#government workers

[sher-ee]

Story here ⬆️

[amodernjunecleaver]

It’s that time when my coworkers are putting up lights, garland, and little trees. Meanwhile I have turned my cubicle into The Jewbicle. I still have a few things to put up, but this is a good start.

[politijohn]

Source

Source

Let’s go

[projectazar]

As a reminder: drowning is silent. Both in the pool and in the office.

[americantaxpayer]

Seems that many government employees haven't a clue to what they are supposed to be doing. Critical thinking is not part of their skills & talent.

[eluminium]

i love how Pearl, from the moment she joined Hermitcraft, has committed FULLY and COMPLETELY to being a public servant of all things. That girl joined probably the most prestigious server you can be invited to, looked around, and said "Very nice builds, but you aren't giving the roads here a fair suck!" and then pulled up her sleeves and WENT AT IT. in s8 she was Head of Infrastructure for Boatem. s9 she was the Cleaning Lady and now in s10 she's Postmaster.

I think she'd lay curled up like a dead spider in a corner somewhere if she wasn't allowed to do public service. Madwoman.

[sentientsky]

bark ruffalo you are everything to me

[nando161mando]

Exploited Worker Discontent...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Worker misclassification is a competition issue

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/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/#bedoya

The brains behind Trump's stolen Supreme Court have detailed plans: they didn't just scheme to pack the court with judges who weren't qualified for – or entitled to – a SCOTUS life-tenure, they also set up a series of cases for that radical court to hear.

Obviously, Dobbs was the big one, but it's only part of a whole procession of trumped-up cases designed to give the court a chance to overturn decades of settled law and create zones of impunity for America's oligarchs and the monopolies that provide them with wealth and power.

One of these cases is Jarkesy, a case designed to allow SCOTUS to euthanize every agency in the US government, stripping them of their powers to fight corporate crime:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/sec-v-jarkesy-the-threat-to-congressional-and-agency-authority/

The argument goes, "Congress had the power to spell out every possible problem an agency might deal with and to create a list of everything they were allowed to do about these problems. If they didn't, then the agency isn't allowed to act."

This is an Objectively Very Stupid argument, and it takes a heroic act of motivated reasoning to buy it. The whole point of expert agencies is that they're experts and that they might discover new problems in American life, and come up with productive ways of fixing them. If the only way for an agency to address a problem is to wait for Congress to notice it and pass a law about it, then we don't even need agencies – Congress can just be the regulator, as well as the lawmaker.

If there was any doubt that Congress created the agencies as flexible and adaptive hedges against new threats and problems, then the legislative history of the FTC Act should dispel it.

Congress created the FTC through the FTCA because the courts kept misinterpreting its existing antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act. Companies would engage in the most obvious acts of naked, catastrophic fuckery, and judges would say, "Welp, because Congress didn't specifically ban this conduct, I guess it's OK."

So Congress created the FTC with an Act that included a broad authority to investigate and punish "unfair methods of competition." They didn't spell these out – instead, they explicitly said (in Section 5) that it was the FTC's job to determine whether something was unfair, and to act on it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The job of the FTC is to investigate unfair conduct before it becomes such a problem that Congress takes action, and to head that conduct off so that it never rises to the level of needing Congressional intervention.

Now, it's true that since the Reagan years, the FTC has grown progressively less interested in using this power, but that's broadly true of all of America's corporate watchdogs. But as the public all over the world has grown ever more furious about corporate abuses and oligarchic wealth, governments everywhere have rediscovered their role as a public protector.

In America, the Biden administration altered the course of history with the appointment of new enforcers in the key anti-monopoly agencies: the FTC and the DOJ's antitrust division. But more importantly, the Biden admin created a detailed, technical plan to use every agency's powers to fight monopoly, in a "whole of government" approach:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Now, this can give rise to seeming redundancies. Take labor issues. The NLRB is a (potentially) powerful regulator that had been in a coma for decades, but has awoken and taken up labor rights with a fervor and cunning that is a delight to behold:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

At the same time, the FTC has also taken up labor rights, using its much broader powers to do things like ban noncompetes nationwide, unshackling workers from bosses who claim the right to veto who else they can work for:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

But the NLRB doesn't make the FTC redundant, or vice-versa. The NLRB's role is principally reactive, punishing wrongdoing after it occurs. But the FTC has the power to intervene in incipient harms, labor abuses that have not yet risen to the level of NLRB enforcement or new acts of Congress.

This case is made beautifully in Alvaro Bedoya's speech "'Overawed': Worker Misclassification as a Potential Unfair Method of Competition," delivered to the Law Leaders Global Summit in Miami today:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Overawed-Speech-02-02-2024.pdf

Bedoya describes why the FTC has turned its attention to the problem of "worker misclassification," in which employees are falsely claimed to be contractors, and thus deprived of the rights that workers are entitled to. Worker misclassification is rampant, and it transfers billions from workers to employers every year. As Bedoya says, 10-30% of employers engage in worker misclassification, allowing them to dodge payment for overtime, Social Security, workers' comp, unemployment insurance, healthcare, retirement and even a minimum wage. Each misclassified worker is between $6k-18k poorer thanks to this scam – a typical misclassified worker sees a one third decline in their earning power. And, of course, each misclassified worker's boss is $6k-$18k richer because of this scam.

It's not just wages, it's workplace safety. One of the most dangerous jobs in the country is construction worker, and worker misclassification is rampant in the sector. That means that construction workers are three times more likely than other workers to lack health insurance.

What's more, misclassified workers can't form unions, because their bosses' fiction treats them as independent contractors, not employees, which means that misclassified construction workers can't join trade unions and demand health-care, or safer workplaces.

Contrast this with, say, cops, who have powerful "unions" that afford them gold-plated health care and lavish compensation, even for imaginary ailments like "contact overdoses" from touching fentanyl – a medical impossibility that still entitles our nation's armed bureaucrats to handsome public compensation:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

Cops have far safer jobs than construction workers, but cops don't get misclassified, so they are able to collect benefits that no other worker – public or private – can hope for.

Not every employer wants to cheat and maim their employees, of course. In Bedoya's speech, he references Sandie Domando, an executive VP at a construction company in Palm Beach Gardens. Domando's company keeps its employees on its books, giving them health-care and other benefits. But when she started bidding against rival firms for jobs funded by the covid stimulus, she couldn't compete – two thirds of those jobs went to other firms that were able to put in cheaper bids. Those bids were cheaper because they were defrauding their workers by misclassifying them. Thus, publicly funded projects were overwhelmingly handed over to fraudulent companies. Fraud becomes a fitness-factor for winning jobs. It's a market for lemons – among employers.

Employee misclassification is a pure transfer from workers to bosses. Bedoya recounts the story of Samuel Talavera, Jr, a short-haul trucker who worked for decades in the Port of Los Angeles. For decades, his job paid well: enough to support his family and even take his kids to Disneyland now and again.

But in 2010, his employer reclassified him as a contractor. They ordered him to buy a new truck – which they financed on a lease-purchase basis – and put him to work for 16 hours stretches in shifts lasting as much as 20 hours per day. Talavera couldn't pick his own hours or pick his routes, but he was still treated as an independent contractor for payroll and labor protection purposes.

This lead to an terrible decline in Talavera's working conditions. He gave up going home between shifts, sleeping in his cab instead. His pay dropped through the floor, thanks to junk-fees that relied on the fiction that he was a contractor. For example, his boss started to charge him rent on the space his truck took up while he was standing by for a job at the port. Other truckers at the port saw paycheck deductions for the toilet-paper in the bathrooms!

Talavera's take-home pay dropped so low that he was bringing home a weekly wage of $112 or $33 (one week, his pay amounted to $0.67). His wife had to work three jobs, and they still had to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing their home. When Talavera's truck needed repairs he couldn't afford, his boss fired him and took back the truck, and Talavera was out the $78,000 he'd paid into it on the lease-purchase plan.

This story – and the many, many others like it from the Port of LA – paint a clear picture of the transfer of wealth from workers to their bosses that comes with worker misclassification. The work that Talavera did in the Port of LA didn't get less valuable when he was misclassified – but the share of that value that Talavera received dropped to as little as $0.67/week.

Worker misclassification is rampant across many sectors, but its handmaiden is technology. The fiction of independence is much easier to maintain when the fine-grained employer-employee control is mediated by an app (think of Uber):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

That's why those scare-stories that AI trucks were going to make truckers obsolete and create an employment crisis were such toxic nonsense. Not only are we unlikely to see self-driving trucks, but the same investors that back AI technology are making bank on companies that practice worker misclassification through the "it's not a crime if we do it with an app" gambit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

By focusing our attention on a hypothetical employment crisis that will supposedly be caused by future AI developments, tech investors can distract us from the real employment crisis that's created by app-enabled worker misclassification, which is also the source of much of the capital they're plowing into AI.

That's why the FTC's work on misclassification is so urgent. Misclassification is a scam that hurts workers and creates oligarchic power – and it's also a mass-extinction event for good companies that don't cheat their workers, because those honest companies can't compete.

Worker misclassification is having a long-overdue and much needed moment. The revolutionary overthrow of the rotten old leadership at the Teamsters was caused, in part, by a radical wing that promised to focus the Teamsters' firepower on fighting worker misclassification:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/19/hoffa-jr-defeated/#teamsters-for-a-democratic-union

This has become a focus of labor organizers all around the world, as worker misclassification-via-smartphone has infected labor markets everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#an-injury-to-one

Bedoya's speech is a banger, and it reminds us that labor rights and anti-monopoly have always been part of the same project: to rein in corporate power and protect workers from the insatiable greed of the capital class:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

[intersectionalpraxis]

[politijohn]

Source

Need more headlines like this

[decolonize-the-everything]

"We need to be honest with ourselves about the kind of country we live in. Let's be honest I mean the Democrats got away with- take away the safety net. And let's be real too when they passed the new deal they weren't thinking about me, they were thinking about entities.

Corporate entities that would benefit from the subsidies, let's be honest with ourselves too. It wasn't about the poor person from Mississippi. It was about the corporate farmers that were starting to develop at that era and figuring out 'how do we subsidize them' that's what the food stamp program is about.

There's something wrong in this country telling people it is okay to work three jobs, not see your kids, not to see your loved ones, not take a vacation, and God forbid you get sick, kay? And I still got a job at home cuz I'm a mother. Cuz let's not forget I don't get a day off.

And I gotta figure all that out.

How we gonna eat, how we gonna pay rent, how we gonna pay the utility bill that- every single thing went up after COVID. Not one thing stayed the same except salaries.

The only thing that stayed the same in this country is the what? Minimum wage, even tho everything else went up.

And we have a democratic president then a republican president then a democratic president, Republican president, and neither party ever talks about what is really going on in this world. I'm not even gonna say the country. What is really really going on in this world.

There is no scarcity.

It's 'how do we pit people against each other so they're too distracted to see everything that I'm too addicted to consuming and how much profit I'm making and more profit, how many houses one individual can have and how many yachts can one individual have.'

And you're gonna arrest me now that I make a tent city?!

So if I take the scraps from the trash and make some kind of shelter for me and my children, regardless of whether I have mental health issues, regardless whether I'm an addict, regardless of whether I am a female, male, whatever. I am a human being first.

With what conscience are you criminalizing poverty?

And it's not gonna stop just in the United States. The poor of the world, not just this country, the world are fed up. The people in Gaza are fed up, people in Kensington, people in San Juan which just went through a storm and does not have electricity because the government that they belong to said you're not our country so we're not gonna give you federal dollars to fix your grid!

And let's not leave out world communities. I live in Haines City, Polk County, Florida okay? But do you think that the poor of world communities have transportation? They don't. Theres not even a f-sidewalk to walk on.

Because I am given the message of 'stay silent, stay poor, stay hidden, and die silently' kay?

If I get a job how do I get to that job? If I even get it when I'm in a world community, kay? Let's not leave those folks behind. There are hundreds and thousands of people living in trailers across the United States who are paying 1600 a month in rent for a trailer. A trailer. Have you ever been inside a trailer? [...] Do you know how that smells?

1600 dollars.

Can you afford 1600 dollars to be living in a trailer. How many jobs do you need to have? Because I personally need to have two. I shave seasonal jobs and I have other jobs; part time jobs that I do.

I have a girl friend who works 3 jobs to live in a trailer!!!!!"

There's no name on screen for me to credit that I can find thus far, but this is where it's from. Skip to 13:56.

Source:

[whatareyoureallyafraidof]

[newyorkthegoldenage]

On December 27, 1928, Governor-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt named Frances Perkins the new Commissioner of Labor, the first woman to hold the job. An advocate for workers' rights, she helped put New York in the forefront of progressive reform by expanding factory investigations, capping the workweek for women at 48 hours, championing a minimum wage and unemployment insurance, and working to end child labor. In 1933, President Roosevelt appointed her Secretary of Labor, a post she held for 12 years. She was the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet position.

Photo: Associated Press