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  1. #101
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    1%ers, VRWC spreading FUD about SS going broke, in order to steal $100Bs via privatization?

    Here's what privatized retirement security can look like

    The Plot to Make Retired Coal Miners Broke


    There was plenty in the complex deal to benefit bankers, lawyers, executives and hedge fund managers. Patriot Coal Corp. was bankrupt, but its mines would be auctioned to pay off mounting debts while financial engineering would generate enough cash to cover the cost of theproceedings.

    When the plan was filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Richmond, Virginia, last week, however, one group didn’t come out so well: 208 retired miners, wives, and widows in southern Indiana who have no direct connection to Patriot Coal. Millions of dollars earmarked for their health care as they age would effectively be diverted instead to legal fees and other bills from the bankruptcy.

    The Squaw Creek miners thought little of it when, in 2007, Peabody passed what remained of its Alcoa venture—some environmental reclamation work at the mine—to an offshoot called Heritage Coal, a subsidiary of a new en y Peabody created called Patriot Coal. The health-care obligation for the retirees was assumed by Alcoa, which paid Patriot to administer the benefits.

    The United Mine Workers of America estimates this has been costing Alcoa about $2 million per year to cover the 208 miners, wives and widows.


    But here’s where the financial engineering got complicated and ultimately threatened those benefits: Peabody also transferred to Patriot 13 percent of its coal reserves, and about 40 percent of its health-care liabilities—the obligations for 8,400 former Peabody workers. A year later, Patriot was loaded up with even more costs when it acquired Magnum Coal, a subsidiary of the country’s second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by 2012, total liabilities of $1.37 billion.
    “We were assured as miners we would have lifetime health-care benefits… [we] depend entirely on this.”

    It looked as if Patriot had been set up to fail, and in 2013 it in fact did, seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Patriot emerged from bankruptcy later that year after getting an investment stake from a New York hedge fund called Knighthead Capital Management. Patriot also reached a deal with the mine workers union to have it take over responsibility for the health care of those nearly 11,000 retirees, with a promise of about $310 million from Patriot to help cover the cost.

    Still, the deal wasn’t enough to keep Patriot healthy. With the industry contracting even further amid compe ion from natural gas, tougher environmental regulations and declining coals reserves in Appalachia, Patriot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yet again earlier this year. This time, its assets are being auctioned off.


    Back in Indiana, there was no reason for the retired Squaw Creek miners to think their benefits were at risk from the Patriot bankruptcy, since they were being paid by Alcoa, a thriving company with $24 billion in annual revenue. But last week, Patriot’s lawyers, from the firm Kirkland & Ellis, made two filings (PDF) (PDF) at the bankruptcy court in Richmond that caught the union and the retired miners by surprise.

    Patriot is not putting the $22 million toward the Squaw Creek health-care benefits. According to the court filings, only $4 million will go toward that purpose—$1 million for the benefits of former salaried managers at the mine, and $3 million for the rank-and-file miners.

    The rest of the money from Alcoa—$18 million—is going to cover the costs of the bankruptcy. This includes the fees for Kirkland & Ellis, which has at least four attorneys from New York and Chicago on the case, and the Washington, D.C., restructuring advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal.

    The agreement with Alcoa, one filing states, “allows the Debtors [that is, Patriot] to obtain cash in the amount of $22,000,000, which will be critical for funding the Debtors’ costs associated with emerging from chapter 11.”

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...ers-broke.html

    Lawyers gotta put food on their families, too.



  2. #102
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    BigCorp/VRWC/Repug/red states' America is becoming a tier, scarier place

    Inside Corporate America’s Campaign to Ditch Workers’ Comp

    One Texas lawyer is helping companies opt out of workers’ compensation and write their own rules. What does it mean for injured workers?

    STANDING BEFORE A GIANT MAP in his Dallas office, Bill Minick doesn’t seem like anyone’s idea of a bomb thrower.

    But
    backed by some of the biggest names in corporate America, this mild-mannered son of an evangelist is plotting a revolution in how companies take care of injured workers.

    Let them opt out of state workers’ compensation laws — and write their own rules.

    ProPublica and NPR obtained the injury benefit plansof nearly 120 companies who have opted out in Texas or Oklahoma — many of them written by Minick’s firm — to conduct the first independent analysis of how these plans compare to state workers’ comp.

    The investigation found the plans almost universally have lower benefits, more restrictions and virtually no independent oversight.

    Minick’s handiwork that allows Costco to pay only $15,000 to workers who lose a finger while its rival Walmart pays $25,000.

    Unlike traditional workers’ comp, which guarantees lifetime medical care, the Texas plans cut off treatment after about two years. They don’t pay compensation for most permanent disabilities and strictly limit payouts for deaths and catastrophic injuries.

    The list of what the plans don’t cover runs for pages.

    They typically won’t pay for wheelchair vans, exposure to asbestos, silica dust or mold, assaults unless the employee is defending “an employer’s business or property,” chiropractors or any more than 75 home health care visits. Costco won’t cover external hearing aids costing more than $600. The cheapest external hearing aid Costco sells? $900.


    The plans in both Texas and Oklahoma give employers almost complete control over the medical and legal process after workers get injured. Employers pick the doctors and can have workers examined — and reexamined — as often as they want. And they can settle claims at any time. Workers must accept whatever is offered or lose all benefits. If they wish to appeal, they can — to a committee set up by their employers.

    Yet Minick’s push has united an unlikely set of allies — unions, trial lawyers and insurance companies. They say his idea isn’t progress, but a return to the Industrial Age before workers’ comp, when workers and their families had to sue their employers or bear the costs of on-the-job injuries themselves.

    “That’s the system we had in place 100 years ago,” said Trey Gillespie, senior workers’ comp director for the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America. “This is not an innovative concept.”


    ...


    https://www.propublica.org/article/i...h-workers-comp

    Less costs for employers, more for the pockets of mgmt and their investors.

    America is becoming nastier and nastier, more brutal, more punitive, every year. "America is a CHRISTIAN country!"





  3. #103
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    Papa John's stores to pay $500,000 wage theft settlement

    "Once again, we’ve found Papa John’s franchises in New York that are ripping off their workers and violating critical state and federal laws,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement. "Once again, I call on Papa John’s and other fast food companies to step up and stop the widespread lawlessness plaguing your businesses and harming the workers who make and deliver your food."

    In July, the attorney general's office arrested Abdul Jamil Khokhar, owner of nine Papa John's stores in New York, accusing him of breaking minimum wage and overtime laws. According to his plea agreement, Khokhar could serve up to 60 days in jail. In another case, the attorney general's office secured a judgment of nearly $3 million against two other Papa John's franchisees.

    In 2013, a report from Fast Food Forward found 84 percent of New York City fast food workers reporting that they'd been victims of wage theft. Fully 100 percent of fast food delivery workers said the same. Schneiderman's efforts to crack down have also led to settlements at franchises of other chains, including Domino's and McDonald's.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...28Daily+Kos%29



  4. #104
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    Perspectives on the “Sharing/Gig Economy”

    According to Steven Hill’s Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers (St. Martin’s Press), the US workforce is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers are being turned into contractors, freelancers, temps and “just-in-time” part-timers. Add to that the steamroller of automation and robots obsolescing millions of jobs, and the jobs picture starts looking grim.

    Now an insidious mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed has produced the latest economic fraud: the so-called “sharing economy,” with companies like Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit providing ever-smaller jobs (“micro-gigs”) and wages, while the companies profit handsomely in the “share the crumbs” economy.

    Lawrence Mishel, EPI President, will discuss this research, showing that neither automation nor the gig economy are the main threats to good quality jobs and robust wage growth. The hype about automation and gig work is not just their impact but how extensive they really are. These are trends to be monitored, says Mishel, but

    the main challenges are the ones that have emerged over the last three decades to suppress wage growth:

    weak labor standards,

    excessive unemployment,

    globalization and

    weakened collective bargaining.

    http://www.epi.org/event/perspectives-on-the-sharing-economy/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Ins ute&utm_campaign =8d3d817944-Event_stream_reminders_10_28_201510_28_2015&utm_me dium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826c50-8d3d817944-58185037

    The VRWC has ed America and Americans, and there's no stopping it.



  5. #105
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    disruptor-in-chief Musk exploits prison labor

    Elon Musk’s solar company used panels made by cheap prison labor for a big taxpayer-subsidized project

    For a huge solar-panel project launched in 2012 at two university campuses in Oregon, it relied on a vendor that used cheap prison labor to produce the panels, under a “buy American/buy local” banner. The story is a good reminder that we need to watch the renewables industry closely to make sure it doesn’t throw human rights and labor ethics out the window in its push toward a clean energy economy.

    For SolarCity, the contract also looked like a win. Under a lucrative state program, the Oregon Department of Energy doled out $11.8 million in tax credits for the $27 million project. (SolarCity would not confirm the amount of the tax breaks despite repeated requests.) Those generous tax incentives — part of the Business Energy Tax Credit program, which ended in 2014 — came with an imperative for “job creation and retention requirements.”

    For its part, SolarCity did install panels that were produced by Oregon workers. But those workers were behind bars at Sheridan Federal Prison — and instead of benefiting from a program that was supposed to pump up the regional economy, they were paid less than a dollar an hour for their labor.

    http://grist.org/business-technology...=daily-horizon



  6. #106
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    Predispute arbitration deny employees’ rights

    Q: “I work for a tech company in San Francisco, I am being unfairly harassed and discriminated against because of my disability.

    I was reading my handbook and it says that if I want to seek legal action for a violation of my fair employment rights,

    I have to go to arbitration,

    waive my right to a jury trial,

    pay for half of the costs and that

    I can only recover my lost wages but not any pain and suffering or punitive damages.

    Yet they “reserve the right” to sue me in court for any claim that I have interfered with their IP rights.

    Is this true, can they take away my rights like this?”


    A: Janet, compulsory predispute arbitration provisions in employment applications are horrible things and are becoming ever more prevalent. Arbitration is a private adjudication of disputes, most often decided by one “neutral” arbitrator without the benefit of a judge, jury or even a factual record of the proceedings.

    These
    arbitration agreements are presented to employees as a precondition to employment: Sign it or no job.

    Most people sign them without reading or understanding what rights they are giving up. You probably signed one.


    Employers like arbitration because arbitrations are private and closed to the public providing secrecy for the employer. Additionally, arbitrations statistically result in lower overall average damage awards than a public trial in front of an unbiased judge and jury of one’s peers.


    I am OK with arbitration agreements wherein two parties can voluntarily determine if they want their dispute submitted to arbitration after they know the nature of the dispute and what is at stake. Then a reasoned decision can be made.

    Compulsory predispute arbitration takes away important cons utional rights before one even knows the nature of the dispute. When it comes to employment discrimination claims or significant injury claims, in 90 percent of the cases, I advise my clients that a jury of one’s peers is far superior to arbitration.

    A jury hears one case whereas an arbitrator hears many. While it may sound like arbitrators would then have more experience, the dangers outweigh the benefits. For example, an arbitrator wants to get repeat business — that’s how they make their living. They want large corporations to use their services again. A jury doesn’t ever expect to be involved in deciding another action involving the same parties. So arbitrators are, consciously or unconsciously, biased and desirous of being in the favor of repeat players which are the companies, not the employees.


    An arbitration agreement is a form of contract. California Code of Civil Procedure Section 1281 states: “A written agreement to submit to arbitration an existing controversy or a controversy thereafter arising is valid, enforceable and irrevocable, save upon such grounds as exist for the revocation of any contract.” For a contract to be enforceable it must meet many tests including a test of fairness. Contracts which are between parties of unequal bargaining power, which are presented as “take it or leave it” may be so onerous that they become contracts of adhesion.


    Generally speaking, contracts of adhesion are those that do not fall within the reasonable expectations of the weaker or “adhering” party. A contract, even if consistent with the reasonable expectations of the parties, may be also denied enforcement if it is unduly oppressive or“unconscionable.” Unconscionability may best be defined as unbearably unfair.


    The courts have held that claims of employment discrimination may be compelled to arbitration if there is an enforceable arbitration agreement.

    To be enforceable, the agreement must:

    1) clearly indicate that you are waiving your right to a jury trial;

    2) be mutual: they can’t force you to arbitrate your claims while reserving the right to sue you for claims that they may have;

    3) not limit your right to obtain discovery of do ents or facts including deposing witnesses;

    4) not place financial burdens on you, such as paying the arbitrator, which you would not face in a State Court action; and

    5) provide the same kind of relief from an arbitrator as you would in court — including damages for pain and suffering and punitive damages if applicable.


    Your limited statement of facts leads me to believe that
    your arbitration agreement may be an unenforceable, unconscionable, contract of adhesion.

    Have a good trial lawyer review the agreement.

    In the revolutionary war people fought and died for the 7th Amendment right to a jury trial.

    Don’t give up your cons utional rights without a fight!

    http://www.sfexaminer.com/dolan-pred...loyees-rights/

    And you people want us to "trust" the good faith of your adored, predatory BigCorp?



  7. #107
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    Employer Political Coercion: A Growing Threat



    A common piece of advice for new hires is to avoid talking about politics, sex, and religion in the workplace. But it may be increasingly difficult for workers to keep their politics to themselves. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, employers now have broad legal rights to campaign for political candidates inside their firms as well as in the public arena. And thanks to new technology, they have the means to track their employees’ political opinions and activities.

    Managers and supervisors can now legally require their workers to participate in politics as a condition of employment. For instance, in most states, managers have the legal right to mandate worker attendance at a political rally for a favored candidate—and fire or punish workers who decline to participate. Consider the following examples from recent years of employers engaging their workers in politics:


    • An Ohio coal-mining firm invited Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for a rally at its plant. The firm’s management told miners that they would be required to attend the rally, and that they would not be paid for their participation.
    • Executives at Cintas, a provider of uniforms and other workplace supplies, and Georgia-Pacific, a major paper-product manufacturer, sent letters to their respective workforces expressing clear partisan stances during the 2012 election. Executives at Georgia-Pacific, which is owned by Charles and David Koch, distributed a flyer and a letter indicating which candidates the firm endorsed in races ranging from the presidency to state government. The letters warned that workers might “suffer the consequences” if the company’s favored candidates were not elected.
    • A renewable energy company whose executives I interviewed reported that it encouraged its workers to contact their members of Congress in an effort to renew a federal tax credit for wind energy, warning its workers of the decline in sales of their products if the credit were to expire.
    • In the wake of a number of highly publicized episodes of racial violence, Starbucks executives launched a campaign for their baristas to start conversations with their patrons about race relations in America. Baristas would write the words “Race Together” on customers’ coffee cups. Staff were also encouraged to visit a company website with essays and videos about race relations. In an earlier 2013 effort, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz encouraged the store’s patrons to sign a pe ion to end a government shutdown, and baristas wrote the words “Come Together” on coffee cups.


    Beyond these vignettes,
    there is evidence that employer efforts to recruit workers into politics—what I call employer mobilization—are common in the American labor force. A recent survey I commissioned indicates that perhaps one in four employees, or about 29 million to 39 million Americans, have been contacted by their managers about voting, political candidates, or public policies and political issues. By comparison, about 100 million Americans reported being contacted by a political party about the 2012 election and about 45 million Americans reported contact from a group other than a party about candidates in that election. Among employers I also surveyed, about half (46 percent) reported engaging their workers in politics.

    Employer mobilization is important to understand because it offers companies an opportunity to shape public policy using a resource already at their disposal—their workforce. Top corporate managers responding to my survey of firms ranked employer mobilization as a highly effective means of influencing government. Debates over corporate lobbying and the power of business in politics thus ought to consider employer mobilization just as much as they focus on campaign contributions and other standard corporate political strategies.


    Coercive forms of political recruitment in the workplace pose a serious threat to workers’ freedom of expression.

    http://prospect.org/article/employer...growing-threat




  8. #108
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    red states, slave states pre-empting on-call drivers from being employees

    Lawmakers in five states push bills stopping ride-share drivers from being treated as employees

    ate legislators in Ohio and Florida are moving ahead with regulations governing Uber and other ride services that would designate all drivers as independent contractors, bolstering a critical but much-disputed aspect of Uber’s business model.

    The states would join North Carolina, Arkansas, and Indiana in requiring the contractor designation as part of new laws governing so-called transportation network companies, a Reuters review of state legislation showed.

    In Ohio, state Rep. Bob Hackett said Uber, Lyft, the taxi industry and other parties were involved in drafting the bill.
    At one point, Uber sent five representatives to a meeting with members of the insurance industry to negotiate language in the bill,

    http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/lawm...e+Raw+Story%29

    Just another example of pro-business Repugs screwing labor.

    Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-11-2015 at 12:36 PM.

  9. #109
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    The arbitration epidemic

    Mandatory arbitration deprives workers and consumers of their rights


    Conclusion

    In the past three decades, the Supreme Court has engineered a massive shift in the civil justice system that is having dire consequences for consumers and employees.

    The Court has enabled large corporations to force customers and employees into arbitration to adjudicate practically all types of alleged violations, including violations of laws to prevent consumer fraud, unsafe products, employment discrimination, nonpayment of wages, and countless other state and federal laws designed to protect citizens against corporate wrongdoing.

    By delegating dispute resolution to arbitration, the Court now permits corporations to write the rules that will govern their relationships with their workers and customers and design the procedures used to interpret and apply those rules when disputes arise.

    Moreover,
    the Court permits corporations to couple mandatory arbitration with a ban on class actions, thereby preventing consumers or employees from joining together to challenge systemic corporate wrongdoing.

    As one judge opined,
    these trends give corporations a “get out of jail free” card for all potential transgressions.

    These trends are undermining decades of progress in consumer and labor rights.

    http://www.epi.org/publication/the-a...tion-epidemic/

    Once the VRWC, starting in the mid 1970s, got their political, pro-business/anti-American hatchet men into SCOTUS, employees, consumers got more and more screwed.



  10. #110
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    Tyson Foods’ Secret Recipe for Carving Up Workers’ Comp

    Over the past 25 years, the giant meatpacking company has taken a lead in pushing for changes in workers’ comp in state after state — often to the detriment of workers.

    About five years ago, one of the nation’s largest corporations, Tyson Foods, drew a bullseye on the official who oversaw Iowa’s system for compensating injured workers.

    As workers’ compensation commissioner, Chris Godfrey acted as chief judge of the courts that decided workplace injury disputes. He had annoyed Tyson with a string of rulings that, in the company’s view, expanded what employers had to cover, putting a dent in its bottom line.


    So when Republican Terry Branstad ran for governor in 2010, vowing to make Iowa more business-friendly, Tyson hosted an event for him at its headquarters and arranged another meeting for him to hear from large companies who were frustrated with the workers’ comp commission.

    Within weeks of his victory, Branstad demanded Godfrey’s resignation. When Godfrey refused, the new governor did the harshest thing in his power: He cut Godfrey’s salary by more than 30 percent.


    Amid the fallout, Tyson drafted and hand-delivered 14 pages of talking points criticizing Godfrey to help Branstad defend his decision.

    Godfrey quickly grasped just how much sway Tyson and other big companies can have over workers’ comp. “It’s just chilling that someone would go to that level to try to influence the system,” said Godfrey, who is now the chief judge of the federal employees’ workers’ comp appeals board.

    Tyson’s tactics, pieced together from depositions and do ents in a lawsuit Godfrey filed — many of which have never been released — are far from unique to the Hawkeye State. Over the past 25 years, as the Arkansas company grew to be one of the world’s largest meatpackers, Tyson has taken a lead in reshaping workers’ comp, often to the detriment of workers, \\a ProPublica investigation has found.

    Tyson’s story also tells a broader one about American politics: How time after time, one determined company, facing a challenge to its profits, can bend government and the law to its will.

    Using its economic leverage — combined with time-honored wining-and-dining and behind-the-scenes arm-twisting — Tyson has helped steer legislative changes through several states in the South and Midwest.

    https://www.propublica.org/article/t...p-workers-comp

    BigCorp corrupts politicians, primarily Repug s, to screw employees for profit.




  11. #111
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    Proposed House and Senate Bills Would Roll Back Worker Protections

    The proposed riders include defunding enforcement of the "three-fourths guarantee," which ensures workers are paid for at least three-fourths of the hours in their contracts. This provision is designed to keep employers from over-recruiting workers and then benching them when hours become scarce.

    "We were promised that there would be plenty of work," says one worker in a videoby migrant worker advocacy group Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM). "We traveled to the U.S. with the dream of having greater financial stability, ... but in the end we were not given as many hours as we had been promised." H-2B workers often go into debt to recruiters to secure American jobs. Once in the U.S., they are not allowed to work for anyone but the employer who sponsors their visa, even if that employer can't or won't give them full-time work. Then they may not be able to pay back their debts, much less bring money home.


    Naomi Tsu, a staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Immigrant Justice Project, emphasized the connection between debt and exploitation on the job. "You'd have these low-wage workers who are bearing hundreds or thousands of dollars in costs and I'm pretty concerned about how vulnerable that leaves the worker once she arrives," she said, citing labor abuses like a human trafficking case involving H-2B workers earlier this year. "She's got to keep working for the same employer no matter how bad things are because it's either that or else go home to the debt."


    Another rider would change the way H-2B workers' wages are determined so that employers could use "private wage surveys" to determine the wage the workers should be paid. This methodology, invalidated by a federal court, leads to wages significantly below those provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    While rolling back worker protections, the riders would dramatically expand the visa program. That could inflame concerns about guestworkers' competing with U.S. workers for jobs—especially if new wage rules mean employers can pay guestworkers less. As of now, H-2B visas are capped at 66,000 a year, with a few exceptions. But one rider would exempt from that cap those who had worked in the U.S. in the past three years—potentially expanding the program to over 200,000 guestworkers a year.


    The Economic Policy Ins ute (EPI) found in 2011 that
    "the H-2B program puts downward pressure on American wages." It also found high unemployment and stagnating wages in top H-2B occupations. The program is supposed to be used for domestic labor shortages, but these statistics suggest employers are using it to bypass normal labor market pressures. Concern about American workers has united some on the Right with those on the Left concerned about migrant workers—conservative outlet Breitbart, for instance, has reported disapprovingly on the H-2B program and efforts to expand it.

    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...er-protections



  12. #112
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    Tyson Foods' Secret Recipe for Carving Up Workers' Comp

    About five years ago, one of the nation's largest corporations, Tyson Foods, drew a bullseye on the official who oversaw Iowa's system for compensating injured workers.

    As workers' compensation commissioner, Chris Godfrey acted as chief judge of the courts that decided workplace injury disputes. He had annoyed Tyson with a string of rulings that, in the company's view, expanded what employers had to cover, putting a dent in its bottom line.


    So when Republican Terry Branstad ran for governor in 2010, vowing to make Iowa more business-friendly, Tyson hosted an event for him at its headquarters and arranged another meeting for him to hear from large companies who were frustrated with the workers' comp commission.


    Within weeks of his victory, Branstad demanded Godfrey's resignation. When Godfrey refused, the new governor did the harshest thing in his power: He cut Godfrey's salary by more than 30 percent.


    Amid the fallout, Tyson drafted and hand-delivered 14 pages of talking points criticizing Godfrey to help Branstad defend his decision.

    Tyson's tactics, pieced together from depositions and do ents in a lawsuit Godfrey filed — many of which have never been released — are far from unique to the Hawkeye State. Over the past 25 years, as the Arkansas company grew to be one of the world's largest meatpackers, Tyson has taken a lead in reshaping workers' comp, often to the detriment of workers, a ProPublica investigation has found.

    Tyson's story also tells a broader one about American politics: How time after time, one determined company, facing a challenge to its profits, can bend government and the law to its will.


    Using its economic leverage — combined with time-honored wining-and-dining and behind-the-scenes arm-twisting — Tyson has helped steer legislative changes through several states in the South and Midwest. It has urged officials, often successfully, to remove or appoint workers' comp judges. And the company's lawyers have crafted novel legal arguments for limiting the rights and benefits of injured workers.

    "It's Almost Like They Wrote the Law"

    As Tyson and other companies have assumed more control over workers' comp, injured workers say they've faced the consequences.
    Billy Shawn Walkup was working at a Tyson bacon factory in Vernon, Texas, in 2011 when he slipped walking down wet stairs and hurt his back.

    About two weeks later, Walkup said, a Tyson employee handed him a form waiving his right to sue. If he didn't sign it, the employee said, his medical care would end and he'd have to go back to full duty within two months.


    "When I have a wife and a 4-year-old son at home — at the time, he was 2 — what am I supposed to do?" Walkup said recently. "I didn't know what was fixin' to happen. I was scared. I was afraid of losing my job."


    Walkup signed the waiver, and the doctor sent him back to work with restrictions. But struggling with pain from the injury, Walkup missed too many days and was fired a few months later.


    Tyson continued paying Walkup's medical care for another year under its
    benefit plan. But after a spine surgeon, whom Tyson approved, determined that Walkup had multiple disc protrusions in his back and numbness in his legs that caused him to occasionally collapse, Tyson sent him for an independent medical exam.


    That orthopedic surgeon was 77 years old and had previously been disciplined by the Texas Medical Board for failing to do ent a physical examination. According to his report, the doctor spent 35 minutes examining Walkup and reviewing his extensive medical records before concluding that he'd merely suffered a strain. No further medical care was necessary, said the doctor, who didn't return calls for comment.


    Tyson terminated Walkup's benefits.

    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...p-workers-comp



  13. #113
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    Penn. Company To Pay Up For Making Workers Clock Out On Bathroom Breaks

    PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A Pennsylvania company that publishes business newsletters will pay about $1.75 million to thousands of employees who had to clock out while going on short breaks, including for the bathroom.

    The company had argued that it wasn't required to pay employees for short breaks.

    The bill includes back pay and damages to 6,000 employees at offices in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio between 2009 and 2013.

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/am...+%28TPMNews%29

    Government TYRANNY and OVERREACH!



  14. #114
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    Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine

    An Oregon medical center’s plan to increase efficiency by outsourcing
    doctors drove a group of its hospitalists to fight back by banding together.

    Dr. Alexander’s method is at the center of an emotional debate in medicine, in which the imperative to increase efficiency in a high-cost health care system is often at odds with the deference traditionally accorded to doctors.

    It’s a debate that came home to Sacred Heart in the spring of 2014, when the administration announced it would seek bids to outsource its 36 hospitalists, the hospital doctors who supervise patients’ care, to a management company that would become their employer.


    The outsourcing of hospitalists became relatively common in the last decade, driven by a combination of factors. There is the obvious hunger for efficiency gains. But there is also growing pressure on hospitals to measure quality and keep people healthy after they are discharged. This can be a complicated data collection and management challenge that many hospitals, especially smaller ones, are not set up for and that some outsourcing companies excel in.


    “They assure you of relief of some headaches,” said Dr. John Nelson, a past president of the Society of Hospital Medicine. He compared outsourcing doctor groups to a management company to hiring a lawn service. “You’re relieved of having to get the mower out. You’re not necessarily assured that you’re happier with your yard.” In recent years, according to the society, 25 to 30 percent of hospitalists have worked for multistate management companies, which also employ doctors in other disciplines, like anesthesiology and emergency medicine.


    Outsourced hospitalists tend to make as much or more money than those that hospitals employ directly, typically in excess of $200,000 a year. But the catch is that their compensation is often tied more directly to the number of patients they see in a day — which the hospitalists at Sacred Heart worried could be as many as 18 or 20, versus the 15 that they and many other hospitalists contend should be the maximum. (Mark Hamm, executive vice president of EmCare, a physician services firm based in Dallas that has no connection to Sacred Heart, said the hospitalists employed by many staffing companies typically see 15 to 18 patients a day, though he said that was true of those who were directly employed by hospitals as well.)


    It was the idea that they could end up seeing more patients that prompted outrage among the hospitalists at Sacred Heart, which has two facilities in the area, with a total of nearly 450 beds. “We’re doctors, we’re professionals,” Dr. Alexander said. “Giving me a bonus for seeing two more patients — I’m not sure I should be doing that. It’s not safe.” (A hospital representative said patient safety was “inviolate.”)


    Some Sacred Heart hospitalists left for other jobs, and the rest formed a union, one of the first of its kind in the country.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/bu...er=rss&emc=rss

    Capital vs Labor. Capital is ing winning.


  15. #115
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    we are going to be Uber'ed ( ed)

    Your job is about to get 'taskified'

    The global digital assembly line has arrived. Its workers labor at computer keyboards, performing the behind-the-scenes tasks that make the Internet appear intelligent and functional. They assign labels like “family” or “theme park” to photos, check that Web URLs work, verify addresses on Yelp, review social media posts flagged as “adult.”
    Corporations, from the smallest start-ups to the largest firms, can now “taskify” everything from scheduling meetings and debugging websites, to finding sales leads and managing fulltime employees' HR files. Instead of hiring help, firms just post their needs to the Web.

    This online piecework, or “crowdwork,” represents a radical shift in how we define employment itself.

    The individuals performing this work are of course not traditional employees, but neither are they freelancers. They are, instead, “users” or “customers” of Web-based platforms that deliver pre-priced tasks like so many DIY kits ready for assembly. Transactions are bound not by employee-employer relationships but by “user agreements” and Terms of Service that resemble software licenses more than any employment contract.

    Researchers at Oxford University's Martin Programme on Technology and Employment estimate that nearly 30% of jobs in the U.S. could be organized like this within 20 years. Forget the rise of robots and the distant threat of automation.

    The immediate issue is the Uber-izing of human labor, fragmenting of jobs into outsourced tasks and dismantling of wages into micropayments.

    Then it happened to him. An email from Amazon's Customer Service Team offered no explanation beyond: “I am sorry but your Amazon Mechanical Turk account was closed due to a violation of our Participation Agreement and cannot be reopened. Any funds that were remaining on the account are forfeited, and we will not be able to provide any additional insight or action."

    Khan's experience should be a warning to us all. Crowdwork may seem like a small eddy of employment, contained to those who work on computer code and Web development. But it looms like a tsunami of change for anyone whose routine work — filing forms, drafting standardized reports, coordinating events — can be broken into bits and farmed out online.

    We must recognize that crowdwork sites are not just technologies that deliver convenient services. They are sites of employment that encompass the globe. Yet there are no clear rules for how this new form of employment should operate. As Team Genius' case demonstrates, the right to be paid for one's labor is no longer guaranteed. Centuries of global labor activism, from child labor laws to workplace safety guidelines, are left vulnerable.

    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed...110-story.html


    Capital vs Labor: labor is being ed back a couple 100 years, screwed by the VRWC/BigCorp strategy.



  16. #116
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    asshole Christians wanting "free stuff" (advantage of union power without paying for it)

    U.S. Supreme Court set to hear challenge to public sector unions

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-unions-idUSKCN0UO0HR20160110

    Who is financing the plaintiffs?
    Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-15-2016 at 03:18 PM.

  17. #117
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    The Right-to-Work Movement's Attack on Women Workers

    Before they were able to collectively bargain, some Vermont home-care workers were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Some were earning a "day rate" of $2 to $3 per hour - even though they worked for an entire day. According to Sheppard, once the union bargained its first contract with the state in 2014, hourly wages increased to $10.80, and the day rate minimum pay became $160 for a full day's work. These benefits were achieved for all Vermont home-care workers - not just those who identify as members of Vermont Homecare United.

    "I knew home-care workers who had been working three jobs and still couldn't make ends meet," Sheppard told Truthout. "This collective bargaining contract helped so many home-care providers in Vermont."


    But soon after this 2014 contract was secured, the right-to-work movement - a movement that seeks to disempower collective bargaining and labor unions generally - won a US Supreme Court case that, based on a First Amendment argument, undercuts home-care workers' collective bargaining activity. Home-care work is a field dominated by women and rife with low wages. The right-to-work movement may now succeed in undercutting collective bargaining across a range of sectors that are dominated by women if the Supreme Court again rules in favor of its First Amendment argument in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA).


    Feminist legal theorists have long argued that there are gendered implications of laws and policies that may seem "neutral" or rooted in cons utional doctrine. Indeed,
    the First Amendment argument touted by the right-to-work movement is a thin veil, underneath which lies a serious gender problem. Effectively, this argument is an attack on women's economic security.

    On January 11, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. CTA, which could weaken collective bargaining for a range of public sector employees, including police officers, firefighters and nurses, in addition to teachers. The named plaintiff in the case is Rebecca Friedrichs, a third grade teacher in Anaheim, California. Friedrichs has been a teacher for nearly 30 years.

    Represented by the Center for Individual Rights, Friedrichs and approximately 10 other plaintiffs are arguing that being required to pay agency fees, or "fair share" fees, to the CTA to help pay for the CTA's work in bargaining for higher wages and better working conditions are in violation of their First Amendment right to free speech because she is not a member of the union and does not support its collective bargaining activities.


    Per Abood, Friedrichs and all teachers can also opt out of supporting any lobbying activity the CTA may engage in, so her money is not supporting political speech. As Justice Stephen Breyer said during oral arguments, negotiating for wages, hours and working conditions is "pretty far removed from the heart of the First Amendment."
    Breyer's comment notwithstanding, early analyses of the oral arguments indicate that the court will side with Friedrichs, upending the longstanding precedent set byAbood v. Detroit Board of Education.

    If the court does side with Friedrichs, many workers may choose to stop paying agency fees, thus gutting many public sector unions of a longstanding source of revenue that supports collective bargaining activity - which could negatively impact the many women who hold positions covered by collective bargaining agreements.

    "Pe ioners in Friedrichs are arguing that every time a union bargains, that is an inherently political act," said Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel of the National Women's Law Center. "That is
    a really naked attempt to strip ability for public sector workers to bargain for very basic protections like better wages and health benefits."

    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...-women-workers

    The decades-long VRWC/BigCorp/Repug strategy of screwing Human-Americans is the greatest danger to Americans.



  18. #118
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    Federal Workplace Law Fails To Protect Employees Left Out Of Workers' Comp


    The mannequin fell 12 feet from the highest shelf. Schiller has hardly worked since, given persistent headaches, memory loss, disorientation and extreme sensitivity to bright light and loud sound.
    He now has to post notes on the front door and refrigerator of his apartment, reminding him to take medications and keep appointments. He carries a letter from his doctor in case he's stopped by police, which says he may appear drunk due to a head injury.


    "I'm next to poverty," Schiller says. "I sit in a dark room. I watch TV like an old 80- or 90-year old person."

    Schiller, 54, is among 1.5 million workers in Texas and Oklahoma who don't have state-regulated workers' compensation to turn to when they're injured on the job. Millions more may join them as more states consider giving employers the right to opt out of state workers' comp systems.


    As NPR and ProPublica have reported, many employers prefer this opt-out alternative to workers' comp, because the state systems, employers claim, result in expensive and long-lasting benefits, costly litigation, and delays in treatment of injured workers.


    When employers opt out, they avoid state regulation and write their own workplace injury plans, which make it easier to deny and cut benefits, control medical care and limit appeals of their decisions.


    But don't worry, employers contend, injured workers are still protected by a federal law – the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. The 1974 law initially applied to pension plans but has evolved to include health care and other workplace benefits.


    "ERISA ... says the benefits must be administered in the best interests of employees," says Dallas lawyer Bill Minick, who leads the movement in Texas and Oklahoma to get employers to opt out of state workers' comp and shift to federal authority.

    Minick and his company PartnerSource dominate a cottage industry, writing and supporting opt-out workplace injury plans, and lobbying for opt-out legislation in other states. ERISA is key to their sales pitch.

    But ERISA didn't do much for Schiller and NPR found the law doesn't provide the protections promised by opt-out promoters.


    "I was getting no help and no doctors would answer me," Schiller says. "And they kept on sending me out the door instead of sending me to a hospital. They'd tell me point blank 'we're here to observe you, not treat you.'"


    Macy's did not respond to NPR's multiple requests for comment about Schiller's case.


    Legal do ents, including witness statements, medical records, depositions and internal e-mails, show Macy's was skeptical of Schiller's injury from the very beginning. The company sent Schiller to doctors who concluded he was psychosomatic. One said he was faking.


    In legal filings, Macy'sclaimed the accident never happened and implied it was staged. The company cut off all benefits for medical care and lost pay.


    "Why would anybody set that up and put themselves through freaking ?" Schiller asks. Unable to work and cut-off from benefits, he lost his pickup and house.


    "I had made $80,000 a year at times and I'm going to give that up to be on Social Security and food stamps?" Schiller says. "Who would want the life that I've got now."

    http://www.npr.org/2016/01/21/460257...rs-compensatio

    TX and OK, red/slave states protecting companies while ing employees.



  19. #119
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    Employee Wellness Programs Use Carrots and, Increasingly, Sticks

    It may be an offer employees simply can no longer refuse.

    Workers increasingly are being told by their companies to undergo health screenings and enroll in wellness programs, as a way to curb insurance costs. Many employees now face stiff financial penalties — often in the form of higher premiums — if they do not have their cholesterol checked or join programs to lose weight or better manage diabetes.


    And a ruling late last month by a federal judge in Wisconsin is likely to further embolden companies to prod workers to join these programs, despite growing concerns over employee privacy and health management.

    While most large employers offer wellness programs, companies and workers alike may find the rules difficult to navigate. The Affordable Care Act allows employers to impose hefty penalties on individuals who do not participate. Nearly half of the large employers offering screenings and wellness programs use some sort of financial incentive to persuade employees to comply,

    employers could screen employees for health risks when offering health insurance.

    Both courts ruled that companies administering health plans could be exempt from provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act that prohibit employers from forcing workers to provide health information. The courts pointed to a safe harbor provision within the act as a reason to allow some employers to demand the data.

    In another case, the E.E.O.C. tried to get an injunction to stop Honeywell International from fining its workers up to $4,000 for not agreeing to biometric testing, according to legal filings.

    Orion Energy Systems. The E.E.O.C. contends that the company stopped contributing to an employee’s insurance coverage when she refused to submit to a screening, and later fired her. The case is still pending.

    Under the Affordable Care Act, businesses can use financial incentives of up to 30 percent of the yearly cost of coverage, which could easily amount to several thousand dollars.

    If the higher courts go along with the idea that companies can demand this information as a condition of enrolling in their health plans, the debate over what is voluntary will be moot, because workers will not be able to afford to say no. “The whole conversation is over,” she said. “You can do anything you want.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/bu...er=rss&emc=rss


    govt + authoritarian BigCorp over employees, over and over and over, but govt + BigCorp refuse to put the two biggest killers on the controlled substances schedule, tobacco and alcohol.

    BigCorp dictating employees' personal health is more evidence why a no-profit govt insurance/public option would get employers out of providing group plans and out of employees most personal lives.

    But of course, 0.1%er/establishment right-wing Hillary says it's too hard to change, to make progress, so let BigCorp keep ing us over, looting America, so vote Hillary, not Bernie.


  20. #120
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    Not Going to Take it Anymore – Doctors in the Pacific Northwest Unionize

    Yves here. This development is very important. Nurses’ unions are effective and well respected. Doctors’ unions should be even more so, particularly since their big grievance is corporatized medicine requiring them to spend less time with patients and reducing their autonomy. As this post explains, they are at odds with management because management cares only about profit while they prioritize the quality of care. And the managers are all MBAs, so it is not as if the effort to routinize care is driven by people who in theory might have ideas about how to achieve better medical outcomes.


    By Roy Poses, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University, and the President of FIRM – the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine. Cross posted from the Health Care Renewal website

    We have posted about the plight of the corporate physician. In the US, home of the most commercialized health care system among developed countries, physicians increasingly practice as employees of large organizations, usually hospitals and hospital systems, sometimes for-profit. The leaders of such systems meanwhile are now often generic managers, people trained as managers without specific training or experience in medicine or health care, and “managerialists” who apply generic management theory and dogma to medicine and health care just as it might be applied to building widgets or selling soap.


    We have also frequently posted about what we have called generic management, the manager’s coup d’etat, andmission-hostile management.

    Managerialism wraps these concepts up into a single package. The idea is that all organizations, including health care organizations, ought to be run people with generic management training and background, not necessarily by people with specific backgrounds or training in the organizations’ areas of operation. Thus, for example, hospitals ought to be run by MBAs, not doctors, nurses, or public health experts


    Furthermore, all organizations ought to be run according to the same basic principles of business management. These principles in turn ought to be based on current neoliberal dogma, with the prime directive that short-term revenue is the primary goal.


    Now there are a few signs that the physicians are getting fed up with having to answer to generic management and managerialism.

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/...-unionize.html

    Something like 50% or more of docs and nurses say they wouldn't choose their profession again.

    The capitalists have definitely won their war on labor. People are pissed off, discouraged, living The American Dream (c)



  21. #121
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    This summer, the Department of Labor (DOL) is expected to implement a new overtime rule, which would raise the overtime salary threshold from $23,660 to $50,440, strengthening the right of 13.5 million additional workers to receive overtime pay and the right to earn a fair living.

    Unfortunately, our opponents in Congress are eager to steal this victory from workers by running out the clock on one of President Obama’s signature economic achievements.

    The Congressional Review Act dictates that all “major” rules are delayed for 60 legislative days after they are submitted to Congress and are subject to a “fast track” process for repeal.

    That process has to end before President Obama leaves office to guarantee a veto of any Congressional resolution of disapproval.

    If the DOL does not act soon, Congress will reverse this critical protection for millions of workers.

    ... from an email.

    $50K is way too low. Should be $75+, but the rule is not any of Hillary's "incremental" bull .

    Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

    Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Overtime

    http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/nprm2015/



  22. #122
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    Caught in the Corporate Feeding Frenzy

    These Texas steelworkers are fighting back against the global elites racing them to the bottom.

    The “human resources” departments of huge corporations are known for issuing helpful bulletins to employees, such as this old joke: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

    Beatings of workers these days take the form of s

    lashing wages and benefits,

    offshoring jobs,

    busting unions, and

    generally disparaging and disrespecting the people who produce their products. It’s a heck of a way to run a business.

    Consider the acious greed of Glencore, the 10th largest corporation in the world. Never heard of it? That’s no surprise — it doesn’t put its name on much. But it’s one of several mega-corporations in the new global economy that snarf up brand names and suck out profits.
    Glencore, a $233-billion, Swiss commodities conglomerate, gobbled up the Sherwin Alumina metals company in 2007, buying it from the Alcoa aluminum corporation (which, in 2001, swallowed the aluminum producer Reynolds).

    Caught in this frenzy of corporate feasting are 450 Sherwin Alumina steelworkers in Gregory, Texas.

    https://goo.gl/maps/1Hu8yFtiLnz

    They’re top-quality producers of aluminum. In 2014, however, the highly profitable Swiss conglomerate rewarded their productivity by demanding deep cuts in their pay and benefits.


    When the members of the Steelworkers union rejected this insulting proposal, Glencore’s henchmen locked the 450 workers out of the plant, hoping to break their morale and bully them into accepting the raw deal.


    But this ploy only intensified the workers’ resolve to reject such gross unfairness. They turned their picket line into a symbolic stand against global corporate elites who’ve adopted anti-worker thuggishness as a normal business practice and a core corporate value.


    Now Sherwin Alumina has filed for bankruptcy, but these workers aren’t letting them off the hook: Their union secured a place at the table among the company’s creditors. The gutsy steelworkers in Gregory, Texas aren’t only standing up for themselves — but also for you, me, and workaday people everywhere.

    http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...feeding-frenzy

    yawn, capitalists screwing labor, the eternal story.



  23. #123
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    Why North Carolina’s New Anti-LGBT Law is a Trojan Horse

    It’s not just bathrooms. Lawmakers also took away the right to sue under state law for all kinds of employment discrimination.

    an even more expansive change made by the law — one that could affect all workers in North Carolina, not just those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

    Tucked inside is language that strips North Carolina workers of the ability to sue under a state anti-discrimination law, a right that has been upheld in court since 1985. “If you were fired because of your race, fired because of your gender, fired because of your religion,” said Allan Freyer, head of theWorkers’ Rights Project at the N.C. Justice Center in Raleigh, “… you no longer have a basic remedy.”

    Conservative-leaning groups have trying for decades to reduce the number of civil lawsuits in the states. In HB2, lawmakers accomplished this by adding a single sentence to the state’s employment discrimination law that says:

    “[No] person may bring any civil action based upon the public policy expressed herein.”

    forces workers seeking redress for discrimination into the federal system, where access is more difficult, the rules are much more complicated, and businesses often have significant advantages. Time, in particular, is on employers’ side: Under federal law, fired workers have just 180 days to file a claim, versus three years in state court. In the past, workers who missed the federal deadline — not uncommon for someone in emotional and economic crisis — could sue under state law instead, said Raleigh attorney Eric Doggett. Now, he predicted, many will discover they’re “hosed.”

    The law’s impact could be “extraordinarily far-reaching,”

    that eliminating the right to sue was “a technical correction” that brings “clarity to a confusing area of workplace law” and takes North Carolina’s anti-discrimination statute “back to its original intent.” He said most employment discrimination cases don’t have merit and don’t belong in the “mosh pit” of state court.

    the lawsuit provision was “incidental” to the larger effort to revamp North Carolina’s law on public accommodations and rein in local governments. “The overall function of the law is to restore the status quo before the City of Charlotte exceeded its legal authority,”

    “We expect to see a flurry of summary judgment motions and motions to dismiss wrongful discharge claims based on this amendment.” Shea, partner in a firm that represents employers, called the change a“bomb.”

    HB2 as part of a pattern of Republican-sponsored measures that have eroded voting and other rights for low-income people of color in recent years. “It’s a continuation of … a wide assortment of things that appear to be rolling back the clock of North Carolina so that it matches the sordid history of 40 to 50 years ago,” he said.

    a burgeoning trend in which conservatives are exploiting a backlash against gay marriage and transgender rights to push legislation with broad ramifications. In Georgia, the governor vetoed a bill allowing faith-based organizations the ability to refuse to rent property, provide education or charitable services, or do any hiring that violates their religious beliefs. In Mississippi, a bill that passed the legislature last week would permit discrimination against anyone who has nonmarital sex.

    HB2 “is more evidence that the forces behind this backlash have a larger agenda than simply attacking marriage rights for same-sex couples,” said Katherine Franke, director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. “They also seek to unravel protections against race discrimination in public accommodations and other contexts.”

    https://www.propublica.org/article/w...ent=1459810205


    Once a slave state, always a slave state. Heavily gerrymandered, heavily voter suppressed, and with vote-counting fraud if needed, NC and other slave states, and red states, are Kock Bros dream states, pro-business, while ing employees, poor, non-Euro-whites, patients, etc, etc.

    Thanks, Repugs!








  24. #124
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    Nashville Voted To Give Poor People, Locals New Construction Jobs. But the State GOP Blocked It.

    Last summer, with the backing of regional labor leaders and community groups, the city of Nashville approved an ordinance requiring large, municipally funded construction projects to devote 10 percent of their hiring to low-income residents. The ballot initiative, which also stipulated that 40 percent of such hires should reside in Nashville’s Davidson County, came amid an historic surge in building projects in the city’s downtown area.

    Last year, the New York Times reported that more than $2 billion worth of construction projects that developers have initiated in the city are poised to reshape Nashville’s skyline. The local hire ordinance, known as Amendment 3, sought to make sure that the city’s poorest residents saw some benefit portions of the city’s building boom by leveraging the Nashville’s government’s contracts with private businesses in an attempt to reduce local poverty, which stands at nearly 20 percent for adults and at roughly 30 percent for children in the Nashville area.

    Yet within weeks of the ordinance passing into law, Republicans in the state legislature introduced a bill to roll back Nashville’s new law and prevent other cities in the state from implementing anything like it.


    In September, a Republican representative also requested that the state’s Republican attorney general issue an opinion on whether the city law was legal in the first place. After the attorney general’s office asserted that the local-hire rule indeed violated a state law that governs licensing, the bill to invalidate Nashville’s new law moved steadily through the legislature.

    “Another issue that has been brought in opposition to my bill, which would nullify the charter amendment, is that we are overturning the will of the voters of Nashville,” said Republican state senator Jack Johnson, who sponsored the bill to preempt Nashville’s local hire law, according to the Tennessean. “In fact we are.”

    http://inthesetimes.com/working/entr...al_local_hires

  25. #125
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    This week in the war on workers: House GOP budget attacks working people. Again.

    taking a look at where their priorities are—and what Republicans would be doing if they controlled all of government. The plan:

    … would cut programs for low- and moderate-income people by about $3.7 trillion over the next decade.

    In 2026, it would cut such programs overall by 42 percent — causing tens of millions of people to lose health coverage and millions to lose basic food or other support.


    In addition, the plan would secure 62 percent of its budget cuts from low-income programs even though they account for just 28 percent of total non-defense program spending (and just 24 percent of total program spending, including defense).


    While cutting supports and services severely for Americans of lesser means, the budget would secure no deficit reduction at all from the more than $1 trillion a year in tax credits, deductions, and other preferences, collectively known as “tax expenditures” — which disproportionately benefit high-income households ...

    That’s $2.9 trillion in healthcare cuts by repealing Obamacare’s subsidies and Medicaid expansion, more than $150 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, cuts to Pell Grants and the Child Tax Credit … all while letting the wealthy continue to reap tax benefits.


    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/04/02/1508559/-This-week-in-the-war-on-workers-House-GOP-budget-attacks-working-people-Again?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_ca mpaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

    Pres Bernie would veto.

    Pres Hillary would probably go along with it most of it, sooner or later, "incrementally" screwing the 99% because she gotta be "realistic", neo-liberally managing the decline of USA.



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