#Trades Industry

[gpstudios]

Title: National Tradesmen Day: Honoring the Skills and Dedication of Tradespeople

Celebrate National Tradesmen Day on September 20 by honoring the skilled tradespeople who keep our homes and communities running smoothly. Show appreciation, support local trades, and celebrate their invaluable contributions.

Introduction National Tradesmen Day, celebrated on September 20, is a special occasion to recognize and appreciate the hard work, skills, and dedication of tradespeople. From electricians and plumbers to carpenters and mechanics, tradespeople play a crucial role in keeping our homes and communities running smoothly. This day is an opportunity to acknowledge their expertise and celebrate their…

[r0tt3n-4ppl3]

95% of women in prostitution want to leave, but can't because they don't have things such as financial means, healthcare, housing, treatment for addiction, or job training.

this is not a 'choice', and it is not 'empowering'.

there is no consent when a woman is fearing for her life.

[its-terf-or-nothin]

[reasonsforhope]

Federal regulators on Tuesday [April 23, 2024] enacted a nationwide ban on new noncompete agreements, which keep millions of Americans — from minimum-wage earners to CEOs — from switching jobs within their industries.

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday afternoon voted 3-to-2 to approve the new rule, which will ban noncompetes for all workers when the regulations take effect in 120 days [So, the ban starts in early September, 2024!]. For senior executives, existing noncompetes can remain in force. For all other employees, existing noncompetes are not enforceable.

[That's right: if you're currently under a noncompete agreement, it's completely invalid as of September 2024! You're free!!]

The antitrust and consumer protection agency heard from thousands of people who said they had been harmed by noncompetes, illustrating how the agreements are "robbing people of their economic liberty," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. 

The FTC commissioners voted along party lines, with its two Republicans arguing the agency lacked the jurisdiction to enact the rule and that such moves should be made in Congress...

Why it matters

The new rule could impact tens of millions of workers, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. 

"For nonunion workers, the only leverage they have is their ability to quit their job," Shierholz told CBS MoneyWatch. "Noncompetes don't just stop you from taking a job — they stop you from starting your own business."

Since proposing the new rule, the FTC has received more than 26,000 public comments on the regulations. The final rule adopted "would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses," the FTC said in a statement.

The agency's action comes more than two years after President Biden directed the agency to "curtail the unfair use" of noncompetes, under which employees effectively sign away future work opportunities in their industry as a condition of keeping their current job. The president's executive order urged the FTC to target such labor restrictions and others that improperly constrain employees from seeking work.

"The freedom to change jobs is core to economic liberty and to a competitive, thriving economy," Khan said in a statement making the case for axing noncompetes. "Noncompetes block workers from freely switching jobs, depriving them of higher wages and better working conditions, and depriving businesses of a talent pool that they need to build and expand."

Real-life consequences

In laying out its rationale for banishing noncompetes from the labor landscape, the FTC offered real-life examples of how the agreements can hurt workers.

In one case, a single father earned about $11 an hour as a security guard for a Florida firm, but resigned a few weeks after taking the job when his child care fell through. Months later, he took a job as a security guard at a bank, making nearly $15 an hour. But the bank terminated his employment after receiving a letter from the man's prior employer stating he had signed a two-year noncompete.

In another example, a factory manager at a textile company saw his paycheck dry up after the 2008 financial crisis. A rival textile company offered him a better job and a big raise, but his noncompete blocked him from taking it, according to the FTC. A subsequent legal battle took three years, wiping out his savings. 

-via CBS Moneywatch, April 24, 2024

--

Note:

A lot of people think that noncompete agreements are only a white-collar issue, but they absolutely affect blue-collar workers too, as you can see from the security guard anecdote.

In fact, one in six food and service workers are bound by noncompete agreements. That's right - one in six food workers can't leave Burger King to work for Wendy's [hypothetical example], in the name of "trade secrets." (x, x, x)

Noncompete agreements also restrict workers in industries from tech and video games to neighborhood yoga studios. "The White House estimates that tens of millions of workers are subject to noncompete agreements, even in states like California where they're banned." (x, x, x)

The FTC estimates that the ban will lead to "the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade." (x)

Clearer explanation of noncompete agreements below the cut.

Noncompete agreements can restrict workers from leaving for a better job or starting their own business.

Noncompetes often effectively coerce workers into staying in jobs they want to leave, and even force them to leave a profession or relocate.

Noncompetes can prevent workers from accepting higher-paying jobs, and even curtail the pay of workers not subject to them directly.

Of the more than 26,000 comments received by the FTC, more than 25,000 supported banning noncompetes. 

[nyaa]

北へ。/ Kita e. White Illumination (1999) Sega Dreamcast

[nealcassatiel]

absolutely unhinged and hilarious official quotation to attach to a season renewal trades announcement  😂  😂  😂

[antisextrade]

Check out or Anti-Sex Trade Subreddit for more quotes: https://www.reddit.com/r/antisexwork/

[victusinveritas]

"And they don’t want to be paid in dollars, they want company scrip, that can only be used in the company store. Wooden nickels. And they don’t want neighborhoods, they want shanty towns, and they don’t want grocery stores, ah that word groceries, we love that word, don’t we? Anyway, they don’t want grocery stores, they want food banks and government cheese, it’s the best cheese."

"Plus they'll all love dying of Black Lung. They love it, think it's the best."

Our best solution for the economy would be to put Trump to work inn the coal mines, and keep him away from any other interaction with the country's economy. Or the country at all.

[brownwomanisland]

*hits feminist blunt*: I hear a liberal feminist take, i turn that shit off.

No I do not want to hear about how empowering it is for a majorly childhood traumatized group of girls to be prostituted women. People love "sex work" takes until you tell them to watch this video about sex trafficking in the Dominican Republic and these parents are pimping out their little girls and boys to these white colonizer rapists. How very empowering that they expressed a desire to find other work to not do it anymore.

Using the language of "sex work" gives rapists impunity to hide behind.

Look at these little girls and boys as their piece of shit parents exploit them and their bodies. No child deserves that.

Title: "Selling sex: underage victims of sex tourists in the Dominican Republic" by Unreported World.

[kropotkindersurprise]

September 11, 2024 - British Trade Unions voted to demand an immediate arms embargo on Israel, following the calls from Palestinian trades unions calling for international solidarity from unions all over the world.

Now let's see if they will actually give this demand any teeth by refusing to handle any shipments of goods to Israel, or to work with any Israeli companies and instituions, or that this will remain in essence a strongly worded letter. [link]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada shouldn’t retaliate with its US tariffs

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Five years ago, Trump touted his "big, beautiful" replacement for NAFTA, the "free trade agreement" between the US, Mexico and Canada. Trump's NAFTA-2 was called the USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement) and it was pretty similar to NAFTA, to be honest.

That tells you a couple things: first, NAFTA was, broadly speaking a good thing for Trump and the ultra-wealthy donors who backed him (and got far richer as a result). That's why he kept it intact. NAFTA and USMCA are, at root, a way to make rich people richer by making poorer people poorer. Trump's base hated NAFTA because they (correctly) believed that it was being used to erode wages by chasing cheaper labor and more lax environmental controls in other countries. Neither NAFTA nor USMCA have any stipulations requiring exported goods to be manufactured by unionized workers, or in factories with robust environmental and workplace safety rules.

The point of NAFTA/USMCA is to goose profits by despoiling the environment, maiming workers, stealing their wages, paying them less, all while poisoning the Earth. Trump's "new" NAFTA was just the old NAFTA with some largely cosmetic changes so that Trump's base could be (temporarily) fooled into thinking Trump was righting the historic wrong of NAFTA.

However, there was one part of USMCA that marked a huge departure from NAFTA: the "IP" chapter. USCMA bound Canada and Mexico to implementing brutal new IP laws. For example, Mexico was forced to pass an anti-circumvention law that makes it a crime to tamper with "digital locks." This means that Mexican mechanics can't bypass the locks US car companies use to lock-out third party repair. Mexican farmers can't fix their own tractors. And, of course, Mexican software developers can't make alternative app stores for games consoles and mobile devices – they must sell their software through US Big Tech companies that take 30% of every sale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Shamefully, Canada had already capitulated to most of these demands. Two Canadian Conservative Party politicians, Tony Clement and James Moore, had sold the country out in 2012, throwing away 6,138 negative responses to a consultation on a new DRM law (on the grounds that they were "babyish" views of "radical extremists"), siding instead with the 54 cranks and industry shills who supported their proposal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When Canadian politicians are pressed on why these anti-interoperability policies are good for Canada, they'll say that it's a condition of free trade, and the benefits of being able to export Canadian goods to the US without tariffs outweigh the costs of having to pay rents to American companies for consumables (like car parts or printer ink), repair, and software sales.

Sure, when Canadian software authors sell iPhone apps to Canadian customers, the payments take a round trip through Cupertino, California and return 30% short. But Canadian consumers get to buy iPhones without paying tariffs on them, and the oil, timber, and minerals we rip out of the ground can be sent to America without tariffs, either (oh, also, a few things that are still manufactured in Canada can do this, too).

Enter Trump, carrying a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods, which he has vowed to impose on his first day in office. Obviously, this demands a policy response. What should Canada do when Trump tears up his "big, beautiful" trade deal and whacks Canadian exporters? One obvious response is to impose a 25% retaliatory tariff on American exporters:

https://mishtalk.com/economics/canada-says-it-will-match-us-tariffs-if-trump-launches-trade-war/

After all, Canada and the US are one another's mutual largest trading partners. American businesses rely on selling things to Canadians, so a massive tariff on US goods will certainly make some of Trump's business-lobby backers feel pain, and maybe they'll talk some sense into him.

I think this would be a huge mistake. The most potent political lesson of the past four years is that politicians who preside over rising prices – regardless of their role in causing them – will swiftly feel the wrath of their voters. The public is furious about inflation, whether it comes from transient covid supply chain shocks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or cartels using "inflation" as cover for illegal, collusive price-gouging.

Canadians are very reliant on American imports of finished goods. That's another legacy of NAFTA: it crashed Canada's manufacturing sector. Canadian manufacturing companies treated the US as a "nearshore" source of non-union labor and weak environmental and safety rules, and shipped Canadian union jobs to American scabs. Canada's economy is supposedly now all about "services" but what we really export is stuff we tear out of the Earth.

Countries that are organized around resource extraction don't need fancy social safety nets or an educational system capable of producing a high-tech workforce. All you need to extract resources is a hole in the ground surrounded by guns, which explains a lot about shifts to the Canadian political climate since the Mulroney years.

Since Canada is now substantially reorganized as an open-pit mine for American manufacturers, cutting off American imports would drive the prices of everyday good sky-high, and would be political suicide.

But there's another way.

Because, of course, Canada – like any other country – has the capacity to make all kinds of things, including high-tech things. Sure, it's unlikely that Canada will launch another Research in Motion with a Blackberry smart-phone that will put the iPhone and Android in the shade. The mobile duopoly has the market sewn up, and can use predatory pricing, refusal to deal, and other anticompetitive tactics to strangle any competitor in its cradle.

But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That's a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple's 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too.

There's no reason that a Canadian app store would have to confine itself to Canadian software authors, either. Canadian app stores could offer 5% commissions on sales to US and global software authors, and provide jailbreaking kits that allows device owners all around the world to install the Canadian app stores where software authors don't get ripped off by American Big Tech companies.

Canadian companies like Honeybee already make "front-ends" for John Deere tractors – these are the components that turn a tractor into a plow, or a thresher, or another piece of heavy agricultural equipment. Honeybee struggles constantly to get its products to interface with Deere tractors, because Deere uses digital locks to block its products:

https://honeybee.ca/

Canada could produce jailbreaking kits for John Deere tractors, too – not just for Honeybee. Every ag-tech company in the world would benefit from commercially available, professionally supported John Deere jailbreaking kits. So would farmers, because these kits would restore farmers' Right to Repair their own tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Speaking of repair: Canadian companies could jailbreak every make and model of every US automobile, and make independent, constantly updated diagnostic tools that every mechanic in the world could buy for hundreds of dollars, rather than paying the five-figure ransom that car makers charge for their own underpowered, junk versions of these tools.

Jailbreaking cars doesn't stop with repair, either. Cars like the Tesla are basically giant rent-extraction machines. If you want to use all the "features" your Tesla ships with – like access to the full charge on your battery – you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees over the life of the car, and when you sell your car, all that "downloadable content" is clawed back. No one will pay extra to buy your used Tesla just because you spent thousands on manufacturer upgrades, because they're all downgraded when you sign over the pink slip.

But Canadian companies could make jailbreaking kits for Teslas that unlock all the features in the car for a single low price – and again, they could sell these to every Tesla owner in the world.

Elon Musk doesn't invent anything, he just takes credit for other people's ideas, and that's as true of bad ideas as it is for good ones. Musk didn't invent the extractive Tesla rip-off: he stole it from inkjet printer companies like HP, who have used the fact that jailbreaking is illegal to turn printer ink into the most expensive fluid in the world, selling for more than $10,000/gallon.

Canadian companies could sell jailbreaking kits for inkjet printers that disconnect them from "subscription" services and disable the anti-features that check for and reject third party ink. People all over the world would buy these.

What's standing in the way of a Canadian industrial policy that focuses on raiding the sky-high margins of American monopolists with third-party add-ons, mods and jailbreaks?

Only the IP laws that Canada has agreed to in order to get tariff-free access to American markets. You know, the access that Trump has promised to end in less than a week's time?

Canada should tear up these laws – and not impose tariffs on American goods. That way, Canadians can still buy cheap American goods, and then they can save billions of dollars every year on the consumables, parts, software, and service for those goods.

This is hurting American big business where it hurts – in the ongoing rents it extracts from Canadians through IP laws like Bill C-11 (the law that bans jailbreaking). Canada could become a global high-tech export powerhouse, selling "complementary" goods that disenshittify all the worst practices of US tech monopolists, from car parts to insulin pumps.

It's the only kind of trade war that Canadian politicians can win against Americans: the kind where prices for Canadians don't go up because of tariffs; where the price of apps, repair, parts, and upgrades goes way down; and where a new, high-tech manufacturing sector pulls in vast sums from customers all over the world.

Canada can win this kind of war, even against a country as big and powerful as the USA. After all, we did it once before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CK3EDncjGI

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

[phoenixyfriend]

I think that one of the things I find most frustrating about the tariffs conversation (and I find a lot of it frustrating) is... well, okay, it's two things, which are related:

ONE: MAGA are stealing leftist talking points

TWO: That's not how protectionist tariffs work. (This is probably the more important one.)

So.

ONE: The rhetoric of 'temporary hardship to reach eventual greater collective stability' is something that the left generally says with a little more sincerity, oftentimes with things like taxes for public infrastructure or welfare.

It also generally means that everyone experiences a touch of hardship, but the wealth is reinvested into the economy to boost the collective good; the sincerity is low with centrists, but higher with the far left.

The hardship is also more likely to not be moving money to the wealthy, something that is very much happening here. There are some massive shortfalls in tax income these past few years, some of which have been going on for decades, like the subsidization of the fossil fuel industry or unusually high investment in the military, but a big one recently has been the 2017 tax cuts that Trump introduced for the wealthy in his first term. They are, from articles I've seen, responsible for trillions in lost revenue per year sine their introduction, and while they expire in 2025, Trump and this Republican Congress have made it clear that they intend to extend those tax cuts as long as they can. The tariffs are to cover that gap in the budget, meaning that everyone is paying more in taxes, on goods that are disproportionately consumed by the lower and middle classes, in order to cover the tax breaks that billionaires got.

Very much stealing from the poor to give to the rich! That's what the tariffs are about!

e.g. yes you're paying a few extra dollars in taxes this year, but it's being invested in developing a free and reduced school lunch program; while you won't see any immediate benefits, and you'll be a little strapped for cash for month or two if you're living paycheck to paycheck, but you'll see a huge load off your mind come September. Could also be a few extra dollars for an infrastructure project, which takes ten years to build... but once it's built, your commute is cut in half because of the new bridge, or the electricity is subsidized by some new wind farms, or the landfill has been assessed and built over to be a safe, clean park. This second example about infrastructure is Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which fed money into infrastructure work and other major projects across the country; in many cases, state Senators, congresspeople, and governors who had voted or campaigned against the IRA would then take credit for the benefits their constituents saw.

TWO: You can't use protectionist tariffs to revive local industry without investing in it. High tariffs can minimize damage to the economy if the industry hasn't already left.

If the factories are still around, and the employees are still there and knowledgeable, and the resources haven't been left to diminish on their own, then you protect them with tariffs in the immediate aftermath of a shift in the status quo. You prevent the 'theft of business' with the tariffs, and since it all just seems to be business as usual domestically, it's a blip in the radar for consumers. A bit more complicated if the domestic market has also been exporting the product, as markets abroad will shift to the cheaper product you are protecting against, but you now have a bit more time to innovate a reason to keep market share.

If the industry has been allowed to diminish, or never really existed in the first place (we can't grow coffee or bananas or avocado or mangos at an industry scale, we do not have the weather for it), then a sudden implementation of protectionist tariffs will pass costs along to the consumer until the industry is up and running again.

You know how you fix that? Subsidize the industry you're trying to revive.

In 1910, there were 144,607 people employed in clothing factories in the US (1910 census, employment). This doesn't include people working in shoe factories (181,010), tanneries (33,553), dressmakers and seamstresses (449,342; presumably separated from the first statistic by not being in a factory), dyers (14,050), sewers and sewing machine operatives (291,209), shoemakers and cobblers not in factories (69,570), and the hundreds of thousands of people in the textiles alone (I'm not doing the math, but it's over a million). So we're looking at several million people in the garment industry in the US, in 1910.

In 2020, the combined category of Textile, Apparel, and Furnishing employment contained a total of 16,510 people.

You cannot bring an industry like that back to the US without heavily, heavily subsidizing it to

A. Keep the costs down to where the public can still buy clothing without making it so the people suddenly in this industry are paid pennies on the hour.

B. Train this new generation of people in an industry that barely exists anymore.

C. Build the infrastructure to support the industry, from cotton gins to sewing factories.

You can't bring back an industry that was in the millions in 1910 when there are less than 20,000 people doing it now, in a population that has more than tripled (92mill in 1910, 331mill in 2020).

I just. You have to feed those tariffs into rebuilding the industry. You can't feed them into tax breaks for the wealthy if your stated goal is to rebuild industry. I know that feeding money to his rich friends is the goal for Trump, but I'm so incredibly frustrated that people don't seem to get the basic functions of protectionist tariff application.

Almost forgot to advertize myself since this was just me venting about current events, inspired by a LegalEagle video, but:

Prompt me on ko-fi! I’m trying to move out of my parents’ house.

[misandresther]

It's not selling your body, it's selling a service. One's body is more than how they fuck.

Are you 'selling sex' or are you selling your body? You can't sell sex without giving away control over your body. By accepting money from males for that "service" you are admitting that they can buy you.

The fact that the average entrance of female sex workers is fourteen should really negate any idea that sex work is in any way empowering or progressive.

The ones claiming they've had a "good experience" with letting men rape them should not dictate how we treat or consider the prostitution industry. An industry that strives off illegally trafficking women and little girls.

"one's body is more than how they fuck" Oh I'm sorry, do these johns and pimps buy women and girls for conversation? Do they pay them for their intelligence? For their academic achievements and qualifications?!

[ex-foster]

[antisextrade]

Sign UK petition: Ban online pornography, and the making and selling of pornography

Hey everyone, there's a petition in the UK calling for a ban on online pornography, as well as the production and sale of porn. The petition is hosted on the official UK Parliament website. If it reaches 10,000 signatures, the government will issue an official response. At 100,000 signatures, the petition will be debate in Parliament. This is finally a real chance to reach the lawmakers and push for change. If you're British or a UK residents, please sign it and encouraging others to do the same.

Please click here to sign it: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/703790

[well-hello-hi]

This is the most disgusting ass shit i have ever seen, shes fucking disgusting, men who jerk off to this should be genocided, dont fucking breed if this is the shit youd do if u were preg. We need to sterilize women who do sw while preg.

And her puss is literally hairy in that photo on the left. Her pregnancy is sooo fucking hideous she motivates me to never breed. I never want to see my stomach look this fucking disgusting.