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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Sanders Is Open to Running for President If Biden Doesn’t Seek Reelection

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) may run for president again in 2024 if President Joe Biden doesn’t seek reelection, a newly revealed campaign memo shows.

    In a memo circulated among political allies and shared with The Washington Post, Sanders adviser and 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir says that, “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president, so we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.”

    If Sanders ran again in 2024, it would be his third time running for president. In both of his previous runs, the democratic socialist was beat by a moderate candidate after establishment members of the party banded together to defeat him.

    Shakir concludes the memo by encouraging allies to weather and address attacks from opponents. “As campaigning heats up in states across the country, your political opponents and their corporate-aligned allies will try to make you feel defensive about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ support for your candidate,” the memo says. “Our advice is to embrace the attacks.”

    The memo also says that, if opponents or members of the media ask allies if they’ll support Sanders if he challenges Biden in 2024, allies should point out that Sanders has been one of Biden’s greatest allies in the Senate.

    “As Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, no one fought harder for the president’s policy agenda than Bernie,” reads the proposed response. “He traveled to Republican Congressional Districts last summer to promote Build Back Better. Unfortunately, that legislation was stopped by corporate Democrats.”

    As Mike Casca, a spokesperson for Sanders, told the Post, Sanders is a popular politician. “While it’s frustrating this private memo leaked to the media, the central fact remains true, which is that Senator Sanders is the most popular officeholder in the country,” Casca said.

    Indeed, as YouGov found in recent polling, Sanders is the most popular politician currently in office, with 48 percent of respondents saying that they have a positive view of him. He has a 6-point lead in popularity over Biden, who is the next most popular active politician, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Donald Trump at 38 percent.

    Sanders has had a major hand in shaping the current Democratic platform. Measures like Medicare for All, student debt reform and free public college were relatively obscure when he first ran on them in 2016 but now have become part of the mainstream political conversation and are even being adopted in some states.

    Biden is likely to run for reelection, however. The president and top advisers have assured allies that he plans on running again in 2024, but with the caveat that he can’t plan for years into the future for certain.

    It’s also unlikely that Biden won’t run for reelection just going by historical standards. Only a small handful of presidents have chosen not to run for reelection, and only 10 presidents have lost to another candidate after running for a second term.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Finds 81 Percent of Voters Say Supreme Court Needs Stronger Code of Ethics

    Amid controversy surrounding Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s personal ties to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, new polling finds that the vast majority of likely voters support implementing a stronger code of ethics for the High Court.

    When asked whether or not they agreed that Supreme Court justices should be subject to a code of ethics requiring them to recuse themselves from any case relating to personal financial or family matters, 81 percent of 1,177 respondents agreed, new polling by Data for Progress finds. Only 10 percent of respondents were opposed to the proposal, giving the supporters a 71-point margin.

    Support held strong across political affiliations. Democrats were the most supportive of the code of ethics, with 84 percent in favor. An overwhelming majority of independents and Republicans also agreed with the idea, with 82 percent and 77 percent of respondents saying as such, respectively.

    The polling comes as Democratic and progressive lawmakers and government watchdog groups are calling for Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s coup attempt on January 6th, 2021. Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called for Thomas to recuse himself from such cases and to disclose his family’s income gathered from far right organizations — or, better yet, to resign, she said.

    These calls were sparked by recent revelations that Thomas’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Trump in the White House after the former president’s loss to Joe Biden. In leaked texts between Ginni Thomas and Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, she appeared to be using her close ties with federal officials in order to push them to overturn the election results.

    Thomas’s financial ties to the right wing have also come into question. In 2011, government watchdog group Common Cause discovered that Clarence Thomas had failed to report that, over the course of 2003 to 2007, Ginni Thomas had received $680,000 from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation. Clarence Thomas later amended his financial statements to reflect that information.

    The existing code of conduct for members of the Supreme Court requires justices to recuse themselves from cases that may relate to their personal finances, but doesn’t specifically bar them from cases that they have personal ties to, outside of financial issues.

    Legal ethics experts say that Thomas’s personal ties make enough of a case for him to recuse himself from all 2020 election-related cases. Voters agree with this; polling from earlier this month found that 53 percent of voters think that Thomas shouldn’t participate in cases involving his wife. The same poll, by Politico/Morning Consult, found that only 28 percent of Americans approve of Thomas.

    The issue with Thomas’s participation in 2020 election-related cases is not only the rulings themselves, experts say, but also that it may shake the public’s trust in the Court overall.

    The public view of the Supreme Court in general has been eroding as conservatives have manipulated the Court in their favor. A poll last year found that less than 50 percent of Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s performance, the lowest approval rating in five years.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Says It’s Time to “End the Failed War on Drugs” and Legalize Marijuana

    On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called for marijuana to be legalized and for past marijuana-related convictions to be erased, as legislation to do so has stalled in the Senate.

    “Legalize marijuana. Expunge past marijuana convictions. End the failed War on Drugs,” Sanders wrote on Twitter.

    Sanders’s statement came among an influx of other legislators calling for the passage of the Marijuana Opportunity and Reinvestment (MORE) Act, which the House voted to pass earlier this month. The bill, which would allow people convicted of certain marijuana crimes to have their records expunged and fully decriminalize marijuana across the country, has stalled in the Senate, where it has little chance of passing due to Republican opposition and the filibuster.

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) called for the abolishment of the filibuster in order to pass the legislation. “Today would be a great day for the Senate to end the filibuster and pass the MORE Act — which would legalize marijuana and expunge records,” Jayapal said on Wednesday.

    Senate Democrats say that they’re working on their own legislation to legalize marijuana that would tweak the way marijuana importers and sellers are taxed.

    Legalizing marijuana is a hugely popular issue among voters. In November, Gallup found that support for marijuana legalization, which has been increasing steadily over the past decades, is at an all-time high of 68 percent.

    Drug legalization advocates and people convicted of marijuana-related crimes say that the passage of the MORE Act could be a huge advancement of social justice in the country. Black people are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana; Black and Latino men also receive longer prison sentences than white men arrested on similar drug charges.

    Even with legalization, these racist disparities remain. In every state where marijuana is currently legal, Black people are still more likely to be arrested for marijuana-related charges.

    The MORE Act takes steps to try to alleviate racial justice issues created by marijuana criminalization and the war on drugs by taxing sales on legal marijuana and redistributing the funds to communities that were especially damaged by the war on drugs. It would also require the Bureau of Labor Statistics to regularly publish data on the demographics of marijuana business owners and employees in hopes of bringing transparency to the industry, which is currently mostly white-owned.

    Some social justice activists have also been seeking to create democratically-owned businesses as the marijuana industry develops from its nascent stages. In Rhode Island, for instance, workers are asking state legislators to reserve licenses for worker-owned cooperatives within the industry in order to ensure that there’s space for more equitable businesses with support and participation from the communities they serve.

    Legalizing marijuana could also be a huge boon for the government’s coffers. A recent report found that states that have decriminalized marijuana have collected more than $10 billion in tax revenues since 2014. Additionally, a study released last week found that legal marijuana reduces demand for prescription drugs obtained through Medicaid funded by state programs.

    “The reductions in drug utilization that we find could lead to significant cost savings for state Medicaid programs,” said Shyam Raman, a doctoral student at Cornell University and co-author of the study. “The results also indicate an opportunity to reduce the harm that can come with the dangerous side effects associated with some prescription drugs.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Administration Considering Extending “Failed” Immigration Policy, Title 42

    The Biden administration is considering delaying the repeal of Title 42, a restrictive immigration policy that has allowed federal agents to turn away and expel millions of asylum seekers at the border under the guise of public health.

    President Joe Biden’s inner circle has been discussing extending the policy for an indeterminate amount of time and he is reportedly facing pressure from moderate Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) to do so. Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that the administration is planning to end its use of the policy on May 23, saying that it’s no longer necessary due to current public health conditions.

    The news sparked frustration among immigration advocates, who are already aggrieved that Biden has kept the policy, originally invoked by Donald Trump in March of 2020, for so long into his tenure.

    “Unacceptable. Shame on the Biden Administration and Democrats for trying to keep this racist sham public health order alive,” wrote Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) on Twitter.

    Late last month, a group of 87 immigrant advocacy organizations led by the Haitian Bridge Alliance and Immigration Hub wrote a letter to the Biden administration saying that the “ongoing use of Title 42 undermines our trust in the administration,” especially since the administration had considered rescinding the order last summer but ended up extending it.

    Immigration advocates have called Title 42 a “failed,” racist policy that serves only to hurt the most vulnerable people at the border. It has caused a crisis at the nation’s southern border, endangering thousands — if not millions — of people who are risking their lives to seek safety in the U.S. Even before the news broke that the administration was considering extending the policy once again, immigration advocates were skeptical that the policy would be repealed in a way that wouldn’t cause further harm to asylum seekers.

    “The announcement to terminate Title 42 is long overdue,” Haddy Gassama, UndocuBlack Network’s national director of policy and advocacy, told Prism earlier this week. “Organizations such as UndocuBlack and Haitian Bridge Alliance and many others have been pushing for the end of this policy for pretty much the two years since its inception. But, we weren’t able to celebrate immediately because there were so many questions around the implementation of that termination and what it would look like.”

    Title 42 is supposed to be used only when there is a dire need to protect public health, but public health experts say that there isn’t any evidence that the policy actually helps to stop the spread of COVID-19.

    Meanwhile, public health experts say that moves like lifting the federal mask mandate for air travel, as a federal judge’s ruling did on Monday, could help spread the virus and is against public health principles — but the Biden administration has been waffling on whether or not it will appeal that ruling.

    Instead, immigration advocates say it’s clear that the use of Title 42 is political, rather than public health related.

    “There is not even an attempt at pretext anymore that Title 42 is anything other than a political measure attempting to set immigration policy. But that’s not legal. At all,” explained Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, on Twitter. “It’s a public health law that can only be used when there is a ‘serious danger’ of ‘introducing’ a disease.”

    Immigration advocates are also frustrated with conservative Democrats like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) for their support of a recent bill that would codify Title 42 into law, with RAICES dubbing it the “Stephen Miller bill,” after the Trump senior adviser who crafted much of the far right president’s racist and restrictive immigration agenda.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Data Reveals 63 Percent of Hourly Starbucks Workers Make Under $15 an Hour

    Despite Starbucks’s claims that it is a progressive employer that prioritizes the needs of its workers, newly released data shows that a majority of the company’s hourly workers make less than the average living wage across the U.S.

    According to research from Harvard/UCSF’s The Shift Project and the Economic Policy Institute, 63 percent of hourly workers at Starbucks make less than $15 an hour. About a quarter of the company’s hourly workers make between $10 and $12 an hour, while another quarter make about $12 to $14 an hour, the data finds. Only about 10 percent of its workers make above $18 an hour.

    This means that a majority of the company’s hourly workers don’t make what economists qualify as a living wage. Even excluding expenses like debts or retirement savings, full time workers must make a wage of at least $15 an hour or higher for a single adult with no children to live on in most states, according to 2021 data; for two adults with two children, the living wage in 2019 was $16.54 an hour, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers found. That amount is most likely higher now, as inflation has soared in the past year.

    A $15 an hour minimum wage has been a goal of the labor movement for so long that the $15 that activists began demanding in 2012 is now worth only about $12, and advocates are asking for a new baseline of at least $18 or more. In California, which houses more Starbucks locations than any other state, a living wage for an adult with no children is $19.41 an hour, according to MIT.

    Many Starbucks workers live in large, expensive metropolitan areas and work for the company part-time while also working other jobs or attending school. On top of that, workers say that the company has been cutting hours across the board for part- and full-time workers, making liberal cuts to workers’ finances as a tactic to quash the union drive.

    This is despite the fact that the company is making record profits. Last year, the company’s profits grew 24 percent to a total of $24.5 billion, while then-CEO Kevin Johnson received a nearly 40 percent compensation raise to over $20 million. Starbucks Workers United, which is working to unionize hundreds of stores across the country, says that the company is decreasing hours in order to union bust.

    Starbucks often touts itself as a progressive company, referring to employees as “partners” and making political statements in support of LGBTQ people and against moves from people like Donald Trump, even as they bar workers from making their own political statements at work. Workers say that the progressive environment that attracted them to the company has diminished over the years — if it ever existed within the company in the first place — and that they’ve been increasingly treated as disposable, during the pandemic in particular.

    Over the past months, the company has been firing workers for seemingly trivial reasons, or for violations of rules that workers say would not normally constitute a termination — including for a sink breaking, allegedly being late and allegedly recording supervisors without their permission. As Vice reports, at least 18 pro-union workers have been fired over the past two months.

    Throughout its union-busting campaign, Starbucks has continually touted its benefits as a reason that workers don’t need a union. On its anti-union website, the company brags about its health insurance and retirement benefits, for instance, as a show of how well workers are treated. However, employees say that many of the benefits the company offers aren’t accessible to workers because they’re too expensive with their current salaries.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Finds 75 Percent of Americans Support Amazon Workers’ Union Efforts

    Workers’ recent efforts to unionize Amazon warehouses and fight for better working conditions are widely popular among Americans across the political spectrum, new polling finds.

    A recent poll of nearly 2,500 Americans, conducted for More Perfect Union by Blue Rose Research, finds that 75 percent of those polled support Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) stated goals to seek “union representation in order to have job security, better pay, and safer working conditions.”

    This support holds across the political spectrum, the polling found. A majority of Donald Trump voters aged between 18 and 49 agreed with the union’s goals. Support was strongest among young Democrats. Among young Joe Biden voters aged 18 to 34, a whopping 91 percent supported the union, with a similar approval rating of 90 percent among Biden voters between 39 and 49 years old.

    Support for the union’s goals is also strong across races; majorities of white, Latinx, Black and Asian respondents are in favor of the union, with the lowest support among white respondents at 71 percent, and the highest among Black respondents at 87 percent.

    The polling comes after ALU won a union in Staten Island, New York, earlier this month by a decisive majority. The workers had faced long odds to unionize in the face of a union-busting campaign that cost $3.4 million at minimum last year, and the independent union’s historic win is causing established labor unions to question whether or not it’s time to reshape how they approach organizing.

    ALU’s movement has been spreading quickly among Amazon workers. Just a week after their victory, ALU president Christian Smalls said that workers at over 100 warehouses had contacted the union about organizing their workplaces.

    Amazon has taken great lengths to project a positive public image, and the poll shows that the company’s efforts have largely been successful; 90 percent of the people who shopped on the Amazon website over the past three months said that they have a favorable view of the company. However, among that group, 75 percent still favored workers’ union efforts.

    It’s possible that Amazon’s reputation for subpar working conditions is still prevalent even among those who have a positive overall view of the company. Last year, the company went to war on Twitter to dispute allegations that quotas for Amazon delivery drivers are so strict that drivers often have to urinate in bottles just to stay on track — allegations that investigations later found the company was fully aware of, despite denying them online.

    In the past few years, the company has pledged to become both the safest and best place to work on Earth, but recent data shows that the company operates some of the most dangerous warehouses in the country. According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data, the company was responsible for 50 percent of warehouse injuries last year, despite only making up about a third of the country’s warehouse workforce.

    While Amazon employs a larger and larger share of the workforce, union membership has been declining. Over the past decades, the percentage of workers who are in a labor union has fallen to about 10 percent overall, and to a measly 6 percent among workers in the private sector.

    At the same time, however, the public’s view of labor unions is becoming more favorable. According to Gallup polling, public support for unions is at the highest level since 1965, with 68 percent support among the public. The support is an indication that the labor movement is on the rise in the U.S.

    The wide support for Amazon’s union effort is also an indication that, in order to earn more support ahead of this year’s midterm elections, Democrats should throw their support behind union efforts among workers at companies that are household names, like Amazon and Starbucks.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Majority of Voters Support Biden’s Billionaires Income Tax, Poll Finds

    New polling finds that most likely voters support President Joe Biden’s plan to implement a minimum tax on the richest households in the U.S., including a tax on unrealized gains from assets like stocks.

    The polling released on Monday by Data for Progress finds that 59 percent of likely voters support the proposal, known as the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, with only 31 percent of those polled in opposition — a 28-point margin.

    The issue is particularly popular among Democrats, with 72 percent of respondents in favor. 55 percent of independent voters said that they favored the proposal, and a plurality of Republicans also support the idea, with 46 percent in favor and 43 percent opposed. People who own stock or real estate are also supportive of the idea, with 54 percent of respondents saying as such.

    Biden recently submitted his budget request for Fiscal Year 2023 to Congress, which includes a minimum tax on the country’s richest roughly 20,000 households, or those worth over $100 million. These households would be subject to a 20 percent minimum income tax rate, and would include traditional incomes as well as unrealized gains from things like stocks and bonds, making it similar to a wealth tax.

    Progressives and Democrats have long advocated for levying a tax on the richest people in the U.S., who are often able to exploit loopholes written into the tax code to pay low effective tax rates. ProPublica recently revealed that, between 2014 and 2018, the 25 richest Americans paid only 3.4 percent of their wealth gains in taxes, despite gaining a whopping $401 billion in that time. In a slightly more expansive analysis last year, White House economists found that the country’s wealthiest 400 families only paid a tax rate of 8.2 percent in income taxes between 2010 and 2018.

    The wealthy are able to get away with paying such low effective tax rates in part due to a strategy known as “buy, borrow, die,” in which the wealthiest Americans can purchase stock and then borrow loans based off of their stock portfolios at very low interest rates. Then, they hold onto stocks — since they would have to pay taxes if they sold them — and eventually pass them onto their heirs, largely tax-free.

    However, Data for Progress’s polling shows that many Americans are unaware of how taxes apply to people whose wealth largely comes from their assets. When presented with a hypothetical scenario in which a household held stocks that increased in value that year but didn’t sell the stocks, 28 percent of people incorrectly said that the household would have to pay taxes on the increased value of the stock. Among people who have never owned stocks or real estate, that proportion increased to 30 percent.

    This misunderstanding could explain why there isn’t more support for the proposal to retool how the richest Americans are taxed. While 66 percent of likely voters surveyed believe that billionaires should be paying more in taxes, 19 percent believe that they are paying the right amount — despite the fact that billionaires pay much lower effective tax rates than the average taxpayer, and are able to leverage their wealth to manipulate markets in their favor.

    It’s unclear if Biden’s proposal will end up in the final budget for next year. Lawmakers like Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have introduced bills directly aimed at taxing billionaires, but they have failed to gain traction in Congress. However, the polling suggests that passing such legislation could help Democrats gain support among voters, which could be crucial for the midterm elections this fall.

    The more Congress delays action on the issue, however, the larger the wealth gap grows. A recent analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness found that billionaires have collectively gotten $2 trillion richer during the pandemic thus far, increasing their wealth by a whopping 70 percent. Elon Musk has especially benefited from the pandemic, with his wealth skyrocketing by 1080 percent over the past two years alone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Workers Strike to Protest the Company’s Harsh Union Busting

    On Friday, Starbucks workers from coast to coast protested against the company’s anti-union campaign, which is becoming increasingly aggressive as the movement rapidly spreads across the country.

    In Raleigh, North Carolina, workers demonstrated against the company on Friday morning to protest the firing of former pro-union Starbucks worker and college student Sharon Gilman. The company recently terminated Gilman after a sink fell on her while she was washing dishes, accusing her of purposely breaking the sink. Demonstrators demanded that Gilman be reinstated, and said that the allegations are false.

    “Sharon Gilman is one of the best partners we have at our store. We are extremely disappointed that the company we saw her working so hard for is willing to fire her over something she is not responsible for and without consulting the witnesses available,” workers at the Wake Forest and Six Forks Road store wrote in a letter to CEO Howard Schultz.

    “If our equipment is so flimsy that it can fall off of a wall only two years after installation, we are concerned about the safety of our coworkers and the fact that Starbucks would rather find a scapegoat than accept responsibility,” they continued.

    Gilman is one of several pro-union workers who were fired by Starbucks over the past couple of weeks. Since Schultz took the helm as CEO on April 4, the company has fired at least four pro-union workers, likely in hopes of scaring employees away from supporting the union and to throw a wrench into upcoming union elections.

    Meanwhile, the workers’ union movement grows stronger by the day. Over 200 stores have filed to unionize, and 21 stores have successfully unionized so far, with a handful of unanimous wins across several states over the past weeks. Most recently, a store in Springfield, Virginia, voted against the union, but Starbucks union organizer Richard Bensinger wrote on Thursday that the loss was the result of “outrageous union busting” at the store by “billionaire bully” Schultz.

    Workers at two stores in Seattle walked off the job to protest Starbucks’s union busting on Friday. At 5th and Pike and Eastlake Avenue, workers are striking until Sunday to protest what they say are unfair labor practices implemented by the company. The union, Starbucks Workers United, says that the company has been making up new policies to retaliate against pro-union workers and slashing hours despite high profits.

    “Given Starbucks’s public portrayal of their empathy and dedication for their partners, it is incredibly disheartening to see such malicious attempts to silence us,” said Eastlake barista Natalie Mattera. “We are the heart of this company and we deserve to be treated as such.”

    Starbucks Workers United has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company with the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over what the union says are illegal retaliatory actions by the company.

    With Schultz in charge, the company’s union-busting tactics have become increasingly brash. On top of firing pro-union workers, the company has begun posting flyers in stores with anti-union information. The flyers include fake tweets made to look like they were sent from the union’s official Twitter account.

    The fabricated tweets show the union making general statements about unionizing that the company then responds to. “In collective bargaining, you start with everything you have and negotiate for more from there,” one fake tweet reads. Underneath the tweet, Starbucks corporate “debunks” the claim with anti-union rhetoric, describing how the company could negotiate against workers’ interests during contract discussions.

    The company currently faces legal trouble from the NLRB, as the board found that they have broken federal labor laws several times during the union campaign. Most recently, the NLRB found that the company illegally fired seven union organizers in Memphis, Tennessee. The organizers, who were terminated in February, made up nearly the entire organizing committee at their store.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Majority of Corporations Don’t Pay State Income Taxes in at Least 7 States

    State corporate tax revenues are declining, and state tax loopholes and cuts to corporate tax rates are allowing a majority of corporations in at least seven states to avoid paying any corporate income taxes, a new report finds.

    In a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), over 60 percent of corporations in Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Tennessee and Wisconsin paid zero state corporate income taxes in varying periods between 2015 and 2019. In Colorado, 71 percent of corporations didn’t pay income taxes between 2017 and 2019, and in Florida, a whopping 92 percent of corporations paid zero income taxes between 2016 and 2019.

    Even larger corporations were able to dodge paying income taxes, EPI’s Josh Bivens found. Between 12 and 27 percent of corporations with $1 billion in taxable income were able to dodge state corporate income taxes entirely over the four years studied.

    It’s possible that corporations were able to avoid paying corporate income taxes in other states as well; EPI only studied states for which data is currently available. In a handful of states, like Ohio and Texas, corporations aren’t subject to corporate income taxes at all.

    Over the past decades, the effective state and local corporate tax rate has fallen by half, despite surging corporate profits. In 1989, it was 5.2 percent; as of 2017, it was only 2.6 percent. If effective tax rates for corporations hadn’t started declining in the last few decades, EPI finds, then state and local governments would have taken in $57 billion more in revenue. This shortfall in revenue could finance a program to provide universal pre-kindergarten in the U.S.

    “Corporate income taxes — both at the federal and S&L level — are highly progressive parts of the U.S. fiscal system,” meaning that corporate income taxes largely affect owners of corporations rather than workers or consumers, Bivens wrote. “The erosion of revenues collected from corporate income taxes has made the overall tax system less progressive, and at the state level it has been a key driver of overall revenue weakness, which in turn has fueled too-austere spending.”

    Overall, as revenues are declining, states are becoming more and more reliant on federal funding and taxes paid by regular households in order to maintain roads and bridges, provide clean water, and fund education. The data suggests that reduced revenues likely have a direct impact on spending. Declining revenues also negatively affect Black and women workers, who are disproportionately employed with state and local tax revenues.

    These declines come even as corporations are posting record profits in recent decades, meaning that corporations aren’t dodging taxes because they can’t pay them, but rather because they are able to exploit tax loopholes.

    State and local officials shoulder at least part of the blame for declining revenues, EPI says, as governments have cut corporate income tax rates. There has also been a rise in corporate profits coming from S-corporations, which are able to pass their income taxes onto shareholders and typically don’t pay corporate income taxes. As such, classifying businesses as S-corporations is a popular way to avoid paying state corporate taxes.

    Along with forcing regular taxpayers to shoulder much of the tax burden, there is no evidence that any of these state and local tax cuts “trickle down” to workers, the report finds. Instead, these tax cuts appear to benefit the richest Americans the most.

    In a press conference on the release of the report, Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, expressed frustration over how easy it is for corporations to dodge paying state and local taxes.

    “It’s absolutely unconscionable that while the two million members of SEIU who clean buildings, care for the elderly and provide essential public services pay their taxes every year, billionaires and their corporations are getting a free ride,” Henry said. “To have a government that works for all of us, we need a tax system that requires corporations and the wealthy to pay their due — period.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • RNC Unanimously Votes to Withdraw From Presidential Debate Commission

    On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that it has unanimously voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has been responsible for overseeing presidential debates since the 1980s.

    The RNC says that, from now on, it will require candidates to sign a pledge that they won’t participate in general election or primary debates unless the debate has been sanctioned by the party, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    This is a significant decision and an escalation from President Donald Trump’s previous grievances with the debate commission. The vote means that unless there is a considerable shakeup in the way that presidential debates are held, Republicans will not participate in presidential debates the way they have been run for decades — though the RNC says that it won’t be pulling candidates out entirely.

    RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement that the RNC believes, without evidence, that debates have been “biased” against Republicans. The committee will work to “find newer, better debate platforms.”

    The debate commission was formed as a nonprofit in 1987 with sponsorship from both Republican and Democratic parties.

    The RNC has signaled in the past months that it will be withdrawing candidates from debates. Earlier this year, the committee sent a letter to the debate commission threatening to leave if the commission didn’t reorganize its format.

    Trump regularly complained that debates were biased against him; in 2020, he withdrew from the second presidential debate with now-President Joe Biden, which was slated to be held virtually after Trump contracted COVID-19. At the first debate,Trump had taken issue with moderator Chris Wallace, then a Fox News anchor, and talked over both Wallace and Biden nearly the entire time.

    Before Trump, Republicans had been complaining for years that the debates were biased; in 2012, Republicans took issue with the fact that a debate moderator corrected Mitt Romney during a debate.

    Ironically, in their current TV-friendly format, debates are actually biased toward Republicans, political commentators have pointed out. The current format allowed Trump to hog speaking time during the Wallace-moderated debate and gave a huge litany of lies a legitimized platform.

    Trump essentially used the debates to lie about the climate crisis, health care, election fraud, and other issues; although fact checkers — who often carry a right-wing bias at corporate news outlets — had flagged many of Trump’s lies as false, not all viewers follow the fact checkers as they watch.

    Left-leaning commentators have long taken issue with the current presidential debate format, which they argue is more about spectacle for cable news audiences than about substantial policy debates — though the current format is still preferable to whatever the GOP could come up with, they say.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Musk’s $43B Offer to Buy Twitter Is Nearly Twice His Entire Pre-COVID Net Worth

    As nearly a million Americans died of COVID during the pandemic, Elon Musk’s wealth skyrocketed — opening the door for him to be able to make offers like buying Twitter for $43 billion, as he did on Thursday.

    As Americans for Tax Fairness documented on Thursday, Musk’s wealth has shot up by a whopping 1,080 percent during the pandemic. On March 18, 2020, Musk was worth an already towering $24.6 billion; now, he’s worth $290 billion. In other words, he has gained over $265 billion in two years, the vast majority of which he accumulated tax-free.

    This is an absurd amount of money, unfathomable likely even to the Tesla and SpaceX owner himself. His current net worth is roughly 1.2 percent of the entire U.S. gross domestic product of $24 trillion. This is more money than a single person could spend in a lifetime — unless they wanted to buy Twitter, one of the world’s most heavily visited websites, at far over its current valuation nearly 7 times over.

    Indeed, Musk took a step toward buying Twitter on Thursday at $54.20 a share, higher than its current share price of roughly $45.50. This would bring the total to $43 billion, which Musk called his “best and final offer.”

    Though the pandemic was ruinous for millions of Americans and the world, it was a huge boon to Musk, now the richest man on Earth. If he wanted to buy Twitter before the pandemic at this price, he would have had to sell all of his assets — and even then, he would have come up short by about $18.4 billion.

    “Workers pay tax on their income all year, every year. Simple justice demands that billionaires do the same,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement provided to Truthout. “Instead, our current system allows billionaires like Musk to accumulate vast amounts of wealth without ever contributing a fair share into the tax system like working families do.”

    Last week, Musk bought a 9 percent stake in Twitter, making him the largest shareholder in the company. The company offered to make him a board member, contingent on a background check, but he refused.

    In his filing this week, he said that simply being a board member wouldn’t have given him enough power over the company. “I don’t have confidence in management,” he said, citing the website’s “potential.”

    It’s unclear what Musk wants to change about the site, but he has a reputation for firing Tesla employees who disagree with him. He and Tesla have also been disciplined by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for illegally firing a union organizer and posting an anti-union tweet in 2018.

    He has also landed himself in legal hot water for his tweets; in 2018, he tweeted that he was considering making the company private, a “joke” that earned him a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a $20 million fine. Stocks are often rocked after Musk tweets about his financial moves; last year, for instance, he tweeted a poll about whether or not to sell 10 percent of his stock in Tesla, causing shares to tumble. In 2020, for no apparent reason, he tweeted that Tesla share prices were “too high,” also causing the price to drop.

    Media experts have raised concerns about the consequences for Twitter and the internet if Musk buys the website. Despite his history of censoring his workers, Musk recently described himself as a “free speech absolutist” after saying that he refused to block Russian news sources from accessing SpaceX’s satellite communication system, Starlink; it’s unclear how these principles would extend to Twitter.

    “Regardless of Musk’s dubious principles, any move to relax content moderation standards warrants legitimate concern,” wrote University of Pennsylvania media policy professor Victor Pickard for The Nation. “For example, changing the policies by which Twitter restricts or suspends accounts that cause social harm could yield more harassment, hate speech, incitement to violence, and dangerous misinformation about voting and vaccines.”

    “Twitter’s uneven adherence to its own rules has been rightly criticized, but having no rules would be a troll’s paradise,” Pickard continued, “a Hobbesian hellscape of all against all, with the most vulnerable having the most to lose.”

    Musk currently also faces a series of scandals related to his businesses and finances. When he made his huge Twitter stock buy, he filed the disclosure 11 days late, netting him an extra $156 million.

    The SEC requires people to publicly announce when they have reached a 5 percent stake in a company, which Musk appeared to have reached on March 14. But he kept buying stock at about $39 per share until he reached 9.2 percent in secret; then, after his announcement, shares rose about 30 percent to above $50 a share.

    Investors have sued over Musk’s late disclosure, saying that they may have missed out on gains because of this move.

    Musk’s companies are also facing scrutiny from three separate government agencies, including over allegations that management at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in California have segregated the shop floor by race, and that Black employees suffer rampant racism. One worker reported hearing racial slurs as often as 50 to 100 times a day, and seeing slurs written as graffiti in the bathroom at work.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Congressional Workers Urge House Leaders to Schedule Vote on Their Union

    On Wednesday, organizing congressional workers sent a letter to House leaders urging them to bring a resolution that would greenlight their ability to unionize to a swift vote.

    House Res. 915, which was filed by Rep. Andy Levin (D-Michigan) in early February, would activate existing policies that would allow congressional staffers to begin petitioning for and forming unions. In its letter, the Congressional Workers Union argues that there’s no reason to keep delaying action on the over two month-old resolution and that it must be brought to the floor.

    “We, as congressional workers, fight every day for a better future for ourselves, our families, this institution, and the American people. However, we currently lack the basic protections and legal processes to organize enjoyed by other federal workers and workers across this country,” the group wrote. “Many of us write and work tirelessly to advance the very laws that protect and promote every worker’s right to organize. We deserve those same rights.”

    The workers asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), and chairs of the House Education and Labor; Rules; and Administration committees to bring the resolution to a vote during the week of April 25, or in roughly two weeks.

    It’s unclear why the resolution hasn’t yet been brought to a vote. Early last month, the House Administration Committee held a hearing on the subject to explore and finalize the resolution. Though the legislation allowing the union, the Congressional Accountability Act (CAA), was passed nearly three decades ago, lawmakers never took the last step to formally authorize workers to unionize.

    The resolution would flip the switch on the legislation, and each Congress member’s office would qualify as a separate bargaining unit that could unionize.

    “For 26 years, Congress has failed to act, and workers have suffered for it,” wrote the Congressional Workers Union. “As the leaders of this institution responsible for protecting American democracy, you now have an opportunity to fulfill the promises of the CAA by extending congressional workers these basic rights — protecting the freedom of association and fostering democracy in your own workplaces.”

    House leaders appear to be in support of the effort. In February, a spokesperson for Pelosi said that she would offer her “full support” for unionization, while Administration Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren (D-California) has said that it is “well past time” for the resolution to be passed. President Joe Biden is also in favor of the push, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

    The resolution appears to have the support of much of the House Democratic caucus. When it was first introduced, it had 136 cosponsors; since then, it has picked up nearly 30 more.

    Congressional workers have been in the midst of organizing for over a year, citing low wages and grueling working conditions. These conditions have led to a “brain drain” from Congress, they say, as well-qualified workers flee for better wages and conditions in the private sector.

    Non-white staffers are treated especially poorly, they say. On the Dear White Staffers Instagram account, anonymous non-white staffers say that they feel like they have no room for advancement, they face racist harassment in the halls of Congress and that Capitol Hill staff are overwhelmingly white, despite increasing diversity in Congress.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Pins Inflation on Biden, But Has Raked In $1.2M From Corporate Donors

    Republicans have been denying corporations’ role in rising prices and instead blaming inflation on Democrats. But a new investigation has found that the same corporations that profited greatly from rising inflation last year have also donated millions to those same Republicans.

    A new report by Accountable.US finds that 18 Republicans who have been the most vocal in shielding corporations from being blamed for rising prices have received over $5.7 million in donations from roughly 30 top companies that reported making $151 million more in 2021 than they did in 2020.

    These Republicans have gone to great lengths to blame the inflation on Democrats in the face of mounting evidence that corporations are at least partially responsible for the current squeeze on consumers.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was the leading fundraiser among these Republicans; McConnell has taken $1.24 million from companies like Walmart, ExxonMobil and Pfizer during his time in office. Earlier this year, he issued a press release saying that the Biden administration is “failing” the working class and that this administration cannot take credit for the current economic recovery.

    In reality, McConnell has gone to great lengths to harm middle- and lower-income workers during the pandemic. He voted against last March’s economic stimulus, which provided a much-needed boost to working Americans’ bank accounts, and decried Democrats’ social safety net bill last year as a “liberal wish list.” Those bills contained provisions like the expanded child tax credit that helped the poor and might have done much more if they had not been slashed.

    Meanwhile, as inflation reaches new highs, corporations have been reaching into the pockets of the working class in order to pad their own profits and pay out shareholders. Recent data has shown that corporate profits reached record highs in 2021, growing by 25 percent year-over-year to $3 trillion. At the same time, price hikes, especially for essential goods, are hitting low-income people the hardest,

    Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), another loud inflation critic, has taken $946,000 in donations from the top profiting companies. Last month, he specifically criticized Democrats for saying that corporations are responsible for high prices, saying instead that inflation was due to the COVID relief package. Other Republicans, like Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), have made similar claims while sitting on hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from top corporations.

    While economic experts say that the relief package may have added to inflation, they also say that pandemic-driven uncertainty like supply chain issues are a much stronger driver of inflation rates. Meanwhile, corporations claim in public that inflation is what’s causing them to raise prices – when, in shareholder calls, they are bragging about raising prices beyond inflation costs and buying back stocks at record high rates.

    “You don’t see any correlation between inflation and the generosity of fiscal relief. Inflation is up everywhere, regardless of whether countries were stingy or generous,” Economic Policy Institute director Josh Bivens told Salon. “You also have to think, ‘What did we get for a couple of percentage points of inflation?’ We got 6.5 million jobs created over a 13-month span – that is an incredibly fast rate of growth that just absolutely dwarfs any other recovery we’ve had before.”

    Republicans are also opposed to policies suggested by Democrats that could stop the price gouging and ease the burden on working class Americans. Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a bill that would levy a 95 percent tax on all excess profits for large corporations in order to ensure that companies aren’t taking advantage of crises like the pandemic and conflict abroad to price gouge.

    GOP lawmakers roundly opposed the idea. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) called the idea a “disaster,” while Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said – without evidence – that Democrats were “misdiagnosing the cause of inflation.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mark Meadows Removed From North Carolina Voter Roll Amid Voting Fraud Inquiry

    Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina’s voter roll as state officials investigate the former Donald Trump chief of staff over allegations that he committed voter fraud in the battleground state in the 2020 election.

    The far right former Trump staffer was removed from the voter list in Macon County on Monday, the county’s board of elections director Melanie Thibault told the Asheville Citizen Times. Thibault said records showed that Meadows voted at the Macon County address in 2020. Officials removed his registration “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” state board of elections spokesperson Patrick Gannon said in a statement.

    The former North Carolina congressman came under investigation last month after reports found that Meadows had been registered to vote from a mobile home address in Macon County in western North Carolina. The owner of the property said that Meadows had never stayed at the property, meaning that it’s possible that Meadows committed a federal crime in using supposedly false information to register to vote.

    As The New Yorker discovered, Meadows and his wife actually live in Virginia, where they are not registered to vote. Virginia is considered a solidly blue state and has voted blue in every presidential election since 2008.

    North Carolina, on the other hand, is a swing state and its 15 electoral votes were especially crucial for Trump to win in the 2020 election. Trump narrowly won the state in the 2020 election.

    Ironically, Meadows was a leading proponent of Trump’s campaign to invalidate the results of the 2020 election over false claims that there was widespread voter fraud. During Trump’s last weeks in office, Meadows repeatedly pushed the Department of Justice to investigate election fraud in order to reinstate Trump.

    Recent texts unveiled by the January 6 committee showed that people in Trump’s orbit seemed to consider Meadows as someone who had the power to overturn the election. Right after the election in November, Donald Trump Jr. texted Meadows to strategize over how to keep his father in power. “POTUS must start 2nd term now,” Trump Jr. wrote.

    Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, also texted Meadows about overturning the election. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice,” Ginni Thomas wrote. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”

    “[T]his is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote on November 24. “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”

    As Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt wrote late last year, the texts revealing the depths of Meadow’s involvement in the election plot are similar to the Watergate tapes that eventually led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren & Chu Call Out IRS Auditors for Targeting Households Making $25K or Less

    In a letter sent to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department on Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) demanded that the agency explain why audits of low-income taxpayers have doubled over the past year.

    The letter, addressed to IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, points out that IRS audits of low-income earners doubled in fiscal year 2021 and that the practice of disproportionately auditing this group goes against President Joe Biden’s pledge to not increase tax scrutiny of people making less than $400,000 in income.

    As the IRS has seen its funding decline over the years, thanks to Republicans, the agency has increased its audits on the poorest Americans, especially people who qualify for the earned income tax credit, or those making less than $25,000 a year, typically.

    This is largely because it’s less resource intensive for the IRS to examine the finances of low-income taxpayers than to attempt to untangle the assets of the ultra-wealthy. The rate of audits for low-income Americans is still increasing, the lawmakers say, a concerning trend as the wealth gap grows ever wider in the U.S.

    “We know the IRS suffers from underfunding, and we are working to secure substantial, permanent funding so the IRS can take on the tax cheating of giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy. But, we also urge you to move swiftly to end the targeting of low-income Americans,” the letter reads. “The most vulnerable taxpayers should not shoulder the burden of insufficient IRS enforcement funding simply because they require fewer resources to audit.”

    In a hearing last month, Rettig denied that the poorest Americans were audited at a higher rate, calling the assertion “absolutely 100 percent false.” But the lawmakers point out that the IRS commissioner was relying on old data; more recent data from the last four years tells a different story.

    A recent analysis of IRS data by Syracuse University researchers found that low-income households making less than $25,000 a year were audited at five times the rate than all other tax-paying households in fiscal year 2021 and double the rate for fiscal year 2018, when low-income earners were 2.5 times more likely to be audited. Out of every 1,000 tax returns, 13 returns from people earning less than $25,000 were audited, while only 2.6 returns from people making over $25,000 went through an audit.

    People who qualified for the earned income tax credit were the subjects of over half of the most common type of audit in FY2021, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) researchers found. Fifty-four percent of correspondence audits, which are conducted by mail rather than face-to-face, were targeted at people making less than $25,000 last year.

    Further, the way that these audits are conducted makes it especially unfair and difficult for these taxpayers to navigate the process, TRAC pointed out. Because the IRS sets up its audits of low-income households to take the least resources possible, the audit subjects are also given the lowest level of customer service. This issue has become worse in recent years as the IRS has been especially overburdened due in part to pandemic programs and chronic underfunding.

    As Warren and Chu point out, however, correspondence audits are actually quite resource intensive, requiring the use of legal and other resources even though they are supposed to be less burdensome for the agency to complete.

    The lawmakers have asked the Treasury Department to explore ways to better enforce tax compliance for corporations and the wealthy. Earlier this year, Senator Warren led a Democratic call for more funding for the IRS as the agency warned that 2022 might be a tough filing year for taxpayers. They called for a minimum increase of 14 percent to the agency’s annual funding as well as an $80 billion investment over the next decade.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Board’s Top Counsel Makes a Formal Move to Make It Easier to Unionize

    This week, the top legal counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) took a formal step to make mandatory anti-union meetings illegal during union campaigns and to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, a long extolled labor law that would make it far easier for workers to unionize.

    In a legal brief issued on Monday in an ongoing case between the Teamsters and Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, the office of NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo called on the board to overrule a 1956 case that paved the way for employers to force workers to attend mandatory meetings in order to feed them anti-union propaganda, known as captive audience meetings.

    The office also called for the labor board to reinstate Joy Silk by overruling a 1974 case that overturned the doctrine after the board had abandoned its use in the 1960s. The Joy Silk doctrine ensures that if workers approach their employer with proof that a majority of the workplace wants a union, the employer can’t reject their request without having legitimate “good faith doubt” about a majority among the workers.

    As it’s relatively rare for employers to have concerns about workers forming a union other than simply not wanting them to, this would bypass the need for union elections in many cases, greatly reducing opportunities for employers to union bust.

    Abruzzo, a Joe Biden appointee, has been advocating for labor reforms and last week issued a memo arguing that captive audience meetings are “inherently” unlawful under the National Labor Relations Act.

    She has also said that the time frame between a union election filing and the election, during which many employers hold such meetings, is a “critical period” for anti-union employers. “They want time to coerce and intimidate workers to not vote for the union,” she said in an interview with More Perfect Union in February.

    “Joy Silk is logically superior to current Board law’s ability to deter election interference,” Monday’s brief says, explaining that current legal frameworks require the NLRB to be reactive to unfair labor practices charges during a union drive rather than allowing the agency to examine employers’ motivations when they refuse to bargain with their workers. Instead of deterring labor law violations, the brief continues, these frameworks open the door for them.

    “After the Board replaced Joy Silk, the commission of unfair labor practices during election campaigns, including unlawful discharges, increased dramatically,” the brief explains. “In turn, the number of elections fell precipitously and, as a result, the rate of unionization now rests near all-time lows.”

    Labor leaders and advocates have urged the NLRB to reinstate Joy Silk, which they say would make it far easier to form a union and could prevent workers from having to suffer abuses from employers when pursuing their right to union representation.

    “Reinstating Joy Silk in its original form would stop employers from playing games and refusing to recognize a union when workers have unquestionable proof of majority support and would deter employers from unlawfully interfering in organizing campaigns,” wrote American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President Liz Shuler on Tuesday. “Reinstating Joy Silk in its original form would be a huge win for workers everywhere.”

    If Joy Silk is put back into use, it could provide momentum for the labor movement, which workers have been reviving in recent months and years. Union membership has been declining for decades, partially because of lax and employee-friendly labor laws.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly Half of All Warehouse Injuries in 2021 Happened at Amazon Warehouses

    If a warehouse worker was injured on the job in 2021, there was about a 50 percent chance that they worked for Amazon, a new report highlighting dangerous working conditions at the company has revealed.

    Though Amazon employed only about 33 percent of warehouse workers in 2021, it was responsible for 49 percent of warehouse injuries that year, according to a damning new report from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition between four major labor unions. The report analyzes data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

    Overall, workers sustained nearly 40,000 injuries at Amazon facilities last year, representing a huge jump from the previous year; from 2020 to 2021, Amazon’s injury rate increased by 20 percent.

    Despite promises to become “Earth’s Safest Place to Work,” the company has shown to be quite the opposite. As SOC’s report and other analyses have found, Amazon’s serious injury rate is far higher than that of other companies. Serious injuries are ones that cause the worker to miss work or be reassigned to less strenuous tasks.

    In 2021, the company’s serious injury rate was 6.8 per 100 full-time equivalent workers, the new report found. This is more than double the serious injury rate of other warehouses, which have an average rate of 3.3 per 100 workers. With 7.7 injuries of any type per 100 Amazon workers filed with OSHA last year, Amazon’s workers suffered injuries at a far higher rate than those in the rest of the industry, who experienced 4.0 injuries per 100 workers.

    The report’s authors say that the reason for Amazon’s high injury rate is the company’s strict quotas and “obsession with speed,” which it monitors using invasive surveillance systems that track workers’ every move. The company also pushes hurt workers to keep working while they are recovering, even if the work will perpetuate the injury or make it worse.

    Musculoskeletal disorders like carpal tunnel or back pain are common among Amazon workers, investigations have found. Repetitive, strenuous movements place strain on workers’ bodies, and symptoms often linger long after the initial injury.

    The company’s policies appear to have a direct influence on its injury rate. While the rate increased each year between 2017 and 2019, from 7.5 injuries to 9.0 per 100 workers, the rate dropped to 6.6 injuries per 100 workers in 2020 — the same year that the company temporarily lightened its quotas in response to the pandemic. Although the policies were only in place for a few months, it was long enough to have a tangible impact on the company’s injury rate.

    To distract from their poor injury rates — and Washington state OSHA investigations into the Seattle-based company that have found wrongdoing — Amazon said last year that it would be spending millions on increasing safety and that it would halve the injury rate within the next five years. Yet the same year that the company made that pledge, the injury rate increased.

    “The facts show that for all of its public relations efforts, Amazon is not doing enough to keep workers safe,” SOC authors wrote. “Amazon could choose to slow the pace of work or ease the pressures of its oppressive monitoring systems. But after doing so in 2020 to accommodate pandemic safety precautions, the company largely returned to its old systems of surveillance and pressure in 2021 — as reflected in the injury data.”

    Amazon warehouse workers have been waging union campaigns in part because of working conditions in their facilities. Workers in Bessemer, Alabama, who are organizing with the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union, and Amazon Labor Union, which recently won a union in New York, have said that improving working conditions are a central plank of their campaigns. At BHM1, the unionizing facility in Alabama, the report found that serious injuries increased by a whopping 43 percent last year.

    The company can afford to ease its quotas, SOC pointed out in its report. While its policies appeared to push workers to injury, the company’s profits grew by 50 percent from 2020 to 2021, from $21.3 billion to $33.4 billion; meanwhile, Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos gained over $52 billion in net worth during the course of the pandemic alone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Introduce Bill Guaranteeing Workers Paid Time Off to Vote

    On Monday, a group of House Democrats introduced a bill guaranteeing that workers get paid time off to vote in federal elections as other voting rights initiatives have fallen flat.

    The Time Off to Vote Act, introduced by Representatives Nikema Williams (D-Georgia), Matt Cartwright (D-Pennsylvania), Cheri Bustos (D-Illinois) and Andy Levin (D-Michigan), would require employers to give their employees at least two hours off of work to vote, either on election day or on a day with early voting.

    Many states have no regulations requiring that workers get time off to vote; even in states that do guarantee that right, many only require that workers get unpaid time off, meaning that workers may not be able to take advantage of the benefit without suffering financially.

    The bill would help to normalize regulations for paid time off across the country, a critical step toward expanding voting access. It requires that the paid time off be separate from workers’ existing benefits.

    “No one should be forced to choose between earning their full paycheck or participating in our democracy,” Williams said in a statement. “In the last two elections, countless Georgians waited in line for hours to vote. Many waited all day. The Time off to Vote Act will make it easier for working people to exercise their sacred right to vote.”

    For months, Democrats have tried — and failed — to pass legislation to protect voting rights. President Joe Biden emphasized the issue during his first year in office, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) killed Democrats’ hope of being able to pass sweeping anti-corruption election bills like the For the People Act, which voting rights advocates have said are crucial to protecting democracy.

    The Time Off to Vote Act has been introduced in previous years, but has never been taken to a vote. Proposals like making Election Day a federal holiday also aim to ensure that work isn’t a barrier to being able to vote, but about a quarter of workers don’t receive days off on federal holidays, according to a 2018 federal survey.

    Not being able to get time off to vote is a major barrier to voting, making it hard or impossible for people to cast their ballots. According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted after the 2020 election, waiting in long voting lines and not having time off are two of the top barriers to voting. With Republicans creating stricter guidelines for mail-in ballot access, some people may be blocked from voting at all.

    These barriers affect Black and Latinx voters disproportionately. Racist voter suppression policies have led to fewer polling stations in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, meaning that people in these communities often have to wait in line for hours to vote; data has shown that Black and Latinx voters wait about 45 percent longer on average than white voters.

    Voters in poorer neighborhoods are also more likely to face long lines while waiting to vote — and for many low-income people, this is an impassable hurdle. Some workers aren’t allowed to take time off to vote, and those that have the option of taking unpaid time off often can’t afford to do so, especially when they may have to wait hours in line.

    While the Time Off to Vote Act could help expand voting access, two hours may still not be enough in places like Georgia, where some workers waited 10 hours or more to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Workers at Over 100 Facilities Have Contacted Amazon Union in Just 1 Week

    In the week after Amazon workers’ historic union victory at a Staten Island, New York warehouse, workers at over 100 Amazon facilities contacted the union about organizing their own workplaces, according to the union’s president.

    The union win has spurred a flood of workers to contact Amazon Labor Union (ALU) about unionizing, Christian Smalls told Yahoo Finance on Friday; just about three days before that interview and four days after ALU won their election, Smalls wrote on Twitter that workers at 50 facilities had already reached out about unionizing.

    If Smalls’s count is accurate, that means that workers at 10 percent of the company’s roughly 1,000 fulfillment and packing centers are interested in unionizing. Amazon employs around a million workers, primarily in warehouse and delivery jobs, meaning that these union efforts could cover over a hundred thousand workers — a remarkable scope.

    Smalls said that he is planning to hold a national call with Amazon employees within the next couple of weeks and will be traveling to facilities to help workers unionize.

    The wave came after ALU won the right to represent the over 8,000 workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, with a 55 percent vote in favor of unionizing. ALU is currently in the midst of organizing a second warehouse in New York City, LDJ5, where about 1,500 people are employed.

    The odds for the newly formed, independent union to win at JFK8 were incredibly slim. ALU’s campaign of bringing food to workers, fundraising for workers in need and connecting with them one-on-one was able to triumph over the multimillion dollar union-busting effort that the company had waged for months.

    And still, to Amazon, JFK8’s election isn’t over. In a recently revealed filing, the company charged that the election was unfairly swayed toward the union, and alleged that the union crossed legal boundaries when pro-union workers chimed up during mandatory anti-union meetings and when workers handed out marijuana to those who wanted it. Recreational marijuana is legal in New York state.

    “These objections have no merit, and exist merely as a tactic to stall the certification of our union, suppress a democratic outcome, damage morale, and shake workers’ faith in the NLRB process,” ALU said in a statement. “In these many objections, Amazon makes claims that are either misleading, trivial, or downright false. These claims will be investigated and dismissed, but not before weeks or months of NLRB time and resources are wasted.”

    It’s unlikely that Amazon will succeed in getting the election invalidated, as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rarely overturns elections with allegations of wrongdoing on behalf of the union, experts say.

    With workers proving that they can successfully organize against the $1.5 trillion company and the movement spreading across the country, ALU has the chance to massively expand in the coming months and years. Last week, Smalls and ALU Vice President Derrick Palmer met with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to discuss how the powerful labor union can aid ALU as it reaches new heights. Smalls says that the union is planning to provide “informal resources.”

    If the union movement catches on within Amazon, it could be a huge boon for the U.S. labor movement at large — which, despite recent successes, has been waning both in numbers and strategically, some labor advocates say. Recent union victories, like those at Amazon and Starbucks, have been led largely by young and college-aged workers; labor organizers say that this could breathe new life into the movement and chart new paths for grassroots organizing.

    Union membership currently hovers at around 10 percent and has been declining for decades. Over the past six months, however, petitions for union elections have increased by 57 percent, according to NLRB data. The data corroborates labor advocates’ recent observations that the movement has come back in a major way.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ocasio-Cortez Warns That Allowing Congress to Trade Stock Erodes Democracy

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pushed to pass a stock trading ban for lawmakers last week, warning that if such legislation isn’t passed, bad faith actors will take advantage of public mistrust in Congress over members’ ability to trade stocks in order to erode democracy.

    In a press conference calling for Congress to pass a ban on stock trading, Ocasio-Cortez said that the issue “isn’t just about actual impropriety, but … about the perception of impropriety.” One of the many consequences of corruption and insider trading within Congress, she pointed out, is that it undermines the public’s trust in the nation’s top legislative body.

    The nation is currently “tackling a crisis of faith in our institutions,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And that exploitation of that crisis of faith is a direct threat to our democracy, as we have seen over the last 2 to 4 years…. because it is these perceptions that can be exploited to undermine our most sacred institutions.” There is a “very direct connection” between public distrust of Congress and the erosion of democracy, she went on.

    On Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez spoke with Democrats in the House and the Senate calling for lawmakers to pass a stock trading ban. The press conference came directly after a House Administration Committee hearing examining the issue, which has bipartisan support in Congress.

    “We have to be able to assure the American people … that they don’t have to worry about if they’re competing with their member of Congress’s stock portfolio in order to be heard,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded. “It’s a pretty simple concept.”

    There are several proposals to ban stock trading; Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colorado) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), among others, introduced a bipartisan bill called the Ban Conflicted Stock Trading Act last year, which would ban lawmakers and their spouses from trading individual stocks while in office. The bill would give lawmakers the option to sell the stocks before taking office or move them into a blind trust, similar to Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly’s (D-Arizona) bill.

    Also before Congress is Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Washington) bipartisan bill that would force members and their spouses to divest entirely from stocks other than widely held investment funds, which they would only be allowed to trade if there were no conflicts of interest. Government watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington says that full divestment from individual stocks is crucial to the success of the ban.

    “Don’t forget that a very small percentage of the American people actually own stocks. This is a privilege of the wealthiest to even own stock,” Jayapal said. “Let’s be clear that there is something very wrong when people who do own stock look at the trades of members of Congress in order to determine whether or not they should buy a stock. There is a direct correlation.”

    Members of Congress as a whole frequently beat the market in stock trading — and the trades they make are often valued in the millions. Last year, members of Congress bought and sold nearly $290 million in stocks.

    Democrats are working on consensus legislation to bring to a vote, but there isn’t yet a timeline for when a bill could be passed. On Thursday, Merkley said that Democratic lawmakers are “essentially unanimous” in their support for a ban. Although some Republicans have voiced their opposition, a handful of Republicans have cosponsored or helped to introduce multiple bills, indicating that there could be enough support among the caucus to overcome a 60-vote filibuster in the Senate.

    Banning stock trading within Congress is enormously popular with voters. Poll after poll has found that voters across the political spectrum are in favor of the idea; a January survey from Data for Progress found that, when presented with arguments for and against the issue, 74 percent of people supported a ban.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Officials Find Starbucks Illegally Fired Seven Union Organizers in Memphis

    Labor board prosecutors have determined that Starbucks illegally fired seven union organizers who formerly worked in a unionizing store in Memphis, Tennessee, backing up the union’s claims that the terminations were clearly unlawful.

    According to Bloomberg, the labor board is planning to issue a formal charge against the company for firing the workers unless the company offers a settlement. The workers — dubbed the “Memphis Seven” by the union — represented nearly the entire organizing committee at the store. Starbucks terminated them in February, alleging that they had violated a number of company policies, including the dress code and rules against entering the back room while off the clock.

    At the time, Starbucks Workers United said that the firings were Starbucks’s “most blatant act of union-busting yet.” The company cited “policies that have never been enforced” to fire the workers, the union said, claiming in a complaint filed after the terminations that the company was illegally retaliating against the workers for organizing.

    “I’m hoping Howard Schultz is a smart man and he settles, but from the union-busting tactics that have continued, I don’t think he’s going to,” Nikki Taylor, one of the fired workers, told Bloomberg. “We’re going to win either way.”

    It is a violation of federal labor laws for employers to take actions to retaliate against pro-union workers, including termination, surveillance, or other forms of punishment. The consequence for illegally terminating a worker, which is incredibly common in union-busting campaigns, is usually very light — typically, the company simply has to rehire the worker and compensate them for lost pay, which is just the normal cost of operation for the employer.

    Even after the labor board finds that an employer illegally retaliated against a worker, such cases can take months or years to litigate. Since fired workers would likely be ineligible to vote in upcoming union elections, firing pro-union workers often proves to be an efficient way for companies to union bust.

    The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is hoping to speed up the litigation process in order to bring more immediate relief to workers who have been on the receiving end of illegal retaliation, Bloomberg reported.

    Meanwhile, the company has been escalating its anti-union campaign, firing numerous workers since the first clean sweep of the Memphis organizers. Over the weekend, the company fired Sharon Gilman, a pro-union worker at a store in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a student at North Carolina State University.

    In February, a sink fell on Gilman while she was washing dishes, startling her. The company, which has lied about its reasons for terminating pro-union workers before, claimed that Gilman purposefully broke the sink — but Gilman and the union believe that she was fired for her support of the union.

    As Howard Schultz retakes the helm at the company, Starbucks’s union-busting campaign may escalate even further. Schultz has been openly anti-union in recent events, and last week said in a town hall that companies like Starbucks are “being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.”

    In a recent Q&A with workers in Long Beach, California, Schultz snapped at a pro-union worker. When union organizer Madison Hall questioned Schultz’s claims that he isn’t anti-union, Schultz said, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?”

    The union has been incredibly successful so far, despite fierce opposition from the company. On Friday, Starbucks Workers United won union elections at all three stores in Ithaca, New York, making Ithaca the first town in which all Starbucks locations are unionized. Sixteen stores have now successfully unionized, and the union recently hit a milestone of 200 union filings across the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A Third of DHS Law Enforcement Staff Have Experienced Sexual Harassment at Work

    A new investigation shows that over a third of employees at law enforcement arms of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) say that they have experienced sexual harassment or sexual misconduct at work — and that officials have been trying to cover it up.

    According to documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), 10,410 employees said in an internal survey that they have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work, including hearing or reading inappropriate jokes, promises of rewards for sexual activity, and rape. Roughly 28,000 people participated in the survey, meaning that about a third of respondents (or about 36 percent) have experienced sexual harassment at work.

    The survey was conducted among employees at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Secret Service. Women make up a small portion of the agencies — at CBP, only 5 percent of the staff are women, according to the draft report.

    The survey is part of a report by DHS’s Office of Inspector General that has been in the works for years; a draft of the report was cleared in 2020 but has not been released or finalized. POGO found that advisers close to Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari have been working to cover up the sexual misconduct portion of the report, deleting parts of the review. Because of these cuts, the report has been held up for over a year.

    The fact that officials are attempting to cover up the sexual misconduct rates helps explain why victims are afraid to speak up, the data found. Though at least 10,000 people said that they had experienced sexual harassment between fiscal years 2012 and 2018, only 22 percent of the alleged victims filed a formal report. Among that group, about 41 percent faced retaliation, career-wise.

    One of the top reasons victims didn’t report harassment was that they didn’t believe that management would be supportive of employees who reported such behaviors. Other major reasons were that they didn’t believe that the employee who harassed or assaulted them would be investigated, or that they were afraid they would face retaliation for reporting the incident.

    Indeed, in many cases, DHS didn’t investigate employees who allegedly harassed or assaulted their coworkers, even when the cases led to settlements in court. One former patrol agent for CBP, Jenn Budd, said that she was raped while in Border Patrol Academy, and told POGO that she faced pressure not to report the assault.

    “My experience is not an anomaly,” Budd told POGO. “In general, the agency has an attitude that male agents are to be believed and those who complain about sexual assault or harassment are not.”

    “Taken as a whole, detailed evidence in the unfinished sexual misconduct report, as well as cuts from the domestic violence report, create the appearance that the four DHS components — which employ roughly 150,000 federal workers — suffer from a widespread culture of impunity, silencing, and retaliation when dealing with sexual misconduct and domestic violence,” POGO’s Adam Zagorin and Nick Schwellenbach explained.

    It’s unclear if DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is aware of the survey’s findings. A spokesperson for Mayorkas told POGO that he “has made it clear to the DHS workforce that sexual harassment and sexual assault will not be tolerated,” and that the agency is taking steps to combat misconduct through “reforms [to] Department policies and employee trainings.”

    Another part of a previous report, of which POGO obtained a draft, found several dozen allegations of DHS law enforcement employees engaging in domestic violence, which were substantiated by investigations. In most of the 35 cases that the Office of Inspector General uncovered, the employee faced no consequences and remained an armed law enforcement officer.

    That report was published in November of 2020, but the earlier draft that POGO obtained found that several key portions were removed or altered, including the part of the report that detailed the number of cases.

    The title of the report, which originally contained its key finding, was also changed. “DHS Has Not Adequately Addressed Law Enforcement Officer Misconduct Related to Domestic Violence” was changed to “DHS Components Have Not Fully Complied with the Department’s Guidelines for Implementing the Lautenberg Amendment,” a law stipulating that only people convicted of domestic violence can’t carry firearms.

    Previous reporting has found that racism and sexism run rampant at DHS agencies. In 2019, an investigative report found a Facebook group where CBP agents made callous jokes and comments about the deaths of asylum seekers and migrants at the border, using slurs and calling them “subhuman.” Agents also posted vulgar memes, including photoshopped images of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) engaging in oral sex with a migrant and with then-President Donald Trump.

    Although DHS investigated the Facebook group, the agents in the group received little discipline and were allowed to remain in their positions working with asylum seekers.

  • Starbucks Workers Have Filed to Unionize 200 Stores

    This week, Starbucks workers hit a milestone of 200 stores filing to unionize. The union has doubled the number of filings in just over six weeks, with more stores joining the movement at a remarkable pace.

    As noted by More Perfect Union, the milestone marks an acceleration in the union drive. The first 100 stores filed for unionization over the course of about 172 days; the second 100 stores took only 48 days. Stores are now filing at an average of more than two stores a day, and have filed in 30 states. Union filings cover over 5,000 workers across the country.

    The milestone also comes as Starbucks Workers United has doubled the number of stores that have successfully formed a union. Just about a month ago, six stores had voted to unionize; as of yesterday, 13 stores had voted to form a union, with more elections in the pipeline.

    Three stores in Rochester, New York, won a union after their votes were counted on Thursday, marking the first stores in Rochester to unionize. There are now unionized stores in New York, Arizona, Washington and Tennessee, including the company’s flagship roastery in New York City.

    “My heart is so full. I couldn’t be more proud of the strength, patience, and perseverance our team demonstrated throughout this very difficult transition,” said Michaela Wagstaff, a shift supervisor and union organizer at a suburban Rochester store, at a press conference. “To others who wish to begin this journey, it’s real and it’s possible. To those who paved the way, thank you for allowing us to learn from you and rely on you.”

    Starbucks Workers United has won all but one of its union elections so far, despite a harsh union-busting campaign from the company, which appears to be escalating its tactics as the union secures more wins. The company has been firing pro-union workers in attempts to quash union efforts; though retaliating against workers for unionizing is illegal, labor charges can take months or years to investigate, meaning that the union vote could be compromised even if the company is later found to have been breaking the law.

    Recently, Starbucks fired union organizer Laila Dalton, a worker in Phoenix, Arizona, who the labor board found was previously illegally retaliated against by the company. Dalton, the only Black person at her store, was threatened by managers and Starbucks HR, who interrogated her over her union organizing and asked if she had made false accusations of racism.

    The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over Dalton’s firing, saying that her firing was a violation of labor laws. The NLRB previously found the firing of another Phoenix union organizer, Alyssa Sanchez, to be illegal.

    Meanwhile, the company has spent likely millions of dollars on its anti-union efforts. It recently fired its top general counsel Rachel Gonzalez, who received $5.3 million in compensation last year, according to Bloomberg Law. The termination is likely related to the union-busting drive, which interim CEO Howard Schultz appears to be planning to escalate.

    In a town hall with workers on his first day as interim CEO on Monday, Schultz said that companies like Starbucks are “being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.” He referred to unions as “outside organizations” that are driving a wedge between management and employees — even though union organizers have repeatedly insisted that the workers themselves make up the union, and that the only party creating division is management.

    Workers have repeatedly asked Schultz and former CEO Kevin Johnson to sign onto their “Fair Election Principles,” which outline non-interference guidelines for the company.

    “We know that this is a victory and we will celebrate it as such, but we won’t feel true success until Starbucks signs the Fair Election Principles to allow others the room to truly engage in an unbiased election,” said Maggie Carter, an organizer in Knoxville, Tennessee, when the Knoxville store won their union last week. “This company can do so much better for us, and we can’t wait to show the entire country exactly what that looks like.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Labor Board’s Top Counsel Argues Anti-Union Meetings Are “Inherently” Illegal

    A top tactic that employers use to feed workers anti-union propaganda and threats could soon be outlawed, as the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) top legal counsel has released a new memo arguing for a return to a previous version of federal labor laws.

    NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo wrote in a memo released on Thursday that captive audience meetings “inherently involve an unlawful threat” against employees. She argued that the board should consider captive audience meetings — which she defined as also including coerced one-on-one meetings with managers — illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

    Abruzzo explained in the memo that captive anti-union meetings were once considered unlawful under federal labor laws, but are now perfectly legal. As a result, they are an incredibly common union-busting practice, and have been employed against recent organizing efforts by workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and more.

    If the NLRB does declare captive anti-union meetings illegal, it would be a major boon for union organizers. Such meetings are incredibly effective at intimidating employees against supporting union efforts; a 2009 study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) using data from 1999 to 2003 found that when employers used captive audience meetings in anti-union campaigns, the union won their election only 47 percent of the time. When employers didn’t use them, that rate jumped to 73 percent.

    Abruzzo said that any interpretation of the law which allows such meetings to take place is plainly wrong. Employers are exercising undue power over employees when they force them to attend meetings limiting their choices and actions in the workplace, she wrote.

    This reasoning can apply to a wide range of meetings, she went on, adding that even when managers aren’t outright telling workers not to unionize, captive meetings can contain “threat[s] that employees will reasonably perceive even if it is not stated explicitly.”

    “This license to coerce is an anomaly in labor law, inconsistent with the Act’s protection of employees’ free choice. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of employers’ speech rights,” Abruzzo said in a statement.

    “I believe that the NLRB case precedent, which has tolerated such meetings, is at odds with fundamental labor-law principles, our statutory language, and our Congressional mandate,” she continued. “Because of this, I plan to urge the Board to reconsider such precedent and find mandatory meetings of this sort unlawful.”

    Labor unions expressed support for Abruzzo’s memo. “The question of whether workers want a union should be the workers’ choice — not the employers’ — free of intimidation and interference. Captive audience meetings make that impossible,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

    While outlawing captive audience meetings could remove a large obstacle for many union organizers, it still may not be enough to equalize labor laws between employers and unions. A 2019 report from EPI found that 41.5 percent of employers were charged with unlawful actions during union campaigns, including moves like firing, harassing and surveilling workers.

    Many employers purposely break the law in waging anti-union campaigns because punishments for labor law violations are incredibly lax and usually only amount to a slap on the wrist, especially for large companies.

    Abruzzo hopes to level the playing field by addressing that, too. Though it’s up to Congress to pass sweeping labor law reforms, Abruzzo wants the labor board to reinstate the use of the Joy Silk doctrine, which would make it far easier for workers to unionize.

    Under Joy Silk, employers would have to present legitimate reasons for not recognizing a union’s majority status among employees — meaning that employers would rarely be able to reject union recognition as long as most workers say they want a union.

    Currently, employers are able to refuse to voluntarily recognize a union, forcing workers to undergo a union election. This buys employers time to hold captive meetings and otherwise discourage workers from unionizing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senate Confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson as First Black Woman Supreme Court Justice

    The Senate has confirmed Kentanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman Supreme Court justice in history.

    Senators voted 53 to 47 to confirm Jackson on Thursday. Three Republicans joined all Democratic senators in voting “yes.” Jackson will be replacing Justice Stephen Breyer, who announced his retirement earlier this year. She is expected to be sworn in sometime mid-summer.

    Jackson was the most progressive person being considered for the job by President Joe Biden, who had pledged to nominate a Black woman to the High Court. Jackson, a former public defender, is the only person on the Supreme Court who has represented criminal defendants, including people detained in Guantánamo Bay. The last justice with experience as a public defender was Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.

    As a D.C. Circuit Court judge, Jackson made rulings favoring unions, including one in 2018, when she rejected executive orders crafted by former President Donald Trump to limit federal workers’ ability to collectively bargain.

    With several confirmation hearings for other federal judgeships under her belt, most recently for her role as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she is the most highly vetted modern Supreme Court justice.

    During her confirmation hearing, Jackson faced a slew of baseless attacks from far right lawmakers, who used the hearing to bring up their bigoted grievances about racial justice and LGBTQ people. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) berated Jackson seemingly just for being Black, framing her as a proponent of the right’s fabricated version of movements for racial justice, while Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) demanded that Jackson define what a woman is in a series of questions aimed at attacking trans people.

    Progressive lawmakers celebrated Jackson’s confirmation.

    “Watch your step, concrete ceiling just shattered,” wrote Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts). “Congratulations to the Honorable SUPREME. COURT. JUSTICE. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Now read that again.”

    This story is breaking and will be updated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Union Filings Have Increased 57 Percent in the Last Six Months, Labor Board Says

    According to new data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), union election filings have increased in recent months, offering concrete evidence that the labor movement is on the rise.

    Between October 2021 and March 2022, union filings increased by 57 percent, up to 1,714 from 748 over the same period last year. Unfair labor practice charges have also increased by 14 percent, the labor board reports, from 7,255 to 8,254.

    The data confirms what labor organizers have already noted: there has been a marked rise in workplace organizing over the past year or so. Previous research found that workers logged over 3.2 million strike days last year, and that there was an increase in strike activity in October, which labor advocates deemed “Striketober” –- but last year was the first year for which researchers compiled that data, so there was no baseline to compare it to.

    Roughly 180 of the filings over the first half of the 2022 fiscal year were from Starbucks workers; other movements like that of unionizing graduate students at schools across the country have also been experiencing a surge over the past year.

    The NLRB says that the increase in the agency’s workload is evidence that the agency is in dire need of more funding. Both major political parties have neglected to raise the agency’s budget for nearly a decade, meaning that the agency has effectively lost about 25 percent of its funding over the past 10 years when adjusted for inflation.

    The lack of funding has resulted in consequences for the agency. The NLRB’s overall staffing has decreased by 39 percent since 2002, while its field staffing has been cut in half. General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo says that this has made it increasingly difficult for the agency to operate — thus also making it hard for the labor board to arbitrate charges against employers and process election filings.

    “Right now, there is a surge in labor activity nationwide, with workers organizing and filing petitions for more union elections than they have in the last ten years,” Abruzzo said in a statement. “This has caused a significant increase in the NLRB’s caseload, and the Agency urgently needs more staff and resources to effectively comply with our Congressional mandate.”

    “While our dedicated board agents continue to process petitions and conduct elections, investigate and prosecute statutory violations, and obtain remedies for victims of unfair labor practices, the NLRB needs a significant increase of funds to fully effectuate the mission of the Agency,” Abruzzo continued.

    Some agency staff blame members of both major parties for the funding decrease. Democrats are currently in charge of Congress, meaning that they have the power to appropriate more funds to the labor board — but they haven’t made moves to do so.

    “They have full control; there’s no excuse. I don’t think appeasement [of Republicans] has worked,” New York NLRB field attorney and staff union president Michael Bilik told HuffPost in March. “If this was a priority then they would do something about it, that’s the bottom line. Republicans are more resolved to destroy this place than Democrats are to save it.”

    President Joe Biden has requested $319.4 million in funding for the labor board for fiscal year 2023, a 16 percent increase over the $274.2 million that the agency has received for nine years. The increase will help ease some strain for the agency, but “will not fully address staffing needs,” the agency said in a press release.

    Research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the agency is responsible for far more workers now than it has been in previous years, despite having less funding. The number of private sector workers per full time NLRB employee has increased from roughly 75,000 workers per employee to over 112,000 workers per employee as of 2019.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Lost 12-Point Lead Among Child Tax Credit Recipients After It Expired

    While the expanded child tax credit was still being sent to families last year, Democrats held a huge electoral advantage over Republicans among recipients. Now, nearly four months after the credit expired, Democrats have completely lost that edge, new polling has found.

    According to polling of roughly 2,000 respondents from Morning Consult/Politico, in December, child tax credit recipients said that they would vote for Democrats over Republicans 49 percent to 37 percent, or by a 12-point margin.

    After the last checks were sent out that month, however, support for Democrats began decreasing. In February, the two parties were roughly tied; in polls conducted in the last week or so, Republicans now have an edge over Democrats in congressional elections of about three points, with about 46 percent support.

    The polls indicate that if Democrats want to capture more of the vote in the midterm elections this fall, they should go big on economic policies like the expanded child tax credit. Polling on other popular issues has also demonstrated this; recent polling by Data for Progress has shown that taking action on student debt would drive a significant amount of voters in key battleground states to go to the polls and vote Democrat this fall.

    The child tax credit expansion, which sent families hundreds of dollars each month to ease child care costs, died last year when conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) loudly announced his opposition to the idea.

    In private conversations, Manchin callously suggested — without evidence — that beneficiaries were using the credit to buy drugs. In public, he advocated for placing a work requirement on the proposal if it did go through, and promoted bad faith claims that the credit was encouraging people not to work.

    Recent research has debunked that claim, however. A newly released research brief from Washington University in St. Louis and Appalachian State University researchers found that the child tax credit had no significant effect on employment, and that those who received the credit were actually employed at higher rates than people who didn’t.

    In fact, employment of beneficiaries only dropped sharply when the expanded tax credit expired in December, with employment rates dropping from 72 percent to 68 percent. The data suggests that the child tax credit actually helps people keep their jobs so that they can afford child care, the costs of which can drive people out of work in order to care for their children full time.

    “Many parents can’t work right now because they can’t afford childcare, but they can’t afford childcare because they can’t work,” said Greg Nasif, public affairs director for poverty eradication group Humanity Forward. “Reverting the Child Tax Credit back to monthly payments could help break this vicious cycle for millions of families and end the decline of employment.”

    Extending the expanded child tax credit wouldn’t just be good politics for Democrats — it would also have huge impacts on families’ finances and the economy at large. In a working paper released last month, researchers found that for every dollar invested in families with children, there would be a return of $10 in societal and economic benefits; if low-income families with one child received an extra $1,000 a year, the program would cost $97 billion and generate $982 billion in benefits.

    The child tax credit was hugely beneficial in lifting and keeping Americans out of poverty. Data shows that child poverty increased by a whopping 41 percent after the credit expired.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Extends Student Loan Payment Pause, Erases Default Status for Millions

    On Wednesday, President Joe Biden officially announced that his administration will be extending the student loan payment pause and erasing default status for millions of borrowers so that they can get a “fresh start” when payments eventually restart.

    The administration will extend the pause through the end of August, Biden announced. “I know folks were hit hard by this pandemic. And though we’ve come a long way in the last year, we’re still recovering from the economic crisis it caused,” he said. “This continued pause will help Americans breathe a little easier as we recover and rebuild from the pandemic.”

    The Education Department announced that it will also be moving borrowers out of default, which could ease financial burdens and uncertainty for millions. There are currently over 7 million student loan borrowers in default, according to the agency’s data.

    Progressive lawmakers had previously advocated for the elimination of default status for these borrowers, saying that the measure was a step that Biden could take to relieve pressure and confusion for individuals who are in debt. They said that the Education Department could legally do so because of debt relief provisions in the CARES Act.

    But progressives’ ultimate goal is for Biden to cancel student debt — preferably all of it, some lawmakers and advocates say.

    Biden’s announcement prompted an explosion of calls for him to cancel student debt. On the campaign trail, he promised to cancel $10,000 worth of loans for every borrower, but he has refused to follow up on that pledge over a year into his presidency, despite progressive lawmakers’ and advocates’ warnings that his failure to do so will jeopardize Democrats’ chances of winning seats in Congress this fall.

    “With costs rising, the last thing working people need right now is another costly monthly payment. Now is the time to finish the job and cancel student debt,” the Congressional Progressive Caucus wrote on Twitter. The lawmakers noted that student debt disproportionately affects Black and Brown people and is also a huge burden on seniors.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), a leader in Congress on the issue of student debt, praised the extension but called on the president to do more. Warren has previously urged Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of debt per borrower, noting the vast economic impacts that borrowers suffer under the weight of student loans.

    “Last week, my colleagues and I led nearly 100 Members of Congress in urging [President Biden] to extend the federal student loan payment pause and today the President heeded our calls,” she said. “This extension is critical, but now is the time for the President to use his authority to #CancelStudentDebt.”

    Many debt advocates brought up a 2020 tweet from Biden’s official campaign account saying that he would cancel a minimum of $10,000 of student debt if elected.

    The Debt Collective, which has been advocating for Biden to eliminate student debt, said that the pause extension is just a bandaid for the problem, which will always loom as long as student debts aren’t canceled. On Monday, the group rallied in front of the Department of Education to encourage Biden to sign an executive order canceling all federal student debt.

    “Now, millions of families will be able to keep billions of dollars in their pockets — a testament to the collective power of debtors,” said Braxton Brewington, Debt Collective spokesperson. “But instead of pushing pause on the student debt crisis every few months — kicking the can down the road — President Biden should actually solve the crisis by picking up his pen and canceling student debt.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders, Bush Unveil Bill to Use the Defense Production Act to Fund Clean Energy

    As President Joe Biden doubles down on fossil fuels amid high gas prices, Democratic and progressive lawmakers have introduced a bill to instead make investments in renewable energy to lower utility prices and boost energy independence in the U.S.

    The Energy Security and Independence Act, introduced Wednesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Jason Crow (D-Colorado), would set the stage for Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur renewable energy production in the U.S. It would authorize $100 billion in funding to do so, and would ensure that at least 40 percent of the funds are used in communities that are on the front lines of the climate crisis.

    The bill comes in wake of conservative calls to increase oil and gas production in response to gas prices shooting up due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though climate deniers often claim that increasing domestic production of fossil fuels is a pathway to achieving energy independence, experts say that the U.S. will always depend on international energy producers as long as the country is largely reliant on fossil fuels.

    Last week, Biden announced that his administration will start unleashing oil from the U.S.’s strategic oil reserve in order to combat high gas prices, though some experts have said that not focusing on boosting renewable energies is a missed opportunity for him and the climate.

    “The days of energy security being synonymous with a reliance on human rights violators like Russia and Saudi Arabia, or a propagation of corporate profits for Exxon, Chevron, and BP, are over,” Bush said in a statement.

    “When we talk about energy security, it’s time we include the safety of Black and brown lives in that definition,” Bush continued, noting that notions of energy security should also take energy affordability, efficiency and the climate crisis into account.

    The bill would maintain momentum from renewable energy investments by creating a Domestic Renewable Energy Industrial Base Task Force in order to chart an all-of-government plan to move toward 100 percent renewable energy. It would provide funding for home weatherization and supply chain improvements.

    Lawmakers also hope to fund heat pump installation as climate advocates hail electric heat pumps as a far more efficient and climate-friendly home heating and cooling method. The bill would create “good, union jobs” to perform such installations, according to its fact sheet.

    “Today, with rising prices on essential items and Russia’s horrific war in Ukraine, it is clear now more than ever: Addressing climate change and energy dependence is not just an environmental issue, it is a matter of national security,” Sanders said. “Not only would this legislation help us combat climate change and strengthen energy security and independence in the U.S., but it will help working families save money on their utility bills, create good, union jobs, and take on the greed of oligarchs both here and abroad.”

    The bill has 27 House cosponsors, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and other progressive squad members. The bill’s six Senate cosponsors include Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts). It also has the endorsement of over 80 climate and progressive organizations.

    Biden has shown a willingness to kickstart climate-related products with the Defense Production Act, a wartime provision used to spur production of products deemed crucial for national security. Last week, he invoked the Defense Production Act to compel mining and processing for electric vehicle batteries and energy storage facilities.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Calls for Student Loan Cancellation as Biden Is Expected to Extend Freeze

    President Joe Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday that his administration is once again going to extend the student loan payment pause, which is currently set to expire in May.

    According to administration officials, Biden will only extend the pause for three months. The new expiration date would be August 31.

    Though the action received limited praise from lawmakers, it’s far from what debt advocates and Democrats and progressives in Congress have been demanding. Last week, nearly 100 Democrats sent a letter to Biden urging him to extend the payment pause through at least the end of the year, and to cancel student debt as he promised to do on the campaign trail.

    Without student debt cancellation, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed out, borrowers will continue to live under looming deadlines, which can add to financial stress.

    “I think some folks read these extensions as savvy politics, but I don’t think those folks understand the panic and disorder it causes people to get so close to these deadlines just to extend the uncertainty,” she wrote in reaction to the extension news. “It doesn’t have the effect people think it does. We should cancel them.”

    Ocasio-Cortez went on to say that constituents have asked her whether or not they should cancel medical procedures or sell their cars in order to prepare for payments to restart. The uncertainty is a “strain,” she said.

    Activists have been pressuring the Biden administration to take action on student debt. The Debt Collective marched in Washington, D.C. on Monday in order to demand that Biden cancel student loans.

    “[P]ausing a crisis does not solve it,” the Debt Collective wrote on Tuesday. “Biden has the complete authority to wipe it out completely with an executive order. Do it now, [Biden].”

    According to the Student Debt Crisis Center, borrowers collectively hold about $1.9 trillion in debt; for the over 40 million people in the U.S. who have student debt, the loans are a major financial burden that are holding them back from being able to participate in the economy. The vast majority of borrowers say that they’re unprepared for payments to restart, with many saying that the payments represent a huge portion of their salaries.

    “Student loans have been paused since 2020 and our economy hasn’t collapsed,” wrote Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) on Tuesday. “The cost of living goes up while wages stagnate. Don’t just delay payments, [President Biden], cancel student debt.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.