The SCOTUS: Fascism Defined

In another bit of “news analysis” that will surprise no one other than a FoxNews viewer (who won’t believe it anyway), the NYT’s almost-resident legal expert, Jeffrey Rosen, Prof of Law at Georgetown Univ, writes that – hold onto your hat – the Bush Supreme Court is very friendly to business interests.

Lately, however, the affinities between the court and the chamber, a lavishly financed business-advocacy organization, seem to be more than just architectural. The Supreme Court term that ended last June was, by all measures, exceptionally good for American business. The chamber’s litigation center filed briefs in 15 cases and its side won in 13 of them — the highest percentage of victories in the center’s 30-year history. The current term, which ends this summer, has also been shaping up nicely for business interests.

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Though the current Supreme Court has a well-earned reputation for divisiveness, it has been surprisingly united in cases affecting business interests. Of the 30 business cases last term, 22 were decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes.

Now there’s a shocker.

One of the key definitions of a fascist govt is one in which the corporate agenda is conflated with the national political and judicial agendas until it’s all but impossible to separate them. We seem to have reached that point, don’t we?

Privatization Leads to Fraud, Mismanagement, and Employee Abuse at Wackenhut

The three words that best describe the private security business these days are “racism”, “corruption”, and “profits”. Wackenhut, the largest private security provider to the Federal govt and the military outside of Iraq, would appear to be awash in all three.

Wackenhut, which has ties to the GOP and the Bush Administration that go almost as deep as Halliburton’s, is currently under investigation:

• in Alaska by the GAO for “inadequate training and incomplete background checks that led to employment of officers with criminal records”, “poor” record-keeping that included falsified training records, and a near-total lack of any kind of monitoring or oversight on the program, as well as for illegally obtaining security contracts that were supposed to go to minority businesses;
• in Miami (scroll to bottom) by Dade County for fraud – overbilling, billing for services not provided, falsifying records of guards’ hours, and violations of labor laws for working guards in some cases 20 hrs/day, 7 days/week;
• by the Homeland Security Committee for “problems at Wackenhut-guarded facilities nationwide that lead to high employee turnover, low morale and ineffective security” at US nuclear sites;
• by the House Govt Reform Committee “to examine charges of racism, discrimination and poor performance;
• at a Tennessee Army ammunition plant where inspectors found holes in the perimeter fences, and where “two teenage runaways were found wandering around the 6,000-acre property after getting dangerously close to explosives” after the number of guards had been cut “in response to higher gas prices”;
• by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for security violations “at Wackenhut-guarded Three Mile Island, Seabrook Station, St. Lucie, and Turkey Point nuclear power plants”;
• and by the Dept of Energy for “shorting the protective force on combat training; excessive overtime; caught cheating during one security drill and involved in a near-friendly fire incident in another” at its Y-12 (Oak Ridge) nuclear weapons plant.

And that’s only a partial list of domestic investigations.

The New Bedford Raid and Its Aftermath

Back in March, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials pulled off the biggest raid New England has ever seen, bursting into a leather factory in New Bedford to arrest 360 illegal aliens who had been working for Michael Bianco, Inc, a company with contracts to “produce safety vests and backpacks for the US military”. The owner, one Francesco Insolia, was charged with “conspiring to encourage or induce illegal immigrants to live in the United States, and conspiring to hire illegal immigrants.” Why would they risk jail to hire illegals? Because those illegals were desperate enough to work in the intolerable conditions which were all Insolia was willing to furnish.

According to affidavits unsealed yesterday, Insolia hired illegal immigrants instead of legal workers because the immigrants were desperate for jobs and more willing to put up with working conditions in his factory. Federal investigators allege workers were denied overtime, docked 15 minutes for every minute they were late, and fined for talking on the job, or for spending more than two minutes in the plant’s squalid bathrooms.

“Insolia and others knowingly and intentionally exploited the government by recruiting and hiring illegal aliens without authorization to work,” said US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, announcing the arrests yesterday. “They exploited the workforce with low-paying jobs and horrible working conditions, exploited the taxpayers by securing lucrative contracts funded by our legal workforce, and exploited the legal workforce by hiring illegal aliens.”

A month later the Boston Globe reported that Insolia had actually had the gall to apply for – and receive – grant money from the state of Massachusetts to “train” the workers he was already abusing.

The New Bedford manufacturer raided by federal agents last month for allegedly employing illegal immigrants won approval for $111,150 in state grants over the last four years to hire and train employees, as part of the company’s expansion.

The Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development approved two grants for Michael Bianco Inc. after the owner of the company, Francesco Insolia, appealed for help in winning new contracts from the US Department of Defense and building its share of the commercial textile market.

In early 2003, Michael Bianco, which then employed 87 people, was awarded a $66,250 grant to hire and train 80 new stitchers and machine operators, and to develop an in-house training program for entry-level workers. The state approved another $44,900 for the company this January, but the March 6 immigration raid put that grant on hold.

I probably don’t need to tell you that there is no evidence whatever that the “training sessions” actually took place. Insolia simply pocketed the money. Or perhaps he used it to pay Luis Torres for the fake ID’s Torres got for Insolia’s workers. But here’s the neat part: city officials, Republican and pro-business all, actually visited the factory and, rather than being appalled by the conditions, offered to help Insolia with the grant money and tax breaks.

FEMA Replaces the Red Cross: Is Martial Law Back in Play?

After FEMA’s shameful performance in the wake of Katrina, one would have thought that nobody in their right mind would assign them the key disaster-relief role, but that’s exactly what just happened.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will replace the American Red Cross as the agency in charge of coordinating the provision of shelter, food and first aid to victims in disasters under an agreement disclosed by a Senate panel yesterday.

The change in the government’s emergency plans, formalized in letters between FEMA and Red Cross leaders Feb. 21, follows criticism of the way they cooperated after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and a new law that bolsters FEMA’s role in providing emergency housing, human services, case management and financial help.

That graf is a doozy. FEMA and the Red Cross were both criticized for not co-operating? Maybe my memory is deficient, but I don’t remember the Red Cross being criticized at all while FEMA screwed up everything it touched. And it continues to. So, what? Now they’re being rewarded for being prime fuckups?

The FEMA takeover will be administrative and will not affect the Red Cross’s traditional direct relief operations, which include opening shelters, providing food and raising money, which totaled more than $2 billion after Katrina, spokeswoman Laura Howe said.

Oh, great. The authors of the biggest administrative clusterfuck since Elphinstone got thrown out of Kabul has just been given the responsibility for administering disaster relief.

Card-Check Bill Passes House

To no one’s surprise, the Employee Free Choice Act passed in the House yesterday.

The measure would represent one of the most significant revisions of federal labor law in 60 years. It is the top legislative priority of the labor movement, which represents a record low 12 percent of the workforce, compared with 35 percent in the 1950s. Major business lobbies have mobilized against it to a level not seen since the fight over Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, according to a Chamber of Commerce official. Yesterday’s 241 to 184 vote was largely along party lines, with 13 Republicans voting for the measure and two Democrats opposing it.

The real fight will come in the Senate where Republicans, representing the corporatocracy as always, have promised to filibuster to prevent its passage. Their primary argument for public purposes is that the EFCA would eliminate the secret ballot, “a cornerstone of democracy”. It’s by far the best argument they could make against the law even though it’s bogus. In what has become a standard GOP tactic, it makes them sound as if they’re protecting workers’ rights even as they vote to take them away.

The irony here is that if the Bush Administration, particularly its Labor and Justice Depts, were doing their jobs, which they’re not, this bill wouldn’t be necessary.

HS and Refugees: Housing Resembles Jail

In response to the criticism of international human rights groups about the inhumane conditions in which refugees are kept, Homeland Security and ICE have made a weak attempt to change their policies.

The day Mustafa Elmi turned 3 years old he had to report to his cell three times for headcount. To be able to get one hour of recreation inside a concrete compound sealed off by metal gates and razor wire he had to pin his picture ID to his uniform.

Such routines characterized Mustafa’s life, as well as that of his mother, Bahjo Hosen, 26, during their first seven months in the United States, the country to which they fled to escape political persecution in their native Somalia. They ended up in the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, one of the nation’s newest detention centers for illegal immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security touts as an “effective and humane alternative” to keep immigrant families together while they await the outcome of immigration court hearings or deportation.

Before the facility opened, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) routinely separated parents from their children upon apprehension by the Border Patrol. Infants and toddlers were placed in federally funded foster homes; adolescents and teenagers were placed in facilities for minors run by the Department of Health and Human Services; and parents were placed in adult detention centers.

An improvement, right? Well, maybe.

Homeland Security Treats Refugees Like Criminals

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
I will clap them in irons, throw away the key,
Send them back where they came from and shut the door
Behind them.

No, that last bit isn’t in the famous poem by Emma Lazarus that graces the Statue of Liberty but it describes the way the Bush Administration and Michael Chertoff’s Homeland Security Dept have been handling “asylum seekers” – people who come here to escape persecution and possible murder for their political views or religion in their home countries, according to a report released yesterday by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Judge Allows Class-Action Suit for Unpaid Overtime

By Maura Dolan and Lisa Girion, LA Times Staff Writers

SAN FRANCISCO — In a closely watched labor law case, the California Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for a class-action lawsuit brought by Sav-on Drug Stores workers who say they were misclassified as managers and improperly denied overtime.

The unanimous ruling overturned a lower-court decision that would have discouraged such suits.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys maintain that many workers — despite being given titles such as “store manager” or “team leader” — spend most of their day on non-managerial tasks such as stocking shelves or tending a cash register, rather than overseeing any aspect of the business.

Companies had hoped that the lower court’s position would slow a wave of overtime litigation that has swept the state in recent years, costing firms hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments and settlements. A broad swath of corporate California has been hit, including Farmers Insurance Group, Bank of America Corp., RadioShack Corp., Rite Aid Corp., Starbucks Corp., Taco Bell Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc.

As a result of the high-court ruling, experts said, California businesses can expect a renewed surge of class-action litigation seeking overtime pay.

“There are probably a fair number of these lawsuits waiting in the wings for the court to clarify what the standards are,” said Steven Katz, a Los Angeles lawyer who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief for other businesses in the Sav-on case. “Now that that has happened, I think we’re going to see those suits being filed.”

A spokeswoman for Sav-on, which has about 300 stores in California, declined to comment on the ruling. Rex S. Heinke, a Los Angeles attorney who represented the drugstore chain, said he couldn’t comment because the litigation was ongoing.

The California Supreme Court ruling came the same week that new federal overtime regulations took effect. Those rules, which are expected to reduce the amount of overtime paid to workers and reduce litigation, were opposed by organized labor and embraced by the business community.

The federal regulations, however, are expected to have little effect in California, which has its own labor laws.

Under the state statutes, workers who spend more than 50% of their time performing the duties of hourly workers, even if they’re called managers, are eligible for overtime pay. Eligible workers who put in more than eight hours a day on the job are supposed to be paid for the overtime at time-and-a-half — 1.5 times their usual hourly rate.

Under federal law followed in most other states, managers may be exempt from overtime pay if their primary duties are supervisory.

The state high court’s decision stemmed from a lawsuit brought by two Sav-on managers who contended that the chain misclassified its assistant managers and operating managers as exempt from the state’s overtime wage laws.

Lawyers in the case have estimated that 600 to 1,400 Sav-on workers may be entitled to back pay if the lawsuit succeeds.

(emphasis added by me)

Employers have tried to use this trick for decades. First, back in the late 60’s, they started giving executives titles in lieu of pay raises (up until then, titles always came with raises attched–you got the raise by earning the title). That worked so well that by the 70’s it had come down the food chain: secretaries started to be called ‘administrative assistants’, even ‘executive assistants’–but no raise. In the 80’s it got picked up by Wal-Mart who took it right to the bottom: grunts were now ‘associates’ and told they were ‘in charge’–of shirts, toiletries, cat food, whatever.

But it didn’t stop there, oh no. Manufacturers tried calling their line workers ‘independent contractors’, and instead of paying everybody at the same scale, they ‘negotiated contracts’, hiring the lowest bidders and pitting worker-against-worker. The ‘independent contractor’ scam had the added attraction that they didn’t have to do withholding or pay their share to the unemployment fund: ‘independent contractors’ were legally considered self-employed and thus responsible for their own unemployment payments. The Duke–Michael Dukakis was Gov then–put an end to that scam, thankfully, but it was just one in a long line of anti-labor tricks designed to push down wages and shove all their responsibilities onto their workers.

That’s why the new overtime rules are evil: it took years of lawsuits and investigations and fines to get corporations to quit playing these games on their employees; the Imperial Overtime Decree basically puts us all back to Square One, and we’re going to have to fight the same damn battles all over again.

Labor Dept Does Something–May Be a First

Elaine Chao’s tenure at Labor hasn’t exactly been known for its aggressive treatment of illegal corporate labor practices, despite the inconvenient fact that that’s what it was created to do, and as the head of it, that’s her job. She has usually supported whatever lame legal excuse or maneuver corporate attorneys came up with to justify their clients’ behaviour, and been exceedingly lax in enforcing labor laws; when she bothered to enforce them at all, it was normally because lawsuits or outside pressure forced her to. So we are only too happy to note that DoL investigators responded to information from a small watchdog group in LA and busted a Target contractor’s Wal-Mart-style treatment of its janitors: wages below minimum, a 7-days/wk work schedule, hiring 15 and 16-year-olds as full-time employees, 50 and 60-hr/wk work schedules without overtime, non-payment of taxes, particularly Social Security–you know the drill.

Labor Department Wins $1.9 Million in Back Pay for Janitors
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Published: NYT, August 26, 2004

The United States Department of Labor announced yesterday that it had reached a $1.9 million settlement with a contractor for the Target Corporation after finding that the contractor had not paid overtime to hundreds of immigrant janitors who often worked seven nights a week cleaning Target stores.

Several janitors said in interviews that the Target contractor was doing much the same as contractors for Wal-Mart had done before an immigration raid at Wal-Mart stores last October – making late-night janitors work nearly 365 days a year, without paying overtime or Social Security and other taxes.

The Labor Department announced its back-pay settlement with Global Building Services of Newhall, Calif., after a two-year investigation found that Global had not paid overtime to 775 immigrant janitors who cleaned Target stores in California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.

The Labor Department was tipped off to the violations by a Los Angeles group, the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund, that monitors whether employers are breaking the law when they use janitors.

“We investigated 50 Target stores, and we saw that janitors were being paid in cash, a flat rate with no overtime, no payroll taxes, no workers comp,” said Lilia Garcia, the trust fund’s executive director. “It’s a cancer in the industry; too many of these big retailers are using problematic contractors.”

Ms. Garcia said her group found that a half dozen of the late-night cleaners were only 15 or 16 years old. She said Global Building Services fired them soon after the federal inquiry started largely because state law bars teenagers so young from working so late at night and so many hours a day or a week. California officials participated in the inquiry.

Last October, federal agents raided 60 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states to arrest 250 cleaners who they said were illegal immigrants. The immigrants were employed by various Wal-Mart contractors, and as at the Target stores, they usually worked seven nights a week and were paid in cash without receiving overtime.

Labor Department officials declined to say whether they were investigating Wal-Mart or its contractors, although Wal-Mart has acknowledged that a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania is investigating whether it illegally cooperated with its contractors to use illegal immigrants as cleaners. Lawyers in New York have filed a class- action lawsuit against Wal-Mart charging various labor violations on behalf of what they estimate are thousands of illegal immigrant janitors.

Felipe Aguilar, who said he cleaned at five Target stores in Southern California, said in a telephone interview: “In my three years there, they gave me very few days off. And when I came back after being out injured for two weeks, the company said, ‘We can’t take you back. Someone else is working in your place.’ ”

Mr. Aguilar said that he worked about 80 hours a week, from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily, and was paid $525 or $625 every 15 days. That came to less than $4 an hour, well below the federal minimum wage of $5.15.

His wife, Claudia, who also worked at Target, said, “We felt bad about the pay; sometimes we felt rage, but we were scared to complain because we needed the job.”

In a statement, Global Building Services said that after these problems were brought to its attention in November 2002, it cooperated fully with the investigation and changed its pay practices.

“We are pleased that we were able to reach an agreement with the Department of Labor to compensate our employees,” Global said. “The company is fully compliant, and we look forward to serving the needs of our retail customers. We feel this is all behind us now.”

Uh-huh. How could Global Building Services not know that something on this scale was happening? Don’t they handle the paychecks? Didn’t they notice the discrepancies, the lack of withholding? If you believe GBS’ absurd statement, you probably also believe that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and the Easter Bunny wears tennis shoes and delivers eggs doing an impression of Tom Jones singing ‘Delilah’.

And we must add that while we’re all in favor of the Labor Dept actually doing something it wasn’t forced to do, we must in fairness note that: a) a $2Mil settlement is peanuts to a company that’s handling Target’s janitorial services in 5 states–5 huge states–and is hardly going to prevent them doing the same thing again when nobody’s looking, so it is effectively little more than the standard wrist-slap; and b) the DoL has yet to charge Target for complicity. It was Target, after all, who hired GBS and then didn’t bother to supervise them.

Oh, I forgot–‘But we didn’t know!’ Yeah, right. Ever notice that if you spend 25 cents on paperclips that wasn’t authorized, there’s a note on your desk from the comptroller the next day? How is that Target can track every expenditure to the penny except what they’re paying a contractor? How come if a buyer overpays $2 for an item their job is in jeopardy, but if they’re paying a contractor $$$MILLIONS$$$ less than the minimum he should be paying his employees, this they don’t notice?

The simple fact is, if you cost them a buck they’ll be all over you like white-on-rice, but if you save them a buck, they don’t give a damn how you did it. Steal it, extort it, exploit it–they don’t know, they don’t care, and they’ll never ask any questions.

From an old Bob & Ray routine–Wally Ballou (Bob) is interviewing a paperclip manufacturer (Ray) about how he san sell his product so cheap (10 cents a gross):

Wally Ballou: But how can your employees survive on $1.15 a week?

Ray: Oh, we don’t delve into the personal lives of our employees. That would be a wanton invasion of their privacy.

Wally: But where do they live? You can’t rent a room for a dollar a week.

Ray: Well, I understand a lot of them live in caves in the hills outside town and forage for food. They make their clothes out of tree bark and I’ve noticed, myself personally, that they don’t wear shoes. I call it ‘self-reliance’.

That routine dates back to the 50’s. Nothing much has changed, it would seem.

Coal Miners’ Health Ins Stripped in Bankruptcy

The lot of Appalachia’s coal miners has ever been a struggle, above ground and below. And now comes a fresh blow for more than 3,000 unionized miners who will lose their health care and retirement benefits under a federal judge’s ruling that it is not necessary for their troubled employer to honor its contract guarantees. Some veteran miners among the 2,300 affected retirees already suffer from black lung and other occupational diseases, but they nevertheless face loss of their medical benefits. So do 1,000 active miners, under the order of a bankruptcy judge in Kentucky.

The ruling makes it easier for Horizon Natural Resources, the nation’s fourth-largest coal company, to sell its six unionized mines as it undergoes bankruptcy. Potential buyers prefer the company’s nonunion mines as better bargains, since they are freer of ongoing financial obligations to workers. So the order canceling medical and other contract benefits presumably levels the auction field for buyers. This is small comfort for the miners caught in the crunch of federal bankruptcy law.

This cruel situation sounds like the stuff of another folk-song lament in Appalachia as the miners watch creditors go to the head of the line. But the bankruptcy judge, William Howard, found that he was well within existing law and might even save jobs if the mines can be sold and kept open in some fashion. Thus does bankruptcy law trump miners’ supposedly guaranteed, doubtlessly hard-earned benefits. The union is vowing an appeal, but the law clearly needs humane revision.