HAROLD MEYERSON , Editor-at-large - The American Prospect
Stephan:
Here is some good news for the working class. Since Reagan the Republicans have been trying to castrate unions, or just make them disappear, while the Democrats have been trying to protect them. Now the Biden administration have been able to make change which strengthens unions. Sadly, however, workers don’t seem to understand what Biden is trying to do to help them.
Credit: Jon Elswick / AP
Last Friday, the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith into bargaining.
The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.
Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing […]
Jessica Corbett, Senior Editor & Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan:
Here is some more good news from the Biden administration for working class men and women. I am surprised that the Democrats cannot seem to figure out how to make it clear to working Americans that the Democrats are attempting to foster wellbeing, while the Republicans are only serving the corporate interests that rent them.
Julie Su, acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor Credit: Arturo Holmes / Getty
Labor rights advocates within and beyond Congress celebrated on Wednesday after the Biden administration proposed a federal rule to restore and extend overtime protections to 3.6 million more salaried workers earning up to about $55,000 a year.
“For over 80 years, a cornerstone of workers’ rights in this country is the right to a 40-hour workweek, the promise that you get to go home after 40 hours or you get higher pay for each extra hour that you spend laboring away from your loved ones,” said Julie Su, who is acting secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) because her nomination is stalled in the U.S. Senate.
“I’ve heard from workers again and again about working long hours, for no extra pay, all while earning low salaries that don’t come anywhere close to compensating them for their sacrifices,” she said. “Today, the Biden-Harris administration is proposing a rule that would help restore workers’ economic security by […]
The other day I did a Texas story about how Republicans wanted to monitor traffic and prosecute anyone helping a woman or girl to get out of the state to get an abortion. I told you there would be more of this. And here it is. The Republican Party is becoming the American Taliban. That may sound partisan, but it is not. It is just what is happening, but no one in corporate media wants to say it.
Attorney General of Alabama Steve Marshall Credit: Alex Wong / Getty
Alabama’s Republican attorney general said in a court filing that he has the right to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for pregnant women to have out-of-state abortions.
In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Attorney General Steve Marshall wrote that providing transportation for women in Alabama to leave the state to get an abortion could amount to a “criminal conspiracy.”
The court filing comes in response to lawsuits against Marshall that was filed in July from two women’s health centers and Yellowhammer Fund, an organization which says it provides “financial and practical support for those who are pregnant and require assistance.” The plaintiffs argue that Marshall violated their constitutional rights by publicly stating that organizations which help pregnant women in Alabama get an abortion out of state could be criminally investigated.
“Alabama can no more regulate out-of-state abortions than another state can deem its laws legalizing abortions to apply to Alabama,” the Yellowhammer Fund lawsuit argues.
The Depression forced both political parties to focus on fostering wellbeing, and this was followed by World War II, which brought the country into a single intent to foster wellbeing. The post-war period saw both parties continuing to be focused on fostering wellbeing, and the middle class was created and became they dominant cultural force. But then came Reagan and the American cultural was transformed into one that grotesquely favored the rich, and put very little emphasis on fostering wellbeing. Out of that came the worst wealth inequality in the country’s history, the worst healthcare system in the developed world, attempts to gut unions, and making college education impossibly expensive. It also meant that all the infrastructure built from the 1930s to the 1960s was left without proper maintenance and upgrades. Now we have come to this.
Phillip Young, a resident from Jackson, Mississippi, takes a break while helping volunteers distribute bottles of water during the city’s water infrastructure crisis. Credit: CNN
When torrential rainfall in August 2022 pushed the Pearl River in Mississippi to surge well beyond its banks, floodwaters spilled into the suburbs of Jackson and led an already-hobbled water treatment plant to fail.
It was the final stroke in what experts described as a yearslong issue in the making, which eventually left tens of thousands of residents in the city without clean drinking water for weeks.
What happened in Jackson, experts say, is a bellwether for what’s to come if America continues to kick the can down the road in addressing its aging and crumbling water infrastructure. The climate crisis threatens to make those issues even more pressing.
When sea levels rise, summers become hotter or heavy rains lead to more flooding, the country’s water infrastructure – largely built last century and only designed to last roughly 75 years – will be more strained […]
James Doubek, Staff Writer - Reader Supported News / npr
Stephan:
Even as both Hawaii and Florida face catastrophic damage as a result of climate change, the corrupt Republican christofascist racist Supreme Court majority has just gutted the protection for the nation’s wetlands forcing the EPA to remove federal regulations.
A snowy egret stands within the salt marsh at Station Creek Landing in St Helena, S.C., on July 10, 2023. Credit: Jim Watson / AFP
The Environmental Protection Agency removed federal protections for a majority of the country’s wetlands on Tuesday to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
The EPA and Department of the Army announced a final rule amending the definition of protected “waters of the United States” in light of the decision in Sackett v. EPA in May, which narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and the agency’s power to regulate waterways and wetlands.
Developers and environmental groups have for decades argued about the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act in protecting waterways and wetlands.
“While I am disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Sackett case, EPA and Army have an obligation to apply this decision alongside our state co-regulators, Tribes, and partners,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
A 2006 Supreme Court decision determined that wetlands would be protected if they had a “significant nexus” to major waterways. […]
