#Contract Workers Management System

[thepresence360]

[simplifyworkforce]

Streamlining Workforce Management with Contingent Workers, Vendor Management Solutions, and Direct Hire

In today’s competitive business landscape, companies often rely on a mix of contingent worker, vendor management solutions (VMS), and direct hire strategies to meet their workforce needs. Balancing these elements effectively can enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure access to top talent.

Understanding Contingent Workers

Contingent workers are non-permanent employees who work on a contractual, freelance, or temporary basis. They provide businesses with the flexibility to scale their workforce based on demand. Companies use contingent workers for specialized projects, seasonal demands, or to fill skill gaps without long-term commitments.

Benefits of Contingent Workers:

Flexibility to scale operations

Access to specialized skills

Reduced overhead costs

The Role of a Vendor Management Solution (VMS)

A Vendor Management Solution is a software platform that streamlines the management of contingent workforce programs. From onboarding to invoicing, a VMS provides businesses with real-time visibility and control over their external workforce.

Key Features of a VMS:

Centralized vendor data management

Compliance and risk management

Automated onboarding and offboarding

Performance tracking and reporting

Direct Hire for Long-Term Success

While contingent workers offer flexibility, direct hire remains a critical strategy for long-term growth. Direct hiring involves recruiting permanent employees who align with the company’s culture and long-term objectives.

Advantages of Direct Hire:

Stability and reliability in the workforce

Enhanced company culture and loyalty

Opportunities for internal growth and development

Integrating VMS for Effective Workforce Management

A robust vendor management solution can support both contingent workforce management and direct hire processes. Businesses can track vendor performance, ensure compliance, and optimize resource allocation. Furthermore, VMS analytics provide actionable insights to improve hiring decisions and workforce planning.

Vendor Onboarding Software: A Comprehensive Guide

7 Tips for Choosing a Contingent Performance Management Software

A Comprehensive Guide to Vendor Assessment

Conclusion

Combining contingent workforce strategies with a vendor management solution and a strong direct hire approach enables companies to remain agile and competitive. With the right tools and strategies in place, businesses can achieve operational efficiency, control costs, and access the talent needed for success.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What industries benefit most from using contingent workers?

Industries such as IT, healthcare, finance, and logistics often rely on contingent workers for project-based or seasonal needs.

2. How does a VMS ensure compliance?

A VMS tracks vendor agreements, monitors certifications, and automates compliance reporting to minimize legal and financial risks.

3. Can a VMS be used for direct hire recruitment?

While VMS platforms primarily manage contingent labor, some offer integrations or modules for managing permanent hires.

4. How can companies balance contingent workers and direct hires?

Businesses can assess workload demands, budget constraints, and long-term goals to determine the ideal mix of contingent and permanent employees.

5. Is it cost-effective to use a VMS for small businesses?

Yes, many VMS providers offer scalable solutions tailored to the needs of small and mid-sized businesses, providing cost savings and operational benefits.

[emsphere-technologies]

Emsphere Technologies' Contract Worker Management: A Blueprint for Success

In today's dynamic business landscape, efficient management of contract workers is pivotal for organizations striving to stay ahead. At Emsphere Technologies, we understand the critical role played by contract labor in various industries. Our Contract Labour Management System stands out as a blueprint for success, offering a seamless and comprehensive solution to streamline the complexities associated with managing a contingent workforce.

Understanding the Need for a Contract Labour Management System

Managing contract workers efficiently is more than just a necessity; it's a strategic imperative. The conventional methods of overseeing a contingent workforce are time-consuming and prone to errors. This is where a robust Contract Labour Management System becomes indispensable. Emsphere Technologies recognizes the challenges faced by businesses in this domain and has engineered a solution that addresses these pain points with precision.

Key Features of Emsphere's Contract Labour Management System

1. Transparent Workforce Visibility

Our system provides real-time visibility into the entire contract workforce. From onboarding to project completion, organizations can effortlessly track the performance and availability of each contract worker. This transparency ensures optimal resource utilization and project planning.

2. Compliance Assurance

Navigating the intricate web of labor regulations is a common headache for organizations employing contract workers. Emsphere's solution is designed to alleviate this burden by automating compliance checks and ensuring that every engagement adheres to the applicable labor laws and industry standards.

3. Seamless Onboarding and Offboarding

Efficient onboarding and offboarding processes are crucial for maximizing productivity and minimizing disruptions. With Emsphere's Contract Labour Management System, these processes are streamlined, allowing organizations to swiftly integrate new talent and seamlessly manage contract worker exits.

4. Performance Analytics and Reporting

Understanding the performance metrics of your contract workforce is instrumental in making informed decisions. Our system provides comprehensive analytics and reporting tools, offering insights into productivity, project timelines, and individual performance metrics. For more information also visit - Comprehensive labour management system

How Emsphere Outperforms the Competition

In the realm of contract worker management, Emsphere Technologies outshines the competition in several key aspects:

1. Customization for Diverse Industries

Emsphere's Contract Labour Management System is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We understand that different industries have unique requirements. Our system is highly customizable, catering to the specific needs and nuances of diverse sectors, ensuring that it seamlessly integrates into your existing workflow.

2. User-Friendly Interface

Ease of use is a top priority for Emsphere. Our system boasts an intuitive interface, ensuring that users can navigate through the platform effortlessly. This user-friendly design minimizes the learning curve, allowing organizations to maximize the benefits of the system from day one.

3. Scalability for Future Growth

As your business evolves, so do your workforce management needs. Emsphere's Contract Labour Management System is built with scalability in mind. Whether you are a small startup or a large enterprise, our system grows with you, accommodating an expanding contingent workforce without compromising efficiency.

Conclusion: Elevate Your Contract Worker Management with Emsphere Technologies

In the fast-paced world of business, where adaptability is key, Emsphere Technologies' Contract Labour Management System emerges as the catalyst for success. Streamlining processes, ensuring compliance, and enhancing visibility, our system is the blueprint that empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of managing a contract workforce effortlessly.

As you embark on the journey of optimizing your contract worker management, trust Emsphere Technologies to be your strategic partner. Experience the efficiency, transparency, and scalability that set us apart in the realm of contract labour management.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“The Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets”

This week only, Barnes and Noble is offering 25% off pre-orders of my forthcoming novel Picks and Shovels. ENDS TODAY!.

While we truly live in an age of ascendant monsters who have hijacked our country, our economy, and our imaginations, there is one consolation: the small cohort of brilliant, driven writers who have these monsters' number, and will share it with us. Writers like Maureen Tkacik:

https://prospect.org/topics/maureen-tkacik/

Journalists like Wired's Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman are absolutely crushing it when it comes to Musk's DOGE coup:

https://www.wired.com/author/vittoria-elliott/

And Nathan Tankus is doing incredible work all on his own, just blasting out scoop after scoop:

https://www.crisesnotes.com/

But for me, it was Tkacik – as usual – in the pages of The American Prospect who pulled it all together in a way that finally made it make sense, transforming the blitzkreig Muskian chaos into a recognizable playbook. While most of the coverage of Musk's wrecking crew has focused on the broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts who are wilding through the server rooms at giant, critical government agencies, Tkacik homes in on their boss, Tom Krause, whom she memorably dubs "the Fagin figure leading Elon Musk’s merry band of pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" (I told you she was a great writer!):

https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/

Krause is a private equity looter. He's the guy who basically invented the playbook for PE takeovers of large tech companies, from Broadcom to Citrix to VMWare, converting their businesses from selling things to renting them out, loading them up with junk fees, slashing quality, jacking up prices over and over, and firing everyone who was good at their jobs. He is a master enshittifier, an enshittification ninja.

Krause has an unerring instinct for making people miserable while making money. He oversaw the merger of Citrix and VMWare, creating a ghastly company called The Cloud Software Group, which sold remote working tools. Despite this, of his first official acts was to order all of his employees to stop working remotely. But then, after forcing his workers to drag their butts into work, move back across the country, etc, he reversed himself because he figured out he could sell off all of the company's office space for a tidy profit.

Krause canceled employee benefits, like thank you days for managers who pulled a lot of unpaid overtime, or bonuses for workers who upgraded their credentials. He also ended the company's practice of handing out swag as small gifts to workers, and then stiffed the company that made the swag, wontpaying a $437,574.97 invoice for all the tchotchkes the company had ordered. That's not the only supplier Krause stiffed: FinLync, a fintech company with a three-year contract with Krause's company, also had to sue to get paid.

Krause's isn't a canny operator who roots out waste: he's a guy who tears out all the wiring and then grudgingly restores the minimum needed to keep the machine running (no wonder Musk loves him, this is the Twitter playbook). As Tkacik reports, Krause fucked up the customer service and reliability systems that served Citrix's extremely large, corporate customers – the giant businesses that cut huge monthly checks to Citrix, whose CIOs received daily sales calls from his competitors.

Workers who serviced these customers, like disabled Air Force veteran David Morgan, who worked with big public agencies, were fired on one hour's notice, just before their stock options vested. The giant public agency customers he'd serviced later called him to complain that the only people they could get on the phone were subcontractors in Indian call centers who lacked the knowledge and authority to resolve their problems.

Last month, Citrix fired all of its customer support engineers. Citrix's military customers are being illegally routed to offshore customer support teams who are prohibited from working with the US military.

Citrix/VMWare isn't an exception. The carnage at these companies is indistinguishable from the wreck Krause made of Broadcom. In all these cases, Krause was parachuted in by private equity bosses, and he destroyed something useful to extract a giant, one-time profit, leaving behind a husk that no longer provides value to its customers or its employees.

This is the DOGE playbook. It's all about plunder: take something that was patiently, carefully built up over generations and burn it to the ground, warming yourself in the pyre, leaving nothing behind but ash. This is what private equity plunderers have been doing to the world's "advanced" economies since the Reagan years. They did it to airlines, family restaurants, funeral homes, dog groomers, toy stores, pharma, palliative care, dialysis, hospital beds, groceries, cars, and the internet.

Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.

That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being…No wonder Tom Krause was tapped for this. He’s their dream employee!"

The fact that Krause isn't well known outside of plunderer circles is absolutely a feature for him, not a bug. Scammers like Krause want to be admitted to polite society. This is why the Sacklers – the opioid crime family that kicked off the Oxy pandemic that's murdered more than 800,000 Americans so far – were so aggressive about keeping their association with their family business, Purdue Pharma, a secret. The Sacklers only wanted to be associated with the art galleries and museums they put their names over, and their lawyers threatened journalists for writing about their lives as billionaire drug pushers (I got one of those threats).

There's plenty of good reasons to be anonymous – if you're a whistleblower, say. But if you ever encounter a corporate executive who insists on anonymity, that's a wild danger sign. Take Pixsy, the scam "copyleft trolls" whose business depends on baiting people into making small errors when using images licensed under very early versions of the Creative Common licenses, and then threatening to sue them unless they pay hundreds or thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Kain Jones, the CEO of Pixsy, tried to threaten me under the EU's GDPR for revealing the names of the scammer on his payroll who sent me a legal threat, and the executive who ran the scam for his business (I say he tried to threaten me because I helped lobby for the GDPR and I know for a fact that this isn't a GDPR violation):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

These people understand that they are in the business of ripping people off, causing them grave and wholly unjust financial injury. They value their secrecy because they are in the business of making strangers righteously furious, and they understand that one of these strangers might just show up in their lives someday to confront them about their transgressions.

This is why Unitedhealthcare freaked out so hard about Luigi Mangione's assassination of CEO Brian Thompson – that's not how the game is supposed to be played. The people who sit in on executive row, destroying your lives, are supposed to be wholly insulated from the consequences of their actions. You're not supposed to know who they are, you're not supposed to be able to find them – of course.

But even more importantly, you're not supposed to be angry at them. They pose as mere software agents in an immortal colony organism called a Limited Liability Corporation, bound by the iron law of shareholder supremacy to destroy your life while getting very, very rich. It's not supposed to be personal. That's why Unitedhealthcare is threatening to sue a doctor who was yanked out of surgery on a cancer patient to be berated by a UHC rep for ordering a hospital stay for her patient:

https://gizmodo.com/unitedhealthcare-is-mad-about-in-luigi-we-trust-comments-under-a-doctors-viral-post-2000560543

UHC is angry that this surgeon, Austin's Dr Elisabeth Potter, went Tiktok-viral with her true story of how how chaotic and depraved and uncaring UHC is. UHC execs fear that Mangione made it personal, that he obliterated the accountability sink of the corporation and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on the (mostly) men at the top who make this call.

This is a point Adam Conover made in his latest Factually podcast, where he interviewed Propublica's T Christian Miller and Patrick Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5tDXRw8kg

Miller and Rucker published a blockbuster investigative report into Cigna's Evocore, a secret company that offers claims-denials as a service to America's biggest health insurers:

https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-prior-authorizations

If you're the CEO of a health insurance company and you don't like how much you're paying out for MRIs or cancer treatment, you tell Evocore (which processes all your claim authorizations) and they turn a virtual dial that starts to reduce the number of MRIs your customers are allowed to have. This dial increases the likelihood that a claim or pre-authorization will be denied, which, in turn, makes doctors less willing to order them (even if they're medically necessary) and makes patients more likely to pay for them out of pocket.

Towards the end of the conversation, Miller and Rucker talk about how the rank-and-file people at an insurer don't get involved with the industry to murder people in order to enrich their shareholders. They genuinely want to help people. But executive row is different: those very wealthy people do believe their job is to kill people to save money, and get richer. Those people are personally to blame for the systemic problem. They are the ones who design and operate the system.

That's why naming the people who are personally responsible for these immoral, vicious acts is so important. That's why it's important that Wired and Propublica are unmasking the "pubescent sovereignty pickpockets" who are raiding the federal government under Krause's leadership:

https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

These people are committing grave crimes against the nation and its people. They should be known for this. It should follow them for the rest of their lives. It should be the lead in their obituaries. People who are introduced to them at parties should have a flash of recognition, hastily end the handshake, then turn on their heels and race to the bathroom to scrub their hands. For the rest of their lives.

Naming these people isn't enough to stop the plunder, but it helps. Yesterday, Marko Elez, the 25 year old avowed "eugenicist" who wanted to "normalize Indian hate" and could not be "[paid] to marry outside of my ethnicity," was shown the door. He's off the job. For the rest of his life, he will be the broccoli-haired brownshirt who got fired for his asinine, racist shitposting:

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury

After Krause's identity as the chief wrecker at DOGE was revealed, the brilliant Anna Merlan (author of Republic of Lies, the best book on conspiratorialism), wrote that "Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work":

https://bsky.app/profile/annamerlan.bsky.social/post/3lhepjkudcs2t

That's exactly it. We are witnessing a private equity-style plunder of the entire US government – of the USA itself. No one is better poised to write about this than Tkacik, because no one has private equity's number like Tkacik does:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Ironically, all this came down just as Trump announced that he was going to finally get rid of private equity's scammiest trick, the "carried interest" loophole that lets PE bosses (and, to a lesser extent, hedge fund managers) avoid billions in personal taxes:

https://archive.is/yKhvD

"Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest rate – it's a law that was designed for 16th century sea captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Trump campaigned on killing this loophole in 2017, but Congress stopped him, after a lobbying blitz by the looter industry. It's possible that he genuinely wants to get rid of the carried interest loophole – he's nothing if not idiosyncratic, as the residents of Greenland can attest:

https://prospect.org/world/2025-02-07-letter-between-friendly-nations/

Even if he succeeds, looters and the "investor class" will get a huge giveaway under Trump, in the form of more tax giveaways and the dismantling of labor and environmental regulation. But it's far more likely that he won't succeed. Rather – as Yves Smith writes for Naked Capitalism – he'll do what he did with the Canada and Mexico tariffs: make a tiny, unimportant change and then lie and say he had done something revolutionary:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/is-trump-serious-about-trying-to-close-the-private-equity-carried-interest-loophole.html

This has been a shitty month, and it's not gonna get better for a while. On my dark days, I worry that it won't get better during my lifetime. But at least we have people like Tkacik to chronicle it, explain it, put it in context. She's amazing, a whirlwind. The same day that her report on Krause dropped, the Prospect published another must-read piece by her, digging deep into Alex Jones's convoluted bankruptcy gambit:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-02-06-crisis-actors-alex-jones-bankruptcy/

It lays bare the wild world of elite bankruptcy court, another critical conduit for protecting the immoral rich from their victims. The fact that Tkacik can explain both Krause and the elite bankruptcy system on the same day is beyond impressive.

We've got a lot of work ahead of ourselves. The people in charge of this system – whose names you must learn and never forget – aren't going to go easily. But at least we know who they are. We know what they're doing. We know how the scam works. It's not a flurry of incomprehensible actions – it's a playbook that killed Red Lobster, Toys R Us, and Sears. We don't have to follow that playbook.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

[ohnoitstbskyen]

I deleted the ask, but someone wrote one basically saying "why do you post reaction videos to Helluva Boss? Don't you know the show exploits its workers and they're overworked and get burned out?"

And, I mean, I love your energy, person who asked, definitely hold on to those values and speak up about this. But also, I am afraid I might have some bad news for you about literally the whole entire animation industry.

As near as I can make out from the sparse journalistic reporting that's been done on SpindleHorse -- and as a sidebar, please for the love of god read actual reporting about these things and not just callout posts and fandom discourse -- as near as I can make out, SpindleHorse as a studio is neither all that much better nor all that much worse than basically anywhere else in the industry on their level. It seems like it is (or was? Hazbin Hotel seems to be run differently) a studio mostly run by contracting people on a project-by-project basis, which leads to a crapton of turnover, and a huge need for organizing and onboarding, which according to the reporting I have read, the producers and freelancers have struggled to balance and manage properly, which has negatively impacted a number of the workers.

Top that with the usual catty, clique-based backbiting, sniping and poorly managed conflict resolution that's just kinda endemic in creative environments mostly staffed by twentysomethings and stressed out freelancers, and you have the recipe for a workplace where a lot of people are going to have a great time and feel creatively fulfilled, and a lot of people are going to come away feeling justifiably burnt the fuck out and exploited.

All of this is... not especially unusual for the animation industry, or indeed for any creative industry. Which is not to say that it is good, or that it should be allowed to be normal, or that it shouldn't be reported on and criticized (and please for the love of god support unionization efforts because that's the only thing that will actually address these kinds of systemic problems). It's just to say that if those kinds of issues are the line in the sand you draw where you refuse to engage with a studio's output...

Then, for starters, say goodbye to basically all of anime, because the Japanese animation industry is actively in a state of crisis trying to recruit new talent because its working conditions and pay are so astonishingly abysmal. And the horror stories that escape from that industry make the issues at SpindleHorse look like summer camp at times.

But you also have to say goodbye to a lot of American and European animation. Please do not imagine that Disney and its subcontractors, or that Nickelodeon or Warner Bros, are benevolent employers. They exploit their staff brutally and are currently trying to crush the labor value of animation with threats of generative AI being used to replace jobs. But those corporations also have extremely well-funded PR departments and the ability to silence employees with NDAs and threats of blackballing, so you don't get to hear as many of the horror stories as you might from a smaller independent studio that's less able to silence criticism by holding people's careers hostage.

All of this is to say that 1) it's valid and important to have criticism of both large and small-scale animation studios, and to keep the well-being and happiness of the workers higher in your priorities than the output of Products™.

And 2) if you're going to have a principle for what kinds of problems make a studio's output morally untouchable for you, and what kinds of problems you think should make a studio's output untouchable to other people, you do need to apply that principle consistently to the entire industry, and not just to the independent animation studio that happens to be surrounded by the internet's most inflammatory fandom discourse.

If you don't apply that principle consistently, maybe don't send reproachful messages to strangers scolding them for not living up to your standards, and even if you do apply that principle consistently, maybe still don't do that, because it's mostly quite annoying, and doesn't really do anything to support animation workers struggling for better working conditions.

The Animation Guild in the US is currently in the middle of a bargaining process with their industry, and they have a social media press kit as well as relevant talking points on their website which you can use to post in solidarity with the workers. If it comes to a full industry strike, consider donating to their strike funds to help them maintain pressure. Outside of the US, try and find out what (if any) local unions exist for animation workers, and maybe sign up to their mailing lists. They will let you know what kind of support they need from you.

[mariacallous]

In the span of just weeks, the U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the U.S. Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly $5.45 trillion in annual federal payments.

Then, we learned that uncleared DOGE personnel had gained access to classified data from the U.S. Agency for International Development, possibly copying it onto their own systems. Next, the Office of Personnel Management—which holds detailed personal data on millions of federal employees, including those with security clearances—was compromised. After that, Medicaid and Medicare records were compromised.

Meanwhile, only partially redacted names of CIA employees were sent over an unclassified email account. DOGE personnel are also reported to be feeding Education Department data into artificial intelligence software, and they have also started working at the Department of Energy.

This story is moving very fast. On Feb. 8, a federal judge blocked the DOGE team from accessing the Treasury Department systems any further. But given that DOGE workers have already copied data and possibly installed and modified software, it’s unclear how this fixes anything.

In any case, breaches of other critical government systems are likely to follow unless federal employees stand firm on the protocols protecting national security.

The systems that DOGE is accessing are not esoteric pieces of our nation’s infrastructure—they are the sinews of government.

For example, the Treasury Department systems contain the technical blueprints for how the federal government moves money, while the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) network contains information on who and what organizations the government employs and contracts with.

What makes this situation unprecedented isn’t just the scope, but also the method of attack. Foreign adversaries typically spend years attempting to penetrate government systems such as these, using stealth to avoid being seen and carefully hiding any tells or tracks. The Chinese government’s 2015 breach of OPM was a significant U.S. security failure, and it illustrated how personnel data could be used to identify intelligence officers and compromise national security.

In this case, external operators with limited experience and minimal oversight are doing their work in plain sight and under massive public scrutiny: gaining the highest levels of administrative access and making changes to the United States’ most sensitive networks, potentially introducing new security vulnerabilities in the process.

But the most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted. It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.

The Treasury’s computer systems have such an impact on national security that they were designed with the same principle that guides nuclear launch protocols: No single person should have unlimited power. Just as launching a nuclear missile requires two separate officers turning their keys simultaneously, making changes to critical financial systems traditionally requires multiple authorized personnel working in concert.

This approach, known as “separation of duties,” isn’t just bureaucratic red tape; it’s a fundamental security principle as old as banking itself. When your local bank processes a large transfer, it requires two different employees to verify the transaction. When a company issues a major financial report, separate teams must review and approve it. These aren’t just formalities—they’re essential safeguards against corruption and error.

These measures have been bypassed or ignored. It’s as if someone found a way to rob Fort Knox by simply declaring that the new official policy is to fire all the guards and allow unescorted visits to the vault.

The implications for national security are staggering. Sen. Ron Wyden said his office had learned that the attackers gained privileges that allow them to modify core programs in Treasury Department computers that verify federal payments, access encrypted keys that secure financial transactions, and alter audit logs that record system changes. Over at OPM, reports indicate that individuals associated with DOGE connected an unauthorized server into the network. They are also reportedly training AI software on all of this sensitive data.

This is much more critical than the initial unauthorized access. These new servers have unknown capabilities and configurations, and there’s no evidence that this new code has gone through any rigorous security testing protocols. The AIs being trained are certainly not secure enough for this kind of data. All are ideal targets for any adversary, foreign or domestic, also seeking access to federal data.

There’s a reason why every modification—hardware or software—to these systems goes through a complex planning process and includes sophisticated access-control mechanisms. The national security crisis is that these systems are now much more vulnerable to dangerous attacks at the same time that the legitimate system administrators trained to protect them have been locked out.

By modifying core systems, the attackers have not only compromised current operations, but have also left behind vulnerabilities that could be exploited in future attacks—giving adversaries such as Russia and China an unprecedented opportunity. These countries have long targeted these systems. And they don’t just want to gather intelligence—they also want to understand how to disrupt these systems in a crisis.

Now, the technical details of how these systems operate, their security protocols, and their vulnerabilities are now potentially exposed to unknown parties without any of the usual safeguards. Instead of having to breach heavily fortified digital walls, these parties  can simply walk through doors that are being propped open—and then erase evidence of their actions.

The security implications span three critical areas.

First, system manipulation: External operators can now modify operations while also altering audit trails that would track their changes. Second, data exposure: Beyond accessing personal information and transaction records, these operators can copy entire system architectures and security configurations—in one case, the technical blueprint of the country’s federal payment infrastructure. Third, and most critically, is the issue of system control: These operators can alter core systems and authentication mechanisms while disabling the very tools designed to detect such changes. This is more than modifying operations; it is modifying the infrastructure that those operations use.

To address these vulnerabilities, three immediate steps are essential. First, unauthorized access must be revoked and proper authentication protocols restored. Next, comprehensive system monitoring and change management must be reinstated—which, given the difficulty of cleaning a compromised system, will likely require a complete system reset. Finally, thorough audits must be conducted of all system changes made during this period.

This is beyond politics—this is a matter of national security. Foreign national intelligence organizations will be quick to take advantage of both the chaos and the new insecurities to steal U.S. data and install backdoors to allow for future access.

Each day of continued unrestricted access makes the eventual recovery more difficult and increases the risk of irreversible damage to these critical systems. While the full impact may take time to assess, these steps represent the minimum necessary actions to begin restoring system integrity and security protocols.

Assuming that anyone in the government still cares.

[beefbologna]

"Liberalism is the erroneous belief that one can paper over systemic inequality with enough contract law, consent fetishism, and lip service to ‘individual freedom’. It is ruling-class propaganda that bamboozles people into thinking that token mass participation in the political process can outweigh the hoarding of wealth and privileges and control over the means of cultural production.

When applied to feminist thought, this ideological defect reframes the imbalances of power in the sexual economy to a simple matter of ‘restricted freedoms’ that can, one by one, be alleviated legislatively through state protectionism. If women are underpaid, then we shall simply make it illegal to pay them less, in much the same way one would apply a bandage to a gaping wound. Surely treating symptoms without investigating causes would eventually solve the problem. We need not inquire why women are paid less, what factors are contributing to their labor being undervalued, and whether there are underlying causes leading to such treatment that legislation alone cannot remedy.

It is, in a sentence, a Human Resources approach to managing rape culture.

What liberal ideologies are worst at addressing, of course, are questions pertaining to their own violences, the injustices and disparities they promulgate, perpetuate, and thrive on, just underneath the facade of bringing all parties to the same table. They have never been able to confront the truth of how workers are far less free to negotiate terms than bosses, concerned more with the image of happy coordination than the reality of who has signed the dotted line with a gun to her head."

Banger article from @taliabhattwrites

[cathkaesque]

At the [Ethical Consumer] conference, Catherine McAndrew tells the story of an agricultural workers strike in Morocco in 2021. McAndrew works for Landworkers’ Alliance, a union of small farmers and land-based workers affiliated to La Via Campesina, an international organisation of agricultural workers’ unions with 200 million members in 81 countries. McAndrew has been involved in many strikes and worker-led social justice campaigns, including amongst Almeria’s Sea of Plastic — as recently featured in The New Climate. But her Morocco experience remains raw.

“It was on a farm called ‘farm 9’, which belongs to an agribusiness called Azura, which employs about 16,000 people”, recounts McAndrew. Farm 9’s name nods to the faceless anonymity of industrialised agriculture — just one number amongst 80+ farms in Morocco, which mostly export tomatoes to the UK. When the farm workers tried to form a union, they found that they were getting their pay docked for attending union meetings. Following a short half hour protest outside their place of work, McAndrew alleges, the union shop steward “was beaten up by two of his managers in the green houses” and later dismissed.

In response and solidarity, the workers went on strike “from the middle of December 2021, to the beginning of January 2022. So six weeks they were camped outside the farm, literally living in tents”, continues McAndrew. “And on the second of January, the company parked cars outside the gates and made it very difficult for the workers to picket safely. It was next to a major works and one of the workers was killed. Her name was Sabah Dinar. She was 30 years old. She had been at the tomato picker at that farm for nine years, and she left behind four children between the ages of three and 12.” Not that you would be able to gauge any of this from Azura’s glossy sustainability reports, with whole sections on ‘A relationship of trust with our stakeholders’ and ‘Sustainability, the lifeblood of our company’.

McAndrew, however, is keen to stress that Dinar’s tragic story represents just the tip of the iceberg. It is the price developing countries pay for developed countries’ growth.

Sometimes it’s the people themselves who are exported, with clear echoes to the chattel slavery and indentured labour that children in the Global North only learn about in history books. In Huelva, Spain, around 15,000 berry picking workers (again, mostly exported to UK supermarkets) are hired from Morocco through a process called ‘contract in origin’; meaning the workers are tied to specific farms and in effect can’t leave. The Landworkers’ Alliance have evidence of Moroccan workers living in barracks, tagged with GPS trackers. Omar (not their real name), a black worker from Gambia, received €45 for a 6.5 hours of work, picking 40kg of produce. The blueberries are then sold at £12 (€15) a kilo in British supermarkets. As a result, this is Omar’s house:

These aren’t mere glitches in an otherwise well-functioning system. This is the system. Never-ending growth on a planet with finite resources must become, by definition, increasingly extractive, exploitative, and destructive. Capitalism requires losers in order for there to be winners. It’s all there in the image of Omar’s house. Omar lives in the foreground of the picture, in a shanty hut made from salvaged plastic from the polytunnels he must work in. In the mid-distance, people look on from relatively comfortable apartment dwellings — albeit not a prime location, due to the unwanted view, with lower rent than more affluent ‘leafy’ neighbourhoods. And high in the blue sky above in the picture, far from view, are playboy Billionaire space tourists stretching their legs on spacewalks (if I’d have written that sentence even five years ago, it would have seemed grotesque hyperbole — but now, thanks to rocketing inequality levels, it is true).

But where does growth come into this? Catherine McAndrew again: “Growth, in an economic sense, is typically measured as an increase or decrease in GDP, gross domestic product, which is a measure of how much economic activity occurs in a country… it is a sum of every transaction, every purchase, every wage, every investment. Countries need to be seen as growing in order to attract new investments and to be able to borrow money on international markets at affordable rates.” Poor countries, largely those who have been previously Colonised, their goods and materials pilfered in order to develop the now developed countries, are not offered affordable rates. Credit rating agencies charge them much higher interest rates compared to developed countries. Borrowing costs are so high that 3.3 billion people — around 40% of humanity — live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education. “This setup — of measuring everything in dollars and measuring everything in terms of a growing market — keeps rich countries rich and poor countries poor”, summarises McAndrew.

[andhumanslovedstories]

This sounds like a shitty question but I promise it's in good faith: How does a healthcare strike work? Like what happens to the patients? When this strike was first kicking off I remember a lot of people saying doctors/nurses/healthcare CANT strike because it's too necessary, which is obviously nonsense, but like... what actually is in place to stop people from getting hurt during the strike?

Massive props btw, striking esp for something so important is brave and hard and I'm in such support of you guys. Hopefully it ends soon and inspires more healthcare workers across the nation to do the same bc the awful treatment has gone on FAR too long.

This is an incredibly fair question! And I appreciate you asking it. It works the way all strikes do: people don't do the work. The consequences of workers refusing to work is the point. And it sucks! We're fully aware of how much this acutely affects patients. A healthcare strike is an argument that whatever short-term harm might be done as a result of work stoppage is less harmful than the long-term harm of current conditions. Other hospitals and facilities can help with patients who would normally come to a striking Providence facility, but obviously there's only so much that they can absorb. Everywhere else is busy as well.

In the case of our strike specifically in Oregon (I can't speak to healthcare unions anywhere else), we gave a mandatory ten-day notice of intention to strike. Ideally, negotiating happens hard during that period. In practice, Providence said they were too busy coordinating replacement care to meet with the union during that time. Providence puts out travel contract nurses and hires scabs to keep hospitals running. In addition, the jobs that aren't unionized are still working. Nursing management works the floor as well.

Through travel contracts and having to turn away patients due to lack of staffing, the Providence system is bleeding money. The hope is that this and public pressure works to bring them to the negotiating table.

[mesetacadre]

One mistake that is very common for communists to make (both online and offline, though it's more annoying online) when talking about and participating in trade unions is forgetting both your and the union's place in class struggle.

A trade union is by its very nature a reformist entity that fights partial struggles at best and reinforces the state's management of capitalism at worst. The purpose of any trade union is to represent a group of workers at the a company or sector at the same level of the capitalists who run it to achieve better conditions for the workforce. Two crucial aspects of this are (1) that it simply puts the workers at the same level of capitalists to negotiate, it does not question the very role of the capitalist in the wider economy, and (2) its ultimate goal is always to reform the contract that defines the relationship between the worker and the capitalist, not to remove it altogether. It does not matter the amount or length of strikes the union might organize, or how much they embolden workers to act in their (supposed) interest. Every fight organized by a union is, by definition, reformist. The only situations in which unions seize to have this character are in either a dictatorship of the proletariat, and like any other element of the superstructure it's put to work in the interests of the working class, or a situation with a strong communist party pre-revolution that has been able to influence the union in such a way that it becomes internally aligned with the interests of the vanguard.

Does this mean that unions are worthless and that we should ignore them because they don't immediately acquire rifles and take over human resources? No. What we should do is avoid creating false illusions or misplacing importance on these fights

An organized (that is, in a communist party) communist's role is to elevate the working masses to a revolutionary conscience, so that the party can have the sufficient amount of people, and organizational capability, to exploit the crises of capitalism to their favor. And this never changes, no matter the context of your intervention. When you go to a protest, you are a communist in that protest, not just another protestor. When you do work in a union, you are a communist in a union, not a unionist. This means that your work and your interactions with other workers should always be done as a communist. You may be an active member of a union, in fact that's the main way for organized communists to act in a workplace, if their party does not have the sufficient strength to act on its own. But you're a communist first, a communist who understands the utility of unions to create the seed of revolutionary-political conscience in workers.

And a misunderstanding of any of these two concepts usually manifests in what I see some communists do, which is taking the reformist slogans of trade unions ("fight for a just wage", "united we bargain", or just an oversimplified "join a union!", for example) and parroting them without much apparent thought. Trade unionism and socialdemocracy go hand in hand, these two currents hinge on the idea of promising workers a bigger slice of the national wealth. But the difference between these two, and part of the reason why many more communists are less critical towards unions I think, is that unions take the position of workers, the "underdog", while socialdemocracy deals directly with putting reforms in place. But ultimately they both misdirect the spontaneous conscience workers acquire by the everyday class antagonism towards policies that reinforce capitalism and the system of wage labor through which workers are exploited in the first place.

[thepresence360]

[simplifyworkforce]

The Future of Workforce and Supply Chain Optimization: Leveraging Technology for Efficiency

In an increasingly complex business landscape, companies must optimize operations to maintain competitiveness. The right technologies, including Workforce Management Software (WMS), Supply Chain Management Software (SCMS), and Direct Sourcing Tools, streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance agility. By integrating these solutions, businesses create a more resilient and adaptive ecosystem to navigate future challenges.

Enhancing Workforce Operations with Smart Solutions

Managing large and diverse teams requires real-time insights and automation. WMS provides:

Automated Scheduling & Time Tracking: Aligns staff availability with demand.

Labor Cost Optimization: AI-driven analytics improve efficiency.

Compliance & Risk Management: Tracks regulations and policies to minimize risks.

Enhanced Employee Engagement: Self-service portals improve satisfaction and retention.

With the right system, organizations gain greater control, ensuring smoother workflows and cost-effectiveness.

Transforming Logistics and Procurement

A well-structured supply chain is the backbone of a successful business. SCMS enhances logistics, procurement, and vendor relations with features like:

Real-Time Inventory Tracking: Prevents shortages and excess stock.

Automated Procurement & Vendor Management: Simplifies order processing.

Data-Driven Demand Forecasting: AI-powered insights optimize planning.

Risk Mitigation: Identifies vulnerabilities and ensures compliance.

Integrating workforce and supply chain management software ensures seamless coordination and efficiency.

Streamlining Talent Acquisition

Traditional hiring methods often rely on intermediaries, adding costs and inefficiencies. Direct sourcing solutions empower companies to:

Build Employer-Branded Talent Pools: Engage with pre-vetted candidates.

Reduce Hiring Expenses: Minimize reliance on external agencies.

Accelerate Time-to-Hire: Streamline recruitment for quicker onboarding.

Improve Candidate Matching: AI-driven processes enhance job-fit accuracy.

A well-executed approach ensures a seamless hiring process aligned with business needs.

A Unified Strategy for Maximum Efficiency

A comprehensive approach that integrates workforce and supply chain technologies delivers:

End-to-End Visibility: A single dashboard for staff, vendors, and logistics.

Seamless Planning: Aligns staffing with supply chain requirements.

Optimized Cost Management: Reduces labor and operational expenses.

Scalability & Agility: Enables rapid adaptation to market changes.

Conclusion

As businesses navigate an evolving digital landscape, adopting advanced tools is essential for sustained growth. These solutions streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance resilience.

Ready to elevate your strategy? Investing in the right technology ensures long-term success in a competitive market.

[emsphere-technologies]

Comprehensive Labour Management System: Streamlining Workforce Efficiency with Emsphere

In today's fast-paced business environment, managing a workforce efficiently is paramount. This is where a Comprehensive Labour Management System (LMS) comes into play. In this article, we'll delve into the world of LMS and explore how Emsphere's innovative software is transforming the way organizations manage their labor force.

Understanding Labour Management Systems (LMS)

What is an LMS?

A Labour Management System, or LMS, is a software solution designed to optimize the allocation, scheduling, tracking, and overall management of a company's workforce. It's a powerful tool that helps organizations enhance productivity, reduce labor costs, and improve workforce engagement.

Key Components of an LMS

An effective LMS typically comprises several key components:

1. Workforce Scheduling

Efficiently allocate tasks and shifts to employees based on their skills, availability, and workload.

2. Time and Attendance Tracking

Accurately record and monitor employee attendance and work hours, reducing errors and ensuring compliance.

3. Performance Analytics

Gain valuable insights into employee performance through data-driven analytics and reporting.

4. Payroll Integration

Seamlessly integrate with payroll systems to automate salary calculations and disbursements.

5. Employee Self-Service Portal

Empower employees to manage their schedules, time-offs, and personal information.

The Emsphere Advantage

Why Choose Emsphere?

When it comes to LMS, Emsphere stands out as a leader in the industry. Here's why you should consider Emsphere's Labour Management System:

1. User-Friendly Interface

Emsphere offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface that requires minimal training, ensuring a smooth transition for your workforce.

2. Customization

Tailor the LMS to your organization's specific needs, from shift patterns to reporting metrics.

3. Real-Time Insights

Access real-time data and analytics to make informed decisions and adjustments on the fly.

4. Compliance and Security

Emsphere takes data security and compliance seriously, ensuring that your sensitive workforce data is safe and protected.

The Impact of Emsphere's LMS

Boosting Efficiency

By automating time-consuming tasks like scheduling and attendance tracking, Emsphere's LMS allows your HR team to focus on more strategic initiatives, ultimately boosting overall efficiency. Checkout: Labour Management Information System

Cost Savings

Emsphere's LMS helps you optimize labor allocation, reducing overstaffing and overtime costs, while also minimizing errors in payroll calculations.

Employee Satisfaction

Empower your employees with self-service options and transparent communication, leading to improved job satisfaction and retention rates.

Conclusion

In today's competitive business landscape, a Comprehensive Labour Management System is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Emsphere's innovative software provides a comprehensive solution to streamline your workforce management, drive efficiency, and boost your organization's productivity.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. Is Emsphere's LMS suitable for small businesses?

Yes, Emsphere's LMS is scalable and can be tailored to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes.

2. How does Emsphere ensure data security?

Emsphere employs robust data encryption and follows industry best practices to safeguard your workforce data.

3. Can I integrate Emsphere's LMS with my existing HR software?

Yes, Emsphere offers seamless integrations with various HR and payroll software solutions.

4. What kind of support does Emsphere provide for its LMS users?

Emsphere offers comprehensive customer support and training to ensure a smooth experience for its users.

5. How can I access Emsphere's LMS for my organization?

To explore Emsphere's LMS and access a free trial, visit Comprehensive Labour Management System

Investing in Emsphere's Comprehensive Labour Management System is a strategic move that can lead to significant improvements in your organization's workforce management. Make the shift today and experience the difference firsthand!

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

I just read the article you posted a while back about TB (heads up- it said the gift article link has lapsed or some such). Did J&J ‘evergreen’ (be allowed to be evil) or was it allowed to become generic?

Relatedly, how do you manage empathy fatigue? I deal with OCD too and it screams at me that I have to care about and do all the things all at once. How do you choose where to put your time and energy?

(Also, when I get the coffee subscription for my husband’s birthday, which version should I get?)

For me empathy fatigue sets in when I careen my attention from this crisis to that one to the next one to the one after that, always feeling overwhelmed by each emerging problem but never having the time or attention to devote myself to one problem or another.

I'll give you an example. In 2014, a horrific ebola epidemic swept through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The world paid attention to it. Everyone was talking about it. And then .... it ended. At least in the global imagination. Money dried up. The world moved on to the next crisis.

That's not to say the next crisis wasn't important. It was important. But in Sierra Leone, the ebola crisis wasn't really over even after people stopped contracting ebola. 15% of Sierra Leone's healthcare workers had been killed by ebola, and the already fragile healthcare system plummeted into what one Sierra Leonean physician described to me as "a state of collapse."

And so the crisis remained a crisis even after the world's attention shifted. 1 in 17 women in Sierra Leone were dying in childbirth. Over 10% of kids born died before the age of five. Tuberculosis killed thousands every year despite curative treatment being available.

And this is when Hank and I finally, belatedly realized that responding to crises in the news was not adequate. Instead, we would need to commit the kind of long-term attention and long-term support that long-term crises demand. This means making difficult choices--there is also high maternal and child mortality in countries other than Sierra Leone, but we choose to focus on Sierra Leone because we see an opportunity to make a difference, because the government is serious if limited in its commitment to improving healthcare and educational opportunities, and because we had to make a choice or else we would be overwhelmed by the many causes.

What about the other causes? Well, we trust people to work on those causes. We believe in their importance. And we support their work by doing ours as well as we can, and trusting they are doing theirs as well as they can. I still get overwhelmed. I still get depressed. But I find that the deeper I go into my particular areas of interest--global healthcare delivery, health care accessibility, ending TB, fighting maternal mortality--the better I feel personally, and the more good I feel like I'm able to do.

2. Johnson & Johnson has not abandoned their secondary patents on bedaquiline but they have committed to allow generics to be available in most countries, even those where the secondary patents apply. Unfortunately this deal leaves out many countries that need generic bedaquiline, including Ukraine, which is absolutely unacceptable. So progress has been made, but the progress (as is so often the case) is inadequate. The fight goes on.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk’s minions—from trusted sidekicks to random college students and former Musk company interns—have taken over the General Services Administration, a critical government agency that manages federal offices and technology. Already, the team is attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X’s image, according to leaked documents obtained by WIRED.

Some of the same people who helped Musk take over Twitter more than two years ago are now registered as official GSA employees. Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter HQ as an unofficial member of Musk’s transition team, has high-level agency access and an official government email address, according to documents viewed by WIRED. Hollander’s husband, Steve Davis, also slept in the office. He has now taken on a leading role in Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Thomas Shedd, the recently installed director of the Technology Transformation Services within GSA, worked as a software engineer at Tesla for eight years. Edward Coristine, who previously interned at Neuralink, has been onboarded along with Ethan Shaotran, a Harvard senior who is developing his own OpenAI-backed scheduling assistant and participated in an xAI hackathon.

“I believe these people do not want to help the federal government provide services to the American people,” says a current GSA employee who asked not to be named, citing fears of retaliation. “They are acting like this is a takeover of a tech company.”

The team appears to be carrying out Musk’s agenda: slashing the federal government as quickly as possible. They’re currently targeting a 50 percent reduction in spending for every office managed by the GSA, according to documents obtained by WIRED.

There also appears to be an effort to use IT credentials from the Executive Office of the President to access GSA laptops and internal GSA infrastructure. Typically, access to agency systems requires workers to be employed at such agencies, sources say. While Musk's team could be trying to obtain better laptops and equipment from GSA, sources fear that the mandate laid out in the DOGE executive order would grant the body broad access to GSA systems and data. That includes sensitive procurement data, data internal to all the systems and services GSA offers, and internal monitoring software to surveil GSA employees as part of normal auditing and security processes.

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told WIRED on Friday.

“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren't government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it'll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”

The new GSA leadership team has prioritized downsizing the GSA’s real estate portfolio, canceling convenience contracts, and rolling out AI tools for use by the federal government, according to internal documents and interviews with sources familiar with the situation. At a GSA office in Washington, DC, earlier this week, there were three items written on a white board sitting in a large, vacant room. “Spending Cuts $585 m, Regulations Removed, 15, Square feet sold/terminated 203,000 sf,” it read, according to a photo viewed by WIRED. There’s no note of who wrote the message, but it appears to be a tracker of cuts made or proposed by the team.

“We notified the commercial real estate market that two GSA properties would soon be listed for sale, and we terminated three leases,” Stephen Ehikian, the newly appointed GSA acting administrator, said in an email to GSA staff on Tuesday, confirming the agency’s focus on lowering real estate costs. “This is our first step in right-sizing the real estate portfolio.”

The proposed changes extend even inside the physical spaces at the GSA offices. Hollander has requested multiple “resting rooms,” for use by the A-suite, a team of employees affiliated with the GSA administrator’s office.

On January 29, a working group of high-ranking GSA employees, including the deputy general counsel and the chief administrative services officer, met to discuss building a resting room prototype. The team mapped out how to get the necessary funding and waivers to build resting rooms in the office, according to an agenda viewed by WIRED.

After Musk bought Twitter, Hollander and Davis moved into the office with their newborn baby. Hollander helped oversee real estate and office design—including the installation of hotel rooms at Twitter HQ, according to a lawsuit later filed by Twitter executives. During the installation process, one of the executives emailed to say that the plans for the rooms were likely not code compliant. Hollander “visited him in person and emphatically instructed him to never put anything about the project in writing again,” the lawsuit alleged. Employees were allegedly instructed to call the hotel rooms “sleeping rooms” and to say they were just for taking naps.

Hollander has also requested access to Public Buildings Service applications; PBS owns and leases office space to government agencies. The timing of the access request lines up with Ehikian’s announcement about shrinking GSA’s real estate cost.

Musk’s lieutenants are also working to authorize the use of AI tools, including Google Gemini and Cursor (an AI coding assistant), for federal workers. On January 30, the group met with Google to discuss Telemetry, a software used to monitor the health and performance of applications, according to a document obtained by WIRED.

A-suite engineers, including Coristine and Shaotran, have requested access to a variety of GSA records, including nearly 10 years of accounting data, as well as detailed records on vendor payments, purchase orders, and revenue.

The GSA takeover mimics Musk’s strategy at other federal agencies like the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Earlier this month, Amanda Scales, who worked in talent at Musk’s xAI, was appointed as OPM chief of staff. Riccardo Biasini, former Tesla engineer and director of operations at the Boring company, is now a senior adviser to the director. Earlier this week, Musk cohorts at the US Office of Personnel Management emailed more than 2 million federal workers offering “deferred resignations,” allegedly promising employees their regular pay and benefits through September 30.

The email closely mirrored the “extremely hardcore” note Musk sent to Twitter staff in November 2022, shortly after buying the company.

Many federal workers thought the email was fake—as with Twitter, it seemed designed to force people to leave, slashing headcount costs without the headache of an official layoff.

Ehikian followed up with a note to staff stressing that the email was legitimate. “Yes, the OPM email is real and should be taken very seriously,” he said in an email obtained by WIRED. He added that employees should expect a “further consolidation of offices and centralization of functions.”

On Thursday night, GSA workers received a third email related to the resignation request called “Fork in the Road FAQs.” The email explained that employees who resign from their positions would not be required to work and could get a second job. “We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” it read. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

The third question posed in the FAQ asked, “Will I really get my full pay and benefits during the entire period through September 30, even if I get a second job?”

“Yes,” the answer read. “You will also accrue further personal leave days, vacation days, etc. and be paid out for unused leave at your final resignation date.”

However, multiple GSA employees have told WIRED that they are refusing to resign, especially after the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) told its members on Tuesday that the offer could be void.

“There is not yet any evidence the administration can or will uphold its end of the bargain, that Congress will go along with this unilateral massive restructuring, or that appropriated funds can be used this way, among other issues that have been raised,” the union said in a notice.

There is also concern that, under Musk’s influence, the federal government might not pay for the duration of the deferred resignation period. Thousands of Twitter employees have sued Musk alleging that he failed to pay their agreed upon severance. Last year, one class action suit was dismissed in Musk’s favor.

In an internal video viewed by WIRED, Ehikian reiterated that GSA employees had the “opportunity to participate in a deferred resignation program,” per the email sent by OPM on January 28. Pressing his hands into the namaste gesture, Ehikian added, “If you choose to participate, I offer you my heartfelt gratitude for your service to this nation. If you choose to stay at the GSA, we’ll work together to implement the four pillars from the OPM memo.” He ended the video by saying thank you and pressing his hands into namaste again.

[reasonsforhope]

Seven thousand more UAW members just walked off the job, expanding the strike to two more plants. Twenty-five thousand autoworkers are now on strike, and the walkout could continue to escalate if the Big Three don’t budge in negotiations.

[UAW president Shawn] Fain announced that Stellantis would be spared this time. The union had been expected to strike all three companies, but, said Region 1 director LaShawn English, three minutes before Fain was scheduled to go on Facebook Live, the UAW received frantic emails from company representatives.

[Note: Love that for the UAW. Also laughing so hard. Three minutes before the next round of strikes were annouced!!]

According to Fain, Stellantis made “significant progress” on cost-of-living allowances, the right not to cross a picket line, and the right to strike over product commitments and plant closures. “We are excited about this momentum at Stellantis and hope it continues,” Fain said...

“See You Next Week — Maybe?”

“These guys wanted to go out a long time ago,” said Cody Zaremba, a Local 602 member at the Lansing GM plant after the news broke that his plant would be joining the strike. “We’re ready. Everybody, truly, I believe, in the entire membership. They’re one with what’s going on.”

Five thousand workers at thirty-eight parts distribution centers across twenty-one states have been on strike since last Friday [September 22, 2023], along with thirteen thousand at three assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri who walked out on September 15. (See a map of all struck facilities here.) ...

The UAW is now calling on community supporters to organize small teams to canvass dealerships that sell and repair Big Three cars and trucks. On Tuesday, the union issued a canvassing tool kit with instructions, flyers, press releases, and talking points.

In negotiations with Ford and GM, autoworkers have clinched some important gains. Among them is an agreement by both companies to end at least one of the many tiers in current contracts, putting workers at certain parts plants back on the same wage scale as assembly workers. The top rate for Big Three assembly workers is currently around $32...

Ford was spared in last week’s escalation, because bargainers there had made further progress on gains for workers.

But today, the UAW once again called out workers at Ford and GM, putting some muscle behind its bold demands — a big wage boost, a shorter workweek, elimination of tiers, cost-of-living adjustments tied to inflation, protection from plant closures, conversion of temps to permanent employees, and the restoration of retiree health care and benefit-defined pensions to all workers.

-via Jacobin, September 29, 2023. Article continues below.

Keep Them Guessing

This year, for the first time in recent history, the union has played the three auto companies against each other with its strike strategy, departing from the union’s tradition of choosing one target company and patterning an agreement at the other two.

The stand-up strike strategy draws inspiration from an approach known as CHAOS (Create Havoc Around Our System), first deployed in 1993 by Alaska Airlines flight attendants, who announced they would be striking random flights. Although they struck only seven flights in a two-month period, Alaska had to send scabs on every plane, just in case. The unpredictability drew enormous media attention and drove management up the wall. Meanwhile the union was able to conserve its strength and minimize risk.

The companies miscalculated where the UAW was going to strike first, stockpiling engines and shipping them cross-country to the wrong facilities. Autoworkers relished the self-inflicted supply chain chaos on UAW Facebook groups and other social media platforms.

Nonstrikers’ morale on the factory floor has gotten a boost from rank and filers organizing to refuse voluntary overtime. With support both from Fain and the reform caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), workers have been encouraging each other to “Eight and Skate,” meaning to turn down extra work and decline to do management any favors.

Majority Public Support

A majority of Americans support the UAW strikers, and the Big Three have taken a PR hit since the strike began, according to a new survey conducted by the business intelligence firm Caliber.

“Eighty-seven percent of respondents told us they were aware of the strike,” Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told the Intercept. “It’s clear the strike is not just causing commercial repercussions, but reputational repercussions as well.”

These reputational repercussions will only worsen...

"We Can Unmake It"

Fain didn't pull any punches in his speech... “That’s what’s different about working-class people. Whether we’re building cars or trucks or running parts distribution centers; whether we’re writing movies or performing TV shows... we do the heavy lifting. We do the real work. Not the CEOs, not the executives.

"And though we don’t know it, that’s what power is. We have the power. The world is of our making. The economy is of our making. This industry is of our making.

“And as we’ve shown, when we withhold our labor, we can unmake it.”

-via Jacobin, September 29, 2023