Posts tagged government mandate
OP-ED: The Billion-Dollar Government Mandate You Probably Haven’t Heard About
July 29, 2024 // All this benefits politically entrenched labor unions by eliminating their competition. But, as decades of data show, prevailing wage laws hurt everyone else. They’re notoriously difficult to implement in the field, forcing contractors to painstakingly track and classify employees’ tasks (for example, paying a general laborer as a “carpenter” if he happens to hammer a nail that day). They hurt employees, particularly entry-level ones, by making it punitively expensive and complicated to hire workers. The brunt of it falls disproportionatelyon minorities, immigrants, younger workers, women, veterans, and small businesses. And they cost taxpayers more by excluding qualified businesses from competing for public-works contracts and driving up costs (not only payrolls, but compliance costs) for those that remain.
The UAW Might Drive the Big Three off a Cliff
September 14, 2023 // Automakers face this reality every day. General Motors is losing money on every electric vehicle, a situation that it hopes to change by 2025, though the path is far from certain. Ford’s EV line is expected to lose $4.5 billion this year, up nearly 50 percent over last year. Stellantis’s CEO has said the costs of the EV transition are “beyond the limits,” meaning the industry can’t continue down this road without making EVs prohibitively expensive.
Efforts to unionize agricultural workers in WA face long-standing hurdles
May 9, 2023 // With Ostrom — and, now, Windmill Farms — workers, labor organizers and community members have held rallies outside the mushroom farm and at several locations where the mushrooms are sold. UFW has asked people to look for the mushrooms in their local grocery stores and help track their distribution. “We have also reached out directly to retailers that carry Ostrom products, asking them to also put pressure on Ostrom to recognize the union,” De Loera said in an email in February. “Consumers can help us do this work by helping to identify Ostrom products in their local stores.” Workers from Sunnyside, community members and UFW staff rallied outside an upscale Seattle grocery store in December 2022 to raise awareness among consumers. Students at the University of Washington successfully lobbied that the school stop using mushrooms from Windmill Farms. The students organized into a group called Students for Farmworkers (SFFW) at UW.