Category Archives: jobs

A Raise in Pay

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Chicago’s Progressive-Democratic Party Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is at it again, this time in an obviously self-serving way.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday proposed an ordinance giving the office of the mayor an annual inflation raise capped at 5%.

Wow.

There are two reasons for an organization giving a pay raise to an employee. One is that the organization is doing better than in the past and is expected to continue at that increased level. This often garners pay raises for all employees, from the top to the bottom.

The other reason is that a particular employee has done especially well and can be expected to continue performing at that level, or the raise is granted after a period of exceptional performance to encourage the employee to continue at the elevated level.

The organization known as Chicago is a failed city. The tip of that failure:

  • violent crime in her city has increased 37% over 2021
  • the murder rate, in particular, is skyrocketing, even compared to 2021, which itself was up markedly over 2020
  • motor vehicle thefts to date are up 74% compared to the same period in 2021
  • major companies fleeing the city

There is no reason to expect this performance trend to do anything other than to worsen. The organization of Chicago is not doing well enough for across the board pay raises, much less for the Mayor or for anyone in the mayor’s office.

Lightfoot is the city’s MFWIC, and not only is the city’s failure her fault by dint of her role as the one in charge, the city’s failure is a direct result of her policies and behaviors. Lightfoot, in particular, deserves no pay raise.

Beyond that, in no way at all does anyone running this organization deserve automatic pay raises, which are independent of performance.

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.