For decades, most American companies have paid their workers once every week or two, minimizing the administrative costs of frequent paydays and maximizing the interest the companies earn by keeping the money in the bank.

And for equally long, workers have complained about the unfairness of waiting for their paychecks.

But now, thanks in part to the gig economy, a small but growing number of employers and start-ups are testing ways to give employees faster access to their wages. A variety of options — some involving payroll cards, and others using A.T.M.s and other methods — have recently hit the market, permitting people to take home their pay as soon as they have earned it.

On one hand, this could be good news for people who live from paycheck to paycheck. If the trend catches on, it could reduce the demand for products like payday loans, which workers use when they run short of money, but which charge very high interest rates. On the other hand, the services that are providing on-demand wages charge fees every time a worker uses them, so there is a trade-off.

From the employer’s perspective, instant payment for a day’s work has the potential to motivate employees to work longer hours — after all, instant financial gratification is a powerful productivity incentive.

In the ride-sharing market, same-day earnings payouts moved rapidly from an experiment to an industry standard. In November, Lyft began offering its drivers the option of cashing out immediately instead of waiting for their weekly payday. More than a third of them have used the feature, which costs 50 cents a transfer, and Lyft has paid out $200 million, executives say.

Uber started testing a similar system in March, pushing drivers’ earnings to a prepaid debit card from GoBank. Last month, it made the option available to nearly all of its 450,000 active drivers in the United States.

Start-ups are also circling. DailyPay, a New York company that lets on-demand workers collect their earnings faster for fees of $1 to $1.50 a day, has enrolled thousands of drivers and delivery people.

“I’ve been surprised at how fast it caught on,” said Harry Campbell, a driver who writes about the industry on his blog, the Rideshare Guy. “It became a competitive advantage. Once Lyft had it, and it was really popular, Uber had to have it too.”

But gig services are a niche part of the job market. Fast cash has long been a perk for waiters, bartenders and other tipped workers. Most Americans draw their paychecks from companies with more rigid financial systems. In that market, there has been little incentive for change — until recently.

Even among those with steady jobs, financial insecurity is pervasive, and some employers are starting to look at how they can help. Giving raises is expensive. Giving people quicker access to their accrued earnings doesn’t have to be.

Eight months ago, Goodwill of Silicon Valley began testing a system that lets its workers use an A.T.M. near the company’s cafeteria to withdraw up to half of the wages that they have already earned from their next paycheck, to a limit of $500. It was an instant hit. More than half of Goodwill’s 300 eligible employees have used it at least once.

Michael Fox, the company’s chief executive, said he was initially skeptical but became a convert when he saw what a big difference the option made for some workers.

“When you have people living on the edge, very small things can cause a rapid acceleration into very bad conditions,” he said. “If you’re just $60 or $90 short, and can’t make a rent payment or buy medicine, it spirals. One little thing creates a huge disaster.”

Goodwill is using technology from PayActiv, a start-up in San Jose, Calif., that uses employers’ wage and hours information to estimate their employees’ earnings. For a fee of $5 per transaction — of which Goodwill pays half as a courtesy to its workers — PayActiv advances the cash. On payday, it recoups the money directly from the employer.

PayActiv’s founder, Safwan Shah, talks with a missionary zeal about the potential impact. “The biggest bank in this country is the bank of the employer, and two to three weeks of salary for most people is stuck there,” he said. “This is a corporate responsibility issue.”

Getting employers to view it that way, though, is an extremely hard sell. Frank Dombroski knows. He has been making the pitch for five years and is only just starting to see signs of momentum.

Mr. Dombroski’s company, FlexWage, of Mountainside, N.J., also advances employees part of their earned but unpaid wages, but unlike PayActiv, it doesn’t use its own money to fund the transactions — it pulls cash directly from employers’ coffers. That is the most financially sustainable approach, he says, but it appeals to only the most highly motivated employers.

“I would be lying if I didn’t say it’s been a struggle, but we kind of knew that going in,” he said.

He thinks the tide is starting to turn. A new partnership with ADP, a big provider of payroll services, has helped FlexWage get on the radar of bigger businesses. The company says it is finalizing deals with two employers that would double the 8,000 people currently using its system.

“There’s been so much attention to the high cost of short-term lending, like bank overdraft fees and payday loans, that employers understand a lot more clearly now the dire need,” Mr. Dombroski said. “We don’t have to convince them that there’s a problem any longer. Now we need to convince them there’s a solution.”

Some companies that facilitate faster access to wages cut out the employer and go right to the workers. Two years ago, Activehours, in Palo Alto, Calif., started offering an app that lets hourly workers snap photos of their time sheets and cash out their coming wages in advance. On payday, Activehours withdraws the money from the worker’s checking account. People at about 10,000 businesses have tried it, including workers at Apple, Starbucks, Whole Foods, Best Buy and Home Depot, the company says.

Like almost all fast-cash borrowing options, the services have fees that can be steeper than alternatives like credit cards. Activehours has a hippie-ish “pay what you think it’s worth” fee structure, but FlexWage and PayActiv charge rates that typically cost $3 to $5 per transaction. A worker who pays $3 to withdraw $100 a week before payday is effectively paying an annual percentage rate of 156 percent for the money.

But those costs still tend to be lower than those of bank overdrafts, payday loans and other emergency lending sources. Eric Zsadanyi, a forklift driver at Goodwill, has been using PayActiv advances almost monthly to pay his rent, which consumes more than one of his biweekly paychecks. He is usually only $50 or $100 short, but if his rent isn’t on time, he owes a $50 late fee.

Mr. Zsadanyi keeps his withdrawals low so that his next check won’t shrink more than he can afford. Knowing that in a bind he can get cash for rent or groceries is a relief, he said.

Factories, hospitals, call centers and other employers with large numbers of variable-hour employees have been among the most receptive to the idea, according to executives at PayActiv and FlexWage. Especially in industries with thin margins, companies are willing to consider new ways to relieve financial strains on their employees — without actually paying them more money.

Still, the biweekly payday is a ritual most companies don’t want to disturb. The regularity with which clients of Paychex, one of the nation’s largest payroll processors, pay their workers — weekly, biweekly or on some other cycle — has not shifted by more than 1 percent over the last eight years. Martin Mucci, the company’s chief executive, is skeptical that faster access to wages will ever move beyond the gig economy.

“It’s not something we’re seeing a large demand for among employees who have a more traditional work relationship with their employer,” Mr. Mucci said.

Ryan Falvey, managing director of the Financial Solutions Lab at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, thinks that might change if people feel more empowered to push back. After all, the era when it took a bookkeeper days to go through time sheets and cut checks is long gone.

“As the economy has gotten faster and people’s lives have become more tenuous, the speed at which people get paid starts to matter lot more,” he said. “I don’t think this is a flash-in-the-pan thing. A year or two in, these are products that have significant user engagement, and they’re growing very quickly.”

For workers, choosing between speed and delayed gratification can be a balancing act.

Amanda Brannon, a single mother of four in Warner Robins, Ga., said that same-day pay was a major incentive for her to moonlight for Uber. If she needs to supplement her grocery or gas budget, she hops in her car and starts driving. A recent 12-hour Saturday shift netted her $220, which she cashed out immediately.

But in her day job, as a legal secretary, she is happy to stick with a traditional lump-sum check.

“It makes it easier to pay for the big stuff,” Ms. Brannon said. “Uber is perfect for daily cash, but getting paid every two weeks is good, too.”Click here for the original article. 

Early in her pregnancy, Whitney Peak traveled to Rio de Janeiro for her job with Leblon Cachaça, a liquor company based in Brazil. That was in October, before much was known about Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that has spread through South America and that scientists say may be linked to a birth defect and brain damage in babies.

She was scheduled to return to Rio in late January for some Olympics-related marketing projects. But after consulting with colleagues, she canceled the second visit — and now regrets the first.

“It is very scary to know I could have unknowingly put my child at risk,” said Ms. Peak, who is still pregnant. “When the time came for the planned trip, I don’t think there was any question that the risk for me to go was too high.”

With reports of Zika infections on the rise, employees and management at a variety of corporations are grappling with how to handle jobs and projects in affected regions.

The virus has created widespread anxiety in countries in the Caribbean and Latin and South America, home to thousands of foreign workers. As the scientific community tries to learn more about Zika — which appears to be linked to microcephaly, which causes babies to be born with unusually small heads — companies are trying to establish policies that juggle both personal privacy and potential health hazards.

With much about Zika unknown, many companies are taking a safety-first approach.

Since mid-January, Delta Air Lines has offered the option for any pilot or flight attendant to swap out a scheduled trip if traveling to areas flagged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In an email, a spokesman for the airline said that to date, a small number of crew members have swapped trips.

Kimberly-Clark, the maker of paper products based in Irving, Tex., is educating its 16,000 employees in affected regions with information about how to protect against the virus — from what type of clothing to wear to the benefits of insect repellent.

“We quickly issued travel advisories, trying to ensure that any travel to the region is for critical business and not a normal run-of-the-mill kind of business meeting,” said Bob Brand, a spokesman for Kimberly-Clark. “We’ve always had pretty extensive pest control measures in place because we operate in countries that have always seen a number of mosquito-borne diseases, but we are stepping up our pest-control measures to make our operations as safe as possible.”

The United States Department of Defense is offering to relocate any pregnant family members of active-duty or civilian military personnel assigned to areas affected by the Zika virus transmission. And on Feb. 4, The New York Times sent an email to employees about Zika, saying that they did not have to accept any assignment that made them feel “uncomfortable about their own well-being” and that they did not need to tell their managers why they were opting out of any assignments.

Corporate medical officers are conferring with people like David O. Freedman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology and founder of the Travelers Health Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He said that because worries about the Zika virus are enmeshed with family planning issues, setting guidelines about it is tricky.

“There are all sorts of legal implications and legal restrictions,” he said. “Do you even hint at advising your female employees not to get pregnant for the next two years, while posted in Brazil?”

And what if a company evacuates its female employees, or urges them to leave a country, he asked. What message does it send if that company also has employees who are native to the country, people who presumably don’t have the same option? The possibility that the virus can be transmitted sexually presents another drawback and may give pause to men who want to have children.

Few companies will speak openly about their Zika policy. A number of multinationals with significant operations in Latin or South America either did not return calls or offered carefully worded statements about “closely monitoring” the situation.

The region is popular with cruise lines and conferences, but Carnival Corporation said it has had only a “few cancellations” on its cruise ships, noting that pregnant women who wish to cancel will be provided alternate itinerary options or can reschedule their voyage for a later date. Four Boston public schools canceled field trips to the Dominican Republic,Ecuador and Nicaragua. A conference in Puerto Rico planned for September — the country’s convention bureau could not recall which one — is being moved to the next spring.

In the region, concern has not yielded to panic. The level of alarm in cities like Rio, in fact, seems lower than in the United States. The national and local news media in Brazil are reporting findings by organizations like the World Health Organization, which called Zika a global health emergency. But Brazilians have dealt with mosquito-borne viruses for a long time, and some of the viruses, like dengue fever, are more feared because they have affected far more people.

Notes of skepticism, or at least pleas for reactions commensurate with the threat, have become part of the newspaper coverage. On Feb. 4, El País, a Spanish newspaper with a Brazilian edition, published a story online with the headline “Is the risk of Zika exaggerated?” The subhead stated, in part, “Lack of scientific knowledge of the virus and its effects on babies inflates number of possible cases.”

One person who is not changing her itinerary is Anna Holzer, a 32-year-old doctor from Polk City, Iowa. In early February, she traveled to the Dominican Republic for medical seminars by the Iowa Academy of Family Physicians. To be sure she knew the risks, she called up Iowa’s state epidemiologist to discuss precautions.

“We just don’t know much about the virus, how it works, the microcephaly connection,” said Dr. Holzer, who noted that some of her patients had asked whether they should travel to affected regions.

“Women who are pregnant shouldn’t be going. And women who are planning to become pregnant should probably wait a month before attempting to conceive,” Dr. Holzer said in a telephone interview before taking her trip. “But other than taking the precaution of using more repellent, I’m planning on enjoying my vacation.”

There is no better — or sadder — way to explain how Zak Stone’s father died in a vacation rental than how he did himself this week, so this is how he began the essay he wrote for the online magazine Matter.

“The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.”

The death is devastating, but no one should be shocked by it, either. As with any big hotel operation, Airbnb hosts are putting up so many people each night that fatal accidents are almost inevitable.

But the incident — and a second death that Mr. Stone disclosed in the essay in Matter, part of the publishing service Medium — does raise important insurance and safety questions about Airbnb, its competitor HomeAway and hotels themselves at the same time as Airbnb is offering more protection.

Let’s start with insurance. A year ago, Airbnb hosts were on their own when it came to liability, and most of them probably assumed that their homeowner’s insurance would offer coverage if a guest was hurt or worse. But most homeowner’s insurance policies have an explicit exclusion for commercial activity.

Airbnb this year began offering free, automatic secondary coverage for liability, in case a host’s insurance company denied a claim. Last month, Airbnb made that coverage primary. It’s still free, and it covers up to $1 million an incident.

It is not yet clear how friction-free the claims-paying process will be. After the death of Mr. Stone’s father, Louis, his family reached a settlement with the insurance company for his host, not Airbnb or its insurer. According to Mr. Stone, that host had an insurance policy that explicitly covered commercial activity. He said in his essay that Airbnb paid a $2 million settlement for the second death he reported, which was from carbon monoxide poisoning in Taiwan.

HomeAway, which was acquired by Expedia last week for $3.9 billion, takes a different approach to insurance. Rather than offering free liability coverage, it urges homeowners to buy more comprehensive coverage elsewhere. The policy that it recommends includes property and contents damage and loss of business in addition to liability. HomeAway earns a marketing fee when its customers buy from its recommended provider, CBIZ.  So why doesn’t HomeAway offer free coverage like Airbnb? Partly because it would be too expensive to offer the comprehensive policy that prudent homeowners probably should have. But HomeAway’s business is different, too. It matches homeowners and travelers and likens itself to a classified advertising service. While HomeAway did not say this specifically, it is possible that it believes that its process shields the company from potential liability and removes any need to provide automatic coverage for homeowners who list there.

Scott Wolf, the president of CBIZ’s property and casualty program division, said in an interview this week that he could not figure out how every Airbnb customer would ultimately be covered. He pointed to Airbnb’s stated annual limit of $10 million on its policy, which its hosts could exhaust with 10 $1 million claims. He estimated that each policy pays out an average of $100 in liability claims each year (though that average results in large part from a smaller number of claims that are extremely high). If Airbnb has, say, 500,000 listings on average (though there are more occupied properties than that many nights of the year), that is $50 million in claims, which is $40 million more than that annual $10 million cap.

One possibility may be that Airbnb, which has many single travelers staying in single rooms for short periods, simply won’t need to make as many claims as HomeAway travelers do. After all, people who use HomeAway often travel with their families to large rental homes with slippery pool decks and leg-eating trampolines. But Mr. Wolf said that his experience insuring bed-and-breakfast owners suggested that hosts who were in residence were actually more vulnerable to claims than absentee owners. After all, you can’t blame a host for a spill that caused a fall if the host is not there.

Airbnb did not want to go into detail about what it pays for its insurance and the precise policy language. But Nick Papas, a spokesman, said that since it started offering liability coverage in January, eight million people had stayed with an Airbnb host in the United States and fewer than 50 hosts had filed claims. “We are extremely confident in the finances underlying our program,” he said in an emailed statement. “When we were looking to expand it, we had multiple competitive bids from different insurers. The numbers show how low the risk factors are, and they’re eager to work with us.”

As for the safety questions, this seemed the perfect opportunity to figure out once and for all whether Airbnb and HomeAway rentals are more dangerous than hotels: Just ask everyone for the accidental death rate per 100 million room nights and compare. That only works if companies are willing to answer, though. HomeAway offered its number right away: zero deaths, as far as it knows. Mr. Stone disclosed the two Airbnb deaths, and the company would not comment further on its death rate.

The American Hotel & Lodging Association does not track industrywide rates. A Hyatt spokeswoman would not disclose its rate or explain why it refused to share it, and an InterContinental Hotels Group spokesman declined to comment. Best Western and Starwood said they did not have the data. Felicia McLemore, a Marriott spokeswoman, and Christine Miller, a Hilton spokeswoman, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their companies’ death rates.

Without good data, we’re all flailing about looking for anecdotes. So let’s start with those nondisclosing hotels. On two separate occasions within weeks of one another in 2013, three people died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the same Best Western hotel in North Carolina. A USA Today investigation that same year turned up eight deaths and 170 other people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning in hotels in the three previous years. Best Western said the company now had an industry-leading carbon monoxide detection and alarm system.

On the fire front, hotels and motels averaged 3,700 a year from 2006 to 2010, according to the National Fire Protection Association, resulting in an average of 12 deaths, excluding emergency personnel, and 143 injuries a year.

We know less about Airbnb and HomeAway, but one thing we know for sure is that their hosts need not follow the myriad regulations about exits and doors and alarms that hotels and motels do. The companies could inspect each property for safety, but they don’t.

And according to Liz Krueger, a New York state senator who has frequently tangled with the home renting companies, it would be better if somebody else did it. “They’d be self-declaring, and it wouldn’t be a governmental entity,” she said. “Call me a supporter of government, because I am, but I think there is a reason you want a third party doing the evaluation as opposed to an interested party who would have a reason not to document the correct things.”

Still, who knows if a government inspector would have noticed the dead tree that killed Mr. Stone’s father or the water heater reportedly at issue in the Taiwan death. Paying strangers to stay in their homes requires that we assume some risk, and we may simply have to get comfortable that we may never know exactly how much risk.

If you’re a host renting out a home or a room, tell your homeowner’s insurance company, even if you think Airbnb’s liability coverage gives you most of the protection you need. After all, your guest’s lawyer will probably sue your insurance company, too, if there is an injury on your property. Make sure that your guests know how to get out in an emergency and that your home has many alarms and is free of unnecessary hazards.

Paying guests should check batteries on fire and carbon monoxide detectors, be wary of kitchen equipment or outdoor toys they don’t normally use and keep a special eye out for things that could harm small children.

Still, let’s give the new players in lodging some credit where it is due. More insurance coverage is better than less, and urging people to be aware of their risks is a welcome evolution in how these companies operate.

View the original article here.

About the Author:

Ron Lieber is the “Your Money” columnist for The New York Times. “The Opposite of Spoiled,” his guide to teaching kids about money and values, will be published by Harper Collins in February, 2015.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Islamist militants stormed a popular hotel in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, on Sunday, blowing up the front gate with a car bomb, shooting guests and hotel workers, and then battling with security forces from the hotel’s rooftop for several hours.

Somali government officials said at least 14 people at the Sahafi Hotel were killed in the attack, which was immediately — and gleefully — claimed by the Shabab militant group.

If there is one hotel everyone knows in Mogadishu, it is the Sahafi. Warlords and militants alike used to hang out and plot schemes in the lounge and courtyard while sipping grapefruit juice and pulling apart camel meat steaks.

Sahafi means journalist in Arabic, and for years the hotel has served as the gateway to one of the world’s most dangerous countries for foreign journalists, aid workers and the rare brave businessman. Even in the hardest times, the staff managed to provide clean rooms and good food. Lobster was one of the house specialties, served alongside mountains of French fries. Recently, the hotel was a popular rendezvous spot for officials from Somalia’s fledgling government.

Around dawn on Sunday, witnesses said, a car rammed into the Sahafi’s front gate and immediately exploded. Several Shabab fighters then scrambled into the hotel, shooting guests. A second car bomb exploded two hours later, wounding several journalists and other people who had rushed to the hotel, located at a busy traffic circle in central Mogadishu, to see what had happened. One young journalist, Mustaf Abdinur Safaana, a freelance TV cameraman, was killed.

Among the other dead, witnesses said, were a Somali lawmaker, a Somali Army general and the hotel’s owner, Abdirashid Ilgayte, who used to welcome guests into his office just off the hotel’s entrance and regale them with stories of violence and intrigue from Somalia’s darkest days.

“The Shabab fighters seized the hotel and controlled it for several hours,” said Mohamed Ali, a taxi driver who was outside the Sahafi while the fighting was going on.

The Shabab remain a potent force in Somalia. They have lost many fighters and much of their territory, pushed out by a coalition of troops from neighboring African countries. But they are still highly dangerous and considered one of Al Qaeda’s most murderous offshoots. They seemed to have perfected mass murder on the cheap, including an attack on a university in Kenya in April in which four young Shabab gunmen killed more than 140 people.

“Mujahedeen entered and took over Sahafi Hotel where enemies lived,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, the Shabab’s military operations spokesman, told Reuters on Sunday, using a common term for Islamic guerrilla fighters.

Multipronged attacks on hotels have become one of the hallmarks of the Shabab, who have killed scores in Mogadishu in recent years by overwhelming security guards at the gates and then sending in suicidal fighters. The Shabab have vowed to turn Somalia into a pure Islamic state; most of their victims have been Somali Muslims.

Photographs taken by bystanders on Sunday showed a huge hole punched through the Sahafi’s third floor, along with streams of black smoke uncoiling into the sky. Rubble was scattered for blocks. Witnesses said several members of the hotel staff had been hiding in locked rooms, calling for help, as Shabab fighters stalked the smoke filled corridors, looking for more victims.

By 11 a.m., African Union troops in Somalia, along with government forces, overpowered the attackers and shot them dead. Somali government officials said there were seven attackers.

Mogadishu may be safer than it used to be, but it is still not safe. The Shabab once controlled much of the city, bullwhipping women and terrorizing the population by enforcing a harsh version of Islamic law. But even after being pushed out by African Union troops, Shabab fighters have shown they can strike anywhere at any time.

Somalia’s government tried to play down some of the concerns stirred up by the attack. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia said on Sunday, “We want to confirm that such terrorist acts does not mean Shabab’s revival, but in the contrary shows clear signs that they are in desperate situation.”

Mohammed Ibrahim reported from Mogadishu, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Nairobi, Kenya.

View the original article here.