#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]

Source

Need more headlines like this

[nando161mando]

Union busting = more money for the ultra-wealthy.

[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

[relaxedstyles]

[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.

[bakobakobako]

This is my cousin, Mika. He got arrested last week by the “Georgian Dream” forces. He got arrested for innocently protesting as shown in this video. He is seen harmlessly standing and saying “we want fair elections” right before a storm of these masked forces attacked, beat, and arrested him.

They broke his nose, 2 of his ribs and he also got a concussion. He’s a father of 3 amazing kids, husband, super talented architect, coolest cousin and the sweetest soul.

I found out today that he even had some internal bleeding. While dealing with all of this, they also made him go to court and fined him about 2,000 lari.

The protests are still happening. Georgians deserve a better government than this.

[moleshow]

the 2020s political argument for unionization is that the only activity/location that rivals the phone in terms of time spent is the workplace. once they clock out they are lost to phone

[yeehawllywood]

I wasn't trying to be mean I just wanted to know your actual views you can't be too careful with country people /gen

You are no older than 16 and those are my actual views. You can’t be MAGA and a trade unionist. That’s common sense.

Bro Im in the greater Los Angeles area. Like I grew up in a trailer on a ranch, still work with animals and rodeo, but I go to the same Target as Jojo Siwa. I get a matcha drink in the morning and a whiskey in the evening. I almost hit a Tesla every day. I can rope a calf and I can skateboard. I’ve seen unwatchable improv and breathed smog that would kill a midwesterner. I can merge across 5 lanes of the 101 with my horse trailer. I’ve been to a gender reveal for a horse. I almost hit Eugene Levy with my truck. I buy my weed at the weed store. I ride my horse through the In N Out drive thru. I’m not country people, I’m the final boss hick.

[oceandiagonale]

RIGHT I SHOULD UPDATE THIS BLOG WITH WHAT'S GOING ON IN MY LIFE

-got a full time job, like a legit career in my field with benefits and a pay scale that increases annually and everything!!!!

--(waiting for benefits to kick in rn though. lol. next month I'll finally get to see a dentist again yaey 💕)

-I'm verrrrrrrry tired right now BUT I've been drawing most days after work because the regular schedule has been really good for me!!!

--adjusting is really hard though!!!!!!

--My work runs on 7-to-10 week cycles and I'm starting from scratch right now. HOWEVER, once I have all of my materials ready for each cycle, I'll have to do barely anything outside of work hours because it'll all just be minor adjustments!!!!! I'm on week 2/9 right now so I'm still scrambling a bit to get everything done every week

BUT

-I swear to god I'll have the redblue wedding up on valentines day. or at LEAST the lead-up to it. 😤😤😤

-sketches of panels I'm looking forward to lining bc they're very cute:

[politijohn]

Source

Let’s go

[nando161mando]

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

[relaxedstyles]

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

If conscription or military service was the root of the women's problems, it was hardly the sum total. For poor women's attempts to scrape out subsistence, absent the field labor or wages of husbands and sons, were immeasurably worsened by other policies to which government-especially the federal one-was driven in its efforts to extract the resources to feed, arm, equip, and pay an army. Confederate armies had been impressing slave labor and provisions in an ad hoc fashion since the beginning of the war and had moved in the fall of 1862 to regularize the practice. But things entered a critical new stage in April 1863 when the War Department imposed the tax-in-kind. The tax was supposed to be assessed only against surpluses, but that was a matter of bitter dispute in practice. That tax represented an extension of state authority and a burden on poor white people that far exceeded any other government levy. Planters could and did protest the government impressment of property, especially slaves, for the war effort. But to poor soldiers' wives, the 10 percent tax was, quite literally, an insupportable burden, the very difference between an eked-out subsistence and starvation. "They are gathering everything they can of the poor soldiers' wives and children," C. W. Walker protested to her governor about the TIK men in her community. "They are as grate enemys as the yankies."

The women fought back, incredulous and enraged. "Do we wimmin ha[ve] to pay [tithes] whare our husbunds is in the war?" one wrote her governor in disbelief. "I tell you," Nancy Richardson told Governor Vance, "if such as we has to give the tenth our husbands ses thay in tend to dye at home that [they] are just waiting for the [tithes] to be takond from us thay will disert just as soon as it is dun." These were no empty threats. They came at precisely the moment governors, including Zebulon Vance, were enmeshed in an escalating battle with deserters and the women who supported them. When Mary Moore warned Vance that she had heard rumors about talk of desertion among men from Davidson County, all of whom were armed with "repeters" (repeating rifles), she laid the blame on the tax-in-kind. "Thare is one thing that should be look after soon," she lectured him, "that is the one io of it comes out of the poor soldiers that have only thir wife or mother and children to labor[.] the army will be brok some of the best soldiers I know say that they will come home if its taken from them."

Increasingly, soldiers' wives saw themselves as the victims of a systemic, not personal, injustice, of a government policy that was literally consuming their substance. One political scientist who has studied Confederate war policy has offered the chilling view that the Confederate War Department "cannibalized the regional economy," that it pursued extraction policies that literally "and steadily consumed the material base of the economy." That was exactly how soldiers' wives saw it, and they said as much in the letters written to the officials they held responsible. Some insisted that the crisis of subsistence was part of a larger conspiracy to expropriate the poor people of their land; those views surfaced particularly in North Carolina, and there speculators were sometimes cast as the advance guard of a long-standing class war. To them, the erosion of yeoman independence was purposeful, a planned-for consequence of government policy. But in every state, soldiers' wives protested that private citizens were empowered to prey on the poor by the government's refusal to act to secure poor women's subsistence.

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south

[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.