crisis. Moshe Y. Vardi is a professor of computer science at Rice University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Shoppers at Uniqlo in New York City can now purchase a matcha and a cold brew alongside their new pair of work trousers. As of March 14, Uniqlos Midtown store is the first North American location of the Japanese-owned fashion brand to open a Uniqlo Coffee. The cafe, owned by Uniqlo, serves a standard beverage menu including coffee, espresso beverages, cold brew, and matcha, as well as hot chocolate and orange juice. Its located inside the store itself, with the same sleek, monochromatic branding as the retail sections. Uniqlo is one of several other everyday luxury retailerslike Muji, Aritzia, and Ralph Laurenthat have likewise opened their own branded coffee shops. Its the modern-day, status-signaling version of a Starbucks inside a Barnes & Noble; turning the store itself into a kind of third place for shoppers to gather in an attempt to earn the coveted reputation of a lifestyle brand rather than merely a clothing store. View this post on Instagram A post shared by UNIQLO USA (@uniqlousa) Why every retailer has a coffee shop now Uniqlo Coffee may be new in the U.S., but its already a staple at Uniqlo locations in Asia, including in Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaysia. These locations tend to have extended menus that also offer small snack foods with local touches. At the Manila global flagship store, for example, shoppers can find melon buns, hojicha gelato, strawberry mint tea, and a cookie butter cheesecake on top of the standard coffee offerings. Brands within Uniqlos niche of elevated basics have already found success in North America with starting their own coffee shops. Artizias A-OK Cafe, which serves coffee, tea, and pastries, has expanded to 11 locations in Canada and recently opened two new stores in Chicago and New York City. Ralph Laurens Ralphs Coffee can be found in multiple New York locations as well as both Europe and Asia, where it sells sweet treats alongside merch like a Ralphs-branded tumbler or a ball cap. And the Japanese retailer Muji recently opened a full-on food hall inside NYCs Chelsea Market, where a robot barista named Jarvis will bring you a black sesame latte on wheels. The coffee shop trend is just another expression of many trendy retailers desire to become known as a lifestyle brand, or a brand that transcends its actual products to encompass a whole vibe or aestheticthink Erewhon releasing a $335 sweatsuit, or Sweetgreen starting its own merch-based loyalty program. An added bonus to the physical coffee shop concept is that it plays into Gen Zs desire to gather in third places post-pandemic, a trend that formerly DTC-only brands like Chamberlain Coffee have also embraced by debuting an actual in-person shop. Market calculation aside, its a well-known fact that shopping is simply more enjoyable with an ice-cold beverage in hand (and it might even keep you browsing those aisles a bit longer.) The A-OK Cafe website spells it out pretty clearly: Don’t let snack-free shopping happen to you.
Category:
E-Commerce
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