Congress Has 12 Days

There are 12 days left after their 5 September return from vacation, driven by the Obamacare requirement for health plan providers to commit by 17 September to selling their health plans for the next year or withdrawing, for Congress to pass a potful of legislation.

Two proposals regarding Obamacare are in the offing.  One would shore up the funds transfer of Federal dollars to those providers who are losing money in ObamaMart, and the other instead would send that money as grants to the States to help them generate their own health coverage plan programs.  This one also would eliminate the Individual Mandate.

Also looming is the debt funding deadline that necessitates raising the debt ceiling to pay currently committed-to bills.

Also: an immigration bill that rationalizes our immigration policy is in conference.  It severely restricts green card issuance (which is foolish IMNSHO), but it has the beneficial effect of that rationalization.

Also: an infrastructure restoral bill is under construction.

Also: bills to withdraw counterproductive, if not outright mendacious, Federal rules and rulings in the EPA, DoEd, Labor, etc that were intended to destroy whole industries (can you say, “coal,” boys and girls?), cancel rule of law on campuses, much too excessively favor unions over management (NLRB), and on and on.

Twelve days of Christmas?  Or is the Grinch coming? [/snark]  Not all of those necessaries have that 12-day deadline, but all of them need to be done quickly, since Congressmen—of both parties and in both houses of Congress—are too (how to put this delicately) chicken to do anything substantive in an election year.  Even were they around in DC doing their jobs instead of hiding out on their various campaign trails.

The Communist Worker’s Paradise

Here’s an example, People’s Republic of China style.  Including the fact that gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal in the PRC, while its governments at all levels blithely ignore those laws.

[A]bout 22% of women have experienced severe or very severe discrimination when seeking employment, according to Zhaopin Ltd, an online recruiter. … That percentage rose to about 43% for women with graduate degrees.

And

A trawl through job listings on Boss Zhipin, the recruitment site, showed some tech companies state explicitly that positions are just for men.

An e-commerce marketing job at NetEase Inc, one of the largest internet companies in China, recently stated that only male candidates need to apply because “the job is tough and stressful.

It begins early on in their society.

Parents often tell their daughters they won’t be good at math or physics or coding.

Welcome to paradise.

Quotas

German businesses better add women to their governances.  Or else Germany’s Großer Bruder will do it for them.  Regardless of qualification.

Big German companies need to put more women on their executive boards, said Germany’s Women’s Affairs Minister Katarina Barley. The official threatened legal measures if the firms fail to fix the problem within the year.

Bad idea.

Quotas just stigmatize those who got in via quota, whether they were truly qualified for the position or not.  And those who are not, and so fail, only strengthen the stigma.  Quotas are especially damaging to black women.  My GP was contemptuously treated as a twofer in med school because she allegedly filled two squares: she’s a woman, and she’s black.  It stinks.

The way to get more favored group into organization is to train those folks up for those positions in the first place so they can compete effectively.  That means the educational system needs to do a better job of training women to lead businesses (to take the present example) and to convince them they want to compete for those positions—which the German educational system already does, it seems, for boys and men.

That, though, would take time—years, a generation or two or three—and politicians (Germany’s are not unique here) don’t care about tomorrow, only about today.  And today’s virtue signaling.

Bogus Beef

Congressmen don’t pay their interns.  Who knew?

At least 174 of the 184 lawmakers who support legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour do not pay their interns, according to a recent Employment Policies Institute analysis.

It’s a bogus beef, though.  Folks employed in minimum wage jobs are low-skill workers doing low-value work, and they’re doing it to build general work experience and ethic, to earn summer spending money, to earn money for college, to build a resume, to supplement an existing family income.

Interns do very little of that.  They’re in the position in order to gain specific experience in the particular job, to build a resume, for college/graduate school course credit, and in many cases with an expectation of being hired by the company for which they interned after graduation.  The “compensation” of expectation for an intern isn’t a dollar income; it’s that particularized experience.

Stuart Varney, a Fox News contributor and host of Fox Business NewsVarney & Co, added this:

If you don’t pay them anything, then you’re simply giving jobs to the sons and daughters of the rich.  You’re giving opportunity to the rich so that they can get in on the ground floor.

That may be true, but it’s not inherent to the concept of internships; it’s specific to the employers—in this case, the politicians.

Labor Law

Recall the 2015 ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that said, via Browning-Ferris Industries v NLRB, that a joint employer was not an employer that shared direct control over a temp agency’s employees with that temp agency, as the long-established 1984 standard held, but that such a joint employer is one that exercises merely tenuous control.

The case is before the DC Circuit on appeal from the ruling.  The Wall Street Journal is properly skeptical of the permanence of a favorable court outcome, as it is with the possibility of a reversing ruling by an NLRB populated with President Donald Trump appointees.

The WSJ is hopeful regarding another path, the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act, which would codify that earlier standard.

That certainly would be a step in the right direction, but there’s no reason to believe a later NLRB wouldn’t simply ignore that or find a way to work around the standard—by creatively reinterpreting it to match it to then supposed social imperatives, as judges do too often with their own rulings.

No, the longer term and more effective solution is for Congress simply to abolish the NLRB altogether and not replace it.