#Labor and Employment Law Firm

[indexblogging]

Selecting the Top Labor and Employment Law Firm in NYC Suited to Your Requirements

The world of labor and employment law may seem like a complex labyrinth to many workers. But, gaining clarity on your worker's rights and understanding the responsibilities your employer owes you could boost your confidence at work. Whether you are facing challenges with remuneration, workplace safety, or discrimination, being armed with an understanding of labor and employment law is vital.

This blog will guide you through the basics, offer practical tips, and show you how a labor and employment law firm nyc can assist you in protecting your rights.

Grasping Your Rights as an Employee

Breaks, Wages, and Hours

Every employee should be aware of their rights regarding breaks, wages, and working hours. Labor laws ensure that you are compensated fairly for your work time. For instance, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the federal minimum wage, mandates overtime pay, and outlines work hour regulations. While states may have their own wage laws, employers must comply with the higher standard.

Discrimination and Harassment Protection

Protection against discrimination and harassment is a fundamental employee right. Federal laws like the Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and other characteristics. Employers are required to provide a work environment free from harassment and discrimination.

Family and Medical Leave

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants eligible employees the right to take unpaid leave for specific family and medical reasons while maintaining job protection. This includes leave for the birth or adoption of a child, a serious health condition, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition.

The Role of Labor and Employment Law Firms

Services They Provide to Employees: Labor and employment law firm specialize in protecting employees' rights. They offer a range of services, including legal advice, representation, and negotiation. Whether you're facing workplace discrimination, wage disputes, or wrongful termination, these firms can guide you through the legal process.

Process of Seeking Legal Advice or Representation: When considering legal action, it's important to know the process of seeking legal advice or representation. Start by researching reputable labor and employment law firms in your area. Many firms offer free consultations, allowing you to discuss your case and explore potential options.

Practical Tips for Employees

Understanding Your Rights: Knowledge is power. Take the time to educate yourself about your rights as an employee. Understanding your rights will help you recognize potential violations and take appropriate action. Stay informed about changes in labor laws that may impact your rights. Resources like government websites, labor unions, and NYC Labor and Employment Law Firm can provide valuable information.

Documenting Workplace Issues: If you experience workplace issues, documentation is key. Keep a record of incidents, including dates, times, locations, individuals involved, and any communications. This documentation can serve as evidence if you need to take legal action.

Seeking Legal Support When Necessary: If you believe your rights have been violated, don't hesitate to seek legal support. Labor and employment law firms are dedicated to advocating for employees and ensuring their rights are protected. Legal experts can provide advice, representation, and support throughout the process.

Contact a labor law firm for a consultation to discuss your situation and explore your options. Taking action promptly can make a significant difference in the outcome of your case.

Empower Yourself and Protect Your Rights

Understanding labor and employment law is essential for every employee. By knowing your rights, recognizing employer obligations, and seeking legal support when needed, you can protect yourself and ensure a fair and respectful workplace.

For those seeking legal support or further information, consider contacting a reputable labor and employment law firm. Their expertise can guide you through any challenges and help you achieve the best possible outcome.

[nevadarafiilaw]

Top Employment Law Firm in Las Vegas

If you are facing workplace legal concerns, you need an employment law firm with experienced labor lawyers. Rafii & Associates, P.C. represents clients in Las Vegas, Nevada and the surrounding areas in all areas of labor and employment. Our unpaid wage and compensation attorneys and discrimination lawyers will protect your rights and seek justice on your behalf for harassment, wrongful termination, and more. Top Employment Law Firm in Las Vegas

[lawfirm-elixir]

Elixir Legal Services is one of the best employment lawyers for employees in Mumbai. We partner with our clients to meet the challenges posed by the modern Indian workplace.

[fans4wga]

Writers Guild West Official: Era of Hollywood Mergers Hastened the Strike

August 10, 2023

Laura Blum-Smith, the Writers Guild of America West’s director of research and public policy, considers the strike a result of a tsunami of Hollywood mergers that has handed studios and streamers the power to its exploit workers.

“Harmful mergers and attempts to monopolize markets are a recurring theme in the history of media and entertainment, and they are a key part of what led 11,500 writers to go on strike more than 100 days ago against their employers,” Blum-Smith said on Thursday at an event with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice over new merger guidelines unveiled in July.

She pointed to Disney, Amazon and Netflix as companies that “gained power through anticompetitive consolidation and vertical integration,” allowing them to impose “more and more precarious working conditions, increasingly short term employment and lower pay for writers and other workers across the industry.” But she sees revisions to the merger guidelines that address labor concerns a key part of the solution to prevent further mergers in the entertainment industry moving forward.

“The FTC and DOJ’s new draft merger guidelines are part of a deeply necessary effort to revive antitrust enforcement,” she added. “Compared with earlier guidelines, the new ones are much more skeptical of the idea that mergers are the natural way for companies to grow. And they focus more on the various ways mergers hurt competition, including how mergers impact workers.”

In July, the FTC and DOJ jointly released a new road map for regulatory review of mergers. They require companies to consider the impact of proposed transactions on labor, signaling that the agencies intend to review whether mergers could negatively impact wages and working conditions. FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was joined by agency chair Lina Khan, said in a statement about the guidelines that “a merger that may substantially lessen competition for workers will not be immunized by a prediction that predicted savings from a merger will be passed on to consumers.” Historically, transactions have been considered mostly through the lens of benefits to consumers.

The guidelines lack the force of law but influence the way in which judges consider lawsuits to block proposed transactions. They also tell the public how competition enforcers will assess the potential for a merger’s harm to competition.

Antitrust enforcers have steadily been taking notice of negative impacts to labor as a result of industry consolidation. “We’ve heard concerns that a handful of companies may now again be controlling the bulk of the entertainment supply chain from content creation to distribution,” Khan said last year during a listening forum over revisions to the guidelines, in a nod to anticompetitive conduct by studios that led to the Paramount Decrees. “We’ve heard concerns that this type of consolidation and integration can enable firms to exert market power over creators and workers alike.”

Adam Conover, writer and WGA board member, said in that April 2022 forum that his show Adam Ruins Everything was killed by AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 when TruTV’s parent company forced the network to cut costs. He stressed that a handful of companies “now control the production and distribution of almost all entertainment content available to the American public,” allowing them to “more easily hold down our wages and set onerous terms for our employment.” It’s not just writers that are impacted by an overly consolidated Hollywood either, he explained. After Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, he said that the studios pushed the industry into ending backend participation and trapping actors in exclusive contracts preventing them from pursuing other work.

Blum-Smith said that aggressive competition enforcement is necessary as “Wall Street continues to push for more consolidation among our employers despite the industry’s history of mergers that failed to deliver any of the consumer benefits they’ve claimed that left writers and audiences worse off with less diversity of content and fewer choices.”

“More mergers will leave writers with even fewer places to sell their work and tell their stories and the remaining companies will have even more power to lower pay and worsen working conditions,” she warned. “Strong enforcement against mergers is essential to protect workers in media and workers across the country and these guidelines are an important step in the right direction.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The moral injury of having your work enshittified

This Monday (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

This week, I wrote about how the Great Enshittening – in which all the digital services we rely on become unusable, extractive piles of shit – did not result from the decay of the morals of tech company leadership, but rather, from the collapse of the forces that discipline corporate wrongdoing:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

The failure to enforce competition law allowed a few companies to buy out their rivals, or sell goods below cost until their rivals collapsed, or bribe key parts of their supply chain not to allow rivals to participate:

https://www.engadget.com/google-reportedly-pays-apple-36-percent-of-ad-search-revenues-from-safari-191730783.html

The resulting concentration of the tech sector meant that the surviving firms were stupendously wealthy, and cozy enough that they could agree on a common legislative agenda. That regulatory capture has allowed tech companies to violate labor, privacy and consumer protection laws by arguing that the law doesn't apply when you use an app to violate it:

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

But the regulatory capture isn't just about preventing regulation: it's also about creating regulation – laws that make it illegal to reverse-engineer, scrape, and otherwise mod, hack or reconfigure existing services to claw back value that has been taken away from users and business customers. This gives rise to Jay Freeman's perfectly named doctrine of "felony contempt of business-model," in which it is illegal to use your own property in ways that anger the shareholders of the company that sold it to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Undisciplined by the threat of competition, regulation, or unilateral modification by users, companies are free to enshittify their products. But what does that actually look like? I say that enshittification is always precipitated by a lost argument.

It starts when someone around a board-room table proposes doing something that's bad for users but good for the company. If the company faces the discipline of competition, regulation or self-help measures, then the workers who are disgusted by this course of action can say, "I think doing this would be gross, and what's more, it's going to make the company poorer," and so they win the argument.

But when you take away that discipline, the argument gets reduced to, "Don't do this because it would make me ashamed to work here, even though it will make the company richer." Money talks, bullshit walks. Let the enshittification begin!

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

But why do workers care at all? That's where phrases like "don't be evil" come into the picture. Until very recently, tech workers participated in one of history's tightest labor markets, in which multiple companies with gigantic war-chests bid on their labor. Even low-level employees routinely fielded calls from recruiters who dangled offers of higher salaries and larger stock grants if they would jump ship for a company's rival.

Employers built "campuses" filled with lavish perks: massages, sports facilities, daycare, gourmet cafeterias. They offered workers generous benefit packages, including exotic health benefits like having your eggs frozen so you could delay fertility while offsetting the risks normally associated with conceiving at a later age.

But all of this was a transparent ruse: the business-case for free meals, gyms, dry-cleaning, catering and massages was to keep workers at their laptops for 10, 12, or even 16 hours per day. That egg-freezing perk wasn't about helping workers plan their families: it was about thumbing the scales in favor of working through your entire twenties and thirties without taking any parental leave.

In other words, tech employers valued their employees as a means to an end: they wanted to get the best geeks on the payroll and then work them like government mules. The perks and pay weren't the result of comradeship between management and labor: they were the result of the discipline of competition for labor.

This wasn't really a secret, of course. Big Tech workers are split into two camps: blue badges (salaried employees) and green badges (contractors). Whenever there is a slack labor market for a specific job or skill, it is converted from a blue badge job to a green badge job. Green badges don't get the food or the massages or the kombucha. They don't get stock or daycare. They don't get to freeze their eggs. They also work long hours, but they are incentivized by the fear of poverty.

Tech giants went to great lengths to shield blue badges from green badges – at some Google campuses, these workforces actually used different entrances and worked in different facilities or on different floors. Sometimes, green badge working hours would be staggered so that the armies of ragged clickworkers would not be lined up to badge in when their social betters swanned off the luxury bus and into their airy adult kindergartens.

But Big Tech worked hard to convince those blue badges that they were truly valued. Companies hosted regular town halls where employees could ask impertinent questions of their CEOs. They maintained freewheeling internal social media sites where techies could rail against corporate foolishness and make Dilbert references.

And they came up with mottoes.

Apple told its employees it was a sound environmental steward that cared about privacy. Apple also deliberately turned old devices into e-waste by shredding them to ensure that they wouldn't be repaired and compete with new devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

And even as they were blocking Facebook's surveillance tools, they quietly built their own nonconsensual mass surveillance program and lied to customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Facebook told employees they were on a "mission to connect every person in the world," but instead deliberately sowed discontent among its users and trapped them in silos that meant that anyone who left Facebook lost all their friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

And Google promised its employees that they would not "be evil" if they worked at Google. For many googlers, that mattered. They wanted to do something good with their lives, and they had a choice about who they would work for. What's more, they did make things that were good. At their high points, Google Maps, Google Mail, and of course, Google Search were incredible.

My own life was totally transformed by Maps: I have very poor spatial sense, need to actually stop and think to tell my right from my left, and I spent more of my life at least a little lost and often very lost. Google Maps is the cognitive prosthesis I needed to become someone who can go anywhere. I'm profoundly grateful to the people who built that service.

There's a name for phenomenon in which you care so much about your job that you endure poor conditions and abuse: it's called "vocational awe," as coined by Fobazi Ettarh:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Ettarh uses the term to apply to traditionally low-waged workers like librarians, teachers and nurses. In our book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and I talked about how it applies to artists and other creative workers, too:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

But vocational awe is also omnipresent in tech. The grandiose claims to be on a mission to make the world a better place are not just puffery – they're a vital means of motivating workers who can easily quit their jobs and find a new one to put in 16-hour days. The massages and kombucha and egg-freezing are not framed as perks, but as logistical supports, provided so that techies on an important mission can pursue a shared social goal without being distracted by their balky, inconvenient meatsuits.

Steve Jobs was a master of instilling vocational awe. He was full of aphorisms like "we're here to make a dent in the universe, otherwise why even be here?" Or his infamous line to John Sculley, whom he lured away from Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Vocational awe cuts both ways. If your workforce actually believes in all that high-minded stuff, if they actually sacrifice their health, family lives and self-care to further the mission, they will defend it. That brings me back to enshittification, and the argument: "If we do this bad thing to the product I work on, it will make me hate myself."

The decline in market discipline for large tech companies has been accompanied by a decline in labor discipline, as the market for technical work grew less and less competitive. Since the dotcom collapse, the ability of tech giants to starve new entrants of market oxygen has shrunk techies' dreams.

Tech workers once dreamed of working for a big, unwieldy firm for a few years before setting out on their own to topple it with a startup. Then, the dream shrank: work for that big, clumsy firm for a few years, then do a fake startup that makes a fake product that is acquihired by your old employer, as an incredibly inefficient and roundabout way to get a raise and a bonus.

Then the dream shrank again: work for a big, ugly firm for life, but get those perks, the massages and the kombucha and the stock options and the gourmet cafeteria and the egg-freezing. Then it shrank again: work for Google for a while, but then get laid off along with 12,000 co-workers, just months after the company does a stock buyback that would cover all those salaries for the next 27 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

Tech workers' power was fundamentally individual. In a tight labor market, tech workers could personally stand up to their bosses. They got "workplace democracy" by mouthing off at town hall meetings. They didn't have a union, and they thought they didn't need one. Of course, they did need one, because there were limits to individual power, even for the most in-demand workers, especially when it came to ghastly, long-running sexual abuse from high-ranking executives:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-harassment-andy-rubin.html

Today, atomized tech workers who are ordered to enshittify the products they take pride in are losing the argument. Workers who put in long hours, missed funerals and school plays and little league games and anniversaries and family vacations are being ordered to flush that sacrifice down the toilet to grind out a few basis points towards a KPI.

It's a form of moral injury, and it's palpable in the first-person accounts of former workers who've exited these large firms or the entire field. The viral "Reflecting on 18 years at Google," written by Ian Hixie, vibrates with it:

https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373

Hixie describes the sense of mission he brought to his job, the workplace democracy he experienced as employees' views were both solicited and heeded. He describes the positive contributions he was able to make to a commons of technical standards that rippled out beyond Google – and then, he says, "Google's culture eroded":

Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision.

In other words, techies started losing the argument. Layoffs weakened worker power – not just to defend their own interest, but to defend the users interests. Worker power is always about more than workers – think of how the 2019 LA teachers' strike won greenspace for every school, a ban on immigration sweeps of students' parents at the school gates and other community benefits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Hixie attributes the changes to a change in leadership, but I respectfully disagree. Hixie points to the original shareholder letter from the Google founders, in which they informed investors contemplating their IPO that they were retaining a controlling interest in the company's governance so that they could ignore their shareholders' priorities in favor of a vision of Google as a positive force in the world:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

Hixie says that the leadership that succeeded the founders lost sight of this vision – but the whole point of that letter is that the founders never fully ceded control to subsequent executive teams. Yes, those executive teams were accountable to the shareholders, but the largest block of voting shares were retained by the founders.

I don't think the enshittification of Google was due to a change in leadership – I think it was due to a change in discipline, the discipline imposed by competition, regulation and the threat of self-help measures. Take ads: when Google had to contend with one-click adblocker installation, it had to constantly balance the risk of making users so fed up that they googled "how do I block ads?" and then never saw another ad ever again.

But once Google seized the majority of the mobile market, it was able to funnel users into apps, and reverse-engineering an app is a felony (felony contempt of business-model) under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad-blocker.

And as Google acquired control over the browser market, it was likewise able to reduce the self-help measures available to browser users who found ads sufficiently obnoxious to trigger googling "how do I block ads?" The apotheosis of this is the yearslong campaign to block adblockers in Chrome, which the company has sworn it will finally do this coming June:

https://www.tumblr.com/tevruden/734352367416410112/you-have-until-june-to-dump-chrome

My contention here is not that Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in personnel via the promotion of managers who have shitty ideas. Google's enshittification was precipitated by a change in discipline, as the negative consequences of heeding those shitty ideas were abolished thanks to monopoly.

This is bad news for people like me, who rely on services like Google Maps as cognitive prostheses. Elizabeth Laraki, one of the original Google Maps designers, has published a scorching critique of the latest GMaps design:

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

Laraki calls out numerous enshittificatory design-choices that have left Maps screens covered in "crud" – multiple revenue-maximizing elements that come at the expense of usability, shifting value from users to Google.

What Laraki doesn't say is that these UI elements are auctioned off to merchants, which means that the business that gives Google the most money gets the greatest prominence in Maps, even if it's not the best merchant. That's a recurring motif in enshittified tech platforms, most notoriously Amazon, which makes $31b/year auctioning off top search placement to companies whose products aren't relevant enough to your query to command that position on their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Enshittification begets enshittification. To succeed on Amazon, you must divert funds from product quality to auction placement, which means that the top results are the worst products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

The exception is searches for Apple products: Apple and Amazon have a cozy arrangement that means that searches for Apple products are a timewarp back to the pre-enshittification Amazon, when the company worried enough about losing your business to heed the employees who objected to sacrificing search quality as part of a merchant extortion racket:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-gives-apple-special-treatment-while-others-suffer-junk-ads-2023-11

Not every tech worker is a tech bro, in other words. Many workers care deeply about making your life better. But the microeconomics of the boardroom in a monopolized tech sector rewards the worst people and continuously promotes them. Forget the Peter Principle: tech is ruled by the Sam Principle.

As OpenAI went through four CEOs in a single week, lots of commentators remarked on Sam Altman's rise and fall and rise, but I only found one commentator who really had Altman's number. Writing in Today in Tabs, Rusty Foster nailed Altman to the wall:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/defective-accelerationism

Altman's history goes like this: first, he founded a useless startup that raised $30m, only to be acquired and shuttered. Then Altman got a job running Y Combinator, where he somehow failed at taking huge tranches of equity from "every Stanford dropout with an idea for software to replace something Mommy used to do." After that, he founded OpenAI, a company that he claims to believe presents an existential risk to the entire human risk – which he structured so incompetently that he was then forced out of it.

His reward for this string of farcical, mounting failures? He was put back in charge of the company he mis-structured despite his claimed belief that it will destroy the human race if not properly managed.

Altman's been around for a long time. He founded his startup in 2005. There've always been Sams – of both the Bankman-Fried varietal and the Altman genus – in tech. But they didn't get to run amok. They were disciplined by their competitors, regulators, users and workers. The collapse of competition led to an across-the-board collapse in all of those forms of discipline, revealing the executives for the mediocre sociopaths they always were, and exposing tech workers' vocational awe for the shabby trick it was from the start.

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/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

[peachdues]

I saw on one of your answers that you make more money than your partner. Was that something that you both had to discuss early on in the rs? Me and my ex broke up because I was earning more than him (and I wanted to climb up the corporate ladder) and I could sense that he felt insecure..

Okay first of all, he’s an insecure little bridge troll. Only insecure little bridge trolls break up with a bad bitch because she out-earns him. You climb the corporate ladder, bestie. Making your own money is the best thing you can do, and that’s coming from a divorce attorney.

Onto your question: I told my husband before we started dating that I planned to go to law school. I was very clear that my goals would not shift if we got into a relationship — AND that I would be attending law school in the place I wanted to practice, which was NOT the city I attended undergrad in when I met him. He was supportive of that from the start, and he supported me financially through law school.

However, the issue of my earnings did become a slight snag last year, when we sat down to go through my first full paycheck as an attorney. My husband was very clear that he’d always known I would out-earn him, but seeing it was different. I think this is also because we maintain separate bank accounts (we Venmo for shared bills lmao), and I do send him money when he needs it. However, to my husband’s credit, he made it clear that his insecurity came from feeling like he wasn’t doing enough for me. My husband may have been raised by a single mother, but he is a cis-man. We grew up in the early 2000s, and the idea that men are supposed to be the main breadwinners, even if a woman does work, was still prominent then.

My husband and I have talked extensively about this. I’ve stressed that, while I make more on paper, *he* provides an enormous financial benefit — health insurance. We’re in the US, so health insurance is tied to employment. My husband works for the government — so while his paycheck is smaller than mine, the health insurance he holds through work is incredible. We both have a lot of medications, and our health insurance caps our co-pay at $40 — even for name brand prescriptions. My yearly PCP costs me no more than $20. A colonoscopy only set me back $200. If we had insurance through my law firm, we’d be in trouble. My firm’s insurance plan is atrocious lmao.

Beyond that, my husband also contributes by holding a great deal of the domestic labor. I love being a lawyer, and one of the biggest reasons is that I’m in control of my own schedule. If I want to go into the office at 10 in the morning, I can. If I want to take off for two weeks at Christmas, I can, and I don’t have to request time off or use PTO.

The down side of that is that, for all the flexibility of being an attorney, there are days or weeks where I am consistently working 10-12 hours a day or more. I’m answering emails at 2 or 3 in the morning, or I have to be at the office before sunrise. It just depends on the client crisis of the day. Sometimes I get home at 7 or 8 at night and still need to work. As a result, Sam handles way more of the household chores than I do (if not almost all of them).

So, that’s how I explained it to him — he does enough for me by (1) being a loving and supportive husband and (2) providing our health insurance and domestic labor. I’ll pay for everything else!

[racefortheironthrone]

Which federal laws and policies would you get rid of or modify in order to help the American labor movement.

I was looking through the labor law tag on my blog and your ask reminded me I haven't actually written a comprehensive post about this on Tumblr. (Indeed, you'd have to go back to my old, old policy blog from 2009...it's been a while.)

One silver lining of the Sisyphean struggle to restore American labor law that's been going on since the 1970s is that the labor movement and their allies in Congress, academia, think tanks, and progressive media have been thinking through this very issue of "what reforms would make a real difference" for a long time. I'm not going to say it's a solved question, but the research literature is pretty robust.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on the three most recent reform packages: the Employee Free Choice Act that was the main vehicle during the Obama years, Bernie Sanders' Workplace Democracy Act (which was introduced repeatedly between 1992 and 2018), and the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act) that is the current proposal of the Democratic legislative caucuses. There's going to be quite a bit of overlap between these proposals, because it's very much an iterative process where allies in the same movement are trading ideas with one another and trying to stay abreast of new developments, but I'll try to tease out some of the similarities and differences.

EFCA

While EFCA contained a number of provisions that sought to close various loopholes in U.S labor law, the three main provisions largely target the flaws that have made it extremely difficult to win a union through the National Labor Relations Act process devised in 1935 that has turned into a Saw-style gauntlet thanks to the professionalization of union-busting and the Federalist Society's strategy of death-by-a-thousand-cuts:

"Card check." Probably the most common pattern of union-busting in the workplace today is a war of attrition by management waged by an industry of specialized law firms. Generally what happens is that the union files for election with a super-majority of ~70% workers having signed union cards, then management delays the vote as long as possible to give their hired "union-avoidance" firm to systematically intimidate, surveil, propagandize, and divide workers, up to and including illegally firing pro-union workers pour encouragez les autres. Over several months, what happens is that the initial 70% of pro-union support starts to erode as workers decide it's just too dangerous to stick their necks out, until the vote happens and the union loses either by a squeaker or a landslide.

Card check short-circuits this process by just saying that if the union files with a majority of cards, you skip the election and the union is recognized. And for all the pearl-clutching by the right, this is actually how labor law works in many democratic countries, because the idea of a fair election that lets management participate is an oxymoron.

Arbitrated first contract. In the event that enough workers keep the faith and actually vote for a union, management's next move is to draw out collective bargaining for a year or more. After a year, the original vote is no longer considered binding and employers can push for a "decertification" vote, which they usually win because workers either give up hope or change jobs. So this provision says that if the two sides can't reach an agreement on a first contract within 120 days, a Federal arbitrator will just impose one, so that at least for two years there will be a union contract no matter what management wants.

Strengthening enforcement. As I said above, one of the problems with existing labor law is that there are basically no penalties for management knowingly breaking the law; companies literally just budget in a line-item and do it anyway. This provision would allow unions to file an injunction against employers for unfair labor practices or ULPs (at present, injunctions are only required for violations done by unions), and would add triple back pay for illegal firings and fines of $20,000 for each ULP. This would make union-busting much more expensive, because companies routinely rack up hundreds and hundreds of them during a campaign.

Workplace Democracy Act

Sanders' proposal includes the main proposals from EFCA, and adds a bunch of additional reforms, like mis-classifying workers as independent contractors, banning captive audience meetings, making "joint employers" liable for labor law violations by franchisees, legalizing secondary boycotts, and requiring employers to report to the NLRB on all anti-union expenditures during a campaign and barring anyone convicted of an unfair labor practice from being hired for anti-union campaigns and making "union-avoidance" consultants liable for fines for ULPs (which would kill the "union-avoidance" industry, because they commit ULPs for a living).

PRO Act

The PRO Act is very much an updating of the previous efforts we've talked about. It bans captive audience meetings, allows for secondary strikes and boycotts, massively increases fines and allows for compensatory damages, ends mis-classification, speeds up the election process, etc.

It also contains a couple new and ambitious proposals:

it allows unions to sue management in court instead of having to complain to the NLRB, which opens management up to a very expensive legal proceeding and discovery.

it bans "right-to-work" as established by the Taft-Hartley Act.

it requires that any worker who's fired for pro-union activity be immediately reinstated while their unfair labor practice process or civil lawsuit is going through the process. This would be enormous just on its own, because it changes the entire veto structure of illegal firing. As it stands, employers fire people and maybe maybe have to pay some back wages in a couple years when the worker has found another job and is unlikely to come back. This would reverse the balance of power, such that the worker is immediately back and other workers can see that they can speak up without getting fired, which makes illegal firings a giant waste of time and money for management.

In terms of stuff that's not on this list that I would add, I would say that an enormous difference could be made by simply making it illegal for management to lock-out their workers or hire scabs. You do that, and unions can win almost every strike.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk’s America PAC and several other defendants, including the reelection campaign for Representative Michelle Steel, a Republican from California, are accused of violating California labor law in a class action lawsuit filed in Orange County on October 30, according to court documents obtained by WIRED.

The named plaintiffs, Tamiko Anderson and Patricia Kelly, were canvassers for Steel in October of this year, according to the suit, which alleges that they weren’t paid agreed-upon wages. America PAC is named because it provided campaigning services for Steel.

The plaintiffs are also suing over an alleged failure to reimburse business expenses and for allegedly being provided inaccurate wage statements. The suit seeks class certification for “All current and former non-exempt employees of Defendants in the State of California who were employed as canvassers and canvassed for Michelle Steel at any time from October 30, 2023, through the present.”

“The Steel campaign has no knowledge of these individuals, they did not and do not work for the Steel campaign, and the campaign will not comment on individuals that involve a Super PAC with which we have no involvement,” a spokesperson for the Steel campaign said in a statement.

These allegations are different from those WIRED reported earlier this week, when canvassers in Michigan said they were tricked and threatened as part of Elon Musk and America PAC’s get-out-the-vote effort for Donald Trump. The door knockers, who worked for a subcontractor of America PAC, were flown to Michigan, driven in the back of a U-Haul, and told they would have to pay hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas. One was surprised to find, upon arrival in Michigan, that they were working to elect Donald Trump.

The Blair Group, a North Carolina firm that the complaint claims is a political consultancy, and Liberty Staffing Services, a Florida firm specializing in hiring and payroll for canvassers and other W2 employees of political campaigns, are the other named defendants. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment. The suit also lists unknown Johns Doe as defendants.

The plaintiffs are owed money, according to the suit.

“As with other members of the Class, Plaintiffs were guaranteed an agreed upon wage hourly wage [sic] upon starting their employment. However, Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Defendants failed to pay them at the correct hourly wage, and, instead, paid them based on the number of residences they canvassed. To date, Plaintiffs have yet to receive the underpaid wages owed to them,” the complaint states.

The defendants in the lawsuit also were not reimbursed for downloading various apps on their personal devices, according to the complaint. The plaintiffs also allege their cell phones were used to track time worked, but that they still were not compensated for those hours.

America PAC, into which Musk has poured more than $100 million, has largely taken up get-out-the-vote operations in key swing states for the Donald Trump campaign. Widespread reports depict its operations as a mess, though—in addition to WIRED’s reporting on its efforts in Michigan, The Guardian has reported that up to 25 percent of its door knocks may be fraudulent, and NBC has reported that campaign operatives have concerns about “suspect data.” In an election all polls show as a toss-up, a shambolic field operation could well mean the difference between victory and defeat.

Neither Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, nor a spokesperson for X, which Musk owns, immediately replied to requests for comment and requests to be put in touch with a representative of America PAC, which does not list contact information on its website. A representative for The Blair Group also did not return a request for comment.

[justbeingnamaste]

The White House has remained firm in its position that it will not intervene in negotiations between port workers and dock employers as trade flows screech to a halt and the lead union boss threatens to "cripple" the economy less than 35 days before the presidential election.

A general strike spread across most of the major ports on the U.S. East Coast Tuesday as the labor union representing the workers, International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), said dock employers failed to give in to their demands. 

The strike threatens to plug up an estimated $2.1 billion in daily trade flows from these busy ports as the presidential election and holiday seasons fast approach. 

Republicans and hundreds of industry associations have called on President Joe Biden to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, a law originally passed in 1947 that gives the president the authority to intervene in strikes if they threaten to cause a national emergency. The act was last used in 2002 by President George W. Bush to reopen ports on the West Coast after employers prevented longshoreman from entering their facilities. 

But before the strike began Tuesday, Biden signaled he would not invoke the post-war act to end the strike, especially given the immense damage from Hurricane Helene across the U.S. Southeast and persistent inflation as the holiday season approaches. 

“Mr. President, will you intervene in the dockworkers strike if they go on strike on Tuesday?” a reporter asked the president. 

“No,” Biden replied. 

“Why not?” 

“Because there’s collective bargaining, and I don’t believe in Taft-Hartley,” Biden said. 

The White House on Tuesday again confirmed the president would not use the authority under the act to intervene in the negotiations even as the union appeared to dig in its heels for the long haul. The White House indicated its calculus stems from briefings by federal agencies on the potential impacts of the strike which “are expected to be limited at this time” on consumers. 

Biden is also motivated by political calculus with the presidential election just more than a month away. Breaking up the strike with his presidential authority could damage Kamala Harris’ chances with a key union worker constituency, among which previous polls show she has struggled to maintain Biden’s levels of support. Leaving the strike unaddressed could cripple the U.S. economy—in the union boss’s own words—under his watch. Historically, a downturn in the economy rarely favors the incumbent party, which in this case would hurt Harris’ election chances. 

[drst]

So this is what the Biden administration spent it's last week in office doing. It's important to know this isn't unusual activity for them. But this is all just in one week:

"Out With a Bang: Enforcers Go After John Deere, Private Equity Billionaires

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/out-with-a-bang-enforcers-go-after

At least for a few more days, laws are not suggestions. In the end days of strong enforcement, a flurry of litigation is met with a direct lawsuit by billionaires against Biden's Antitrust chief.

Matt Stoller

Jan 16, 2025

It’s less than a week until this era of antitrust ends. And while much of the news has been focused elsewhere, enforcers have engaged in a flurry of action, which will by legal necessity continue into the next administration. One case in particular angered some of the most powerful people on Wall Street, the partners of a $600 billion private equity firm called Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR).

But before getting to that suit, here’s a partial list of some of the actions enforcers have taken in the last two weeks.

The Federal Trade Commission

Filed a monopolization claim against agricultural machine maker John Deere for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment, a suit which Wired magazine calls a “tipping point” for the right to repair movement.

Released another report on pharmacy benefit managers, including that of UnitedHealth Group, showing that these companies inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion.

Sued Greystar, a large corporate landlord, for deceiving renters with falsely advertised low rents and not including mandatory junk fees in the price.

Issued a policy statement that gig workers can’t be prosecuted for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and along with the Antitrust Division, updated guidance on labor and antitrust.

Put out a series of orders prohibiting data brokers from selling sensitive location information.

Finalized changes to a rule barring third party targeted advertising to children without an explicit opt-in.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Went to court against Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by deceiving them on savings accounts and interest rates.

Fined cash app purveyor Block $175 million for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers.

Proposed a rule to prohibit take-it-or-leave-it contracts from financial institutions that allow firms to de-bank users over how they express themselves or whether they seek redress for fraud.

Issued a report with recommendations on how states can update their laws to protect against junk fees and privacy abuses.

Sued credit reporting agency Experian for refusing to investigate consumer disputes and errors on credit reports.

Finalized a rule to remove medical debt from credit scores.

The Antitrust Division

Sued to block a merger of two leading business travel firms, American Express Global Business Travel Group and CWT Holdings.

Filed a complaint against seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage.

Got four guilty pleas in a bid-rigging conspiracy by IT vendors against the U.S. government, a guilty plea from an asphalt vendor company President, and convicted five defendants in a price-fixing scam on roofing contracts.

Issued a policy statement that non-disclosure agreements that deter individuals from reporting antitrust crimes are void, and that employers “using NDAs to obstruct or impede an investigation may also constitute separate federal criminal violations.”

Filed two amicus briefs with the FTC, one supporting Epic Games in its remedy against Google over app store monopolization, and the other supporting Elon Musk in his antitrust claims against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Reid Hoffman.

And honorary mention goes to the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights.’"

It's worth reading the entire piece because the Biden people have also gone after KKR which is one of the biggest and most well-connected private equity firms. Remember when suddenly last year all the rich people who used to donate to both parties stopped giving money to Democrats? The billionaires coup against Biden was because of anti trust enforcement.

IF YOU'RE THINKING "GOSH I NEVER HEARD ABOUT ANY OF THIS BEFORE" I HOPE YOU CAN PUT TOGETHER THAT THE NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS ARE ALL OWNED BY BILLIONAIRES WHO ARE VERY ANGRY ABOUT ALL OF THIS AND MAYBE THAT'S WHY YOU NEVER SAW ANYONE TALK ABOUT THE HUGE RESURGENCE OF ANTI TRUST WORK DONE BY BIDEN FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS.

And no, Trump cannot magically make this all go away. The lawsuits will have to be played out and many of them have state level components that mean the feds can't just shut them down.

X

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing plan to provide policy and staffing to a future Republican president, proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years. It would also weaken overtime regulations, give corporations wider latitude in misclassifying workers as independent contractors, and dismantle safety regulations that prohibit young people from working dangerous jobs.

The initiative’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, is an attempt to roll back New Deal-era, working class victories by allowing state-level exemptions from the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, and by creating nonunion “employee involvement organizations” to undermine unions’ negotiating power. It additionally calls for sharp reductions in the budgets of the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor and a freeze on new hires. Project 2025 is organized by The Heritage Foundation and includes more than 100 conservative groups on its advisory board, which have collectively received more than $55 million from groups tied to conservative megadonors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch. Leo has been pushing the Supreme Court to further erode the power of organized labor, and the Koch family has waged a war on unions for more than 60 years.

[...]

Project 2025: Eviscerate overtime and dismantle pro-worker regulations

One central proposal in Mandate that illuminates Project 2025’s extreme anti-work posture is the suggestion that employers should be allowed to eviscerate overtime regulations and potentially withhold pay. The attacks on overtime take several forms, including a proposal to allow workers to accrue vacation instead of time-and-a-half compensation — but at least 40 percent of lower- and middle-income workers already don’t use their allotted paid time off. Under this policy employers could coerce workers into “voluntarily” selecting vacation that they’re either formally or informally prohibited from taking, thereby denying them overtime compensation. Project 2025 further recommends that workers and bosses agree to extend the overtime threshold to a period of two weeks or one month. The policy would empower management to overload busy weeks with extra-long shifts and take advantage of slow periods through under-scheduling — effectively eliminating overtime altogether. 

[...]

A return to company unionism

Project 2025 seeks to roll back New Deal-era labor victories by proposing that Congress “pass legislation allowing waivers from federal labor laws” — like the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act — “under certain conditions.” Allowing state-level exemptions to the NLRA and FLSA would almost certainly trigger a race-to-the-bottom dynamic, where firms relocate to states with the weakest (or nonexistent) labor protections at the expense of workers. That’s what happened in states that passed so-called “right-to-work” laws — which starve unions of resources by preventing them from collecting fees from all employees they represent, thereby creating a free-rider problem — where employers were able to depress wages and union membership.    Unions have made significant gains under the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labor law and investigates anti-union practices. That progress is largely thanks to NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has taken an aggressive, pro-worker enforcement posture. Project 2025 promises to fire her on “Day One.” It also calls for reductions in the budgets of the NLRB and the Department of Labor to the “low end of the historical average,” as well as implementing a “hiring freeze for career officials.” 

[...] Project 2025 would further undermine unions by eliminating “card check” — where a majority of workers who have signed union authorization forms can ask their employer for voluntary recognition — and mandating “the secret ballot exclusively.” Although the idea of a secret ballot has the veneer of democracy, in practice it’s a power grab for management. By forcing organizers to go through the byzantine NLRB election process, an employer can buy itself time to wage an anti-union campaign and bog down the process, often through illegal means. A 2019 study found that employers violated labor laws in 41.5% of NLRB-supervised union elections in 2016 and 2017 and intimidated or coerced workers in nearly a third of all elections. 

The radical right-wing Project 2025 spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation in association with over 100 organizations has an agenda attacking labor and unions.

[indexblogging]

How to Pick the Right Labor and Employment Law Firm for You

Navigating the world of labor and employment law can feel like walking through a maze for many employees. Yet, understanding your rights as a worker and knowing what obligations your employer holds can empower you in your job. Whether you're dealing with pay issues, workplace safety, or discrimination, having knowledge of labor and employment law is crucial.

This blog will guide you through the basics, offer practical tips, and show you how a labor and employment law firm can assist you in protecting your rights.

Understanding Your Rights as an Employee

Breaks, Wages, and Hours

Every employee should be aware of their rights regarding breaks, wages, and working hours. Labor laws ensure that you are compensated fairly for your work time. For instance, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the federal minimum wage, mandates overtime pay, and outlines work hour regulations. While states may have their own wage laws, employers must comply with the higher standard.

Discrimination and Harassment Protection

Protection against discrimination and harassment is a fundamental employee right. Federal laws like the Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and other characteristics. Employers are required to provide a work environment free from harassment and discrimination.

Family and Medical Leave

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants eligible employees the right to take unpaid leave for specific family and medical reasons while maintaining job protection. This includes leave for the birth or adoption of a child, a serious health condition, or to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition.

The Role of Labor and Employment Law Firms

Services They Provide to Employees

Labor and employment law firm specialize in protecting employees' rights. They offer a range of services, including legal advice, representation, and negotiation. Whether you're facing workplace discrimination, wage disputes, or wrongful termination, these firms can guide you through the legal process.

Legal experts can help you understand your rights, assess the strength of your case, and determine the best course of action. Their expertise ensures that you have the support you need to address workplace issues effectively.

Process of Seeking Legal Advice or Representation

When considering legal action, it's important to know the process of seeking legal advice or representation. Start by researching reputable labor and employment law firms in your area. Many firms offer free consultations, allowing you to discuss your case and explore potential options.

Case Studies Highlighting Successful Outcomes

Labor and employment law firm have a track record of achieving successful outcomes for employees. Case studies can provide insight into how legal representation can make a difference. For example, a recent case involved an employee who faced retaliation after reporting safety violations. With the help of a labor and employment law firm, the employee was able to secure a settlement and ensure workplace safety improvements.

Empower Yourself and Protect Your Rights

Understanding labor and employment law is essential for every employee. By knowing your rights, recognizing employer obligations, and seeking legal support when needed, you can protect yourself and ensure a fair and respectful workplace.

For those seeking legal support or further information, consider contacting a reputable labor and employment law firm. Their expertise can guide you through any challenges and help you achieve the best possible outcome.

[nevadarafiilaw]

Best Labor Lawyers in Las Vegas

If you are facing workplace legal concerns, you need an employment law firm with experienced labor lawyers. Rafii & Associates, P.C. represents clients in Las Vegas, Nevada and the surrounding areas in all areas of labor and employment. Our unpaid wage and compensation attorneys and discrimination lawyers will protect your rights and seek justice on your behalf for harassment, wrongful termination, and more. Best Labor Lawyers in Las Vegas

[lawfirm-elixir]

Elixir Legal Services is one of the best employment lawyers for employees in Mumbai. We partner with our clients to meet the challenges posed by the modern Indian workplace. We find solutions and manage risk in employment, incentives, pension, legal challenges, and objectives.

[vague-humanoid]

Goodwill hired at least three union-busting firms to lead the charge against its own employees. The firms included Sarah Hirt, a “persuader” consultant from Pennsylvania, and two Florida-based firms, JF Management & Consulting LLC and The Labor Pros. These firms are notorious for their anti-union tactics, which often involve captive audience meetings, one-on-one discussions, and close surveillance of workers.

According to disclosure documents, The Labor Pros, a firm infamous for its involvement in several high-profile anti-union campaigns, spearheaded the anti-union efforts at Goodwill. From August 28 to September 17, 2024, The Labor Pros was paid $3,750 per day, possibly amounting to at least $75,000 for their services during this period. This staggering sum does not include additional costs for legal fees, travel, and other expenses related to the anti-union campaign. Despite these massive expenditures, Goodwill employees, including those with disabilities, continue to earn around $15 per hour — and in some cases, even less due to the subminimum wages allowed under federal law.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Precaratize bosses

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

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

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

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

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

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/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Image: Vlad Lazarenko (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en