#Labor and Workplace Reporting

[marinamitu-blog]

Covid-19: Cause of Critical Concern to Workers

In this corona crisis, the whole country is under lockdown and a general holiday has been declared. Most people are staying at home to prevent the infection from spreading. While a lot are fine staying at home and some are enjoying their time spent with their family, for some this is not the case of just staying home to relax with their family. For some it is a life and death struggle to stay at home without proper work and an empty stomach.

Kuddus is working as a security guard in Dhaka and has to stay at the workplace for the convenience of the people living in the building he is guarding. Thus he is staying alone here without his family. As he is living here alone, he has to go out for buying groceries for himself. He is worried about his health, but more than that he is worried about his family in the village as they are solely dependent on him. “It is harder to send money at home as there are less Bikas agents around. It takes few days to find an agent, I am very worried about my family”, says Kuddus.

Kuddus isn’t the only one. Many workers are facing such problems during this covid-19 pandemic. Due to the Corona crisis, many factories and businesses are closed. Some of them are unsure if they will be able to continue further even if the lockdown has withdrawn. Some workers are having financial crisis because of not getting payment properly as their employers are unable to pay properly. Abdul Baten who is working in a garments factory as a cutting master, is having trouble with his finances as he didn’t get his full wage. He received only half of his payment. This is causing trouble for him to provide for his family properly. He is worried about daily needs, especially when Eid is nearing. He is not even sure when he will get the rest of the salary let alone the Eid bonus. He is still required to pay the house rent. As the factories are open and operating, he and the other RMG workers are needed to go to work. He claims, “In the factory there isn’t any special precautions for corona and it is not possible to maintain social distance at the time of work”. In a research on Bangladesh apparel workers it is claimed that, “The factories can’t pay the workers’ salaries in this critical situation. Therefore, millions of workers have been sent home without their wages.”

This is not the case of only garments workers. Another joint survey of the Power and Participation Research Centre and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development reveals that, per capita daily income of urban slum and rural poor drops by 80% due to present countrywide shutdown enforced by the government to halt the spread of Covid-19. It also shows that 40%-50% of these people took loans to meet the daily expenses.

Sumon is working in a gold workshop as a gold smith. In normal times he makes a decent income and during the Eid season they have a lot of work. But due to the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown all the gold shops are closed and there is no sell. Sumon says that in the time when they were supposed to get more money and bonus incomes, they are facing the threats of keeping their jobs. After all if there is no work there is no income for them as they earn on the base of their work. Al-Amin who is working as a driver and like Kuddus he is staying at home alone as his family is at the village. But unlike Kuddus he is not staying in Dhaka for the sake of work rather he couldn’t go home to his family because of the lockdown as moving from one place to another is not possible. Even though he is still in the city, his employers are not giving him any duty and are telling him to stay at home. When asked about what he was doing to stay safe from corona virus, he said that he is staying home unless it is necessary like shopping from groceries. He added that he is even praying at home instead of going to the mosque except for ‘Jumma’. He also said that he is maintaining cleanliness as well. When asked if his employers helped him to stay safe in this crisis time, he said that they gave him mask, gloves and sanitizers. They are also calling him regularly to check on him.

Like the employees the employers are also very concerned regarding the covid-19 virus and the lockdown. A lot of them are unable to run their businesses and only a few are able to run it in a limited range. A lot of them are unable to pay their employees salary; in fact some of them are unable to keep the workers and have to cut off some employees. Sahidullah, owner of Kazi Builders, a construction business, has sent his entire workers home as all the construction sites are closed due to the pandemic. He said, “All the construction sites are closed and the workers are off duty. I have paid their wage but I am unable to pay any bonus for the Eid. I can barely manage myself, but the payments will not come unless the constructions are finished. The more delayed the constructions are the costlier it will get. So in the future I might not be able to higher same amount of workers as before”. Babul, a construction worker under Sahidullah said that they are very worried, as this lockdown has taken away their income source as all the construction projects have closed down for the time being. “If we cannot work, we will not have the money to support our families. Our employer is helping us now but if the construction is closed for longer than he won’t be able to help either. This is scarier than the virus. The virus can kill us but starving to death is worse than corona for us”, said Babul.

Not just factories and businesses but those who entirely depend on house rent for their income are also facing problems. Nasrin Ara has few houses of her own and is solely dependent on the rent for her income. But due to this Corona crisis, many of her tenants are unable to pay the rent properly. Among the 48 of her tenants, only eight of them paid the rent fully. Some of them paid the half. Even some of the tenants have left because of losing her job. She said, “This is a criticaltime where we cannot pressure the people to give the rents. But we have to go on too. This is our only income source. I have already reduced the rent of this month. I am even not sure how I will pay the security guard, cleaner and the other employees next month. I have already cut off their bonus for Eid but if this continues I might not be able to keep them in their post.” A lot of her tenants are RMG workers and most of them have their factories open. They have to go for work every day. As a result, she is also concerned about the spreading of the infection.

Not only just Kuddus or Baten, there are people many workers like them who are suffering mentally and financially in this pandemic of Covid-19. There are also many people like Nasrin and Sahidullah who are also helpless and are unable to keep the workers working under them to their jobs. If a solution to this situation is not found soon many more are going to end up worse than them.

[theautumnriverleaves]

working for family is funny because my mother will often say "i can't wait for you to get another job and see how good you have it here" as if 1) i don't currently work two jobs and therefore know what other workplaces are like in 2024 and 2) she straight up doesnt give me breaks when we get in fights

[rightnewshindi]

केरल में कर्मचारियों को कुत्ते की तरह घुमाने का वायरल वीडियो: सजा का सच या बदनामी की साजिश?

Kerala News: केरल के कोच्चि में एक निजी मार्केटिंग कंपनी पर अपने कर्मचारियों के साथ क्रूर व्यवहार करने का सनसनीखेज आरोप लगा, जिसने सोशल मीडिया पर तूफा�� मचा दिया। वायरल वीडियो में कर्मचारियों को गले में बेल्ट बांधकर कुत्ते की तरह घुमाने और अपमानजनक सजा देने के दावे किए गए। इस घटना ने लोगों को हैर��न कर दिया, लेकिन जांच के बाद मामला कुछ और ही निकला। आइए, इस पूरे मामले की सच्चाई को करीब से जानते…

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

question! if a workplace is violating labor laws (which they often are) is there anything that prevents an employee from:

printing out copies of the laws being violated, maybe with helpful highlights/summaries

(and a helpful reporting hotline, if possible)

taping these signs anonymously in the employee bathroom stalls

i know retaliation is something many workers worry about, but bathrooms at least still don't have security cameras. so is this a practical anonymous thing to do? and if so, why isn't it more common?

[wat3rm370n]

PAYDAY REPORT:

PODCAST: Koch Industries Using “Texas Two-Step” to Prevent Asbestos Victims from Going to Court

[theonion]

Calling the findings of its comprehensive survey of American workplace practices “total bullshit,” the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment issued a report Monday concluding that you should be able to retire after, like, six years of working full time. “We evaluated the data around current U.S. employment rates, and our research shows that it’s basically crazy that we have to waste our whole damn lives working before we can retire,” said report co-author Sarah Middleton, who explained that six years is actually a really long time and that it sounds like more than enough labor for one person. “Our research found that people have to work and stuff or else nothing would get done, but anything more than half a decade or so seems cruel and excessive. That has to be hundreds of hours of work, right? And after consulting with experts across the field, we determined that six years was a totally reasonable amount of time to pay your dues before you get to kick back and chill.

Full Story

[ohnoitstbskyen]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform

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/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1385565737167724545?lang=en

The reason for their newfound popularity is obvious: the rise and rise of algorithmic management tools, in which your boss is an app. That IBM slide is right: turning an app into your boss allows your actual boss to create an "accountability sink" in which there is no obvious way to blame a human or even a company for your maltreatment:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

App-based management-by-bossware treats the bug identified by the unknown author of that IBM slide into a feature. When an app is your boss, it can force you to scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Or it can steal your wages:

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

But tech giveth and tech taketh away. Digital technology is infinitely flexible: the program that spies on you can be defeated by another program that defeats spying. Every time your algorithmic boss hacks you, you can hack your boss back:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Technologists and labor organizers need one another. Even the most precarious and abused workers can team up with hackers to disenshittify their robo-bosses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For every abuse technology brings to the workplace, there is a liberating use of technology that workers unleash by seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

One tech-savvy group on the cutting edge of dismantling the Torment Nexus is Algorithms Exposed, a tiny, scrappy group of EU hacker/academics who recruit volunteers to reverse engineer and modify the algorithms that rule our lives as workers and as customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Algorithms Exposed have an admirable supply of seemingly boundless energy. Every time I check in with them, I learn that they've spun out yet another special-purpose subgroup. Today, I learned about Reversing Works, a hacking team that reverse engineers gig work apps, revealing corporate wrongdoing that leads to multimillion euro fines for especially sleazy companies.

One such company is Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo. Foodinho/Glovo has been in the crosshairs of Italian labor enforcers since before the pandemic, racking up millions in fines – first for failing to file the proper privacy paperwork disclosing the nature of the data processing in the app that Foodinho riders use to book jobs. Then, after the Italian data commission investigated Foodinho, the company attracted new, much larger fines for its out-of-control surveillance conduct.

As all of this was underway, Reversing Works was conducting its own research into Glovo/Foodinho's app, running it on a simulated Android handset inside a PC so they could peer into app's data collection and processing. They discovered a nightmarish world of pervasive, illegal worker surveillance, and published their findings a year ago in November, 2023:

https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/Exercising%20workers%20rights%20in%20algorithmic%20management%20systems_Lessons%20learned%20from%20the%20Glovo-Foodinho%20digital%20labour%20platform%20case_2023.pdf

That report reveals all kinds of extremely illegal behavior. Glovo/Foodinho makes its riders' data accessible across national borders, so Glovo managers outside of Italy can access fine-grained surveillance information and sensitive personal information – a major data protection no-no.

Worse, Glovo's app embeds trackers from a huge number of other tech platforms (for chat, analytics, and more), making it impossible for the company to account for all the ways that its riders' data is collected – again, a requirement under Italian and EU data protection law.

All this data collection continues even when riders have clocked out for the day – its as though your boss followed you home after quitting time and spied on you.

The research also revealed evidence of a secretive worker scoring system that ranked workers based on undisclosed criteria and reserved the best jobs for workers with high scores. This kind of thing is pervasive in algorithmic management, from gig work to Youtube and Tiktok, where performers' videos are routinely suppressed because they crossed some undisclosed line. When an app is your boss, your every paycheck is docked because you violated a policy you're not allowed to know about, because if you knew why your boss was giving you shitty jobs, or refusing to show the video you spent thousands of dollars making to the subscribers who asked to see it, then maybe you could figure out how to keep your boss from detecting your rulebreaking next time.

All this data-collection and processing is bad enough, but what makes it all a thousand times worse is Glovo's data retention policy – they're storing this data on their workers for four years after the worker leaves their employ. That means that mountains of sensitive, potentially ruinous data on gig workers is just lying around, waiting to be stolen by the next hacker that breaks into the company's servers.

Reversing Works's report made quite a splash. A year after its publication, the Italian data protection agency fined Glovo another 5 million euros and ordered them to cut this shit out:

https://reversing.works/posts/2024/11/press-release-reversing.works-investigation-exposes-glovos-data-privacy-violations-marking-a-milestone-for-worker-rights-and-technology-accountability/

As the report points out, Italy is extremely well set up to defend workers' rights from this kind of bossware abuse. Not only do Italian enforcers have all the privacy tools created by the GDPR, the EU's flagship privacy regulation – they also have the benefit of Italy's 1970 Workers' Statute. The Workers Statute is a visionary piece of legislation that protects workers from automated management practices. Combined with later privacy regulation, it gave Italy's data regulators sweeping powers to defend Italian workers, like Glovo's riders.

Italy is also a leader in recognizing gig workers as de facto employees, despite the tissue-thin pretense that adding an app to your employment means that you aren't entitled to any labor protections. In the case of Glovo, the fine-grained surveillance and reputation scoring were deemed proof that Glovo was employer to its riders.

Reversing Works' report is a fascinating read, especially the sections detailing how the researchers recruited a Glovo rider who allowed them to log in to Glovo's platform on their account.

As Reversing Works points out, this bottom-up approach – where apps are subjected to technical analysis – has real potential for labor organizations seeking to protect workers. Their report established multiple grounds on which a union could seek to hold an abusive employer to account.

But this bottom-up approach also holds out the potential for developing direct-action tools that let workers flex their power, by modifying apps, or coordinating their actions to wring concessions out of their bosses.

After all, the whole reason for the gig economy is to slash wage-bills, by transforming workers into contractors, and by eliminating managers in favor of algorithms. This leaves companies extremely vulnerable, because when workers come together to exercise power, their employer can't rely on middle managers to pressure workers, deal with irate customers, or step in to fill the gap themselves:

https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/

Only by seizing the means of computation, workers and organized labor can turn the tables on bossware – both by directly altering the conditions of their employment, and by producing the evidence and tools that regulators can use to force employers to make those alterations permanent.

Image: EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/files/issues/eu-flag-11_1.png

CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

[reasonsforhope]

"Millions of Australians just got official permission to ignore their bosses outside of working hours, thanks to a new law enshrining their "right to disconnect."

The law doesn't strictly prohibit employers from calling or messaging their workers after hours. But it does protect employees who "refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact or attempted contact outside their working hours, unless their refusal is unreasonable," according to the Fair Work Commission, Australia's workplace relations tribunal.

That includes outreach from their employer, as well as other people "if the contact or attempted contact is work-related."

The law, which passed in February, took effect on Monday [August 26, 2024] for most workers and will apply to small businesses of fewer than 15 people starting in August 2025. It adds Australia to a growing list of countries aiming to protect workers' free time.

"It's really about trying to bring back some work-life balance and make sure that people aren't racking up hours of unpaid overtime for checking emails and responding to things at a time when they're not being paid," said Sen. Murray Watt, Australia's minister for employment and workplace relations.

The law doesn't give employees a complete pass, however...

"If it was an emergency situation, of course people would expect an employee to respond to something like that," Watt said. "But if it's a run-of-the-mill thing … then they should wait till the next work day, so that people can actually enjoy their private lives, enjoy time with their family and their friends, play sport or whatever they want to do after hours, without feeling like they're chained to the desk at a time when they're not actually being paid, because that's just not fair."

Protections aim to address erosion of work-life balance

The law's supporters hope it will help solidify the boundary between the personal and the professional, which has become increasingly blurry with the rise of remote work since the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 2022 survey by the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute, a public policy think tank, found that seven out of 10 Australians performed work outside of scheduled working hours, with many reporting experiencing physical tiredness, stress and anxiety as a result.

The following year, the institute reported that Australians clocked an average of 281 hours of unpaid overtime in 2023. Valuing that labor at average wage rates, it estimated the average worker is losing the equivalent of nearly $7,500 U.S. dollars each year.

"This is particularly concerning when worker's share of national income remains at a historically low level, wage growth is not keeping up with inflation, and the cost of living is rising," it added.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions hailed the new law as a "cost-of-living win for working people," especially those in industries like teaching, community services and administrative work.

The right to disconnect, it said, will not only cut down on Australians' unpaid work hours but also address the "growing crisis of increasing mental health illness and injuries in modern workplaces."

"More money in your pocket, more time with your loved ones and more freedom to live your life — that's what the right to disconnect is all about," ACTU President Michele O’Neil said in a statement.

The 2022 Australia Institute survey... found broad support for a right to disconnect.

Only 9% of respondents said such a policy would not positively affect their lives. And the rest cited a slew of positive effects, from having more social and family time to improved mental health and job satisfaction. Thirty percent of respondents said it would enable them to be more productive during work hours.

Eurofound, the European Union agency for the improvement of living and working conditions, said in a 2023 study that workers at companies with a right to disconnect policy reported better work-life balance than those without — 92% versus 80%."

-via GoodGoodGood, August 26, 2024

[fuck-customers]

Management just released a stupid new policy that I'm pretty sure is illegal under US labor law. The general standard has been FOR YEARS that the first 5-10 minutes of our shifts are to get set up and settled in for the day before starting on calls (I work in a call center). Management has now released a statement saying that everyone needs to be ON CALLS the moment they clock in for their shift, and that 5-10min of settling in (logging into our client software, setting up our computers, checking work-related communications/email) need to be done BEFORE clocking in now, despite the fact that these are work-related tasks and should not be done off the clock.

I'm about 98% sure that's wage theft under federal law and have every plan to report this to the DoL. I'm also pretty sure my workplace is non-compliant in regards to the posting of FLSA standards document (legally, one HAS to be posted in the office, per the DoL website; I've never fucking seen one in the damn office), so I'll be reporting that as well once I confirm. Not to mention the potential EEOC claim for ignoring my established ADA accommodations. Idk what management is doing, but it's Bad

Posted by admin Rodney

[follow-up-news]

A Senate committee investigation accused the nation's largest online retailer Amazon of putting workers at risk of injury in the name of speed — while manipulating workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they truly are. The findings were released late Sunday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The report stems from an 18-month investigation that reviewed seven years of Amazon workplace injury data and interviewed over 130 Amazon workers. It found that despite Amazon's claims of safe working conditions, company data showed that its warehouses have "significantly higher" injury rates than both the industry average and non-Amazon warehouses. More specifically, over the past seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured compared to workers at other warehouses in the sector. The report also found in 2023, Amazon warehouses recorded more than 30% more injuries than the industry average.

[iww-gnv]

American workers are dying, local businesses are reporting a drop in productivity, and the country's economy is losing billions all because of one problem: the heat. July was the hottest month on record on our planet, according to scientists. This entire summer, so far, has been marked by scorching temperatures for much of the U.S. South, with the thermometer reaching triple digits in several places in Texas between June and July. In that same period, at least two people died in the state while working under the stifling heat enveloping Texas, a 35-year-old utility lineman, and a 66-year-old USPS carrier. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 36 work-related deaths due to environmental heat exposure in 2021, the latest data available. This was a drop from 56 deaths in 2020, and the lowest number since 2017. "Workers who are exposed to extreme heat or work in hot environments may be at risk of heat stress," Kathleen Conley, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Newsweek. "Heat stress can result in heat stroke, heat exhaustion, heat cramps, or heat rashes. Heat can also increase the risk of injuries in workers as it may result in sweaty palms, fogged-up safety glasses, and dizziness. Burns may also occur as a result of accidental contact with hot surfaces or steam." While there is a minimum working temperature in the U.S., there's no maximum working temperature set by law at a federal level. The CDC makes recommendations for employers to avoid heat stress in the workplace, but these are not legally binding requirements. The Biden administration has tasked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) with updating its worker safety policies in light of the extreme heat. But the federal standards could take years to develop—leaving the issue in the hands of individual states. Things aren't moving nearly as fast as the emergency would require—and it's the politics around the way we look at work, the labor market, and the rights of workers in the U.S. that is slowing things down.

[autisticadvocacy]

"However, for disabled people, the labor market has never really worked and continues to showcase the persistence of systemic ableism."

[feminist-space]

"Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate.

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs.

Many common foods and medications — from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines — can prompt erroneous results.

The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor — she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances — for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job — she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.

...

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country.

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women.

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care.

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds — which come from the same plant used to make heroin — are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests.

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results."

Read the full piece here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/09/09/drug-test-pregnancy-pennsylvania-california

[mariacallous]

In 2019, the American chattering class was atwitter about “cancel culture”: The New York Times reported on its popularity among teenagers; in 2020, Harper’s Magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” whose 153 world-renowned signatories—academics, writers, and artists—worried that a lack of “open debate” over police reform and other issues of social and racial justice was yielding to “dogma or coercion.”

Outside legacy media, cancel culture then became part and parcel of right-wing political agendas, with the End Woke Higher Education Act—which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Sept. 19—marking one of several “anti-woke” initiatives launched by Republican congressional lawmakers.

A heavily reworked version of a 2022 German book, The Cancel Culture Panic by Adrian Daub offers a historical analysis of the so-called cancel culture moral panic that spread from the United States to the rest of the world. Daub argues that cancel culture is but the latest iteration of discussions of political correctness that emerged in the United States during the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.

Daub’s goal isn’t to catalog. Rather, he wants to reorient our attention and demystify fears in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, as he believes that “[p]eople talk about cancel culture so that they don’t have to talk about other things, in order to legitimize certain topics, positions, and authorize and delegitimize others.”

Ultimately, Daub argues, hysteria over cancel culture keeps “us from finding solutions we desperately need” to widespread problems “of labor and job security,” the “digital public space,” and “accountability and surveillance.”

Daub begins by arguing that accusations of cancel culture obscure a widening gap between the “objective frequency of the phenomenon and its media presence.” Fears of alleged censorship, of excessive identity politics, and of “wokeness” are, Daub says, disproportionate to verified cancellations.

For example, the individuals who are often affected—for instance, professors at U.S. universities—have lost their jobs not because of cancel culture, but a specific academic or professional dispute. One example: “In 2021, Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada moved to fire [math professor] Lars Jensen, citing two consecutive unsatisfactory performance reviews that accused him of ‘insubordination,’ among other things.” Specifically, Jensen had distributed “fliers at a state math summit that criticized the college’s math standards—a move Truckee Meadows administrators said disrupted the meeting.”

Cases of real “canceling” in America’s colleges and universities are thus in fact quite low; Daub notes, for example, that “[f]or the year 2021,” his research indicates that just a “total of four” professors “experienced what we would likely see reported in the press as a classic cancel story.” This, despite the conservative National Association of Scholars listing hundreds of cancellations.

Daub argues that “the persuasiveness of cancel culture warnings results from the fact that it insists on suddenness while actually drawing on well-established truisms and conventions.” Historically, he links the panic over cancel culture to fears over political correctness, which—reacting to feminism and the diversification of workplaces and universities—spread in the United States in the early 1990s, above all during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

But Daub identifies a deeper discursive background: conservative narratives, which first emerged in the 1950s, that imagine U.S. higher education—really, the eight universities that make up the Ivy League—as bastions of “anti-Christian” bias and “anti-individualistic” ideologies.

In these narratives, which Daub argues were produced by members of “think tanks and nonprofit foundations set up by wealthy conservative donors” beginning in the 1970s, leftist academics insidiously swap canonical works—by William Shakespeare, Plato, Homer, and so on—with literature supposedly focused on identity and ethnicity, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Intersecting with this backdrop, a wave of mainstream publications about political correctness’s apparent tyranny in the academy swept through the United States. These presented the concept sensationally, with “the flavor of the courtroom,” even if those presentations were “nowhere near the truth.”

In fact, Daub argues, a certain type of anecdote about cancel culture—imprecise, brief narratives from questionable sources with a punch line—are told as credible and received as plausible. For example: Psychology professor Jordan Peterson once reported in a viral video that a client of his was a bank employee who spoke of how their bank decided to cease using the term “flip chart” because it could be used “pejoratively to refer to Filipinos.”

Particular features of this and other cancel culture anecdotes develop, disappear, or are replaced with new details; in fact, this anecdote has been circulating since the 1990s, and sometimes features a Filipino gang member at a community panel meeting. Regardless, the more frequently that a cancel culture anecdote is referenced and recounted, the more that it gains credibility, and the more that it further inflames the moral panic over cancel culture.

Daub expands his analysis to our age of globalization—one in which, he argues, cancel culture anecdotes have helped produce moral panic in different global settings, becoming invariably linked to particular national issues, discussions, and societal anxieties.

In Germany, fears intersect with the concern that “left-wing censorship” and “identity politics from the left” will culminate, as theorized in political scientist Josef Joffe’s March 2021 Neue Zürcher Zeitung essay, in an imagined violent and wholesale cultural revolution. In the United Kingdom, cancel culture arrived after Brexit and became, in Daub’s assessment, “at least in part a crutch for managing the shambolic aftermath of the decision to leave.”

And if Europeans obsess about U.S. universities, in Russia and Turkey, Daub writes, “the focus is on popular culture and social media.” In March 2022, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the supposed cancellation of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for her views on transgender people.

In his conclusion, Daub interrogates how “calls for a defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the so-called woke campus, or cancel culture in publications such as Le Figaro, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic can morph into—or at least indirectly contribute to—illiberal political-governmental restrictions on speech and institutions.

For instance, following the flurry of articles on cancel culture in 2019, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis signed the Stop WOKE Act into state law on April 22, 2022, and positioned himself as a 2024 presidential candidate in part by whipping up hysteria about cancel culture.

But, more broadly, Daub sees the anti-cancel culture movement as advancing a dark and illiberal vision of institutions and society. For him, “figures like the Le Pens [of France], the Trumps [of the United States], [Austria’s] Jörg Haider, [Italy’s] Silvio Berlusconi, [the United Kingdom’s] Boris Johnson, and [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro … retain a certain conservative institutionalism, while they simultaneously participate in the populist/authoritarian degradation of institutions,” and they do this in part through using the tool of the cancel culture panic.

For these leaders, universities teach junk to students; companies go woke and go broke; the military is weak due to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and experts are politically correct drones. All while casting themselves as liberal and tolerant, these illiberal figures construct straw man arguments from the legitimate concerns of minority perspectives and dismiss them as cancel culture; this allows for the powerful and privileged to reinforce political and social hierarchies, uphold majority rule, and crush opposition.

The fact that the cancel culture panic spread to other countries indicates how U.S. soft power remains operative. Nevertheless, despite Daub’s insights into the moral panic in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, he does not, for example, engage with its occurrence in China, where competitive social media platforms, streaming and video platforms, and state-run media outlets drive a “real” version of “cancellation.”

In 2021, for example, there were a series of high-profile celebrity cancellations in China; some transgressors were imprisoned, others not. The latter group included actor Zhang Zhehan, though, in his case, being “canceled” meant losing work and removal from social media platforms: in August 2021, Zhang was “canceled” because of old vacation photos showing Zhang posing with cherry blossoms, which had been taken in the open park area of Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war criminals involved in the atrocities of World War II.

Furthermore, the intense public concern about cancel culture in the United States seems to have modulated itself. One reason might be related to changes in perceptions about the political alignments of Big Tech and social media companies. According to a 2024 study conducted by the Pew Research Center, Americans are overall inclined to see Big Tech corporations as more aligned with liberal than with conservative views. But these views now run up against the reality of Big Tech’s political donations in this year’s U.S. presidential election. “Silicon Valley,” as reported in The Guardian, “poured more than $394.1m into the US presidential election this year,” and most of that—$242.6m—was given by Elon Musk.

Americans’ perceptions of Big Tech corporations also now collide with how changes in the ownership and operation of Big Tech and social media companies have affected platforms, their attention economy, and the way that they circulate information.

It was announced after Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022—which he claimed to do because he wanted to protect “free speech”—that the rechristened “X” would discontinue its policy prohibiting COVID-19 misinformation; at the same time, algorithm changes led to X’s promotion of false viral information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a November 2023 report declaring that 98 percent of misinformation, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other hate speech vis-à-vis the Israel-Hamas war remained publicly viewable on X after a week of notice was given to the social media site.

Meanwhile, in 2023, Twitter—like Meta and Alphabet, the parent companies of Facebook and Google, respectively—dumped a significant number of its content moderators. While Gizmodo reported in 2016 that Facebook workers routinely suppressed conservative news in the “trending topics” section, a recent study published in Science and Nature showed that “[a]udiences who consume political news on Facebook are, in general, right-leaning.” And as reported in El País, 97 percent of links to what Meta’s fact-checkers deem to be “fake” news “circulate among conservative users.” (It’s fair to wonder whether cancel culture memes figure prominently among these links.)

Cancel culture panic’s newest inflections might also be related to a shift in who seeks to do the “canceling”: Rather than only cultural left—which prompted the era of #TimesUp, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter—the cultural right also now commands public attention. In 2023, conservatives in America “canceled” Bud Light because of a social media promotion by TikTok personality and transgender woman Dylan Mulvaney, and the new Star Wars TV show The Acolyte, because it centered women and people of color.

Will U.S. citizens become fed up with the ways that Big Tech and social media feed panic on both sides of the country’s political divides? According to the aforementioned Pew Research Center study, large majorities of Americans believe that social media companies as possess too much political power and as censor political viewpoints that they reject.

But political will appears to be lacking in the United States to do much about it. In contrast, in August 2023, the European Union enacted the Digital Services Act, which aims to curb online hate, child sexual abuse, and disinformation.

Still, the panic about leftist cancel culture hasn’t so much faded from Americans’ consciousness as it has transformed. The idea of “wokeness” was the primary axis on which U.S. President-elect Trump oriented his latest campaign rhetoric. “Kamala is For They/Them. President Trump is For You,” voters were told in one prominent anti-woke campaign advert.

Now an anti-cancel culture president and his anti-woke cabinet are chomping at the bit. Stephen Miller, Trump’s nominee to become his Homeland Security advisor, launched America First Legal in 2021, filing more than 100 legal actions against “woke corporations” and others. And Musk, who vowed in 2021 to “destroy the woke mind virus,” along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote the 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, were named by Trump to lead a department that aims to “delete” aspects of the U.S. federal government deemed too costly.

One shudders at the possibility that other liberal democracies will follow the path of cancel culture panic as far as the United States now has.

[silveryshards]

Lunch Date

NSFW! KiriBaku. Pro-hero Top!Kirishima x Pro-hero Bottom!Bakugo. All characters are 18+, this is time skip era.

Tags/Warnings: Established relationship, workplace sex, rough/slightly feral Kiri, not quite enough prep, saliva as lube, coaxing/light praise, swearing, overstimulation, squirting, unprotected sex, anal sex, creampie, accidental quirk use, furniture destruction THAT IS MAHOGANY!, exhibitionism if you squint?

Word Count: 1,544

A/N: hehe, proud of this, GIF is not representative of story

After finally fucking confessing their feelings to each other and coupling up, Kirishima and Bakugo became absolute menaces to the poor staff of Dynamight’s agency.

Why?

Because the 25-year-olds fucked like teenaged rabbits. Nearly an entire decade’s worth of pent-up sexual tension had finally broken the flood gates and everyone was getting swept up in the deluge.

When Red Riot went solo and left Fatgum’s agency, it only got worse.

Kirishima smashed his lips against his boyfriend’s perfectly full ones, big hands on his tiny waist shoving him back against the sturdy wooden desk in Dynamight’s office. Bakugo grunted against the kiss, but Kirishima didn’t care. Kats could handle it.

Riot hauled Bakugo’s perfectly firm ass onto the workspace, sending office supplies and reports flying. The blonde started to growl a protest at the mess when Kirishima’s sharp teeth captured Kat’s plump lower lip between them and sucked. The growl was replaced with a delicious moan from his boyfriend’s throat.

The hulking, huge Eijiro fit himself perfectly between Katsuki’s strong thighs. His labored breathing warmed Katsuki’s face and neck. The red head had caged him in on his desk between two thick arms.

Katsuki’s heart thundered in his chest as his lungs heaved to provide oxygen to a blood supply that had concentrated in one area in particular, leaving the rest of him dizzy. With each beat of his heart Kats’ cock throbbed in his pants, weeping precum and begging to be touched.

They were supposed to be having lunch. A damn fucking normal disgustingly cutesy lunch date! But no, his delicious himbo had strode into the office, ate up the distance between them in a handful of strides, and pressed his monster of a bulge against Kats’ abs while growling, “I need you.”

And there they were. Kirishima pressing that massive hard on into his hip while he pinned Katsuki down on his very expensive solid wood desk and yanked his metal mask off.

“There,” the red head growled, tossing the useless metal across the room. He fully leaned in and devoured Bakugo’s lips now that he wasn’t worried about hurting him with the damn costume. His hips ground and rocked against his boyfriend’s firm body. 

Bakugo just held on for dear god damn life and tried to not be swallowed alive. His lips and tongue were a frenzy as they met Ei’s kiss for kiss, swirl for swirl. Heat flared all across his body as lost himself in his boyfriend, his cock so achingly hard he might rival Kirishima’s damn quirk.

“Red,” Bakugo moaned against his lips since it was clear he wasn’t coming up for air anytime soon. “Need you too.”

Kirishima growled and in seconds his pants were undone and the monster they had been restraining throbbed against his bare abs. It was angry red and leaking clear precum all over Bakugo’s hip and pelvis. The blonde’s tongue darted along his bottom lip, thirsty. 

Hardened hands clacked together beneath Bakugo’s thighs, and he looked down just in time for his boyfriend’s sharp claws to shred his pants, exposing Bakugo’s equally aching cock and his quivering hole that begged to be filled.

Eijiro’s breathing was heavy and came in rough pants. Like an animal in rut. His pupils were blown wide and Bakugo could only see the faintest hint of the red iris. Red eyes met red eyes and held contact as Kirishima shoved two fingers into Bakugo’s mouth, pressing his tongue down and reaching them to the back of his throat.

Practiced and expertly, his hot tongue swirled around Eijiro’s thick fingers as he sucked, gagged, choked, and drooled on them beautifully. Ei fucked his fingers down his man’s throat a few times before withdrawing them. His fingers weren’t without warmth for long, as he pressed them to Bakugo’s tight ring.

A strangled groan ripped from the depths of Bakugo’s throat as his ass gave way and let Kirishima’s huge fingers sink into him. Right away, those long, thick fingers made their way to the front and stroked across the swollen spot inside that made Bakugo’s eyes roll back and his cock throb, threatening to explode.

“So fuckin’ beautiful for me,” Eijiro groans. He drools all over his left hand, good thing he already was over the scene in front of him, and stroked his monster a few pumps. Katsuki was flushed from tits to temples, his pale skin dusting a delicious rouge at his arousal. His full bottom lip was trapped between desperate teeth and those piercing ruby eyes were still rolled back in pleasure.

Fuck. Yes. Katsuki Bakugo was a beautiful sight to behold. Kirishima’s cock jumped in agreement and spilled more slick precum into his hand, which just became lube. Those thick fingers were still going, ripping the most siren’s call keening noise from his boyfriend.

Dragging his eyes away from the blonde’s face, Ei saw that Bakugo’s cock drooled precum in a steady stream. The mushroom head that he just loved to pop between his lips and suck on was nearly purple. Kats’ abs flexed and his chest heaved, it wouldn’t take much.

“Go ahead baby, let go,” Ei said in a gentle tone that contrasted his feral desire. Red eyes snapped forward and met his before Bakugo’s back arched and he groaned, his cock shooting white cum all over his hero costume, some splattering against the underside of his jaw he was cumming so hard.

“Fuck.” He couldn’t wait anymore. In an ideal night where they had time, Eijiro would pick Katsuki apart bit by bit and make him beg for each of the four fingers he’d stretch him open with for his huge cock. But that wasn’t now and with how much spit was around his messy hole and the precum pouring from Eijiro’s throbbing cock, there wouldn’t be an issue.

“Ready?” he asks, without really listening for the answer. He didn’t want to overstimulate his boyfriend and make him squirt. Wait, that actually sounded hot as fuck. In one fluid motion he’d lined himself up, grabbed Katsuki’s thighs, and pulled him onto his cock all the way to the base.

Bakugo nearly screamed as stars burst on his vision from that massive cock splitting him in two and abusing his prostate. His semi-hard cock shot to attention just in time for clear fluid to erupt from the tip, a second orgasm rocking Bakugo before he was fully recovered.

“God yes that’s what I wanted. Hold on baby, I’m not far behind,” Kirishima growls and brutally pounds his cock into the tight hole that threatened to suffocate his member.

His animalistic grunts, growls, and groans echoed in the office along with the wet slapping of Kirishima’s heavy balls against Bakugo’s perfectly round cheeks. Bakugo moaned and held on for dear life, so far in the clouds of pleasured bliss he was bordering on being in orbit.

For the millionth time in the last month Kirishima grunts out: “We should’ve done this in high school.”

Too blissed out from the huge cock rearranging his insides, Bakugo only gurgles an answer. Red chuckled and went harder, the coil inside him tightening further and further. Angling his hips so the thick head stroked his prostate every pass, Kirishima settled on a desk rattling pace.

Bakugo roused and became lucid as he whimpered. His cock valiantly tried to rise but a refractory period was what made him human, and it couldn’t. That didn’t stop his balls from drawing up taught and spots from appearing in his vision as he barreled towards his third fucking orgasm.

“Ei,” he whined in a tenor that only Eijiro got to hear.

“I’m here, I’m here, gonna fill your perfect ass up. Gonna cum with me baby?” he grunted out, his hips stuttering and the thrusts losing their fluidity as he approached an earth-shattering orgasm.

When the blonde nodded and looked at him with pleading eyes, it tipped Kirishima over. He roared in pleasure and pounded into that perfect little hole a handful more thrusts before burying in balls deep. Bakugo’s back arched beautifully as he came dry, crying out Eijiro’s name.

Kirishima growled as he spilled a massive load in his boyfriend. The pleasure made him lose control of his quirk, hardened hands digging into the wood of Bakugo’s desk as his insides were painted completely white. With a shuddered breath, he collapsed forward and buried his face in Bakugo’s neck.

They laid, panting heavily and trying to catch their breath despite being fit as fuck. After several minutes Kirishima groaned and pulled himself off Bakugo’s sticky stomach and chest.

Sharp teeth flashed as he grinned at his wrecked boyfriend. “Maybe we should get lunch more often.”

“Mmm, fuck off Shitty Hair, ‘n tell my secretary to cancel the rest of my day. ‘M goin home to nap,” Bakugo mumbles back.

Kirishima cleaned them up and donned his costume, walking out to carry out his boyfriend’s wishes despite his thighs shaking with the aftershocks of that earthquake level orgasm. As he smiled at the clearly traumatized secretary and was about to tell her to clear Kats’ schedule, a roar and angry explosions sounded from the pro’s office.

“SHITTY HAIR! MY DESK!”

Kirishima grinned sheepishly and rubbed the back of his neck, “Oops.”

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