Posts tagged senate confirmation
Opinion: Julie Su’s confirmation would harm restaurants and app workers
May 24, 2023 // If Su’s policy preferences took effect, U.S. restaurants — 90 percent of which are small businesses — would face considerable cost increases and job losses. And 23 million U.S. workers–parents, veterans, students, caregivers, and many others who have chosen to earn with app-based platforms — could have their earning power greatly curtailed. We simply cannot take that risk when our economy already faces serious challenges from inflation, supply chain problems, and workforce issues. We want to work with the next secretary of Labor to help restaurant owners and employees, app-based workers, and our customers thrive. That’s why the next secretary must have a track record of listening to diverse viewpoints and respecting the kind of opportunity and flexibility our industries provide.
Opinion: Julie Su Keeps Failing Up, and Biden Doesn’t Care
April 10, 2023 // How in the world did Julie Su get nominated to run the federal Department of Labor? Su is a former civil rights attorney, former head of the California Department of Labor under Gov. Gavin Newsom, and head of California’s Department of Labor Standards Enforcement under former Gov. Jerry Brown. She was deputy director of the federal DOL and now is acting director as she awaits a tough Senate confirmation in the next few months. I had immediately thought that the Peter Principle might explain it. Coined by Canadian sociologist Laurence Peter in his 1968 book of the same name, it postulates that the tendency in all organizations is for “every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence,” as Investopedia put it. But that surely can’t explain Su, who already reached that level in her previous employment. Investopedia also mentioned the Dilbert Principle, named after the comic strip: that big organizations promote people precisely because of their incompetence. In other words, they promote them to get them out of the way. Su was California’s top labor official and ultimately responsible for the Employment Development Department when a major scandal rocked that unemployment insurance–disbursing bureau. “California has given away at least $20 billion to criminals in the form of fraudulent unemployment benefits, state officials said Monday, confirming a number smaller than originally feared but one that still accounts for more than 11 percent of all benefits paid since the start of the pandemic,” according to a 2021 Los Angeles Times report.
New Report Details Concerning Labor Movement Trends
March 4, 2022 // If these trends continue to play out, many workers may ask themselves if the NLRB is there to protect their rights, or to protect the union bosses who are already in power. One big way to protect workers would be for Congress to pass legislation like the Employee Rights Act (ERA). This bill provides several safeguards against union coercion and other tactics, as well as guarantees workers a secret ballot election when it comes to union organizing.
A Wild Time for Union Organizing: Analysis of selected recent developments at the NLRB and in union organizing campaigns
February 28, 2022 // This paper examines recent tactics used by labor organizations in private sector unionization campaigns, trends in the number of unionization elections, areas of emphasis to be expected from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and other areas of note in the collective bargaining space.