National labor relations act

President Joe Biden nominated a lawyer who currently works at a firm notorious for union-busting to serve in a powerful regulatory position on Wednesday. Biden nominated Susan Harthill, an attorney at the Washington firm Morgan Lewis, to serve on the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC). Harthill was hired as a partner at Morgan Lewis in 2018 after serving as the Department of Labor’s deputy solicitor of labor for national operations and is currently a senior consultant at the firm. “Susan Harthill represents employers in the full range of employment law and Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) matters, with a focus on counseling, compliance, litigation, and audits and investigations,” the White House said Wednesday. “Ms. Harthill advises employers on statutory and regulatory compliance and conducts trainings, including harassment and discrimination training,” it continued. (RELATED: Amazon Warehouse Workers Overwhelmingly Reject Unionization …

Continue Reading about Biden Nominates Lawyer From Anti-Union Firm For Top Labor Position →

Union Cooperation Minister Amit Shah said on Saturday that the Centre will soon bring amendments to the Multi State Cooperative Society Act and a new policy for the cooperatives is on the anvil. He added that the question that cooperatives are a State subject could be responded to in legal terms but the newly created Ministry will work in tandem with the States and “there will be no friction”. The cash-rich cooperatives in many States are controlled by the Opposition parties such as the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress. The cooperatives decide political fortunes in States such as Maharashtra, Kerala, Gujarat, parts of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. The formation of the Ministry of Cooperation was announced on July 5 and Home Minister Amit Shah was allocated the portfolio during the Cabinet expansion. Mr. Shah said the Centre was also planning amendments to the laws that govern the Primary Agricultural Credit Society (PACS) following which …

Continue Reading about Cooperative Society Act to be amended soon: Amit Shah →

The recent policy note “Home, Prohibition and Excise Department, Tamil Nadu Police” by the Tamil Nadu Home Department on the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012 demonstrates a superficial understanding of sexual offences against children. The ambiguity of the categorisation and the misrepresentation of data cause concern, as the policy note will determine scheme and programme intervention and budget allocation. The baldness of classification of cases under the Act as “POCSO Rape” and “POCSO Others” without any nuance is bound to cause public alarm. It is deceptive on two fronts. First, the note demonstrates an archaic understanding of sexual violence which the Act intentionally turned on its head in 2012. In the absence of a definition of what constitutes “POCSO rape”, one can only speculate whether it refers to the pre-POCSO definition of rape as was defined in the Indian Penal Code, which considered only peno-vaginal penetration, or it includes the …

Continue Reading about A policy note that renders POCSO Act vague →

[ Race affects our lives in countless ways. To read more stories on race from The New York Times, sign up here for our Race/Related newsletter . ] The city of Detroit took everything from Keith E. Williams and his family. He now wants it back. Right before he was born, Mr. Williams’s parents and older siblings left Black Bottom, a once vibrant and predominately Black neighborhood in Detroit, when city officials demolished the area as part of what was billed as a large-scale urban renewal project in the 1950s. The land is now a major freeway, I-375, and the location of the largely white, and affluent, Lafayette Park neighborhood. Although city officials claimed it had successfully relocated the Black Detroiters who once lived there, no independent source ever confirmed those assertions , according to The Detroit Free Press. Mr. Williams’s family, who were among 43,096 displaced residents and an additional 409 Black business owners, struggled to rebuild their lives. “It …

Continue Reading about Reparations for Black Residents Are Becoming a Local Issue as Well as a National One →

Celebrating 100 years of the Speakers' Conference which coincides with the platinum jubilee of Indian independence, 75 different programmes on Parliamentary democracy would be organised in different parts of the country, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla said on Saturday. "The tradition of holding Speakers' Conference is completing 100 years this year. The first such conference was held in 1921 at Shimla and once again after 100 years, the conference is taking place in Shimla," Mr. Birla told reporters here. He said the participants would discuss issues related to the parliamentary democracy, including the objectives achieved in the past 75 years. "Along with it, we plan to hold the 75 different programmes in different parts of the country involving the smallest but the most important and responsible institution of the democracy, which is village Panchayat to Parliament, municipal corporations, legislative assemblies or Panchayats," Mr. Birla said. The Speaker said this is the …

Continue Reading about 75 programmes on Parliamentary democracy across nation, announces LS Speaker Birla →

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contained in H.R. 4350 passed the U.S. House with Republican support Thursday. On September 23, 2021, Breitbart News reported that the 2022 NDAA contains a provision authorizing military courts to issue orders restraining military personnel from “possessing, receiving, or otherwise accessing a firearm.” The provision for prohibiting gun possession is contained in Section 529 of the NDAA. That section is titled, “Authority Of Military Judges And Military Magistrates To Issue Military Court Protective Orders.” The specific provision gives military courts the authority to prohibit gun possession via protective orders in two ways: 1. By giving the subject of the order an “opportunity to be heard on the order.” 2. By issuing the order ex parte. An electromagnet is used to pick up some of approximately 3,500 confiscated guns to be melted down at Gerdau Steel Mill on July 19, 2018 in Rancho Cucamonga, California. The weapons …

Continue Reading about Defense Bill with Red Flag Provision Passes in House with GOP Support →

“The bigger the wage gap across spouses, the smaller the labor supply of the secondary earner, which is typically the wife.” — Stefania Albanesi, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox . The September jobs numbers, released by the Labor Department on Friday , confirmed what economists and experts had feared: The recession unleashed by the pandemic is sidelining hundreds of thousands of women and wiping out the hard-fought gains they made in the workplace over the past few years. While the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.9 percent in September, far below the record high of nearly 15 percent in April, a large part of that drop was driven not so much by economic growth — though there were some job gains — but by hundreds of thousands of people leaving the job market altogether. A majority of those dropping out were women. Of the 1.1 million people ages 20 …

Continue Reading about Why Did Hundreds of Thousands of Women Drop Out of the Work Force? →

Boris Johnson’s government plans visas for 5,000 foreign drivers to meet demand, despite coronavirus lockdowns having put many British people out of work  — with a senior Tory MP suggesting Afghans be used. Driver shortages have led to shortages at petrol stations and a round of panic-buying, but rather than pressing employers to increase pay and establish training programmes for unemployed Britons — whose ranks have been significantly swelled by anti-coronavirus lockdown policies — Britain’s governing Conservative Party is, as ever , looking to bring in more foreign workers. Temporary visas will be issued for around 5,000 foreign drivers primarily but not exclusively from the European Union, according to the BBC, with more details on the scheme expected on Sunday. Tobias Ellwood, a senior backbench Member of Parliament (MP) for Johnson’s party and a former Defence minister, meanwhile, suggested “imaginative ideas” to supplement the driver drive in comments reported by the …

Continue Reading about Boris to Bring in 5,000 Foreign Drivers, Tory MP Wants to Use Afghans →

Elementary students returned to classrooms in Long Beach, Calif., on Monday and campuses from Los Angeles to Boston prepared for significant expansions of in-person instruction as a majority of the nation’s districts have now begun to reopen school buildings, many of which have been closed for more than a year. On Monday, Burbio, which monitors some 1,200 districts including the largest 200 in the country, reported that 53.1 percent of students were in schools offering daily, in-person classes, and that for the first time, the proportion of students attending school virtually or in hybrid classes had dropped. The change, Burbio officials said, appeared to be driven by the return in elementary and middle schools to in-person classes, and by the new rules from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention permitting schools to allow three feet of social distance instead of six feet in elementary schools. But a number of roadblocks to reopening remain. On the West Coast, …

Continue Reading about A majority of school districts are now open. But not everyone wants to return. →

Good morning. Some of California’s ballot propositions are expensive campaigns driven largely by deep-pocketed special interests . Some ballot propositions ask voters complex questions with potentially broad national implications. Proposition 22 — whose supporters and opponents have collectively raised a staggering $204 million , according to the California Secretary of State’s office — is both. Most of that has come from three companies : Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, whose leaders have spent months locked in a bitter battle with the state over a law passed last year meant to give gig workers more benefits and protections by requiring that they be classified as employees rather than contractors. [Read more about the new law .] The ballot initiative, and all the money they and other gig work companies have thrown at it, would allow those companies to essentially exempt themselves from that requirement, but give drivers some benefits. A poll released …

Continue Reading about The Uber Battle on California’s Ballot →