#UNION GOVERNMENT

[dhallblogs]

Punjab and Haryana High Court Asks Telecom Ministry to Limit Pre-paid Sim Cards.

Chandigarh: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has asked the Union government to limit the number of prepaid SIM cards to one per person. This was issued as part of an interim order in the Sumit Nandwani V/S State of Haryana litigation.

ALSO READ MORE- https://apacnewsnetwork.com/2024/06/punjab-haryana-high-court-asks-telecom-ministry-to-limit-pre-paid-sim-cards/

[politijohn]

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Need more headlines like this

[edinijam]

రాజధాని రహస్యం

ఆంధ్ర ప్రదేశ్ కు మూడు రాజధానులు ఆచరణలో సాధ్యమేనా? బయటికి ఎవరు ఎన్ని చెప్పినా  అసలు రాజధాని ఒక్కటే అవుతుంది. ఎందుకంటే సీఎం, మంత్రులు ఎక్కడ ఉంటే అదే ప్రజల దృష్టిలో రాజధాని అవుతుంది. ఇపుడు ఏపీ రాజధాని విశాఖపట్నం అన్నది సీఎం జగన్ ఇటీవల చేసిన వ్యాఖ్యలతో ఇది తేలిపోయింది. త్వరలోనే ఆయన తన నివాసాన్ని కూడా అక్కడికే మార్చనున్నారు. జగన్ పైకి మూడు రాజధానులను ఏర్పాటు చేస్తామని అంటున్నారు. కానీ ఆయన దృష్టిలో…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Worker misclassification is a competition issue

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/#bedoya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[nando161mando]

Union busting = more money for the ultra-wealthy.

[prontaentrega]

argentina is going full red scare its genuinely worrying

[beauty-funny-trippy]

"As Vice President Kamala Harris rakes in record-breaking donation hauls, Donald Trump’s campaign is falling behind — and increasingly relying on billionaires to bankroll Super PACs to remain competitive. It’s happening as the former president promises favors to donors: lucrative new policies, regulatory rollbacks, administration roles. You name it, it’s on offer.

"The massive outside spending comes as Trump promises the world to wealthy donors. In April, Trump reportedly asked oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to help his campaign as he promised to roll back Biden’s environmental regulations and speed up corporate mergers. Despite previously calling bitcoin 'a scam,' Trump has courted cryptocurrency investors with promises to enact regulations that 'benefit' the industry and hire friendly regulators."

Trump is selling-out America to further his own selfish ambitions. He's promising to create an economic landscape to benefit billionaires, huge corporations, and himself — hurting the middle class, unions, small businesses, and the environment.

We need to send a clear message this November that AMERICA IS NOT FOR SALE — not to Putin, not to Billionaires and greedy Corporations, not to anyone.

[commiepinkofag]

Take action to stop chat control now!

Chat control is back on the agenda of EU governments.

EU governments are to express their position on the latest proposal on 23 September. EU Ministers of the Interior are to adopt the proposal on 10/11 October.

On Monday a new version of the globally unprecedented EU bill aimed at searching all private messages and chats for suspicious content (so-called chat control or child sexual abuse regulation) was circulated and leaked by POLITICO soon after. According to the latest proposal providers would be free whether or not to use ‘artificial intelligence’ to classify unknown images and text chats as ‘suspicious’. However they would be obliged to search all chats for known illegal content and report them, even at the cost of breaking secure end-to-end messenger encryption.

[sub-at-omicsteminist]

While I cannot speak for all schools I can tell you what’s going on at the one I work in.

The school is down 2 science teachers and have been since September, no one is applying for the job.

Several members of staff have been off with mental health issues for months due to how stressful everything is.

Two head of departments have handed in their resignations

Two maths teachers have handed their resignations in

3 Teaching assistants have quit

Loads of teachers have their resignations ready to be turned in but are reluctant to leave because they care about the kids.

SEN students aren’t getting their allocated 1-1 support hours due to a shortage of Teaching assistants

The science department can’t afford to do certain practicals

The art department can’t afford new equipment

Only certain classrooms can afford to be heated

Some children who aren’t registered Pupil premium are going hungry and some kind members of staff are buying their lunches for them out of their own pocket.

There’s a shortage of note books

The chairs keep breaking and there’s not enough money to replace them. ( students swinging on chairs over time breaks the back legs)

There’s no glue, the glue that’s left is kept inside offices or teachers desks

There’s no spare stationary, loads of teachers are buying stationary for kids out of their own pockets.

Kids behaviour is getting worse, teachers are battling tik tok and other forms of media for their attention and it’s exhausting.

Kids are starting to think rules don’t apply to them and refuse to come to lessons and are verbally abusive to each other and staff members

There’s been an increase in schools in my area of kids getting into fights and disrupting lessons

The school I work in isn’t even a ‘bad’ school, it’s one of the most applied to in the area which gets the some of the best GCSEs results in the county.

A lot of people are acting like only the “troubled schools” are being affected and it’s not. Every school is struggling which is why Teachers and support staff are protesting.

How can anyone run a school without the budget or the staff, the strikes aren’t affecting your kid’s education, the government is.

[relaxedstyles]

The American Media

[politijohn]

Source

Let’s go

[captainjonnitkessler]

I think labor is one area (of many) where if you're involved in the politics, the "there's no difference between the political parties so don't bother voting!" line just absolutely falls apart. Like . . . Democrats aren't super invested in labor, but Republicans are actively trying to dismantle unions at a federal level. Most of the mechanics I know lean heavily conservative, but almost every single labor leader I've met has been staunchly, if reluctantly, Democrat. My local trades newsletter is constantly begging people to vote Democrat. My local union is constantly telling its members that it's not that the union is partisan in who it supports; we just keep happening to support Democrats because they at least nominally support labor whereas Republicans are openly trying to fuck us over on every conceivable level.

I went to a tradewomen convention the other day and like half the speaking time was devoted to reiterating the importance of voting. Every speaker was like "please, it has been SO MUCH fucking easier and we have made SO MANY strides since 2020 and it is almost entirely thanks to the Biden administration. Please, please, please do not fuck this up for labor and organizing in 2024."

And it's not because they're neoliberal shills who don't want progress - it's because they've BEEN out there doing the work and they know first-hand what the difference is between a Republican and a Democratic administration. So if you claim to support unions - well, this is what union leaders are asking you to do.

[nando161mando]

Dock workers of the COSCO union in Pireus, Greece block munitions shipment to Israel

[referencees]

So if anyone hasn’t heard yet, Joe Biden visited the auto workers picket line today, making history as the first sitting US president to join an ongoing strike….ever.

While explicit support of labor unions isn’t unheard of in the history of American politics, it is within all of our lifetimes. Famously Ronald Regan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, and then went on to become one of the most anti-union, anti-labor presidents in our history.

All this to say, this is a Big Fucking Deal.

[drumlincountry]

Just had a phone call with my mother about her friend who toooootally wants to rent their spare house out to a refugee family but just needs to know all the ins and outs of the government supports available first. like "mhm and is that €500 a month tax free? and can they ask them to pay more rent on top of that? But the €500 is guaranteed right? Yeah they're very generous they'd be easygoing they're a great landlord but they just wants to have assurance the tenants won't wreck the place...."

[betty-bourgeoisie]

Probably my most unpopular Alfred headcanon is that he didn't participate in the roaring 20's at all because he was busy being a farmer in Oklahoma that decade