A Raise in Pay

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.

Indentured Servitude

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.

Unions for Socialism

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.

Another DoJ Failure

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.

Biden’s Union Push

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.

It’s Not Even That

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.

An Interesting Exercise

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

Just the News Has a Question

The news outlet ran a poll over the weekend. The question was this:

How concerned are you that additional IRS funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will lead to more audits for typical taxpayers?

As of Sunday morning, the enormously unscientific poll—consisting solely of JtN readers—was running 96% Extremely concerned.

Keep in mind that the IRS has been targeting Conservatives and conservative organizations at least since early in the Obama administration (if not sooner; that’s just when it became exposed).

Term Limits

There are a number of term limits proposals on offer regarding politicians.

Then, as James Sherk pointed out in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Career employees fill almost all federal jobs. Only 4,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees are political appointees. Career federal employees consequently do almost all the work of government.

Here’s my term limits offer, this one regarding civil servants/career federal employees—and I’d apply it to Federal contract employees, also.

Jobs

Some statistics indicate a strong and growing jobs situation in our economy. Other statistics…not so much.

A couple of the latter, for instance.

The labor force participation rate has dropped for the second month in a row in the face of burgeoning inflation and wage growth that isn’t keeping up, so that real wages—what your money actually can buy in the grocery store and gas station and for your home in the form of electricity—are shrinking drastically.