The Trump Supreme Court sided with business over workers yet again, in a case that got the four liberal justices so exercised that they each wrote their own dissent. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg even noted that she wrote her dissent to “emphasize once again how treacherously the court has strayed from the principle that arbitration is a matter of consent, not coercion.”
In Lamps Plus v. Varela (note the name if you’re in the market for a lamp), Frank Varela, one of 1,300 workers whose tax information had been compromised thanks to his employer, Lamps Plus, tried to sue, only to be tripped up by a mandatory arbitration clause in his contract. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit did say that class arbitration would be allowed. The Trump-Bush wing of the court disagreed, because class arbitration would be inconvenient for businesses, and they are all about stacking the deck in favor of employers.
In the primary dissent, Justice Elena Kagan noted that Varela’s contract called for “any and all disputes, claims, or controversies” to go to arbitration without explicitly rejecting class arbitration, and that California law requires ambiguity in a contract to go against the party that wrote the contract. “Lamps Plus drafted the agreement. It therefore had the opportunity to insert language expressly barring class arbitration if that was what it wanted. It did not do so,” Kagan wrote. But Republican justices care neither about California law nor about workers’ rights when an employer’s wishes are at stake.
● Maine AFL-CIO becomes first state federation to support a Green New Deal. The national AFL-CIO has not been supportive.
● Women did everything right. Then work got greedy.
Women don’t step back from work because they have rich husbands, she said. They have rich husbands because they step back from work. [...]
It’s only in the last two decades that salaried employees have earned more by working long hours. Four decades ago, people who worked at least 50 hours a week were paid 15 percent less, on an hourly basis, than those who worked traditional full-time schedules. By 2000, though, the wage penalty for overwork became a premium. Today, people who work 50 hours or more earn up to 8 percent more an hour than similar people working 35 to 49 hours, according to a sociology paper using Current Population Survey data by Youngjoo Cha at Indiana University, Kim Weeden at Cornell and Mauricio Bucca at the European University Institute.
● The dark-money lobbying group going after pension funds:
[I]n practice the [Institute for Pension Fund Integrity] primarily attacks divestment initiatives and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs. The information it publishes on public funds is frequently rife with errors and seemingly self-serving data. And for someone striving to make pensions nonpartisan, Burnham has deep political ties. He served on President Donald Trump’s transition team in 2016, and was recently subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into potential abuses of power and illicit campaign activities.
● Despite worries of too many schools, charters keep opening in Kansas City.
