Tag Archives: jobs

It’s Not Your Company

Posted on by
Reply

Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.

A Teachers Union Strike

Posted on by
Reply

There have been teachers union strikes in Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and now there’s one set to go off later this week in Arizona.  Readers know my disdain for union strikes generally: they’re nothing but legalized extortion—”nice business you got here.  Be too bad if something were to happen to it.  Like, say, it’s destroyed because nobody works here anymore.”  It isn’t possible to negotiate when the other party is sticking a gun in your ear—even if it’s “just” a metaphorical gun.

But it’s especially despicable when it’s a teachers union strike.  These persons are using children as hostages to back up their extortion.  And the Arizona one is all about ego and hurt feelings.

Lynn White, a high school biology teacher in Gilbert, AZ:

People feel like the state doesn’t respect the job we do as public school teachers[.]

Never mind that respect comes the way any honest American gets it: by earning it with actual deeds.  It certainly doesn’t come because this or that person, or collection of them—think they’re special.  And in the case of public school teachers, those deeds are how well they teach, as demonstrated by the quality of their graduated students.  And that’s not very high (scroll down the table at the link to see Arizona’s bad and worsening performance in 4th grade math).

Arizona should replace the strikers en masse with substitutes and insist on actual teaching performance.

A Board Whose Time has Come and Gone

Posted on by
Reply

The National Labor Relations Board is supposed to protect all workers, but it’s been focused on union workers exclusively for far too long.  In the effort, too, it’s become far too politicized to be useful or able to be rehabilitated.

For instance, it ignores the courts.

In [a] DC Circuit case…the NLRB ignored the court’s longstanding precedent on an employer’s bargaining obligations under a collective-bargaining agreement, forcing a Michigan health clinic to defend itself against charges it knew the court would reject.

The NLRB ignores other long-standing precedent, also.  For instance, it has ruled [sic] the franchising companies—a McDonald’s, a Subway, and so on—are at least partially responsible for the employment practices of the franchise holder—a particular McDonald’s or Subway restaurant—even though employment decisions are entirely the purview of the franchise license holder.

Peter Schaumber, ex-NLRB Chairman under ex-President Bush the Younger, argued in his op-ed at the link that the NLRB could cure this by issuing a slew of regulations that would reverse those abusive practices.  It’s true enough that regulations ” adopted after public notice and comment cannot be overturned without ‘substantial justification’ or renewed rule-making,” but that’s only a temporary sop.  The same politicization would leave it straightforward (if cumbersomely so) to find “substantial justification” or to spend the time to go through “renewed rule-making” in order to alter the NLRB to its members’ ideology—even ego—rather than staying focused on all workers.

Formalizing regulations through rule-making processes cannot correct the board’s political biases, whichever way those might lean.

The NLRB needs to be done away with altogether.

Fired or Resigned?

Posted on by
Reply

Ex-Veterans Affairs Secretary is making his case that he didn’t resign, he was fired.

Shulkin said he had not submitted a resignation letter, or planned to, and was only told of Trump’s decision shortly before the Twitter announcement.

Of course, the format of a resignation is immaterial to the act; in particular, letters are the polite, professional way to quit, but they’re not required, not at all.  Too, learning that your boss wants you to leave “shortly before the Twitter announcement” might be impolite, even impolitic, but again, learning the boss’ desire is not required for resigning.  Nor is desiring one to leave the same as firing that one.

The distinction in this context might seem minor, but it actually flows from a very serious legal matter.

The semantics could be relevant to Trump’s ability to name an acting VA secretary to temporarily fill Shulkin’s place. Last week, Trump named Defense Department official Robert Wilkie to the acting position….
Under federal law, a president has wide authority to temporarily fill a federal agency job if someone “dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to perform the functions and duties of the office.” There is no mention of a president having that authority if the person is fired.

The fact is, Schulkin may have felt considerable pressure to resign, and it’s common to conflate pressured-to-resign with being fired, but the two are not the same.  Especially here.  Cabinet Secretaries are nominated by the President, but they are confirmed by the Senate.  The President cannot fire a Secretary.  He must be impeached.  It may be that Secretaries serve “at the pleasure of the President,” but once confirmed, they serve “at the pleasure of Congress,” also.

Schulkin could have held out for being impeached, but he resigned—under pressure certainly, but voluntarily nonetheless.

I am Shocked, Shocked

Posted on by
Reply

Recall Amazon.com’s playing off of several cities against each other in order to maximize the tax breaks and other returns that company might get for building its second headquarters in the “winning” city.  Now we discover this in the offing:

US cities vying for Amazon.com Inc’s second headquarters risk facing an unexpected consequence to victory: other companies will demand the same hefty tax breaks conferred on the online retail giant.

How amazing is that?  Other companies want in on the goodies.

I’m not shocked at that; I’m shocked that those cities’ managers didn’t see this coming.  Their lack of anticipation speaks poorly of their ability to respond to those demands.

It also speaks poorly of the competence of those cities’ managers.