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More than 90 per cent of non-essential workers in the largest group of striking Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) workers took strike action during the first week of the labour stoppage, according to new government figures.
An average of 71,000 employees from the core public administration group of 120,000 workers were off the job, according to figures released by the Treasury Board.
When the 46,000 employees who are deemed essential and obligated to work are accounted for, the vast majority of public servants (about 96 per cent) eligible to strike did so.
In a statement, the Treasury Board warns that data collection may vary by organization and is continuing to be refined. It said that staff on vacation or leave are not counted among the workers who withdrew their labour. [...]
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Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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A group of 14 conservative lawmakers in both chambers of Congress last week reintroduced legislation that would make the federal government an at-will employer and abolish the Merit Systems Protection Board, effectively eviscerating federal workers’ civil service protections and chilling whistleblowing.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., are the lead sponsors of the Public Service Reform Act (H.R. 3115), which would make career federal workers at-will employees and get rid of most of the avenues currently available to appeal adverse personnel decisions. It also would abolish the MSPB and send most appeals directly to federal appellate courts, although it preserves a 14-day window for whistleblowers to allege retaliation before the Office of Special Counsel.
“It is far past time to reinstate accountability to the people for the federal bureaucracy by requiring that like any private sector employee, federal workers can be removed from their positions,” Roy said in a statement. “Notwithstanding the majority of federal workers who faithfully serve, especially our law enforcement personnel, we should not allow a wall of red tape to shield those engaged in noncompliance with the law and brazen political partisanship. Federal employees should keep their jobs based on merit, just like the people they serve.”
The bill also allows for federal workers to appeal adverse personnel actions they believe were discriminatory to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, although the legislation requires EEOC to scrap its policies relating to the federal workforce and apply private sector rules to the proceedings.
And it creates a disincentive to federal workers filing appeals of their firings through a provision that says that if a court finds a complaint to be “frivolous” or otherwise “brought in bad faith,” the employee’s defined benefit annuity is automatically reduced by 25%.
“It’s clear that the bureaucracy of the federal government is both a waste of taxpayer dollars and inefficient,” Scott said in a statement. “Red tape and bloated federal agencies constantly slow down progress and hamper American innovation. It’s time to change Washington so it actually works for the American people. The Public Service Reform Act will boost accountability and responsiveness across the federal government by making all executive branch employees at-will.”
Roy previously introduced his bill last July, but with Democrats in control of the House, it languished. With a divided Congress, its chance of passage now remains low. But the bill has gained support, with the number of initial cosponsors growing from 5 to 14.
Between this legislation and other initiatives gaining steam within the Republican party, including a proposed revival of Schedule F, which has already been endorsed by The Heritage Foundation, former President Trump and other likely GOP presidential candidates, it is clear that efforts to upend the federal civil service have become a central plank of the party’s platform. These plans, along with early signs of a push to declare federal employee unions unconstitutional, suggest “truly epic storm clouds” are on the horizon, according to Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy.
“It’s inconceivable that a major Republican candidate would stake out a position any more favorable to federal employees,” Kettl wrote. “[Conservatives] are offering two tracks for remedies: executive action, especially through a revival of Schedule F; and judicial cases, especially through challenges to the role of public employee unions and, even more fundamentally, to the role of the merit system itself.”
#us politics#news#government executive#2023#Merit Systems Protection Board#republicans#conservatives#gop policy#gop platform#gop#civil service protections#federal workers#whistleblowing#rep. chip roy#Sen. Tim Scott#Public Service Reform Act#HR 3115#Office of Special Counsel#Equal Employment Opportunity Commission#Schedule F#the heritage foundation#donald trump#Don Kettl#worker's rights
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big W
#stream#i mean fuck intel agencies but the point is that federal workers can smoke pot without being fired#which then leads to PUBLIC businesses to allow their employees to smoke weed without getting fired#i mean it makes me laugh bc …. everyone who works for the government is absolutely probably smoking weed
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Brazil Federal Police chiefs to hold walkouts in push for better wages
A union of Federal Police chiefs voted on Tuesday to stage work stoppages in an attempt to put pressure on the government to offer them better wages. Labor representatives will come up with a timetable for “partial and escalating” walkouts. Although illegal, industrial action by police forces has become increasingly common in Brazil.
This morning, the police chiefs’ union called for the firing or resignation of Justice Minister Anderson Tor
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#brazil#brazilian politics#politics#economy#workers' rights#police#public security#federal police#mod nise da silveira#image description in alt
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"The studios thought they could handle a strike. They might end up sparking a revolution"
by Mary McNamara
"If you want to start a revolution, tell your workers you’d rather see them lose their homes than offer them fair wages. Then lecture them about how their “unrealistic” demands are “disruptive” to the industry, not to mention disturbing your revels at Versailles, er, Sun Valley.
Honestly, watching the studios turn one strike into two makes you wonder whether any of their executives have ever seen a movie or watched a television show. Scenes of rich overlords sipping Champagne and acting irritated while the crowd howls for bread rarely end well for the Champagne sippers.
This spring, it sometimes seemed like the Hollywood studios represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers were actively itching for a writers’ strike. Speculations about why, exactly, ran the gamut: Perhaps it would save a little money in the short run and show the Writers Guild of America (perceived as cocky after its recent ability to force agents out of the packaging business) who’s boss.
More obviously, it might secure the least costly compromise on issues like residuals payments and transparency about viewership.
But the 20,000 members of the WGA are not the only people who, having had their lives and livelihoods upended by the streaming model, want fair pay and assurances about the use of artificial intelligence, among other sticking points. The 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists share many of the writers’ concerns. And recent unforced errors by studio executives, named and anonymous, have suddenly transformed a fight the studios were spoiling for into a public relations war they cannot win.
Even as SAG-AFTRA representatives were seeing a majority of their demands rejected despite a nearly unanimous strike vote, a Deadline story quoted unnamed executives detailing a strategy to bleed striking writers until they come crawling back.
Days later, when an actors’ strike seemed imminent, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger took time away from the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho not to offer compromise but to lecture. He told CNBC’s David Faber that the unions’ refusal to help out the studios by taking a lesser deal is “very disturbing to me.”
“There’s a level of expectation that they have that is just not realistic,” Iger said. “And they are adding to the set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
If Iger thought his attempt to exec-splain the situation would make actors think twice about walking out, he was very much mistaken. Instead, he handed SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher the perfect opportunity for the kind of speech usually shouted atop the barricades.
“We are the victims here,” she said Thursday, marking the start of the actors’ strike. “We are being victimized by a very greedy entity. I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right, when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history at this very moment.”
Cue the cascading strings of “Les Mis,” bolstered by images of the most famous people on the planet walking out in solidarity: the cast of “Oppenheimer” leaving the film’s London premiere; the writers and cast of “The X-Files” reuniting on the picket line.
A few days later, Barry Diller, chairman and senior executive of IAC and Expedia Group and a former Hollywood studio chief, suggested that studio executives and top-earning actors take a 25% pay cut to bring a quick end to the strikes and help prevent “the collapse of the entire industry.”
When Diller is telling executives to take a pay cut to avoid destroying their industry, it is no longer a strike, or even two strikes. It is a last-ditch attempt to prevent le déluge.
Yes, during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, picketers yelled noncomplimentary things at executives as they entered their respective lots. (“What you earnin’, Chernin?” was popular at Fox, where Peter Chernin was chairman and chief executive.) But that was before social media made everything more immediate, incendiary and personal. (Even if they have never seen a movie or TV show, one would think that people heading up media companies would understand how media actually work.)
Even at the most heated moments of the last writers’ strike, executives like Chernin and Iger were seen as people who could be reasoned with — in part because most of the executives were running studios, not conglomerations, but mostly because the pay gap between executives and workers, in Hollywood and across the country, had not yet widened to the reprehensible chasm it has since.
Now, the massive eight- and nine-figure salaries of studio heads alongside photos of pitiably small residual checks are paraded across legacy and social media like historical illustrations of monarchs growing fat as their people starve. Proof that, no matter how loudly the studios claim otherwise, there is plenty of money to go around.
Topping that list is Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive Davd Zaslav. Having re-named HBO Max just Max and made cuts to the beloved Turner Classic Movies, among other unpopular moves, Zaslav has become a symbol of the cold-hearted, highly compensated executive that the writers and actors are railing against.
The ferocious criticism of individual executives’ salaries has placed Hollywood’s labor conflict at the center of the conversation about growing wealth disparities in the U.S., which stokes, if not causes, much of this country’s political divisions. It also strengthens the solidarity among the WGA and SAG-AFTRA and with other groups, from hotel workers to UPS employees, in the midst of disputes during what’s been called a “hot labor summer.”
Unfortunately, the heightened antagonism between studio executives and union members also appears to leave little room for the kind of one-on-one negotiation that helped end the 2007-08 writers’ strike. Iger’s provocative statement, and the backlash it provoked, would seem to eliminate him as a potential elder statesman who could work with both sides to help broker a deal.
Absent Diller and his “cut your damn salaries” plan, there are few Hollywood figures with the kind of experience, reputation and relationships to fill the vacuum.
At this point, the only real solution has been offered by actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently suggested that workers seize the means of production by getting back into the indie business, which is difficult to imagine and not much help for those working in television.
It’s the AMPTP that needs to heed Iger’s admonishment. At a time when the entertainment industry is going through so much disruption, two strikes is the last thing anyone needs, especially when the solution is so simple. If the studios don’t want a full-blown revolution on their hands, they’d be smart to give members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts they can live with."
#sag-aftra strike#sag strike#fans4wga#writers guild strike#actors guild strike#union solidarity#wga strong#i stand with the wga#wga strike#writers strike
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Who’s to Blame for Out-Of-Control Corporate Power?
One man is especially to blame for why corporate power is out of control. And I knew him! He was my professor, then my boss. His name… Robert Bork.
Robert Bork was a notorious conservative who believed the only legitimate purpose of antitrust — that is, anti-monopoly — law is to lower prices for consumers, no matter how big corporations get. His philosophy came to dominate the federal courts and conservative economics.
I met him in 1971, when I took his antitrust class at Yale Law School. He was a large, imposing man, with a red beard and a perpetual scowl. He seemed impatient and bored with me and my classmates, who included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, as we challenged him repeatedly on his antitrust views.
We argued with Bork that ever-expanding corporations had too much power. Not only could they undercut rivals with lower prices and suppress wages, but they were using their spoils to influence our politics with campaign contributions. Wasn’t this cause for greater antitrust enforcement?
He had a retort for everything. Undercutting rival businesses with lower prices was a good thing because consumers like lower prices. Suppressing wages didn’t matter because employees are always free to find better jobs. He argued that courts could not possibly measure political power, so why should that matter?
Even in my mid-20s, I knew this was hogwash.
But Bork’s ideology began to spread. A few years after I took his class, he wrote a book called The Antitrust Paradox summarizing his ideas. The book heavily influenced Ronald Reagan and later helped form a basic tenet of Reaganomics — the bogus theory that says government should get out of the way and allow corporations to do as they please, including growing as big and powerful as they want.
Despite our law school sparring, Bork later gave me a job in the Department of Justice when he was solicitor general for Gerald Ford. Even though we didn’t agree on much, I enjoyed his wry sense of humor. I respected his intellect. Hell, I even came to like him.
Once President Reagan appointed Bork as an appeals court judge, his rulings further dismantled antitrust. And while his later Supreme Court nomination failed, his influence over the courts continued to grow.
Bork’s legacy is the enormous corporate power we see today, whether it’s Ticketmaster and Live Nation consolidating control over live performances, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Amazon, Google, and Meta taking over the tech world.
It’s not just these high-profile companies either: in most industries, a handful of companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.
This corporate concentration costs the typical American household an estimated extra $5,000 per year. Companies have been able to jack up prices without losing customers to competitors because there is often no meaningful competition.
And huge corporations also have the power to suppress wages because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs.
And how can we forget the massive flow of money these corporate giants are funneling into politics, rigging our democracy in their favor?
But the tide is beginning to turn under the Biden Administration. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are fighting the monopolization of America in court, and proposing new merger guidelines to protect consumers, workers, and society.
It’s the implementation of the view that I and my law school classmates argued for back in the 1970s — one that sees corporate concentration as a problem that outweighs any theoretical benefits Bork claimed might exist.
Robert Bork would likely regard the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts with the same disdain he had for my arguments in his class all those years ago. But instead of a few outspoken law students, Bork’s philosophy is now being challenged by the full force of the federal government.
The public is waking up to the outsized power corporations wield over our economy and democracy. It’s about time.
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MEXICO DECRIMINALIZED ABORTION AT A FEDERAL LEVEL TODAY!!!!
The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) has decriminalized abortion at the federal level throughout the country. This unanimous decision of the highest court obliges federal public health institutions, such as the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), Institute of Security and Social Services for State Workers (ISSSTE) and Pemex, to offer the service on a free basis. In addition, it indicates the resolution of the Court, in no case may medical personnel be criminalized. This decision is one more step towards the freedom to terminate the pregnancy, after the historical precedent of 2021.
This Tuesday, thanks to an injunction from the feminist organization Gire, the First Chamber of the Court ruled: "The legal system that penalizes abortion in the Federal Penal Code is unconstitutional, since it violates the human rights of women and people with ability to gestate”. This represents several advances, on the one hand, it is not only that abortion cannot be criminalized, but also that federal health institutions must provide the service.
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How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage
I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition
And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth
That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.
The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.
That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.
The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:
https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator
It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/
When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706
Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."
It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."
It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.
That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22
While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.
Google forcefully disputed this claim:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297
They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.
Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:
https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529
She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.
I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.
I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.
Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:
Make everything as complicated as possible;
Make everything as secret as possible;
Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
Image:
Jason Rosenberg (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/
CC BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
--
Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/
CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
#pluralistic#secrecy#opacity#google#antitrust#trustbusting#wired#working the refs#megan grey#semantic matching
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#hard shell#air coin#urine explosion revolution#chicken series#fraud#rescue#humanitarian reli#but actually let his ant workers publicize his ugly#in the disaster area#and advocated his new Chinese Federation#. I expected to be proud of my#by rubbing the heat of the war. Un#recently#my fake rescue trick has caused strong dissatisfaction among volunteers from other countries#resulting in conflict. Recently#while connecting with the live broadcast of the ant workers who#for themselves in the disaster areas in Ukraine#the ant workers#to their masters in tears#saying that they had been#by volunteers from other countries#and were reviled as#who supported Trump and Bannon. After hearing this#President GUI Yan was very angry. He said angrily that he had invested in suing the troublemakers and showed off his wealth. How could he n#the self deceptive#ant workers troublemakers attacked them because of envy and jealousy. This statement of plague turtle is reall#but showed off his gold and silver in front of ant workers. Guo Wengui's bankruptcy application is undoubtedly a provocation to the court#which is actually#and evading the payment of fines#which is really suicidal. And Guo's false rescue and shameless behavior of real money fraud also caused public anger
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Half the workers at Eilat Port are on the verge of losing their jobs after the seaport took a major financial hit due to the crisis in Red Sea shipping lanes, Israel’s main labor federation says.
Eilat sits on a northern tip of the Red Sea and was one of the first ports to be affected as shipping firms rerouted vessels to avoid attacks by the Houthis in Yemen.
The Histadrut labor federation, the umbrella organization for hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, says port management has announced it intends to fire half of the 120 employees. The dock workers will hold a protest later today, it says.
#yemen#jerusalem#tel aviv#current events#palestine#free palestine#gaza#free gaza#news on gaza#palestine news#news update#war news#war on gaza#houthis#red sea#red sea blockade#ansarallah#ansar allah
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Federal public sector workers’ wages, adjusted for inflation, are no better than they were in 2007, a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows.
“The average federal public sector worker’s wages only buy the same today as they did in October 2007,” the CCPA report states. “No other industry—none—has seen average inflation adjusted wages pushed back as far as federal public sector workers.”
Over 100,000 federal public workers hit the picket lines across the country on Wednesday with a two-year expired contract and no wage offers that kept up with the rising cost of living.
Even if the union wins its current wage demands of 4.5% increases each year for three years, “those average federal worker wages would still be 4.8 per cent below the industrial average,” the report notes.
Full article
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
#cdnpoli#canadian politics#canadian news#canada#canadian#workers rights#wages#federal public workers#federal public sector#federal employees#unions#strikes#strike action#CCPA#canadian centre for policy alternatives
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Things to keep in mind when writing stuff involving (U.S.) federal offices/federal employees/federal contractors:
You need a badge to get in. If you don't have a badge you will at minimum have to go through a metal detector and have your stuff be x-rayed and sign in and then have an escort. You might get a guest lanyard, a temporary ID badge, or a wristband. At maximum you just won't get in.
You can potentially get in with a badge for a different agency, but you will still likely need to sign in and be let in manually, because your badge won't have building access to swipe you in past security
It can take a long time to get a badge, and it's way worse for contractors. For contractors it can take anywhere from days to over a year to get badged.
Working for the federal government doesn't necessarily mean you have a security clearance. A lot of civilian agencies just require a public trust, which generally involves much lower requirements and a much less invasive background check but can involve the equivalent of a Secret clearance background check (namely if you have a law-enforcement sensitive public trust).
You need to get fingerprinted, which may happen at the actual badging office or at a random contracted fingerprinting place. Basically all fingerprinting is digital at this point.
You need to get fingerprinted even if you have already been fingerprinted/badged elsewhere. They generally don't talk to each other.
Having a clearance can make it a bit easier/faster to get a public trust elsewhere due to reciprocity, but it can still take a while.
Federal buildings are often set pretty far back from the road and/or they have barricades in front of them.
It's not uncommon in some agencies to see mix of people in uniform and people not in uniform. Not all uniformed services are military. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps are both non-armed uniformed services.
Most federal employees operate under the General Service (GS) pay scale, and people will sometimes be referred to as a GS-X (e.g., GS-13, GS-14). This is an easy reference of relative position.
Some federal employees may operate under other pay scales, such as the Federal Wage System for blue-collar workers. High-ranking federal employees may be under the Senior Executive Service (SES) which is above the GS scale. Other agencies (e.g., the SEC) use their own pay scales.
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Monday May 1.
May Day.
Today is a day that requires little introduction. It is #may day, otherwise known as #international workers day or Labour Day. Celebrated every year on May 1, or the first Monday of May, it marks a day of celebration and solidarity between laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement. It is a national public holiday in many countries across the world and has a fascinating, inspiring history. The Marxist International Socialist Congress met in Paris in 1889, where they established the Second International as a successor to the International Workingmen's Association. It was here they established a resolution for a "great international demonstration" to support demands for an eight-hour working day from the working classes. Today's date, May 1, was selected by the American Federation of Labor to mark a general strike in the United States. This strike began on this date in 1886, and subsequently became an annual event. In 1904, the Sixth Conference of the Second International called for "all Social Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace". But it is not just consigned to history, by any means, because #may day continues to this day.
There are strikes, marches, rallies, and protests across the world today marking May Day. The struggle continues, but today is also the celebration. Wherever you are across the world, and however you're spending International Worker's Day 2023, we wish you love, light, and solidarity in the fight for better.
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But Germany’s performances of repentance have their limits. They do not extend, for example, to the genocide the German colonial army committed in Namibia against Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, killing tens of thousands. Germany did not officially apologize for those bloody acts until 2021 and has not agreed to pay meaningful reparations to descendants of the victims. If the new German identity relies on isolating the Holocaust as a shameful aberration in national history and nullifying it via solemn remembrance, there is little room for the memory of colonial violence in the nation’s self-mythology. Genocide scholar Dirk Moses named this approach the “German catechism” in a 2021 essay that sparked heated debate. “The catechism implies a redemptive story in which the sacrifice of Jews in the Holocaust by Nazis is the premise for the Federal Republic’s legitimacy,” wrote Moses. “That is why the Holocaust is more than an important historical event. It is a sacred trauma that cannot be contaminated by profane ones—meaning non-Jewish victims and other genocides—that would vitiate its sacrificial function.”
Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” the state’s very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.
To that end, in recent years, Germany’s laudable apparatus for public cultural funding has been used as a tool for enacting a 2019 Bundestag resolution declaring that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel is antisemitic. Although the resolution is technically nonbinding, its passage has led to an unending stream of firings and event cancellations, and to the effective blacklisting of distinguished academics, cultural workers, artists, and journalists for offenses like inviting a renowned scholar of postcolonialism to speak, tweeting criticism of the Bundestag resolution, or having attended a Palestinian solidarity rally in one’s youth. A network of antisemitism commissioners—a system explored in this issue in a feature by Peter Kuras—has been deputized to monitor such offenses. These commissioners are typically white, Christian Germans, who speak in the name of the Jews and often playact Jewishness on a public stage, posing for photo ops in yarmulkes, performing Jewish music, wearing the uniform of the Israeli police, and issuing decrees on who is next in the pillory. When they tangle with left-wing Jews in Germany, canceling their events and attacking them as antisemites in the pages of various newspapers, they suggest what Germany’s antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein has said directly: That the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans—that, in fact, these Jews do not understand antisemitism at all. In a perverse twist, the fact that the Germans were the most successful antisemites in history has here become a credential. By becoming the Jews’ consummate protectors, Germans have so thoroughly absorbed the moral lessons bestowed by Jewish martyrdom that they have no more need for the Jew except as symbol; by the logic of this strange supersessionism, Germans have become the new Jews. This is not only a matter of rhetorical authority on Jewish matters but is also often literal, as this self-reflexive philosemitism has led to a wave of German converts to Judaism. According to Tzuberi, “The Jewish revival is desired precisely because it is a German revival.”
If Jews are negated by this formulation, Palestinians are villainized by it. Last year, when the German state banned Nakba Day demonstrations, only days after the murder of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, police justified this suppression by claiming, in a familiar racist trope, that protesters would not have been able to contain their violent rage. Indeed, in Germany Palestinian identity itself has become a marker of antisemitism, scarcely to be spoken aloud—even as the country is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, with a population of around 100,000. “Whenever I would mention that I was Palestinian, my teachers were outraged and said that I should refer to [Palestinians] as Jordanian,” one Palestinian German woman speaking of her secondary school education told the reporter Hebh Jamal. Palestinianness as such has thus been stricken from German public life. In The Moral Triangle, a 2020 anthropological study of Palestinian and Israeli communities in Germany by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor, many Palestinians interviewed said that to speak of pain or trauma they’ve experienced due to Israeli policy is to destroy their own futures in Germany. “The Palestinian collective body is inscribed as ontologically antisemitic until proven otherwise. Palestinians, in this sense, are collateral damage of the intensifying German wish for purification from antisemitism,” wrote Tzuberi.
July 5, 2023
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Writers Guild West Official: Era of Hollywood Mergers Hastened the Strike
August 10, 2023
Laura Blum-Smith, the Writers Guild of America West’s director of research and public policy, considers the strike a result of a tsunami of Hollywood mergers that has handed studios and streamers the power to its exploit workers.
“Harmful mergers and attempts to monopolize markets are a recurring theme in the history of media and entertainment, and they are a key part of what led 11,500 writers to go on strike more than 100 days ago against their employers,” Blum-Smith said on Thursday at an event with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice over new merger guidelines unveiled in July.
She pointed to Disney, Amazon and Netflix as companies that “gained power through anticompetitive consolidation and vertical integration,” allowing them to impose “more and more precarious working conditions, increasingly short term employment and lower pay for writers and other workers across the industry.” But she sees revisions to the merger guidelines that address labor concerns a key part of the solution to prevent further mergers in the entertainment industry moving forward.
“The FTC and DOJ’s new draft merger guidelines are part of a deeply necessary effort to revive antitrust enforcement,” she added. “Compared with earlier guidelines, the new ones are much more skeptical of the idea that mergers are the natural way for companies to grow. And they focus more on the various ways mergers hurt competition, including how mergers impact workers.”
In July, the FTC and DOJ jointly released a new road map for regulatory review of mergers. They require companies to consider the impact of proposed transactions on labor, signaling that the agencies intend to review whether mergers could negatively impact wages and working conditions. FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, who was joined by agency chair Lina Khan, said in a statement about the guidelines that “a merger that may substantially lessen competition for workers will not be immunized by a prediction that predicted savings from a merger will be passed on to consumers.” Historically, transactions have been considered mostly through the lens of benefits to consumers.
The guidelines lack the force of law but influence the way in which judges consider lawsuits to block proposed transactions. They also tell the public how competition enforcers will assess the potential for a merger’s harm to competition.
Antitrust enforcers have steadily been taking notice of negative impacts to labor as a result of industry consolidation. “We’ve heard concerns that a handful of companies may now again be controlling the bulk of the entertainment supply chain from content creation to distribution,” Khan said last year during a listening forum over revisions to the guidelines, in a nod to anticompetitive conduct by studios that led to the Paramount Decrees. “We’ve heard concerns that this type of consolidation and integration can enable firms to exert market power over creators and workers alike.”
Adam Conover, writer and WGA board member, said in that April 2022 forum that his show Adam Ruins Everything was killed by AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner in 2018 when TruTV’s parent company forced the network to cut costs. He stressed that a handful of companies “now control the production and distribution of almost all entertainment content available to the American public,” allowing them to “more easily hold down our wages and set onerous terms for our employment.” It’s not just writers that are impacted by an overly consolidated Hollywood either, he explained. After Disney acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, he said that the studios pushed the industry into ending backend participation and trapping actors in exclusive contracts preventing them from pursuing other work.
Blum-Smith said that aggressive competition enforcement is necessary as “Wall Street continues to push for more consolidation among our employers despite the industry’s history of mergers that failed to deliver any of the consumer benefits they’ve claimed that left writers and audiences worse off with less diversity of content and fewer choices.”
“More mergers will leave writers with even fewer places to sell their work and tell their stories and the remaining companies will have even more power to lower pay and worsen working conditions,” she warned. “Strong enforcement against mergers is essential to protect workers in media and workers across the country and these guidelines are an important step in the right direction.”
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Microsoft reneged on promises it made in court during its Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial in 2023 by laying off 1,900 employees in late January, according to the FTC. FTC lawyer Imad Abyad filed a letter with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday, effectively telling on Microsoft. “This newly-revealed information contradicts Microsoft’s representations in this proceeding,” the FTC lawyer wrote.
Microsoft announced on Jan. 15 that it was laying off 1,900 workers from its gaming division — around 8% of that part of the company. A large portion of those layoffs were at the newly acquired Activision Blizzard. The percentage of Activision Blizzard layoffs has not been made public, but at least 899 of that 1,900 worked out of Activision Blizzard’s California offices, according to public records.
#news#labor news#gaming news#tech news#the ftc#ftc#federal trade commission#microsoft#activision blizzard#blizzard#2024 layoffs#tech industry layoffs#gaming industry layoffs#layoffs
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