#Labor Department

[lifewithchronicpain]

The U.S. Department of Labor is proposing a sweeping new rule that would put an end to the decades-old practice of allowing employers to pay workers with disabilities less than minimum wage.

The agency issued a proposed rule this week to phase out what are known as 14(c) certificates. Under a federal law dating back to 1938, employers can obtain the special certificates from the government to pay those with disabilities less than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.

If the rule is finalized, the Labor Department would immediately cease issuing new certificates. At that point, existing certificate holders would have three years to stop paying workers with disabilities so-called subminimum wage. (Read more at link)

It shouldn’t have taken this long but I’m glad it’s finally being done.

[threefeline]

Haven’t seen anything about this here yet but they’re trying to pass something in March that basically makes companies like Lyft and DoorDash to reclassify their workers from "contractors" to "employees" and idk this is kinda cool. It basically makes them follow six criteria to see wether the worker is an ‘employee’ or a ‘contractor’ whereas Trump’s old rule was only two and it was like super weirdly vaguely worded

The title is a bit inflammatory but the article describes that it’s a pretty big win for the workers so

[alyfoxxxen]

Judge denies union demand to block DOGE’s access to Labor Department data - POLITICO

"[The government] also had agreed to limit DOGE’s interactions with DOL as a result of the lawsuit, pending Friday’s hearing. But Bates’ ruling clears the way for DOGE to begin examining dozens of Labor Department systems, including those that relate to workers compensation claims, workplace safety investigations and key gauges of the U.S. economy."

[follow-up-news]

The U.S. Department of Labor wants a federal judge to prevent Hyundai and two other Alabama companies from what the government contends is the illegal employment of children. The complaint filed Thursday follows an investigation by the department’s Wage and Hour Division that found a 13-year-old worked between 50 and 60 hours a week operating machines on an assembly line that formed sheet metal into auto body parts. The defendants include Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama LLC, SMART Alabama LLC and Best Practice Service, LLC. The lawsuit said it seeks to end the use of child labor and require that the companies give up profits linked to the alleged practice.

[cherryblossomshadow]

Speaking Plainly About Who Is Robbing You

Hamilton Nolan

People who are saving money for retirement often seek out professional financial advice … What many professional financial advisers do instead, however, is to advise people to do things that will benefit the financial adviser … It is a form of legalized robbery, of polite fraud.

.

The Biden administration tried to make this illegal. In April, the Labor Department finalized a rule that would require retirement advisers to be fiduciaries, meaning that they would be legally required to act in their clients’ best interests.

It would make it illegal for advisers to rip their clients off.

Many people probably assume that it is already illegal for their financial advisers to rip them off.

It is not. 

.

Of course, the Retiree Robbery Industry was quite opposed to this new rule that would prevent them from robbing you.

“The lobbying group ACLI — whose board of directors includes executives from Prudential, Lincoln Financial and New York Life — argued in January that the government threatened to create an ‘impermissible barrier’ between savers and advisers,” the Post reports. “An allied industry group — the Federation of Americans for Consumer Choice, or FACC — argued that the rules would be ‘potentially devastating for the insurance industry,’ particularly because they could restrict agents’ commissions.”

“For Americans who choose to invest in annuities, the rules could save them about $32.5 billion over the next 10 years,” says the Post. That $32.5 billion can either go to you or to the advisers ripping you off. That is what this is about.

.

Because this issue touches on issues that can be made to seem esoteric and hard to understand—as soon as you say the word “fiduciary,” it sounds like you are talking about something that requires some serious financial expertise—it has flown under the radar of the general public. That could be remedied somewhat if we just spoke about this issue in plain and direct terms. Republicans who have been paid off are trying to ensure that an industry that exists to rob you can continue robbing you. That is what is happening here.

.

This is one of the best examples you will ever find of a common thing: An outrage that persists only because people don’t really understand it. And why don’t people understand it? Because keeping it obscured is a key to its continued existence.

“Pay me to rip you off!” is not a compelling advertisement.

This is a case where the media can actually be helpful. We can speak plainly about what all of this is.

This is a scam where Wall Street takes a piece of your savings for nothing.

They are robbing you.

Politicians who are in their pockets are helping them.

.

All in all it is a pretty good picture of How Things Work. The mechanisms of oppression are easy to see here. The way that money is made dishonestly and then invested back into a system that protects the continued operation of the scam is shown here in stark relief. Notably, nothing at all would be different about this story if we were discussing instead racketeers running numbers who paid off the police and politicians to protect themselves, except for the legality in question. Morally and operationally, it is the same.

.

It is common for people to think of contentious political issues as things that people differ on due to deep in unbridgeable ideological divides. Abortion, gun control, LGBTQ rights, racism—these are things that people have strong feelings on, but we assume that those feelings are products of our upbringings and cultural experiences and you can see how, if your life had been different, and you had been brought up differently, you might have landed on the other side. Much of the tendency of people to call for “civility” in politics is due to the implicit belief that most political beliefs are just natural outgrowths of our own life experiences and therefore we should be understanding of those whose experiences happened to be different from our own.

This is not that.

This is just power. This is material politics. The division of spoils. Powerful groups use their power to get money and they use their money to protect their grift. In this case, the grift is ripping off people’s retirement savings.

When clearly understood, there are not two equally legitimate sides to this issue. There is only, on one side, the robbers, and on the other side, the people who are getting robbed. The government will ultimately weigh in on one side or the other.

.

The next time you get tempted to bow to the politesse of “We may disagree but we must all respect one another,” please remember this. This is the bulk of what happens in politics. Interest groups looking out for their own interests. All interests are not equally righteous. For example, one interest may be “Skim money away from regular people’s savings by posing as advisers who will help them,” and one opposing interest may be “Protect people from being ripped off.”

There is a right and wrong answer here.

It is not so much that the politicians on the other side of this issue think differently about the path to economic prosperity for all; it is that they are corrupt. They are okay allowing you to be ripped off because the continuation of that grift can be in their own personal interests.

Again, we all benefit from speaking plainly about this. Acquiescing to speak about things in bullshit word salad is a primary reason why this corruption can continue for so long.

.

Should this make you cynical?

No, it should make you demand campaign finance reform.

In order to stop this mechanism we must cut off the flow of money from the Ripoff Industries to the politicians. Until then, this goes on and on and on.

[rightnewshindi]

मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ नहीं दे रहे शिक्षण संस्थान, श्रम विभाग ने 15 संस्थानों को भेजे नोटिस

मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ नहीं दे रहे शिक्षण संस्थान, श्रम विभाग ने 15 संस्थानों को भेजे नोटिस #News #RightNewsIndia #RightNews

श्रम विभाग ने कर्मचारियों को मातृत्व लाभ और ग्रेच्युटी का लाभ न देने वालों संस्थानों पर शिकंजा कसना शुरू कर दिया है। शिमला जोन के तहत विभाग के श्रम निरीक्षकों ने 50 से अधिक शिक्षण संस्थानों का निरीक्षण किया है। इनमें 15 संस्थानों को कानून का उल्लंघन करने पर नोटिस जारी किए गए हैं। यदि यह संस्थान कानून का पालन सुनिश्चित नहीं करते तोे अब इनके खिलाफ कानूनी कार्रवाई होगी। मातृत्व लाभ (संशोधन)…

[narmadanchal]

लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ ने कलेक्टर के नाम दिया मांगों का ज्ञापन

इटारसी। लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ (Public Service Center Employees Union) ने कलेक्टर को ज्ञापन देकर कर्मचारियों ने अपनी समस्या सुनाई। संघ ने कलेक्टर (Collector), अनुविभागीय अधिकारी, तहसीलदार एवं श्रम विभाग (Labor Department) के नाम ज्ञापन दिया। लोक सेवा केन्द्र कर्मचारी संघ के जिला अध्यक्ष सचिन केवट (Sachin Kevat) एवं प्रदेश कर्मचारी संघ के सह मंत्री उत्तम यादव (Uttam Yadav), भारतीय मजदूर संघ…

[victusinveritas]

Put not your faith in princes. Labor is where the power is.

[onlytiktoks]

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-judge-strikes-down-biden-overtime-pay-rule-2024-11-15/

[parttimereporter]

PSSI, one of the country's largest cleaning services for food processing companies, started being investigated last summer, the DOL said. 

While searching three meatpacking plants owned by JBS USA and Turkey Valley Farms in Nebraska and Minnesota, department officials found 31 underage workers as young as 13. PSSI's headquarters in Kieler, Wisc., was also searched.

The DOL ultimately found 13 plants in eight states had 102 underage workers – Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas. 

[sainte666]

URGENT: Stop Subminimum Wage by submitting a comment in support of the Department of Labor's notice of proposed rulemaking on ending 14c by this Friday

Comments are due by Friday, January 17 2025 at 11:59pm ET

Learn more here: endsubminimumwage.org

Comment here:

Hi, disabled US Americans and disability allies. Do you like being paid fairly for a job? Do you think everyone should be treated equitably at work regardless of your disability status? Do big companies like Goodwill who prey on disabled people kind of disturb you but you don't know what to do?

I have a time sensitive request. We have a chance to get the DOL to end submimimum wage, an archaic loophole in US labor law that lets companies pay wages below the federal minimum wage to employees with disabilities (most frequently people with intellectual and developmental disabilities but this can happen to anyone with a significant disability that impacts your ability to work without accommodations). We desperately need more comments in support of this.

Unfortunately there's a small but focused group of parents of people with disabilities who behave much like the small groups who get massive numbers of book bans approved each year. Right now it's like 2:1 comments against ending 14c vs comments in support of ending this horrible program.

I'm joining other disability advocates to ask people to write a comment to help combat this dynamic even if it's "I believe people with disabilities should be paid minimum wage and 14c certificates should be phased out". Please take 5 mins and write a comment.

So many people believe in the concepts around ending 14c but these parents are relentless in their efforts to continue these ableist policies that demean and humiliate workers with disabilities, not to mention continue to trap us in cycles of poverty and institutionalization.

Please write your thoughts on ending subminimum wage in a comment either through the endsubminimumwage.org site by Friday at 12pm ET or directly on the record through the federal register by Friday at 11:59pm ET.

Please reblog this post and share with your US American followers. Let's show up!!!

[saywhat-politics]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkscrump Linkdump

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Well, Saturday's come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn't fit into this week's newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I'm days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:

https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I'm appearing at Boskone, the city's venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:

https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/

Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I'm regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:

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

But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's Lawfare article about how Musk's seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Farrell and Newman's point isn't merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation's digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they're seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I'm gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea's autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls

But not everyone is taking Musk's bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:

https://gizmodo.com/americas-unions-sue-doge-launch-the-department-of-people-who-work-for-a-living-2000559998

And they've launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of "The Department of People Who Work for a Living":

https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/

It's nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they're fucking up all over the place.

Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden's CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can't be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What's more, any "violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act," which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn't apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/shutting-down-cfpb-is-not-like-shutting-down-usaid.html

That isn't the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off

Before last week, Justin Trudeau's political legacy seemed assured. His many leadership failures, along with a billionaire-funded dark-money hate-machine that targeted him with culture-war nonsense and climate denial all added up to record low approval ratings. It was so bad that Trudeau actually sent Parliament home (recklessly leaving Canada without a legislature on the eve of Trump's presidency) and resigned as Liberal Party leader.

A week ago, pretty much everyone in Canada figured that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was about to romp to victory with a Ba'ath-style Parliamentary majority. Poilievre was and is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a guy who has literally never had a job except for "politician," who nevertheless ran as a political outsider, leading a coalition of racists, climate exterminationists, xenophobes, forced-birth militants, and other cryptofascists and low-tax brain-worm victims. The threat of a Poilievre government with a commanding majority was frankly terrifying. Think of him as someone with Trump's agenda and Mitch McConnell's ruthless administrative competence. Trump is bad enough – but smart Trump? Nightmare.

Then came the Trump tariffs and the annexation threats, and overnight, the Tories' 20-point lead narrowed to a two-point lead, which continues to shrink. Poilievre's brand boils down to "Make Canada America Again" – dismantle medicare, smash unions, punish immigrants, ban abortion. With Canadians booing the American anthem at NFL and NBA games and Quebecois demonstrators waving maple-leaf flags, this is not a good time to be running as the America guy.

Don't get me wrong. Trudeau is terrible. Bill Clinton terrible, say. But Poilievre? A fucking monster. Canada's political future may just have been rescued by Trump's big, stupid mouth. Thanks, eh?

Meanwhile, south of the border, our American cousins keep getting fed into the corporate woodchipper. It's been just over a year since Mainers went to the polls and voted in a Right to Repair law with an 83% majority. But a year later, the law is foundering, amid a corporate legal blitz led by the automakers, who have also put Massachusetts' massive popular 2020 Right to Repair law on ice with endless lawfare. :

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/automakers-sue-to-kill-maines-hugely-popular-right-to-repair-law/

This is the status quo in America. As a highly influential, widely cited 2014 peer-reviewed study found:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

In other words, the only time the American people get what they demand is when giant corporations and oligarchs want it too. But when the plutes want something that the people despise, they almost always get their way.

Speaking of which, how's things going with Uber?

This week, Hubert Horan, the aviation industry analyst whose writings on Uber are the most important analysis of the company's business, investor scams, wage theft, and lobbying, published his long-awaited 34th research note on the company:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-four-tony-wests-calamitous-legacy-at-uber-and-with-the-kamala-harris-campaign.html

This edition is devoted to Tony West, Uber's Chief Legal Officer, and also brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, as well as manager of her disastrous failure of a 2024 election campaign. West may have run a Democratic presidential campaign, but he epitomizes the corporate corruption that gave rise to Trump. As Horan writes, West's first major accomplishment at Uber was to get the company exonerated for intimidating customers who were raped by Uber drivers. But his obituary will lead with the fact that he got Prop 22 passed in Calfornia, legalizing Uber's worker misclassification gambit, which allows the company to pay well below minimum wage and evade all workplace protection laws.

It was West who tapped Silicon Valley's tech oligarchs for large-dollar donations to the Harris campaign, which presumably played a substantial role in Harri's unwillingness to take a tough line on Big Tech while on the trail, creating the (correct) impression among voters that Harris would stand up for big business over their own interests.

It's an important read, and it's a reminder that the Democrats lost the last election every bit as much as Trump won it, and that their paralysis in the face of a national crisis is absolutely in character for the Democratic Party.

But on the other hand, the antitrust surge in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and China (!) over the past five years are all the more remarkable and heartening in light of the dismal and corrupt state of world governments. After all, there is no billionaire-backed dark money lobby whipping up support for smashing corporate power. The antitrust victories of the 2020s marked a turning point – the first time in my memory when extremely popular policies that the wealthy hated triumphed.

Decapitating the agencies that made those policies won't change the enormous political rage that led to the antitrust surge. If anything, it will only feed it. Enforcers like Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter did brilliant, important work – but they were only able to do it because of us. They're out of office, but we're still here. Don't ever forget that.

I certainly won't. This week, I turned in the edited manuscript for my next book, a nonfiction title called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The day I turned it in Ars Technica ran a huge package called "As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders," reeling off the most disgusting high-tech ripoffs trying to worm their way into your home and wallet:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

This sparked an epic Reddit thread on r/NoStupidQuestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1ij42yh/what_are_some_other_examples_of_enshittification/

I love to see how giving a name and a description to this phenomenon has captured and directed some of that rage. And for the record, it doesn't bother me at all that some of these people are using "enshittification" to mean "corporations fucking shit up" without regard to my formal definition of the process. As I wrote last October:

Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

And also: there's a lot of stuff that's just shitty right now, which is one of the reasons my word's putting up such great numbers. People are getting fed up with it, in ways large…and small. Take the post-pandemic trend of using your phone in speaker-mode in public places. I'm a prison abolitionist, but I'll make an exception for people who do this. Display 'em in stocks. Chain 'em up by their wrists. Or, you know, do what they do in France: fine them €150 for using a speakerphone on the train:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20250206/french-train-passenger-fined-e150-for-using-phone-on-speaker

Speaking of gruesome tortures, the essential Long Forgotten blog has posted its extensive, thoughtful review of the changes to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Very few people can write about built environment entertainment like Long Forgotten (the only other person who comes to mind is the excellent Foxx Nolte). Long Forgotten's verdict is "mostly good, but man, that new gift shop *suuuuucks:

https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2025/02/beyond-bride-other-changes-in-2025.html

OK, it's time for me to go and make my packing list for the tour. I'm going to leave you with a song. Last night, my pal Cynthia Hathaway turned me on to the Shotgun Jazz band, led by trumpeter/frontwoman Maria Dixon. If you like Louis Prima-style shout-singing, you'll love 'em – I bought everything they had on Bandcamp this morning:

https://www.shotgunjazzband.com/

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/2025/02/08/commixture/#petardhoists

Image: i ♥ happy!! (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Messy_storage_room_with_boxes.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/