Republicans in Tennessee are pushing a bill through the GOP-controlled legislature that would establish an “alternative form of marriage,” creating a class of common-law marriage that would be limited to heterosexual people and circumvent age limits.
The bill, HB 233, would make it so that children of any age could be married. The bill’s main sponsor, Republican state Rep. Tom Leatherwood, told WKRN that the bill would create “an alternative form of marriage for those pastors and other individuals who have a conscientious objection to the current pathway to marriage in our law.” He has confirmed that “[t]here is not an explicit age limit.”
Only heterosexual people would be allowed to be married under the new class of marriage, which defines marriage as being between “one man” and “one woman.” It was likely filed as a homophobic response to a ruling against former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last month, in which a federal judge found that Davis had violated couples’ constitutional rights when she refused to marry them because they were gay.
“I don’t think any normal person thinks we shouldn’t have an age requirement for marriage,” said Democratic state Rep. Mike Stewart, adding that Republicans are essentially seeking to give people a free pass for “statutory rape.”
Lawmakers, along with gender-based violence and sexual assault survivor advocates, have raised concerns that eliminating an age limit for marriage would open up doors for children to be abused. In recent years, some states have been considering raising their age limit for marriage in order to prevent child abuse.
“The Sexual Assault Center does not believe the age of consent for marriage should be any younger than it already is,” the Sexual Assault Center of Middle Tennessee told WKRN. “It makes children more vulnerable to coercion and manipulation from predators, sexual and other.”
Research from 2021 found that nearly 300,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. Although the age of consent in most states is 18, children can be married as young as 16 with parental consent in many states — meaning that a child could potentially be coerced into marriage with their rapist. Only five states currently bar marriage for children.
Republicans across the country, including in Tennessee, have been passing bills specifically targeted at LGBTQ youths; advocates say that these bills would similarly lead to child abuse. GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have passed especially strict bills specifically targeting transgender children, banning them from participating in sports that align with their gender and barring school districts from freely teaching about sexual orientation or gender.
In Florida, Republicans passed a bill last year that would allow adults to inspect children’s genitals if they think that the child is transgender. The bill would leave children vulnerable to both discrimination and sexual abuse.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy may have broken federal conflict of interest laws by holding investments in a company with federal government contracts for COVID rapid test kits, according to a government watchdog’s analysis of the embattled Trump appointee’s financial disclosures.
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found in a report released last week that DeJoy owns roughly between $50,000 and $250,000 of stock in Abbott Laboratories, which produces the popular BinaxNow COVID testing kits. Earlier this year, federal officials awarded Abbott a $306 million contract for test kits as part of the government’s plan to send households free tests through the United States Postal Service (USPS). Abbott also recently won a contract modification for over $1 billion for test kits.
Further, DeJoy had made two transactions involving Abbott between January 7, when the USPS was announced as the shipping partner on the government’s plan, and January 13, when the government announced that Abbott would help provide tests for the program. The two transactions, one valued at between $1,001 and $15,000 and the other valued between $15,001 and $50,000, were made under an agreement about the value of the transactions, according to the filing.
Shortly after those announcements, DeJoy also touted the plan, which was a major win for the Postal Service. “The 650,000 women and men of the United States Postal Service are ready to deliver and proud to play a critical role in supporting the health needs of the American public,” DeJoy said in January. “We have been working closely with the administration and are well prepared to accept and deliver test kits on the first day the program launches.”
POGO says that DeJoy’s stock holdings could be in violation of conflict of interest laws, which bars government officials from reaping personal financial benefits from government projects that they’re involved or participating in.
Even if DeJoy doesn’t ultimately profit from his stock holdings, they could still be illegal, POGO writes. “[T]he law is intended to avoid even the risk that personal finances will influence the performance of official duties,” the report explained. “DeJoy’s stock ownership can trigger the ban on participating in any aspect of the project, whether that’s assisting with logistics or public relations.”
Though it’s unclear if DeJoy was involved in negotiating the contract with Abbott, he still oversaw a major part of the program as the head of the Postal Service. His promotion of the project would also qualify as more direct participation.
“The public shouldn’t have to second-guess whether DeJoy is more concerned with his stock portfolio than ensuring Americans get their mail, packages, prescriptions, and COVID-19 tests on time,” POGO wrote, urging Congress and federal officials to investigate DeJoy’s Abbott stock holdings.
DeJoy’s financial disclosures show that he’s a very active stock trader. In just six months in 2020, DeJoy reported 861 transactions.
He has come under fire for potential conflicts of interest before. According to financial disclosures from last year, DeJoy has a stake in shipping company XPO Logistics worth between $25 million and $50 million. XPO, which DeJoy formerly led as CEO, often works with the USPS to aid in busy shipping times. Overall, he has racked up over a dozen potential conflicts of interest.
Lawmakers have previously said that DeJoy’s conflicts of interest should have disqualified him for consideration for the role, but only the USPS Board of Governors has the ability to remove him. Though President Joe Biden has nominated new board members – enough to form a majority of Democratic board members who could vote DeJoy out – their nominations are stuck in the Senate.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced on Friday that the committee will soon hold a hearing on how corporate greed is contributing to rising prices and inflation.
The hearing scheduled for Tuesday will highlight a “level of corporate greed [that] has only widened the gap between the top one percent and the working class,” according to the press release. It will feature testimony from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Lindsay Owens, director of Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic advocacy group.
“The American people are sick and tired of corporate greed,” Sanders said. “They are sick and tired of being ripped-off by corporations making record-breaking profits. They are sick and tired of being forced to pay outrageously high prices for gas, rent and food while large corporations make out like bandits.”
The hearing comes as high prices are squeezing working-class Americans, while corporate profits rise. As inflation rose by 7 percent in 2021, corporate profits increased by 25 percent to reach nearly $3 trillion – a record high. CEOs and shareholders are benefiting heavily from these profits; last year, S&P 500 firms spent more than $900 billion.
Meanwhile, prices for basic needs have also skyrocketed. Gas prices are up 38 percent, used car prices have increased by 41 percent and Tyson has increased its prices on meat products, the press release points out. Analysis from Bloomberg last week found that the average family will have to shell out an extra $5,200 this year for the same level of consumption as previous years.
As corporations were raising prices, executives bragged about it. As Owens wrote in March, CEOs in many industries have told investors on earnings calls that raising prices on products has been a successful tactic for raising revenues and stock prices.
The Vermont lawmaker has been urging Congress to address corporate profiteering. During a speech on the Senate floor in February, Sanders said that billionaire wealth hoarding has led to an oligarchic society in the U.S.
“The time is long, long, long overdue for Congress to start addressing the needs of the American people,” the independent senator said. “Maybe, just maybe, we should do what the American people want, and not what wealthy campaign contributors want.”
In late March, Sanders introduced a bill that would capture nearly all excess profits through 2024. The Ending Corporate Greed Act would levy a tax on corporate windfall profits, capturing 95 percent of corporate profits exceeding average pre-pandemic levels through 2024.
This would not be the first time that the country implemented similar taxes in order to prevent corporate price gouging. During the first and second World Wars and the Korean War, the U.S. taxed profits to ensure that companies weren’t taking advantage of wartime to pad their pockets.
Other lawmakers have introduced similar bills; in February, lawmakers debated whether or not to give federal regulators more power to crack down on and potentially ban corporate price gouging. Republicans claimed that high prices are caused by labor shortages and inflation, though industries have been lobbying against corporate price gouging regulation in order to keep their profits high.
In a stunning win, Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, New York, have voted to form the company’s first union in the U.S., overcoming a years-long, multimillion-dollar union-busting campaign.
Workers at the JFK8 warehouse voted 55 percent in favor of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) with a vote of 2,654 to 2,131, according to Thursday and Friday’s ballot counts from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Roughly 8,300 workers are eligible to be a part of the union, likely making it one of the largest bargaining units in recent history.
The vote is a major victory for the union, and is especially remarkable coming from a fully independent union that was only formed last year. It will send shockwaves across the country as the labor movement experiences a resurgence, demonstrating that workers can overcome huge odds in labor organizing.
“My team has been amazing, the way we’ve been organizing camping out for the last 11 months in front of the building, occupying the breakroom. I didn’t expect nothing less,” Christian Smalls, ALU president, told Motherboard outside of the vote count held in Brooklyn. “I know what these organizers have been doing, what they sacrificed, what I sacrificed to get to this point, and I’m just happy to see it come into this realization. Happy to be a part of this.”
Amazon, which has been accused of illegal union busting by the NLRB, had waged a fierce anti-union campaign at JFK8, harassing workers with racist remarks, firing organizers, and employing a wide range of other typical union busting tactics like holding mandatory anti-union meetings and surveilling pro-union workers.
In February, New York police arrested Smalls and two other ALU organizers for bringing food to workers on behalf of the union, which they said was clearly a tactic by the company to intimidate workers against the union. The company claimed that the workers were trespassing. Amazon also fired Smalls in 2020 for organizing a walkout over the company’s COVID-19 safety protocols.
@amazon wanted to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against them…. welp there you go! @JeffBezos@DavidZapolsky CONGRATULATIONS @amazonlabor We worked had fun and made History #ALU # ALUfortheWin welcome the 1st union in America for Amazon
Workers at the Amazon BHM1 warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, also had their votes counted this week. With a majority of the ballots counted, the union drive, led by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, was behind with 875 votes in favor and 993 votes against. However, there are still over 400 ballots that have been challenged by either the company or the union that won’t be counted until the NLRB decides whether or not they’re valid.
Bessemer workers have also faced brash anti-union moves from the company. This is their second chance at forming a union after the NLRB determined that Amazon illegally interfered with the first election; though the union is behind so far in this attempt, it is much closer this time around. Last time, the labor board took particular issue with a mailbox that Amazon installed on company grounds to collect ballots that workers said was constantly surveilled by the company to intimidate workers who may be voting “yes.”
Between union busting in Bessemer and Staten Island — including anti-union moves at another Staten Island warehouse that has yet to vote on unionizing — Amazon spent a total of $4.3 million on anti-union lawyers last year, according to financial filings.
JFK8 workers will now face another challenge: negotiating with Amazon to create their first contract. The company will likely continue employing anti-union tactics to stonewall union workers, as countless anti-union employers have done before them.
The boost in profits exceeds the 7 percent inflation for consumer prices, bolstering arguments that companies are raising prices beyond inflation rates in order to pad their profits. Meanwhile, hourly wages for U.S. workers increased by about 4.7 percent last year, which is equivalent to a pay cut of about 2.4 percent.
Experts say that the record profits are evidence that inflation isn’t a concern for corporations.
“Clearly, mega-corporations could easily absorb the higher costs of goods and services right now,” wrote Robert Reich, former labor secretary and economics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “They’re not raising prices because they have to. They’re doing it because – with so few competitors – they can. The problem, at its core, is corporate greed.”
Indeed, corporate executives have admitted on earnings calls with shareholders that they’re not afraid to exploit inflation and current crises like the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to increase their profits.
“Our business operates the best when inflation is about 3 percent to 4 percent,” Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen told investors last June. “A little bit of inflation is always good in our business.”
Other corporate executives have lied about their reasons for raising prices. As CBS reported, Tyson’s CEO told shareholders that the company it’s only raising prices on meat products in order to cover inflation costs for the company. However, it posted profits of $1 billion in the first quarter of 2022, a 48 percent raise over the same period last year.
Lawmakers have proposed legislation to reign in runaway profits. Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would have created a minimum tax rate of 15 percent in order to prevent companies from paying $0 in taxes or a negative tax rate, thanks to corporate subsidies.
Other recent proposals have been aimed directly at current profits. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) unveiled his corporate windfall profits tax, which would levy a 95 percent tax on corporate profits that exceed pre-pandemic levels for companies that make more than $500 million in profits yearly. The tax resembles policies that the U.S. put in place during World Wars I and II and the Korean War to discourage companies from profiteering from the conflicts.
“We cannot allow big oil companies and other large, profitable corporations to continue to use the war in Ukraine, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the specter of inflation to make obscene profits by price gouging Americans at the gas pump, the grocery store, or any other sector of our economy,” Sanders said in a press release on the bill. “During these troubling times, the working class cannot bear the brunt of this economic crisis, while corporate CEOs, wealthy shareholders, and the billionaire class make out like bandits.”
In wake of evidence revealing ties between Ginni Thomas — the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — and Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has called for Clarence Thomas to resign.
Recent reporting has revealed that conservative activist Ginni Thomas played a role in organizing January 6 attackers, and attended the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House before the crowd marched to the Capitol. Last week, leaked texts revealed that she had encouraged Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to move forward with the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“Clarence Thomas should resign,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Tuesday. “If not, his failure to disclose income from right-wing organizations, recuse himself from matters involving his wife, and his vote to block the January 6th commission from key information must be investigated and could serve as grounds for impeachment.”
About a decade ago, Clarence Thomas failed to disclose payments to his wife from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, which had paid Ginni Thomas $680,000 over the course of four years. In his decades as a Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas has not recused himself from any case related to his wife’s right-wing activism. He was also the only justice to vote in January to grant Trump’s request to block the release of January 6-related presidential documents.
Ocasio-Cortez later warned on Twitter that if Democrats don’t take up a vote to impeach Clarence Thomas — a process that is similar to the impeachment process for presidents — they could face political consequences later.
When she and other Democrats pushed for Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 over his extortion of the Ukrainian government, Ocasio-Cortez said, some top Democrats were skeptical, saying that it would come back and hurt their party. But in hindsight, it would have been irresponsible for Congress to ignore the issue, and Democrats would have ended up shouldering the blame, she said.
“When we look back at the decision to impeach Trump over Ukraine today, could you imagine if the naysayers and those claiming to be ‘politically savvier’ won?” said Ocasio-Cortez. “WE would be explaining why we allowed it to happen instead of the Senate explaining why they acquitted.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued, tying Trump’s impeachment to the current situation with Clarence Thomas. “Often what seems like the righteous yet politically foolish thing short term ends up being the wisest choice long term,” she said. “All this is to say we shouldn’t dismiss actions available re: Clarence Thomas’s acts.”
A group of congressional Democrats sent a letter to the Supreme Court on Monday, asking for Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from cases related to January 6 or the plot to overturn the 2020 election. “[G]iven the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements,” the lawmakers wrote.
In Morton, Illinois, at a welding shop for trucking company G&D Integrated, welders worked in fear that one small mistake could end up killing someone. The way that the shop floor was arranged, roughly 2,500 pound truck decks could drop on someone if a chain snapped.
“If guys weren’t paying attention and didn’t let the guy next to him know if a chain snapped or one of the rigging, one of the shackles snapped, the frame would fall right on the other guy and kill him,” Ron Rhoades, a welder at G&D, told Truthout. The tables that the welders worked on were simply too close to each other, workers said.
But when the workers tried to ask managers to move the tables for their own safety, they were brushed off. It wasn’t necessarily an issue of funding — the tables simply needed to be moved 90 degrees, no new equipment needed. Still, workers faced resistance from management, who fielded their concerns on this and other safety issues but never acted on them.
Management’s blasé attitude toward worker safety was typical in the roughly 20-person welding shop at G&D, where workers voted to unionize with the Iron Workers Union last October by a 16 to 4 vote. Workers say that they sought representation so that they could have a voice in the workplace.
“We all felt that it was pretty much just a matter of time before somebody got hurt,” said Thomas Hanley, a former G&D welder. “Other places I’ve worked with usually would listen to the people that work there and if there was a better way to do something, then they were all on board with it.”
The company came down hard on the union drive, amassing a mountain of union-busting charges in the process. Now, nearly six months later, there are only two workers left in the shop. Throughout the union-busting campaign, some workers were either fired or quit; then, on March 1, management told most of the remaining 10 or so workers that they were to pack their belongings and leave.
The Iron Workers Union has filed nearly 150 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), alleging that the company’s anti-union practices were illegal, according to Iron Workers Union representative Vince Di Donato. The charges “run the whole gamut,” Di Donato told Truthout, “anything from wrongful terminations, surveillance, retaliation, unilateral changes, discrimination” — a slew of common union-busting tactics that the union says violated federal labor laws.
Before the union drive, workers were berated and abused by their direct supervisor, Tony Campbell, who refused to implement safety-related changes or otherwise listen to his employees when they came to him with concerns. Shortly after Campbell was hired a couple of years ago, he hired one of his friends to manage the group, workers said — even though his friend had little to no welding experience and some of the welders had decades under their belts.
“It was Tony’s way or no way,” said Rhoades, one of the workers who initially contacted the union. Rhoades was among the group of workers who was fired in March. “There was no compromise at all, no matter what you said.”
Timing was constantly an issue for Campbell, workers said, even though the welders working in the shop last year were so efficient that they had cut manufacturing time for some products in half. Campbell would often stand on the mezzanine, where he could see over the shop floor, to time how quickly tasks were completed and to pit workers against each other. He would also time how long workers took in the bathroom; if they weren’t fast enough, he would turn off the air conditioning in the bathroom, even though it was often the only reprieve for workers on hot days.
After workers staged a march in September to demand that their union be recognized — a request that was roundly rejected by the company — management began holding mandatory anti-union meetings, surveilling and isolating pro-union workers and excluding them from meetings. The company also hired several union busters from the Labor Relations Institute, a notorious union-busting firm, which cost about $3,000 a day, Di Donato said.
“In our captive audience meetings with union busters, they would say, ‘Oh, well, Joe O’Neill, the owner of the company, he’s pissed. He’s pissed off. There’s a good chance he’s gonna close the doors, get rid of all you guys if you push this through,’” said Michael Stout, a former welder fabricator for G&D.
Around the time of the union drive, the company was bringing in record profits, which workers say was partly due to their labor. They wanted to share in those profits with the company, but asking for a raise was often a non-starter — even with the boom in business, managers would do things like pull old, frayed straps that workers had thrown away out of the trash and order employees to reinstall them.
At one point, before the union drive, managers had put off Hanley’s annual review too long, preventing him from receiving his annual 80 cent an hour raise. While other workers whose reviews were delayed would get back pay for the time that they missed, managers decided after a few months that Hanley’s review had been delayed too long and that he simply wouldn’t get his raise for that year.
The union-busting drive escalated quickly after workers overwhelmingly won their union. Pro-union workers suddenly had “points” for unexcused absences on their record despite never missing work; employees at the company are allowed 12 points before they are fired. Overtime was cut for pro-union workers only. Previous threats to the workers’ jobs became outright warnings, as managers would show them letters from G&D’s primary client, mining and construction multinational Komatsu, saying that the unexcused absences were forcing Komatsu to withdraw its contracts.
Managers also singled out workers who they knew to be pro-union. An employee who management identified as one of the original organizers had his workstation moved next to management’s office, where he was separate from other workers and could be surveilled. At one point, after the employee got knee surgery, managers refused to let him work for months, even though they had let him come back to work after he got the same knee surgery a few years ago.
Another pro-union employee was bullied by management; once, managers came up to the employee and tried to buy the Iron Workers Union shirt off of his back. “They bid against each other with [the worker] standing there, offering him money,” Di Donato said. “I think they went up to $50.”
Meanwhile, during sessions to negotiate a contract for the workers, management refused to bargain and stonewalled the union at every turn.
Di Donato says that the company’s union busting is the “prime example” for the reinstatement of the Joy Silk doctrine, a decades-old order that would require employers to provide legitimate reasons for declining to voluntarily recognize a majority-supported union and implement much harsher penalties for unfair labor practices. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo announced last year that the agency has been considering reinstating the rule, which has been dormant for several decades. Labor advocates say that the implementation of Joy Silk would change the landscape of the labor movement, which has been experiencing a resurgence over the past few years, and make it far easier for workers to form a union.
Just reimplementing Joy Silk may not be enough for workers, however. As union membership has fallen, the NLRB has been shrinking, HuffPost reported this month. The agency’s budget hasn’t been increased in a decade, thanks to inaction from Congress, making it far more difficult for the agency to handle its growing volume of work.
Workers say that though G&D may take a hit financially due to the mass layoffs, management may consider union busting to be worth the cost. “I think they’re willing to take that hit because they’re so anti-union,” Hanley said.
Workers have also speculated that the reason the company is so determined to get rid of the union is that managers are afraid the union will spread to its truck drivers; the first worker they fired in the anti-union campaign was also the only truck driver in the unit. “They did everything they could to keep him out,” said Di Donato.
Di Donato believes that the union wouldn’t have had to file any of the labor charges if Joy Silk had been in place — and that workers could have continued at their jobs and secured a union contract by now.
“Union busting is a billion dollar a year business for a reason,” he said. “Our workers voted yes in the election. They held strong. But I’ll tell you right now, I don’t know too many groups of workers that would go through what these guys did and still vote yes.”
“Instead, these workers are out in the unemployment line looking for a job because the company broke the law multiple times,” Di Donato continued, “and they’re trying to get away with it.”
Last week, the day after the 111th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, a mysterious, smoky gas began filling an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. According to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), workers didn’t know what the gas was; while workers on the third floor were asked to take unpaid time off and leave at around 1:30 pm Central time, people on other floors were kept working at their stations.
At around 4:30 pm, a little over an hour after workers first saw the gas on the first floor and with no word from management, workers evacuated by word of mouth, fearing that the gas was smoke or another dangerous substance, the RWDSU said.
Outside, there were only a few emergency vehicles at the roughly 850,000 square foot facility, and the workers were told to clock out. At 7 pm, with the gas still present, night shift workers were ushered in to work.
The gas was later determined to be vaporized oil from a dysfunctional compressor. It’s unclear if this could cause health issues.
“Everyone was very confused, and the lack of information made us feel very unsafe,” Amazon worker Isaiah Thomas said, expressing shock that employees were kept inside even after the third floor was evacuated. “I don’t know what I was breathing in for that long, and I don’t know if it’s still in the air at work today either. I feel very unsafe and I wish management would treat us like humans and care about our safety in a real way.”
The Amazon workers have contacted the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) over the incident at the warehouse. The fulfillment center, known as BHM1, has been in the midst of a union campaign for nearly two years.
The company has disputed the RWDSU’s account of the incident, claiming that it evacuated workers and is paying them for their whole shift, though Amazon has lied to the public before in order to save face.
“Accidents happen, but there’s no reason why thousands of workers should have had to keep working breathing in what we thought was smoke for hours,” Thomas said. “Why is my health less important than a package getting shipped?”
The smoke filled the Amazon warehouse only one day after the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Thomas pointed out.
The 1911 fire at a garment factory in Manhattan is among the deadliest workplace incidents in U.S. history, killing 146 workers, most of whom were young immigrant women. The casualties were largely the fault of the factory’s owners, who regularly locked workers inside the building without access to stairs and exits; when a major fire broke out, workers were forced to jump out of windows in hopes of saving themselves.
Late last year, OSHA launched an investigation after a tornado collapsed an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing six people and leaving one person injured. Workers said that the deaths were partially due to unsafe policies from Amazon, which banned employees from having a cell phone on them while working.
RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum called for better safety standards in response to the incident. “Amazon knowingly kept workers at their stations for hours during the incident, failed to properly evacuate the facility, and told workers to go back to work before any clarity on the safety of the vapor in the air was known,” Appelbaum said.
“It is unconscionable that Amazon would keep workers at their stations when there is a known health and safety issue,” he continued. “Workers’ lives should never be put in jeopardy for profits, something Amazon has an inexcusable history of doing.”
On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a bill that would capture nearly all of the excess profits being raked in by major U.S. corporations as they exploit ongoing crises to pad shareholders’ and executives’ pockets.
The Ending Corporate Greed Act would levy a 95 percent tax on excess profits for corporations that make more than $500 million in yearly revenue until 2024, and would apply to about 30 top companies. The bill, cosponsored by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and introduced by Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) in the House, would raise an estimated $400 billion in one year.
Unlike recent windfall tax proposals, Sanders’s bill would target not only the oil and gas industry but all other large corporations in the country, including Amazon, Starbucks, Blackstone and Pfizer.
The legislation is inspired by windfall profits taxes that were enacted during the first and second World Wars and the Korean War; during WWII, the tax rate reached 95 percent in order to prevent war profiteering. As Sanders’s press release on the bill points out, the U.S. enacted a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies in the 1980s after the government temporarily implemented price controls on oil during the energy crisis of the 1970s.
“The American people are sick and tired of the unprecedented corporate greed that exists all over this country. They are sick and tired of being ripped-off by corporations making record-breaking profits while working families are forced to pay outrageously high prices for gas, rent, food, and prescription drugs,” Sanders said in a statement.
“The time has come for Congress to work for working families and demand that large, profitable corporations make a little bit less money and pay their fair share of taxes,” he continued.
Profits that are higher than average profits from pre-pandemic years would be subject to the tax, and wouldn’t be subject to revenues to ensure that companies aren’t punished for raising prices for legitimate reasons.
Last year, major corporations like Chevron, Apple and Moderna made tens of billions of dollars more than they did in pre-pandemic years; between 2015 and 2019, Amazon made an average of $6.9 billion in profits a year, but the company’s profits skyrocketed to $38.2 billion in 2021.
The bill would discourage companies from raising prices in order to pad profits, a practice that has run rampant in recent years as companies take advantage of the COVID economy and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sanders’s bill is similar to previous Democratic proposals in that it targets corporate windfall profits as those profits are soaring, but it goes much further in its scope and size.
Previous bills have only targeted oil and gas companies; one proposal by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) would tax Big Oil’s income in 2022 at only 50 percent above companies’ average pre-pandemic incomes. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-Rhode Island) windfall tax bill would subject crude oil barrels imported or produced to a 50 percent tax on the difference between current prices and average pre-pandemic prices.
Progressive advocates and economists say that Sanders’s bill is necessary to protect customers from being fleeced by companies that are seeking to fill executives’ and shareholders’ wallets. The bill has been endorsed by organizations like the Economic Policy Institute and the Sunrise Movement.
“The Covid pandemic, and now war in Europe, have caused immense suffering — but also prosperity for a few giant corporations,” said University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman. “In the past, the United States has successfully used excess profits taxes to remedy this unfairness. Senator Sanders’s bill reconnects with this distinguished tradition, for the benefit of us all.”
On Monday, the White House unveiled President Joe Biden’s 2023 budget proposal, which includes a minimum tax on the nation’s wealthiest people, a measure that progressive lawmakers and advocates have long called for.
The “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” would subject households worth over $100 million to a 20 percent minimum tax rate. The tax slightly retools what is considered income for the wealthy, as it would tax salaries as well as unrealized gains from assets like stocks and bonds, making it similar to previous wealth tax proposals from Democratic lawmakers.
The tax is projected to raise roughly $360 billion in revenue, the majority of which would come from the nation’s roughly 700 billionaires. Overall, the proposed budget would lower the federal deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
The proposal will likely have the support of progressive and Democratic lawmakers in Congress, who tried to pass a similar measure last year in the Build Back Better Act, which was sabotaged by Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). It’s unclear if the two conservative lawmakers would support Biden’s proposal.
“This minimum tax would make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters,” the document detailing the tax says. “[T]his new minimum tax will eliminate the ability for the unrealized income of ultra-high-net-worth households to go untaxed for decades or generations.”
Indeed, billionaires often pay tax rates that are very low compared to the level of wealth that they are allowed to accumulate. An analysis from the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Council of Economic Advisers last year found that between 2010 and 2018, the nation’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid only 8.2 percent of their income on average, which is lower than even the lowest federal income tax rate of 10 percent for low-income earners.
Moreover, billionaires don’t owe taxes on the vast majority of their wealth; people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos deliberately make low salaries on paper so that they can avoid paying federal taxes. They don’t have to pay taxes on their stocks until they sell them, and the taxes on stock sales can be relatively low compared to the amount of money that stocks are sold for.
Because of the nation’s lax tax code for billionaires, the top roughly 0.002 percent are given free license to accumulate more wealth than any individual could ever need.
Earlier this month, a report by Americans for Tax Fairness found that the nation’s billionaires have gained $1.7 trillion in wealth during just the past two years, marking a 57 percent growth in their collective net worth. Those gains alone could nearly pay off the entirety of student debt owed by borrowers in the U.S., but would likely never be taxed under the current tax system.
“In a tax system full of special favors for the wealthy, none is more outrageous than the ability of billionaires with skyrocketing fortunes to go tax free year after year or pay much less than they should owe,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, said in a statement on Monday. “President Biden’s Billionaires Income Tax takes a historic step to bringing us closer to a single system in which the ultrawealthy start paying taxes each year on their wealth gains the way workers pay taxes on their paychecks.”
This will likely prove to be a winning proposal for Biden. Polling has found that a majority of likely voters from across the political spectrum believe that billionaires should be subject to more taxes and that those taxes should take unrealized capital gains into account.
New research finds that if the expanded child tax credit were made permanent, the social and economic benefits from the investment would far outweigh the costs of the program.
A working paper from Columbia University, Barnard College and Open Sky Policy Institute researchers finds that if low-income families with one child saw their income increase by $1,000 a year, the benefits would outweigh the cost of the program 10-fold.
While making the program permanent would cost the government $97 billion, it would create social benefits worth $982 billion. These benefits include direct impacts, like improved health and longevity for both children and parents and increased future earnings for the children, and indirect benefits, like lower crime rates. Taxpayers would also benefit, saving $135 billion in total, the research finds.
Working papers are often not yet peer reviewed or edited for publication in a journal. If the paper’s findings are true, it bolsters arguments from advocates of expanding the tax credit that the benefits of the program quite literally outweigh the costs.
Other research has found that the expanded child tax credit from the COVID stimulus bills, which gave families $300 a month for children under 6 and $250 a month for children aged 6 to 17, had a huge impact on the economy. Data released last month found that after the tax credit expired in January, child poverty increased by 41 percent, plunging 3.7 million children into poverty.
Other surveys also showed that the tax credit was transformative for families. The Census Bureau has found that 91 percent of low-income families spent the credit on necessities, while 92 percent of families said that the payments helped improve their financial stability, according to a poll by SaverLife.
Some conservatives have tried reviving the proposal by tying it to work requirements, but advocates say that adding hurdles would only weigh down the program and make it harder for the money to reach families who need it most.
The Child Tax Credit expansion lifted millions of kids out of poverty.
In the annals of American history we have never had a government program that so clearly and directly helped so many in such direct need.
Poverty is a policy choice. It’s not too late to renew the expansion.
Progressive lawmakers expressed frustration last year as Manchin demanded that they choose between the tax credit, paid family leave or child care funding proposals that were in some versions of the Build Back Better Act.
Some progressive lawmakers have called for reviving the expansion. “Another month without the expanded Child Tax Credit and working people continue to pay the price,” wrote Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) on Wednesday. “We have to fix this. Renew it now.”
On Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) introduced a bill that would get rid of a limit on the construction of public housing and take steps to guarantee affordable housing for all Americans.
The Homes for All Act would authorize the construction of 12 million public housing and affordable housing units, making a $1 trillion investment in construction projects over the next decade. The legislation would also make funding for maintenance and other expenses related to public housing mandatory, in order to ensure that public housing funding isn’t cut in the future.
Omar said that the bill, which is cosponsored by progressive Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), and others, is especially timely as the nation faces an urgent housing crisis.
“Since the eviction moratorium ended, we have seen an uptick in people being kicked out of their homes,” Omar said in a statement. “We need solutions that meet the scale of this crisis. We need Homes for All, my bill to invest in 12 million new housing units – vastly expanding the available affordable housing stock, driving down costs throughout the market and creating a new vision of what public housing looks like in the United States of America.”
The bill takes aim at a particular provision called the Faircloth Amendment, which has prevented the government from constructing mass amounts of new public housing units since 1999. The amendment, supported by Republicans in the ‘90s, specifically bars public housing agencies from using funds to build new housing, and locks in the amount of public housing units to the level they were at in 1999.
Housing advocates have long called for the repeal of the Faircloth Amendment, and several lawmakers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have introduced legislation that would get rid of the provision.
Last year, Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation specifically aimed at repealing the limit; she attached it to an early version of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill last year, but affordable housing provisions were ultimately negotiated out, and the social spending provisions were eventually nixed entirely thanks to conservative Democrats.
Omar has introduced the Homes for All Act before, in 2019. But this week’s bill comes as the nation faces a new crisis, fueled by pandemic-related economic instability and real estate firms that are buying up homes in order to turn them into investments in record numbers.
At the end of 2021, institutional and individual investors made up a quarter of home sales. A disproportionate amount of these investments are low- and mid-priced homes, meaning that homebuyers are being out-competed and forced to rent.
Meanwhile, corporate landlords are waging what seems like a coordinated effort to jack up rent prices, exploiting tenants who are already experiencing high inflation rates. According to Redfin, rents have risen by 14 percent on average; in some cities, like Austin, Texas, rents are being hiked up by an average of 40 percent, forcing people to reevaluate their finances or find somewhere else to live.
Housing advocates have praised the bill as timely and urgently needed. It has been endorsed by organizations like the National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Working Families Party.
“Everyone living in the United States should have safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing: a Homes Guarantee. Right now, our country falls woefully short of delivering on this promise,” said Tara Raghuveer, housing campaign director for People’s Action, which also endorsed the bill. “The housing and homelessness crises are the direct and predictable result of treating housing as a commodity rather than a human right… This will be the new standard by which progressive housing policy is measured.”
Democrats in the House Oversight Committee have scheduled the first hearing to consider Medicare for All since the onset of the pandemic, as progressive lawmakers wage a new push for the proposal.
Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York) and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) will lead the hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, March 22, to consider proposals for universal health care and to assess the ways that the U.S.’s primarily private health care system is affecting people without insurance.
The hearing will also feature Representatives Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-New York), Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), as well as testimony from big names in the Medicare for All sphere, like activist Ady Barkan and economics professor Jeffrey Sachs, among others.
“We deserve a health care system that prioritizes people over profits, humanity over greed, and compassion over exploitation,” Bush wrote on Thursday. “That’s why we’re holding our first Medicare for All hearing since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy will save lives.”
This is the latest move in progressive lawmakers’ recent push to revive the campaign for Medicare for All, which has been relatively dormant in Congress for several years; the last time Democrats held a hearing on the subject was 2019.
In the hearing, lawmakers will cover Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Washington) Medicare for All Act, which would establish a single-payer health care system and which recently surpassed a record 120 cosponsors. Democrats will also discuss inequities faced by non-white people, people with disabilities and LGBTQ people, who are disproportionately underinsured or uninsured.
“As chairwoman of the Oversight Committee,” Maloney told The Nation, “I am holding this hearing to examine how the gaps in our current system threaten the health of the most vulnerable among us and how Congress can ensure that every person in this country has access to high-quality health care — no matter who they are.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) recently announced that he is planning to reintroduce his Medicare for All legislation; the last time he did so was in 2019.
“In the midst of the current set of horrors — war, oligarchy, pandemics, inflation, climate change, etc. — we must continue the fight to establish healthcare as a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders wrote. The Vermont lawmaker also recently called for all medical debt to be abolished.
The hearing comes during a pandemic that has exposed major cracks in the U.S. health care system. In the early months of the pandemic, an estimated 7.7 million people lost health care coverage after losing their jobs, leaving them in the lurch as COVID-19 swept the U.S., the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t have universal health care.
As the pandemic continues, disparities in pandemic-related health outcomes have become even more clear. A survey last year found that about 1 in every 3 COVID deaths and 40 percent of cases are linked to a lack of health insurance. Another study found that for every 10 percent increase in a county’s rate of uninsured people, the county experienced 70 percent more COVID infections and 50 percent more deaths.
Starbucks workers in Seattle won their union with a unanimous vote on Tuesday, becoming the first store in the company’s hometown to form a union in several decades.
Workers voted 9 to 0 to form a union at the Broadway and Denny store, becoming the seventh location to unionize with SEIU-affiliated Workers United. The win hits close to home for the company, which is in the midst of a fierce union-busting campaign across the country.
“We are so excited to win our union unanimously and for what this means for the national movement. Our victory is going to make other Starbucks partners confident and show that we can organize Starbucks,” said Sydney Durkin, a shift supervisor at Broadway and Denny. “This is what happens when workers stand together and fight together.”
The Broadway and Denny store, which filed to unionize in December, is a popular location for corporate employees to visit on their way to work, workers said. The store is located in incoming CEO Howard Schultz’s home district and is only 10 minutes by car from Starbucks’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.
Workers say that while the company has been using aggressive union-busting tactics in other parts of the country, it has treated pro-union employees in Seattle with much more respect. While the company tried to union bust by singling out individual workers during the first weeks of their campaign, the union busting stopped abruptly after a month, which was “really jarring,” said Rachel Ybarra, a barista at Broadway and Denny.
“It’s hard not to think that it has to do with who Starbucks is choosing to discipline. Buffalo was the first to file, so it got hit hard,” said Ybarra. “But Mesa and Memphis – almost all the organizers they’ve fired have been of color. It’s impossible not to notice that.”
Ybarra added that it was “disgusting” that the company turned other stores into a “warzone” while giving Seattle organizers special treatment.
The workers condemned Starbucks for union busting and asked the company to live up to its supposed progressive principles.
“There’s a right side of history and a wrong side of history, and right now, Starbucks is on the wrong side of history,” Durkin said. “Union rights are civil rights, and Howard Schultz’ old union busting tactics won’t work here.”
The unionization comes just as Schultz is preparing to take over for Kevin Johnson as interim CEO. Workers have said that Schultz is being brought back in specifically for his union-busting capabilities; several Starbucks locations and a roastery were unionized in the 1980s, but the union was decertified in the 1990s while Schultz was leading the company. In his 1999 memoir and in conversations with workers, Schultz has described unionization as a personal affront to him and his leadership.
The union-busting campaign has faced scrutiny from lawmakers. In a letter to Schultz sent by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Tuesday, Sanders called on Schultz and the company to stop union busting and “obey the law.” The lawmaker pointed out that the U.S. Constitution guarantees workers the right to organize.
As former CEO Howard Schultz takes the helm once again at Starbucks, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has demanded that the company “do the right thing” and allow employees to exercise their legal right to organize.
On Tuesday, Sanders wrote a letter to Schultz demanding that the company step out of the way of unionizing workers. He emphasized that Starbucks workers are afforded the right to unionize under the U.S. Constitution, pointing out that the company has already been found by federal officials to be violating the law in its union busting attempts.
“As you prepare to head back into your former role as Starbucks CEO, I am writing to you with a simple request,” Sanders said. “Please respect the Constitution of the United States and do not illegally hamper the efforts of your employees to unionize.”
The union recently announced that workers at over 150 locations have filed to unionize so far, a figure that grows nearly every day. Workers at the company’s hometown of Seattle voted to join a union on Tuesday afternoon with a unanimous vote of 9 to 0. They joined six stores that have already voted to form a union and there are quite a few more elections ongoing or coming up in the next weeks and months.
Workers say that the company has brought Schultz back as interim CEO in order to crack down even further on the unionizing effort. They have asked lawmakers to increase public pressure on the company to hurt its public image and discourage further anti-union moves.
The union, Starbucks Workers United, has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing the company of over 20 counts of illegal union busting. On Monday, the list of unfair labor practices charges grew as the union filed allegations that the company illegally threatened New York pro-union workers with loss of income and benefits or termination at locations in Long Island and Manhattan.
Sanders expressed frustration over the company’s potentially illegal anti-union tactics. “Instead of obeying the law, I am deeply concerned that Starbucks has engaged in a massive union busting campaign led by outgoing CEO Kevin Johnson. Workers have been fired for ‘the crime’ of being pro-union,” Sanders wrote.
The Vermont lawmaker pointed out that the company has plenty of resources at its disposal to meet workers’ demands for better pay and working conditions. Starbucks raked in $29.1 billion in profits last year, paid Johnson $20 million in compensation in 2021, and has pledged to spend $20 billion on stock buybacks and dividends over the next three years.
“I am under the impression that Starbucks respects its ‘partners’ and supposedly adheres to progressive values. If that’s the case, it should behave lawfully and respect the decisions of its employees as to whether or not they want to join a union,” the lawmaker continued. “This is a pivotal moment for Starbucks. As you return to the company, it is time to do the right thing: End the union busting and obey the law.”
Electrifying the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) fleet of vehicles would be both feasible and carry many benefits for the agency and the climate, a new report finds, bolstering the case against adopting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to buy an all-new gas-guzzling fleet.
According to the report, prepared by the USPS Office of Inspector General, nearly all of the agency’s routes could be serviced by electric mail trucks. Only 2,600 out of 177,000 routes wouldn’t be serviceable with electric vehicles – the other nearly 99 percent of routes fit within the 70 miles that the USPS has found that the electric trucks could travel on one charge.
The Inspector General concluded that electric vehicles would be able to meet nearly all of the Postal Service’s needs while helping the agency save money over time and meet its sustainability goals of a 25 percent carbon dioxide emissions reduction by 2030.
“We identified several clear benefits of adopting electric vehicles into the postal delivery fleet, including improved sustainability and environmental impacts,” the Office of the Inspector General wrote. “The Postal Service is poised to refresh its delivery fleet at a moment when electric vehicle technology is rapidly advancing. Battery ranges are improving, and battery costs are declining.”
The report comes as the Postal Service is poised to defy President Joe Biden’s pleas for the agency to go all-electric. Under the direction of DeJoy, the Postal Service finalized a plan last month to purchase up to 165,000 gas vehicles, frustrating climate advocates who say that USPS trucks are perfect candidates for electrification.
Indeed, an experimental fleet of six electric vehicles adopted by the USPS in 2017 showed numerous benefits. The agency found last year that, since 2017, those six vehicles have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 52,770 pounds. If those findings are extrapolated to an all-electric fleet, emissions reductions would triple compared to the current plan to purchase a 90 percent gas-powered fleet, the report found.
The tiny electric fleet also saved the agency $10,000 in fuel costs, since electricity is cheaper and more reliable per equivalent gallon of gas. While gas has fluctuated between roughly $2 a gallon and over $4 a gallon during the past decade, the cost of electricity per equivalent gallon of gas has hovered around $1.25, according to the report.
Buying an all-electric fleet could save the postal agency money in the long run. Electric vehicles are more reliable than gas trucks and require less maintenance to operate. Meanwhile, private companies like UPS and Amazon are buying electric vehicles in part to try to reduce emissions.
The chief caveat is that the upfront costs of buying electric vehicles would be significantly higher than the current plan to replace the agency’s 217,000 older vehicles with new gas-run trucks, according to the report. Not only would the trucks be more expensive, they would also require the installation of chargers for the vehicles when they are not in operation.
However, if Congress is willing to provide a subsidy of about $7 billion, the agency would be able to break even on the costs in about 10 years, the report finds. Congress is considering a bill that would provide such a subsidy, but the bill is moot if the agency doesn’t decide to go all-electric.
Democrats in Congress have been trying to stop DeJoy’s plan. A group of House Democrats recently called for an investigation into the contract to buy the vehicles, questioning whether or not the agency properly conducted an environmental review of the plan. Meanwhile, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) introduced a bill earlier this month that would stop the USPS from purchasing a new fleet unless at least 75 percent of the replacement vehicles were electric.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called for medical debt to be abolished on Monday in response to news that the country’s three largest credit agencies will be removing paid-off medical debt from credit reports.
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion announced last week that credit reports will no longer include medical debt that went to collections after it’s been paid off. This accounts for almost 70 percent of medical debt on credit reports, and will eliminate billions of dollars in recorded debts. The agencies are also extending the grace period before medical debt appears on credit reports from six months to one year.
Sanders praised the move, but said that it doesn’t go far enough. “‘Medical debt’ and ‘Medical bankruptcy’ are two phrases that should not exist in the United States of America,” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “Removing 70 percent of past-due medical debt from credit reports is a step in the right direction, and much more needs to be done. We must cancel all medical debt.”
Earlier this week, Sanders said that he’s planning to reintroduce legislation to establish Medicare for All as millions of people are set to lose Medicaid coverage under a privatization scheme that the Biden administration is implementing. Medicare for All would eliminate most medical payments, greatly reducing if not eliminating widespread medical debt issues.
Adults are putting off needed medical care or skipping prescriptions because of the costs associated, including people with insurance coverage who cannot afford the co-pays and coinsurance. Though it comes at the expense of people’s health, such behavior is understandable given that millions of people in the U.S. are pushed into poverty by these out-of-pocket medical expenses.
In his last presidential run, Sanders campaigned on eliminating medical debt and placing strict guidelines on how medical debt could be enforced.
“500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year from medical bills. They didn’t go to Las Vegas and blow their money at a casino. Their crime was that they got sick,” he said in 2019. “How barbaric is a system that says, ‘I’m going to destroy your family’s finances because you had cancer’?”
At the time, it was estimated that Americans hold about $81 billion in medical debt, according to a 2016 study. A more recent study from last year finds that Americans actually owe about $140 billion in medical debt, which has become the largest source of debt in collections in the country in recent years. That study did not include data from the pandemic, which may have caused that figure to balloon even more.
On Friday, Starbucks Workers United announced that 150 stores have filed to unionize over just the past few months, marking a milestone in the rapidly growing campaign.
The Westmoreland location in Portland, Oregon, was the 150th location to file for unionization. “The Westmoreland partners are standing with their fellow Starbucks workers coast to coast,” the union wrote. “Together we – the partners – will make a better Starbucks!” Since then, severalmorestores have filed to unionize.
Workers have been filing to unionize nearly every day; at the end of February, the union marked its 100th store filing, meaning that an average of about two stores has filed to unionize every day over the past month. Six stores have successfully unionized so far, with more elections scheduled for the coming weeks. Only one store has voted against unionization.
Over the weekend, Starbucks workers at one store went on strike to protest what workers say are unsafe working conditions. Workers at a store in Overland Park, Kansas, say that the company has been retaliating against pro-union workers at the location, which filed to unionize earlier this year. The location recently underwent a union election.
One pro-union worker, Maddie Doran, told KCUR that the location has been understaffed and that management accused her of stealing around the time of the election, which Doran said was “clearly retaliation.”
Retaliating against pro-union workers is just one way that Starbucks has been union busting, according to the union.
Starbucks Workers United has filed over 20 complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the company over the past weeks, alleging that the company has been using illegal union-busting tactics in order to quash union efforts. The company has illegally coerced workers during anti-union meetings, retaliated against and fired union organizers, and restricted workers from talking to journalists, the union says.
Recently, the union said that the company has been cutting hours for workers in order to punish pro-union workers and interfere with their organizing campaigns. A union survey of workers found that employees have had between two and 15 hours cut from their weekly schedules, which has impacted workers’ finances and potentially rendered them ineligible for benefits like health care.
The union has asked the labor board for a nationwide injunction against the company to stop it from continuing to cut hours.
“Being a single woman living on my own, I chose this job because I was promised that I would be able to maintain any hours needed in order to survive, for me, that was at least 35 hours minimum a week,” Angel Krempa, a shift supervisor in Buffalo, said in a statement earlier this month. “Since going to court to fight for my store to receive ballots, I have had to fight to get at least 35 hours, I cannot afford to pay my bills without dipping into my student loan bill account now.”
“I’m terrified I won’t be able to survive on my own much longer, for a corporation that brings in millions of dollars in revenue, I am deeply insulted and hurt, when all I’ve tried to do is bring accountability to my managers,” Krempa went on.
So far, Starbucks has been losing its legal battles against the union. Last week, the NLRB found that the company illegally retaliated against two pro-union workers in Phoenix, Arizona, firing one and suspending another. If a judge finds that Starbucks broke the law, the company will have to distribute materials about workers’ right to organize and give the fired worker back pay.
However, the company may be looking to ramp up its anti-union campaign. It recently brought back Howard Schultz to act as CEO, replacing CEO Kevin Johnson in a move that workers say was clearly due to Schultz’s anti-union history.
On Monday, hundreds of Chevron workers in the San Francisco Bay Area went on strike after voting down the company’s latest contract offer, which workers say contained insufficient wage raises.
The contract, covering over 500 workers, was struck down by United Steelworkers (USW) Local 5 members on Sunday. Workers were forced to go on strike after the company said that it had already offered its “last, best and final” contract, according to the union.
“It’s disappointing that Chevron would walk away from the table instead of bargaining in good faith with its dedicated work force,” Mike Smith, USW’s National Oil Bargaining Program chair, said in a statement. “USW members continued to report for work throughout the pandemic so our nation could meet its energy needs. They deserve a fair contract that reflects their sacrifice.”
The company has brought in workers to replace the union members, which it has been training for a year. The latest contract expired in February and workers have been operating under a rolling daily extension, according to the union.
The refinery workers say that one of the main reasons for the strike is insufficient wage raises. USW, which currently represents about 30,000 oil workers in negotiations with oil and chemical employers, reached a national agreement with refiners in February to raise wages by 12 percent over four years.
Local 5 had asked for an additional pay bump of 5 percent in order to account for higher costs of living in the San Francisco area, where it’s estimated that individuals must make at least $80,000 a year just to survive.
The company has offered additional increases of about 2.5 to 3.5 percent. “We countered with just a minimal bump and we were told by the corporation that there was no movement, no money,” Local 5 Vice President B.K. White told KTVU. “We feel when a company can report 15 billion profit and the highest profit since 2014, they can give the people whose backs they’re making these earnings off of, give them a little boost to help them out.”
Indeed, Chevron reported high 2021 profits earlier this year. The company increased its profits to $15.6 billion in 2021 after experiencing a loss of $5.5 billion in 2020. Meanwhile, even though the company lost money in 2020, it paid its CEO, M.K. Wirth, nearly $29 million in compensation. The company also recently promised its shareholders that they would see dividends from current high oil prices, and increased its stock buyback program to as much as $10 billion a year.
In response to workers’ demands, the company has said that their asks “exceeded what the company believes to be reasonable.” The company has said that it plans to resume talks, though the union says it hasn’t been contacted about further negotiations.
According to labor reporter Jonah Furman, the strike could just be the first in a series of strikes for the roughly 200 USW bargaining units in negotiations. “[T]his could be the first shot in a much wider work stoppage, like the one that happened in 2015, only this time against the backdrop of high political stakes re: domestic oil supply, massive inflation that is primarily dramatized through gas prices, and a generalized increase in pro-worker sentiment,” Furman wrote in his newsletter, Who Gets the Bird?.
Recent polling finds that voters overwhelmingly support cracking down on Big Oil as gas prices have reached record highs and lawmakers pursue legislation to tax their profits.
The poll, conducted earlier this month by Hart Research Associates on behalf of the League of Conservation Voters and Climate Power, found that a whopping 87 percent of voters believe that lawmakers should take action against profiteering oil and gas companies. Eighty percent of voters favor a windfall tax on industry profits, which would discourage companies from price gouging.
Most voters agree that oil companies are profiteering off of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with 57 percent of voters saying as such and only 24 percent of voters disagreeing. Meanwhile, 49 percent of voters say that current high gas prices are due to oil and gas companies wanting to pad their profits, while only 37 percent say that prices are a reflection of market conditions.
Democrats have pinned high prices directly on oil and gas companies looking to profit off of international conflict and pandemic-related economic uncertainty. Progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) have called for accountability for the industry. “[T]here should be consequences” for oil company “profiteering,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted last week.
Earlier this month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) introduced a bill that would tax barrels imported or produced by large oil companies based on the difference between current prices and average pre-pandemic prices. Revenue collected from the tax would be redistributed directly to the public, with checks totalling about $240 a year for individuals making less than $75,000 in income.
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) introduced similar legislation last week, which would directly target taxable income from this year that exceeds pre-pandemic profits. The bill would also give consumers a a tax credit based on that tax.
The polling suggests that passing such a bill would be a winning strategy for Democrats looking to have a leg up in the 2022 midterms. Though experts say that there is virtually nothing that President Joe Biden could do to affect gas prices, higher gas prices largely correlate with lower presidential approval; Biden’s approval began dipping in late summer last year, around when inflation began rising and gas prices followed.
Democrats have an opportunity to win over voters with messaging around gas prices as well. Sixty percent of poll respondents say that price gouging is a major cause of high gas prices; the same proportion also says that oil companies’ decisions to limit production and export large volumes of oil are keeping prices high.
“Democrats can increase their advantage on these issues by not taking Republican calls for expanded oil production at face value and by making sure voters understand these proposals for what they really are,” the polling memo reads. “For example, by 46 percent to 36 percent, voters oppose relaxing or eliminating clean water protections that limit the development of shale oil, and voters need to know that this is what Republicans want when they call on America to ‘drill, baby, drill.’”
Oil companies and conservatives have indeed been advocating for more drilling in the face of the war in Ukraine. They claim that increasing production is currently crucial, ignoring the fact that the U.S. is already producing near its limit.
In response to the poll, climate activists have called for the passage of a windfall tax. “Despite the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns, voters know who is to blame for high gas prices: Big Oil,” Jamie Henn, Fossil Free Media director, said in a statement. Fossil Free Media has launched a campaign in support of the proposal to push Congress to pass the bill.
“For politicians on both sides of the aisle, this polling is proof that their constituents overwhelmingly support the idea of a windfall profits tax that would stop Big Oil profiteering and send relief directly to consumers,” Henn continued. “If members of Congress refuse to act, it’ll be concrete evidence that they’re in the pockets of the industry.”
The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected Republican-drawn district maps in the state for the third time, sending the majority-Republican Ohio Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board yet again.
In a 4-3 decision, the judges found that the maps were unconstitutional and didn’t reflect the will of voters in the state. “Substantial and compelling evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the main goal of the individuals who drafted the second revised plan was to favor the Republican Party and disfavor the Democratic Party,” the majority wrote.
The majority, including one conservative justice, said that Republicans have inflicted “chaos” on themselves in the map-drawing process. They directed the commission to turn in new maps by March 28. At least part of the primary election set to take place on May 3 will almost certainly have to be delayed.
“Resolving this self-created chaos thus depends not on the number of hands on the computer mouse but, rather, on the political will to honor the people’s call to end partisan gerrymandering,” the ruling reads. Republicans have already had their maps rejected by the court twice for gerrymandering, and the commission has missed numerous deadlines to pass maps.
Ohio’s state legislative redistricting process thus far:
– Missed deadline – Vote w/o bipartisan support – @OHSupremeCourt rejects gerrymandered maps – Vote w/o bipartisan support – Court rejects again – Missed deadline – Vote w/o bipartisan support – Court rejects a third time
Democratic state lawmakers criticized Republicans for trying to pass gerrymandered maps yet again.
“For a third time, the Supreme Court has ruled that the majority party is not above the law and cannot blatantly disregard the will of Ohio voters and the Ohio Constitution,” said Ohio House Minority Leader and Democratic redistricting commission member Allison Russo in a statement. “Democrats have a state legislative map proposal ready to go that is fair, constitutional, and closely reflects the statewide voting preferences of Ohioans. Now, it is up to the Republican Commissioners to work with us to adopt the fair maps Ohioans deserve.”
The most recent maps were adopted by the redistricting commission 4 to 3, with only Republicans voting for the map and one Republican joining the two Democrats in the group to vote against them. Because they weren’t passed with a bipartisan majority, they would only have been in place for four years.
When the commission redrew the maps after they were rejected for the second time in February, the justices ruled that the maps gave unfair favor to Republicans, giving them 58 percent of seats when previous election data has shown that about 54 percent of Ohio voters preferred Republicans. The maps then would have created a 42 percent seat ceiling for Democrats, the justices found.
Under the newly rejected maps, Republicans would have gotten 54 percent of seats in the state, matching voter preferences on a surface level. But voting rights advocates said that the maps would have put a hard cap on the number of districts that Democrats could win, regardless of voter preferences in that election.
Democrats weren’t given a chance to contribute to the map-drawing or even review the maps when they were presented in February, justices said in their decision. “The evidence shows that the individuals who controlled the map-drawing process exercised that control with the overriding intent to maintain as much of an advantage as possible for members of their political party,” the justices wrote.
On Thursday, GOP Gov. Mike DeWine suggested that Republican and Democratic mapmakers “work together” on the fourth draft, which is theoretically the entire purpose of the redistricting commission. The group was created in 2015 in a constitutional amendment approved by voters, in order to stamp out partisan bias in the map-drawing process, but Republicans have been able to commandeer the commission and create gerrymandered maps anyway.
On Wednesday, Starbucks announced that it will be replacing CEO Kevin Johnson with former CEO Howard Schultz as interim chief executive, a move that union organizers say is meant to directly target their union drive.
In a press call with Congressional Labor Caucus members on Wednesday, union organizers said that they’re wary of Schultz and his anti-union attitude. They say that Schultz has told organizing workers that the union drive is a personal insult to him.
“I think it’s very clear why they brought Howard back in,” said Starbucks Workers United organizer and Buffalo employee Casey Moore. The board believes that “Howard is the only person who can convince workers to not unionize,” Moore said.
Buffalo worker and union organizer Jaz Brisack said that Schultz is “coming out of the shadows to lead this fight against the union.” Brisack noted that when the New York workers began their campaign, the company brought out a “Buffalo SWAT team” made up of company executives to fight the union, including Schultz.
Indeed, Starbucks board chair Mellody Hobson said on CNBC on Wednesday that Schultz is “singularly capable of engaging with our people in a way that will make a difference.” During the company shareholder meeting the same day, Hobson said that the company will not take a neutral stance on unionizing, as major shareholders have requested, because it would limit “our ability to speak to our partners in certain ways.”
Starbucks Workers United has asked Schultz to sign onto the group’s “Fair Election Principles” asking for non-interference during the union campaign. Labor Caucus co-chair Rep. Donald Norcross (D-New Jersey) echoed that appeal in the press call on Wednesday. “Howard, do the right thing here,” Norcross said. “Give these workers a voice.”
Though Schultz stepped down from CEO in 2017, he has been involved with the company as executive chairman and traveled to Buffalo last year to convince workers to turn against their then-nascent union campaign. In a speech, Schultz bizarrely compared the company to Holocaust victims and repeatedly referenced workplace issues that unionizing workers had complained about.
Schultz, who likely would have been the U.S. Labor Secretary if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, has had a decades-old record of being against unions at Starbucks. In his 1999 memoir about leading the company, Schultz wrote that he views unionization as an affront to him and his leadership. “I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns. If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union,” he wrote. Schultz stepped down as CEO in 2000 and returned from 2008 to 2017.
Starbucks workers have tried to unionize before — drives in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s and early 2000s and in New York in the late 2000s faced strong opposition from the company, which was led by Schultz during many of those years. Labor leaders at Seattle Starbucks stores and a local roasting plant that were unionized in the late ‘80s, when Schultz first took ownership of the company, said that Schultz was extremely hostile toward them.
The first time Pam Blauman-Schmitz, local union representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers, visited the plant under Schultz’s leadership in the late ‘80s, “He went ballistic screaming at me, telling me to get out of the plant,” Blauman-Schmitz told The New York Times. “He followed me all the way out.”
However, the current union campaign, which has already led to six unionized stores, is the largest the company has ever faced. About 145 stores have filed to unionize so far, and the filings are coming in at an incredibly fast rate —just a few weeks ago, the union was celebrating having gotten filings from over 100 stores.
As the union campaign has grown, the company’s union-busting moves have gotten bolder. Starbucks recently began cutting hours across the board for employees, a move that workers say is meant to financially and psychologically manipulate pro-union employees.
On Wednesday, workers met with the Congressional Labor Caucus and asked lawmakers to increase the pressure campaign against Starbucks. The company’s stock has fallen over the past six months, and shareholders have asked the company to lighten its stance on the union in part because the campaign has been bad for publicity.
“No workers should go through what we’re going through,” said Brisack. The workers joined the caucus in calling for the passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would clear the path for unionizing workers in the U.S. and place harsher penalties on union-busting employers.
After roughly 60 Amazon warehouse workers walked off the job demanding a raise and better working conditions on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) expressed support for the workers in their multi-state walkout.
The main motivation behind the walkout, which took place at three separate facilities in New York and Maryland, was a demand for $3 an hour raises. Workers also called for 20-minute breaks, which the company offered earlier in the pandemic but reduced to only 15 minutes in recent months.
Led by Amazonians United, workers have circulated a petition over the past months with a list of demands, calling for more staffing and better inclement weather policies after six workers in Illinois died when a storm swept through an Amazon facility.
Workers said that the deaths could have been avoided if the company had allowed cell phones on the work floor and held storm drills with workers; the company has extended the phone policy and established a severe weather hotline, The American Prospect reports, but has ignored other demands from the workers.
“If Jeff Bezos can afford a $500 million yacht, a $23 million mansion with 25 bathrooms and a rocket ship to blast a comedian to outer space, you know what? Amazon can afford to give its employees a $3 raise,” tweeted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Wednesday. “I stand in strong solidarity with the Amazon workers walkout.”
Amazon has granted $3 raises to some facilities on a seasonal basis, but not every facility, which workers are frustrated with. Pay at the ZYO1 delivery station in Queens starts at $16.25 an hour. Starting pay at the DMD9 facility in Maryland is $15.90.
“It’s about pay for everybody,” one ZYO1 worker told The American Prospect. “We’ve made it clear the past few months.”
In response to workers’ campaign for better working conditions at ZYO1, managers punished the workers by taking snacks away from the break room, but then reintroduced them by handing workers snacks individually. One worker described the move as “brainwashing” and demeaning.
Longer breaks are crucial for the workers who are on their feet all day at work. “We work really long days, and we work at night,” Maryland associate Linda Gomma told the Associated Press. “Our breaks are really the one time we get to sit down and stretch our legs. Those five minutes don’t really matter to Amazon at all. But they matter a lot for our muscles and our sanity.”
While workers beg for better working conditions, the company has made huge profits off of their labor. Net sales increased by 22 percent in 2021 over 2020, jumping to $469.8 billion. Last year, when its new CEO Andy Jassy stepped in to run the company after Bezos took a step back, the company gave him over $200 million in stock on top of his previously awarded stock worth $45.3 million. The median pay at the $1.6 trillion company was $29,000 last year.
The company also recently announced a huge stock split and a $10 billion stock buyback plan, showing that the company has money to spare.
For the first time in Starbucks workers’ union campaign, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that the company has taken illegal moves in its fight against the union, including retaliation against workers for organizing in Phoenix, Arizona.
In response to a petition filed by Starbucks Workers United in January, the NLRB found that the company fired one worker, Alyssa Sanchez, while suspending another Laila Dalton, for their union organizing activity.
The company suspended Dalton and fired Sanchez “to discourage employees from engaging in these or other concerted activities,” NLRB regional director Cornele A. Overstreet wrote, adding that the company’s actions against Dalton shows it “has been interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” by federal labor laws.
Managers illegally surveilled workers and suspended Dalton for previously unenforced rules, the complaint said. If a judge is able to confirm the labor board’s allegations, then Starbucks will have to hold meetings and post notices informing employees of their legal right to form a union at the Phoenix location. It will also have to reimburse Sanchez for lost wages.
“Today is the first step in holding Starbucks accountable for its unacceptable behavior during the unionizing efforts in our store and stores around the country,” said Bill Whitmire, a barista at Dalton and Sanchez’s location. “Laila and Alyssa were traumatized and their hope is that no other Partner EVER has to go through what they have gone through.”
In spite of the complaint, a leaked video uncovered by More Perfect Union found that Starbucks is still disciplining Dalton, who says that managers are “out to get [her]” because of her role as an organizer.
The complaint came just one day before a huge shake up at the company. CEO Kevin Johnson announced on Wednesday that he’s stepping down and that former CEO Howard Schultz would step in in the interim. In a statement, Johnson said that he had been planning to retire when the pandemic ended.
In an interview on CNBC on Wednesday, Starbucks board chair Mellody Hobson said that Schultz has a “connection with our people” and that he is “singularly capable” of engaging with workers. However, as More Perfect Union has noted, Schultz is vehemently anti-union and wrote in a memoir in the 90s that employees don’t need a union if they have “faith in me and my motives.”
Schultz also traveled to Buffalo, New York, earlier in the workers’ union campaign in order to discourage employees from unionizing. In the speech, thbizarrely compared the company to Holocaust survivors, painting the company as unselfish despite that the workers were unionizing for better working conditions and liveable wages.
“Today, we learned that Kevin Johnson will be stepping down as Starbucks CEO & Howard Schultz will return as interim CEO,” Starbucks Workers United wrote on Twitter. “We encourage Howard Schultz, who has been a leader of Starbucks’ anti-union campaign, to put union-busting behind him and embrace Starbucks’ unionized future.”
Major investors have been urging Hobson and Johnson to take a neutral stance toward the union and have expressed frustration that Starbucks has been allegedly retaliating against workers. Union busting has been a bad look for the company; over the last six months or so, the company’s stock has trended down despite record high revenues.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) has been fashioning herself as a rank-and-file Republican to GOP donors and mocking President Joe Biden while defending far right members of Congress, according to an upcoming book.
In This Will Not Pass, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns describe how, at a private fundraiser with mostly Republican lobbyists, Sinema marketed herself as anti-tax and anti-government. While disparaging Biden, the Arizona senator reportedly spoke fondly of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who, like Sinema, has workedto sabotage Democrats throughout Biden’s presidency thus far.
“I love Andy Biggs,” Sinema said. “I know some people think he’s crazy, but that’s just because they don’t know him.” Biggs, in return, has praised Sinema and her partner-in-obstruction Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) for their work in keeping the filibuster.
Biden aides have said that Sinema doesn’t sound like a Democrat, but more like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), according to the book.
Aides have also said that Sinema is incredibly recalcitrant when it comes to masking policies around Biden. Last spring, “she became the first-ever lawmaker to argue with White House aides when they asked her to wear a face mask in the company of the president, repeatedly asking why that was necessary when she had been vaccinated,” the authors wrote.
Sinema is the first lawmaker to oppose masking around Biden, who is in an age group that’s especially at risk for severe COVID infection. Her choice is especially notable considering how Republicans have vehemently opposed masking rules.
If what’s written in the book is true, it means that Sinema was against masking around the president even before Republicans were, despite Republican members’ willingness to rack up fines to defy House mask mandates beginning around the same time.
The reporting altogether appears to paint Sinema as an unreliable lawmaker who is ready to pick fights and throw her own party under the bus.
Sinema’s insistence on destroying the Democrats’ agenda over the past year has led people to speculate that she may switch parties, though other political observers say that she makes strategic alliances with Republicans in order to fuel her own ambitions and ego. Indeed, Sinema has raked in donations from deep-pocketed Republicans, and Manchin’s single-minded quest to destroy Democrats’ Build Back Better Act last year made them the stars of headline after headline.
Sinema has been infamous for refusing to communicate her goals with the press or even with the president, frustrating activists and progressive groups who have launched early campaigns to primary her. Polls have found that that effort may be successful: Though she isn’t up for reelection until 2024, Sinema loses handily to potential progressive challengers in polls.
As crude oil prices are dropping, President Joe Biden is demanding that gas prices be lowered to ease the impact on the public.
On Wednesday, Biden tweeted a chart showing the current discrepancy between oil price and gas price trends. “Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too,” Biden said. “Last time oil was $96 a barrel, gas was $3.62 a gallon. Now it’s $4.31. Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.”
Crude oil prices have been dropping over the past week after hitting highs of over $120 a barrel in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the past few days, they’ve dipped below $100 – but, while gas prices had climbed in tandem with rising crude oil prices, they haven’t lowered at the same pace. Instead, according to AAA, gas prices are still around $4.31 a gallon on average.
Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too.
Last time oil was $96 a barrel, gas was $3.62 a gallon. Now it’s $4.31.
Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans. pic.twitter.com/uLNGleWBly
Biden is echoing progressive lawmakers’ recent cries to hold oil and gas companies accountable for jacking up prices in response to the current crisis. The fossil fuel industry is “profiteering,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) wrote on Monday. “And there should be consequences for it.”
If gas prices were to remain high, CNN reports, the average household would spend $1,300 more a year on gas, spending a collective $165 billion more on gas than consumers did in 2019. Gas prices are currently about $1.50 higher per gallon than pre-pandemic levels.
A lag between crude oil prices and gas prices is common in the oil and gas industry, experts say, and is typically called “rockets and feathers” – gas prices rocket on the way up, but fall back down like feathers.
Biden doesn’t think it should be this way.
“Try explaining how it’s just rockets and feathers to President Biden, and you’d better be ready to hear, ‘That’s a bunch of malarkey’ coming back at you,” a senior White House official said to CNN. “The president is very much within his rights to point out that if you’re going to have rockets on the way up, you need to have rockets on the way down, not feathers.”
When the Ukraine crisis first began, gas prices had already been creeping up as inflation rose and the industry padded its profits. Biden warned companies against using the crisis to raise prices. “American oil and gas companies should not exploit this moment to hike their prices to raise profits,” Biden said as Russian forces began the invasion of Ukraine.
Biden has already put oil and gas companies on notice. In November, he directed the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether or not oil and gas companies are artificially boosting gas prices while using inflation as a cover. A recent poll found that most voters think that corporations are using the pandemic in order to increase their profits.
Republicans have been blaming Biden for the gas price increases, but in reality, Biden exercises little to no control over gas prices.
Experts say that profit-seeking is at least part of the reason that gas prices are high. Wall Street investors are insisting that dividends and profits stay high amid several ongoing crises, and high gas prices can maintain payouts for them and executives. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry is pushing for subsidies like tax breaks as customers are fleeced at the gas station.
Last week, Democrats introduced legislation to tax barrels of oil produced or imported by large oil and gas companies in order to discourage profiteering. The revenue raised from the tax would be given back to consumers in the form of quarterly checks under the bill.
Conservative Democrat and coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) has announced that he is opposed to President Joe Biden’s nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Federal Reserve board, throwing uncertainty into whether she will have enough votes to be confirmed by the Senate.
In a statement, Manchin said that he is “unable” to support Raskin’s nomination. “Her previous public statements have failed to satisfactorily address my concerns about the critical importance of financing an all-of-the-above energy policy to meet our nation’s critical energy needs,” he said, implying that Raskin’s views on climate are “politicize[d].”
Manchin has offered few other concrete reasons for his opposition to Raskin. But notably, the lawmaker makes millions of dollars off of coal companies that he founded in the 1980s, and has received many times more money from the oil and gas industry in this election cycle than any other member of Congress, despite not being up for reelection until 2024.
Raskin, who is nominated to be the Fed’s top banking regulator, is a progressive favorite. She has been hailed as a climate champion for her stances that the Fed should be tough on the fossil fuel industry and that the agency should take the risks that the climate crisis poses to the country’s finances seriously; early in the pandemic, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury Department warned the Fed that it shouldn’t give subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, which was already volatile even before the pandemic.
“The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare just how vulnerable the United States is to sudden, catastrophic shocks,” Raskin wrote in an op-ed for TheNew York Times in May of 2020. “Climate change poses the next big threat. Ignoring it, particularly to the benefit of fossil fuel interests, is a risk we can’t afford.”
Because Republicans are staunchly opposed to Raskin, it’s possible thather nomination is doomed. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is also cozy with the oil and gas industry, told reporters on Monday that there isn’t a path forward for Raskin’s nomination.
Like Manchin, Republicans have claimed that Raskin’s views are too politicized for the Fed. In fact, the party is so opposed to her that the 12 Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee boycotted the vote to advance her nomination, rather than simply voting ‘no.’ Experts described the move to lengthen the amount of time that the Fed board would be vacant as “an enormous dereliction of duty,” especially given the magnitude of the country’s current economic crises, economist Joseph Stiglitz told The New Yorker.
The fossil fuel industry has poured lobbying money into opposing Raskin’s nomination. GOP lawmakers have no objections to the renomination of Republican Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who has largely not taken climate risks into account in decision-making despite the huge risks in ignoring its impacts on the economy.
The real politicization of Raskin’s nomination seems to be coming from climate denying conservatives like Manchin, who are vehemently opposed to taking action to combat the climate crisis. Experts say that Raskin’s views are far from extreme or partisan — in fact, many financial institutions are already taking climate into consideration.
“Her views are in the mainstream,” Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, told HuffPost. “There are over 100 central banks around the world that are part of the Network for Greening the Financial System. They’re all saying climate is a risk. Our current chair of the Federal Reserve says climate is a risk.”
The union representing Starbucks workers across the country has filed a complaint with the federal labor board, saying that the company has been cutting hours for employees in order to interfere with workers’ union campaigns.
In the unfair labor practice charge, Starbucks Workers United says that in cutting hours, the company is financially punishing organizers or pro-union workers and interfering with organizing efforts. The union also claims that the cuts “seek to coerce employees into not starting or supporting workplace organizing campaigns,” according to a press release.
Under federal labor laws, retaliating against workers for union organizing is illegal, but the punishments for doing so are incredibly weak. The union is calling for an immediate nationwide injunction to force the company to stop cutting hours.
According to a survey of the union’s members, workers have had between two and 15 hours cut from their weekly schedules, which impacts workers’ finances and can render them ineligible for benefits like health care and tuition coverage. Reductions have been taking place in at least 20 states, the complaint says.
In order for workers to be eligible for the company’s health insurance program, they have to work 20 hours a week on average. The company has touted its health insurance benefits in anti-union efforts, but may be rendering employees ineligible to use them.
“Partners pretty much across the board have experienced a cut in their hours. Full-time partners have watched their schedules drop from 30 to 35 hours to 22 to 25, and some part-time partners are only seeing one shift a week compared to their usual three or four,” Maddie VanHook, a barista at a store in Cleveland, Ohio, said in a statement. “Despite the claims that the company is ‘overspending’ on labor, we’re still seeing managers hiring people in and we’re seeing increases in business.”
Indeed, the company appears to have cash to spare when it comes to spending what likely amounts to millions of dollars on top union-busting lawyers. Meanwhile, the company is making record profits and, in the fiscal year 2021, made $29.1 billion in consolidated net revenues. That is an increase of 24 percent over the previous year — an increase that was largely driven by in-store sales, the company said in a financial report.
Workers, who have filed to unionize at over 130 stores so far, have said that current hour cuts are unlike any they’ve ever seen in their years working at Starbucks. One Phoenix worker, Sofia Delgado, told More Perfect Union that her hours were slashed from up to 21 hours a week to 5.5 hours, even though her availability was wide open nearly all week. Delgado ultimately had to quit in order to find a job that offered more hours.
“In the eight years I’ve worked for Starbucks I’ve never seen the company slash hours this severely or this widely,” said Seattle shift supervisor Sarah Pappin.
“My husband and I have been saving up to start our family. I have no idea how that’s going to happen now when my hours have been reduced by 32 percent,” Pappin continued. “Many of us are scrambling to find second jobs to make ends meet, but we’re scared that reducing our availability will cause them to cut our hours even more, or even fire us like they have done in Buffalo.”
Earlier this month, the union filed 20 charges against the company, with federal labor officials alleging that Starbucks violated labor laws on many occasions, including when it fired Cassie Fleischer, a former Starbucks worker and union organizer in Buffalo, New York. Starbucks has also barred pro-union employees from attending mandatory anti-union meetings in which the company coerces workers into voting against unionization, Starbucks Workers United alleged.
Despite its army of anti-union lawyers, Starbucks has lost every legal battle that it has tried to wage against the union so far. In attempts to dilute elections, the company has continually tried to argue that union elections should be held region-wide, rather than within individual stores. But the National Labor Relations Board has rejected that argument, saying that store-by-store votes are appropriate for the company.
American billionaires have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth during the pandemic as the rest of the public has suffered due to an unstable economy, a new analysis shows.
In an analysis released last week, Americans for Tax Fairness found that billionaires have accumulated $1.7 trillion in wealth during the last two years alone, meaning that they are now 57 percent richer than they were in March of 2020. U.S. billionaires are now worth a collective $4.6 trillion, and the amount of wealth that they’ve hoarded over the past two years alone could have paid for nearly the entire Build Back Better Act.
There are also more billionaires in the U.S. than at the beginning of the pandemic, according to the analysis of Forbes data. In March of 2020, there were 614 billionaires; there are now 704, marking an increase of 15 percent.
The 15 richest billionaires in the country have contributed hugely to billionaires’ cumulative wealth gain. The top billionaires each gained at least $10 billion during the pandemic, with people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates gaining over $52 billion and $31 billion, respectively. Some billionaires more than doubled their wealth, like Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Elon Musk saw the highest gains of the top 15 billionaires, both in proportion to his previous wealth and in sheer dollar amounts. In March of 2020, Musk was worth an already towering $24.6 billion. Over the pandemic, he added a whopping $209.4 billion to his wealth, bringing his net worth to $234 billion. This is a gain of 851 percent.
Meanwhile, in 2020 and in 2021, wages and salaries for workers only increased by 2.6 percent and 4.5 percent respectively. Together, billionaires hold more than the bottom 50 percent of the American public —made up of 65 million households —who own $3.4 trillion total.
It’s likely that none of these wealth gains will ever be taxed, the report found. Without regulations to rein in billionaire wealth, this gap continues to get worse; a RAND corporation report from 2020 found that the bottom 90 percent of the public would have $50 trillion more in 2018 if income growth had stayed as equitable as it was in the 1970s.
Still, the report advocates for the implementation of a billionaires income tax, which would capture a portion of billionaires’ investment incomes, which are not taxed. Measures like a wealth tax could also help stem the explosive and inequitable growth of billionaires’ wealth. Polling has found that the concept of taxing billionaires is popular with voters from across the political spectrum.
“For billionaires, it’s been two years of raking in the riches, while for most families it’s been two years of fear, frustration and financial worry,” said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness.
“Working families pay what they owe in taxes each paycheck. Billionaires generally pay little or nothing in taxes on these extraordinary gains in wealth,” Clemente continued. “Congress should enact a Billionaires Income Tax to directly tax these wealth gains as income each year, so that billionaires begin to pay their fair share of taxes.”
According to new estimates that the Census Bureau released on Thursday, the 2020 census undercounted Black people, Latinx people and Native Americans, which advocates have warned could potentially lead to voter disenfranchisement.
All three groups were undercounted at higher rates than they were a decade ago. Latinx people were undercounted by about 5 percent, or over three times the rate from 2010. Black people were undercounted by about 3.3 percent, while Native Americans on reservations were undercounted by over 5.6 percent.
Meanwhile, non-Hispanic white people were overcounted by 1.64 percent, the bureau found. The miscounts, which have already been used for redistricting, could give disproportionate power to white populations while further disenfranchising populations that already face voter suppression. The more accurate population counts from Thursday’s report won’t affect redistricting, according to the New York Times.
Experts say that the high miscounts may be the result of difficulties due to COVID and attempts to suppress the census by former President Donald Trump. Meddling from the Trump administration “wreaked havoc” at the Census Bureau, NPR reported earlier this year, and pressured the agency to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count.
Trump ultimately succeeded in getting the count cut short by a month. Experts say that his efforts were a transparent campaign to expand GOP power while also potentially sabotaging local governments, who receive funding based on census counts.
Population counts from the census can be used by redistricting officials to determine the number of districts in a state that should be majority non-white. The government also uses census data to guide decisions on where to direct about $1.5 trillion a year to state and local governments for things like health care. The bureau has long undercounted marginalized populations and overcounted white people.
Groups representing Black, Indigenous and Latinx people were outraged over Thursday’s report.
“A year ago when the first results of the 2020 Census were released, we said we smelled smoke. The [Census Bureau’s] estimates released today confirm that this census was a five-alarm fire,” Arturo Vargas, the CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said in a statement. Vargas said in a press call that he had never seen such a large undercount of Latinx people in over three decades of following the census.
“These results confirm our worst fears,” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said in a statement. “Every undercounted household and individual in our communities means lost funding and resources that are desperately needed to address the significant disparities we face.”
Groups like the National Urban League say they may file litigation over the results, but there may be limited legal options to remedy the issue. “We’ve talked about voter suppression. Now we see population suppression,” National Urban League president Marc Morial said.
Advocates have previously sued over Trump’s obstruction of the count, alleging that the bureau violated its duty, as set by the Constitution, to accurately count the population.
