Category Archives: jobs

Indentured Servitude

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The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West wants to force unionization on companies and their employees whether those employees want it or not. The SEIU-UHW’s proximate target is California’s dialysis industry. California’s Proposition 29 is the union’s latest (after two prior ballot failures in the two prior election cycles) effort targeting dialysis.

The measure, which would require dialysis clinics to have a physician, nurse practitioner or physician assistant “on-site during all patient treatment hours, would cost dialysis clinics $376,000 to $731,000 per year—per clinic. That would drive many into bankruptcy closure because they can’t afford those costs.

That’s bad enough. Here, though, is the enforcement mechanism the union has included in its ballot measure.

[T]he language of Prop 29 says it would prohibit “clinics from closing or substantially reducing services without state approval.”

That’s naked indentured servitude. That’s what unions want. Recall unions’ prior and long-standing drive to force non-union workers in any company to pay union dues under the guise that the union is working for them as well as their actual members.

Now unions want to reduce businesses and their employees to the status of serfs, permanently tied to the land/permanently tied to operation.

Unions for Socialism

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Workers at an Apple Inc store in Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall have voted to organize, styling themselves the Penn Square Labor Alliance.

Here’s the deal, though, as laid out by Charity Lassiter, a member of the new organization’s organizing committee:

Now that we’ve won the election, it is our hope that management will come to the table so that we may collectively work towards building a company that prioritizes workers over profit and encourages employees to thrive[.]

To hell with profit, to hell with business success—which is how jobs get created, how wages increase—companies exist as non-governmental social welfare organs.

That’s the stuff of socialism.

Another DoJ Failure

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DoJ has fined a business in Maryland $300,000 because it asked its employees for particular items of documentation as proof of citizenship or legal resident alien status instead of accepting the generic sets of documents that “Federal law” allows. Per DoJ,

Federal law allows workers to choose which valid, legally acceptable documentation to present to demonstrate their identity and permission to work, regardless of citizenship, immigration status, or national origin.

Regardless of…immigration status. So a company wants to be careful that it’s hiring legal workers by applying tighter standards to its own workforce, and DoJ objects. ‘Course if the company is caught with illegal aliens in its employ—that regardless of immigration status part—it could lose its license to operate.

But never mind.

Biden’s Union Push

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Or maybe it’s Biden’s union putsch.

The Labor Department on Tuesday proposed a rule that aims to reclassify millions of independent contractors as employees. About 20 million Americans work as independent contractors, which have more autonomy than employees and can set their own hours and work for multiple companies at the same time.

But that autonomy is anathema to the Left: it’s much harder to unionize all those independent contractors, much harder to bring them under control until they’re created formal employees and so can be forced into unions in closed shop States. And make no mistake: the Progressive-Democratic Party is bent on eliminating all right-to-work laws so that every State becomes a unionized closed shop State.

This move by the Biden administration is just an early one on its path to making it easier to convert these free market jobs to mandatory union jobs. And to increase government control over average Americans and so to increase Party power.

It’s Not Even That

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The Wall Street Journal thinks President Joe Biden’s (D) write-off of $10,000 worth of student loan debt is a “forgiveness coup.”

It has that effect, but I don’t think Biden is operating that deviously. This is nothing more than Biden and his Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate nakedly buying votes for this fall and 2024. It’s the bread part of bread and circuses, with the circuses being staged by his Party supporters in Congress alternately touting his having bypassed Congress to do this and bleating that he didn’t go far enough in the doing.

But at what cost is Biden buying those votes? Purely fiscally, he’s forcing us taxpayers to pony up $300 billion to make good on Biden’s largesse, according to Penn Wharton, and as much as twice that according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Politically, the move seriously angrifies a major fraction of us American citizens and voters. Perhaps chief among these are the majority of us who have no student debt to pay off: we never went to college/university; we went to work, instead, vis., in the trades, without which no house, no office building, no road, no mine or well, no part of our nation’s infrastructure gets built. Or we went to other than Ivy League schools to get quality educations in marketable areas of study, didn’t borrow to do so, and got jobs. Or we went to Ivy League or those Other Than schools, borrowed, and paid off our loans—because we got degrees in marketable areas and so got jobs.

We are the folks Biden and his syndicate are explicitly tapping to cover his forgiveness. We’re the folks who have demonstrated a grand capacity to pay off debt, so Biden is calling on us to use that skill some more.

Morally, it’s costing those bailed-out students the practice of actually keeping their own commitments, and it’s trapping them into the welfare cage of being too used to government welfare to get out of it. Because that’s the easy way out for them, and that’s what this sort of “forgiveness” teaches them.

There’s also the potential financial cost to these bailed out persons: now they have money to buy their first house, start a family, buy a car, …? Who’ll lend them the money? Are they now too great a credit risk, expecting as they might, simply to be able to walk away from that loan, too, when repaying it becomes inconvenient to them? Who’ll be willing to hire them, with potential employers looking askance at their willingness to walk away from inconvenient commitments.

The answers to those last questions will unroll only over the next few years—possibly to no serious effect, possibly to the great detriment of these persons, and thence to our economy.

One other thing is certain: colleges and universities will raise their tuition and other charges to absorb this Progressive-Democrat donation. That will leave none of us in the real economy better off.