Amazon

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Share the Profits! Why US business must return to rewarding workers properly | Robert Reich

      by

      Share the profits! Why US businesses must return to rewarding workers properlyRobert ReichThe economy is booming and corporate profits are huge, but American wages still stagnate. History provides the answer According to this week’s release from the commerce department, the US economy has been growing at its fastest pace in almost 40 years. Corporate profits are their highest in 70 years. And the stock market, although gyrating wildly of late, is still scoring record gains.Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts | Robert ReichRead moreSo why do most Americans remain gloomy about the economy? Mainly because their real (inflation-adjusted) wages continue to go nowhere.Steeply-rising profits, economic growth and stock market highs – coupled with near-stagnant wages – has been the story of the American economy for decades. Most economic gains have gone to the top.So why not share the profits?Profit-sharing was tried with great success in the early decades of the 20th century but is now all but forgotten. In 1916, Sears, Roebuck & Co, then one of America’s largest corporations with more than 30,000 employees, announced it would begin to share profits with its employees, giving workers shares of stock and thereby making them part-owners.The idea caught on. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing bandwagon included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak and US Steel.The Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested profit-sharing as a means of reducing “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers. Profit-sharing gave workers an incentive to be more productive, since the success of the company meant higher profits would be shared. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions because payroll costs dropped as profits did.By the 1950s, Sears workers had accumulated enough stock that they owned a quarter of the company. And by 1968, the typical Sears salesperson could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1m, in today’s dollars.The downside was that when profits went down, workers’ paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, workers would lose all their investments in it. The best profit-sharing plans took the form of cash bonuses that employees could invest however they wish, on top of predictable wages.But profit-sharing with regular employees all but disappeared in large US corporations. Ever since the early 1980s when corporate “raiders” (now private-equity managers) began demanding high returns, corporations stopped granting employees shares of stock, presumably because they didn’t want to dilute share prices. Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s.Yet, just as profit-sharing with regular employees disappeared, profit-sharing with top executives took off, as big Wall Street banks, hedge funds, private equity funds and high-tech companies began doling out huge wads of stock and stock options to their MVPs.The result? Share prices and chief executive pay (composed increasingly of shares of stock and options to buy stock) have gone into the stratosphere, while the wages of the typical worker have barely risen.Researchers have found that before the 1980s, almost all the increases in share prices on the US stock market could be accounted for by overall economic growth. But since then, a large portion of the increases have come out of what used to go into wages.Jeff Bezos, who now owns around 10% of Amazon’s shares, is worth $170.4bn. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, such as warehouse workers, haven’t shared in the bounty.Amazon used to give out stock to hundreds of thousands of its employees. But in 2018 it stopped the practice and instead raised its minimum hourly wage to $15. The wage raise got headlines and was good PR – Amazon is still touting it – but the decision to end stock awards was more significant. It hurt employees far more than the increased minimum helped them.Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attack | Robert ReichRead moreIf Amazon’s 1.2 million employees together owned the same proportion of Amazon’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s – a quarter of the company – each Amazon worker would now own shares worth an average of more than $350,000.America’s trend toward higher profits, higher share prices, mounting executive pay but near stagnant wages is unsustainable, economically and politically.Profit-sharing is one answer. But how can it be encouraged? Reduce corporate taxes on companies that share profits with all their workers, and increase taxes on those that do not.Sharing profits with all workers is a logical and necessary step to making the system work for the many, not the few.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS economyOpinionEconomicsStock marketsUS domestic policyUS taxationUS politicsAmazoncommentReuse this content More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      California passes landmark bill targeting Amazon’s algorithm-driven rules

      by

      CaliforniaCalifornia passes landmark bill targeting Amazon’s algorithm-driven rulesThe legislation would require warehouses to disclose to government agencies the quotas used to track workers Kari PaulFri 10 Sep 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Sep 2021 07.58 EDTCalifornia has passed a landmark bill taking aim at Amazon and the controversial, algorithm-driven rules that govern the lives of its warehouse workers.The first-of-its-kind law was passed by the state senate this week and will soon land on the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom, who has not yet signaled whether he will sign it.Under the bill, warehouses will be required to disclose to government agencies – and to the employees – the quotas and metrics used to track workers. It would ban penalties for “time off-task”, which discourage workers from using the bathroom or taking other necessary breaks. It also prohibits retaliation against workers who complain.Amazon warehouse workers could get second vote on forming unionRead moreThough the bill applies to all warehouse jobs in California, its passage has called attention to Amazon, where workers have described brutal conditions under which productivity metrics are key and every move is surveilled. Some have even reported having to urinate in bottles on the job to avoid being penalized for taking time to use the bathroom.“Amazon is really kind of an outlier at this point in terms of the sophistication of their technologies,” said Beth Gutelius, a research director at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development.Workers at the tech behemoth live in fear of being fired for being marked as having too much “time off-task” or working too slowly, said Yesenia Barrera, a former Amazon warehouse worker who now organizes with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a non-profit workers’ rights group“It is really stressful and physically demanding to keep up,” she said. “They never tell us how much we are doing, you are never really sure how well you are doing – we are just told to keep going.”She said she first found out she was being tracked when she injured herself on the job and her manager was able to see through the scanning technology that she had stopped working. Amazon has a rate of injury that is 80% higher than that of non-Amazon warehouses, according to a recent report by a coalition of labor unions.“This bill would show workers how much they are doing and create a standard that is going to lessen injuries,” Barrera said.The bill is a “good start” in addressing the new paradigm of labor and surveillance, said Christian Castro, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Allowing workers to see their own productivity statistics “puts the power back into worker hands”, he said.“At the end of the day, this is about safety,” he said. “People should be able to go to work and come home safely.”The law comes as Amazon is increasingly facing pressure to address concerns about its warehouse conditions. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the largest US labor groups, voted in June to make unionizing Amazon employees one of its top priorities after a separate unionization effort in Alabama failed after intense pressure from Amazon.Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has in the past acknowledged some of the criticisms, saying in a letter to shareholders in April, “We need to do a better job for our employees.” Amazon did not respond to request for comment about the new law.Gutelius said that if the law is passed, she believed Amazon would only apply the changes to its California warehouses. But she was hopeful the law would put pressure on other states and federal legislature to do the same.“This is something that should really should be addressed across the country,” she said. “This bill will put pressure on our national policymakers to address the question of how we’re guiding workplaces into the 21st century.”TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsAmazonWorkers’ rightsnewsReuse this content More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘They should be worried’: how FTC chair Lina Khan plans to tackle big tech

      by

      US politics‘They should be worried’: how FTC chair Lina Khan plans to tackle big tech Within weeks of her appointment to the commission, Facebook and Amazon asked that she be recused from antitrust investigationsKari PaulSun 15 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 15 Aug 2021 01.01 EDTLina Khan has some of the biggest companies in the world shaking in their boots.The 32-year-old antitrust scholar and law professor in June became the youngest person in history and the most progressive in more than a decade to be appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).Khan’s appointment places her at the helm of the federal agency charged with enforcing antitrust law just as it is poised to tackle the giants of the technology industry after years of unchecked power. And it’s clear that big tech isn’t happy about it.Within weeks of Khan’s appointment, both Facebook and Amazon requested that Khan be recused from the FTC’s antitrust investigations into their companies, arguing that her intense criticism of them in the past meant she would “not be a neutral and impartial evaluator” of antitrust issues.Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech? | John NaughtonRead moreKhan has forcefully argued for the need to rein in powerful firms like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google, developing an innovative antitrust argument that has revolutionized the way we think about regulating monopolies.“She understands how these companies are harming workers, innovation and ultimately democracy and is committed to taking them head on,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an antimonopoly advocacy organization.“This is a gamechanger.”‘A meteoric rise’Before Khan took it on, antitrust law enforcement in the US had atrophied. For decades, it had functioned under the “consumer welfare standard”, which meant that the government would only take action against a company for anti-competitive practices if consumers were hurt by increased prices. But by the time Khan was a student at Williams and then Yale Law School, tech behemoths had built de facto monopolies by giving away their products for free or at such low prices that no one else could compete.In the early years of the tech boom it was widely assumed that the industry would essentially regulate itself, according to Rebecca Allensworth, a professor of antitrust law at Vanderbilt University. That Yahoo’s popularity gave way to Google and Myspace to Facebook appeared to be proof that “competition in tech was intensive without any government involvement”, she said. “But we have seen how that has really changed, as has our understanding of how these companies can abuse the market.” Slipping through the cracks of these old antitrust standards, tech companies amassed unchecked power, acquiring competitors and scooping up billions of customers. In 2020, Apple became the first American company to be valued at $2tn. That same year, Amazon eclipsed $1tn, joining Microsoft, at $1.6tn, and Google parent Alphabet at $1tn.In her now-famous 2017 Yale Law Journal article, Khan argued that the rise of these mega companies proved that modern American antitrust law was broken, and that the traditional yardsticks by which regulators determine monopolies need to be re-examined for the digital age.Keeping prices low has allowed Amazon to amass a large share of the market, giving it a disproportionate impact on the economy, stifling competition and further perpetuating monopoly, she argued.“The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation – factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets,” she wrote.She also investigated mergers and examined the impact the resulting tech monopolies have on product quality, suppliers and company conduct. Even if these companies’ practices resulted in some benefits for consumers, they were harmful to markets and democracy at large, she said.The immediate impact of her thesis was undeniable, with the New York Times announcing Khan had “singlehandedly reframed decades of monopoly law”. Politico called her “a leader of a new school of antitrust thought”. Christopher Leslie, a professor of antitrust law at University of California, Irvine, characterized Khan’s rise in recent years as “meteoric”.“It’s unprecedented to have somebody ascend to such an important leadership role in antitrust enforcement so soon after graduating from law school,” he said. “But it’s also unprecedented to have somebody make such a significant impact on antitrust public policy debates so quickly after graduating.”Big tech in the hot seatIn 2019, Khan brought her new approach to antitrust to Congress, serving as counsel to the US House judiciary committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial, and administrative law. Spearheading the committee’s investigation into digital markets, she played a large role in the publication of its landmark report: a 451-page treatise on how companies including Google and Amazon abuse their market power for their own benefit.Khan also served as legal director at the political advocacy group Open Markets Institute and taught antimonopoly law at Columbia until her appointment to the FTC in 2021.Khan’s appointment marked a break from the “revolving door” between the FTC and the private sector, in which people with years of experience defending companies in Silicon Valley become regulators. Her new role also comes at a time when reining in big tech is one of the only issues that unites a deeply divided Congress.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said Khan’s leadership of the FTC was “a huge opportunity to make big, structural change” to fight monopolies and Senator Amy Klobuchar praised Khan as “a pioneer in competition policy” who “will bring a critical perspective to the FTC”. The Republican Ted Cruz told Khan he “looked forward” to working with her on these issues.Khan has her critics. The former Republican senator Orrin Hatch has condemned her thesis as “hipster antitrust”. Mike Lee of Utah said she “lacks the experience necessary” for the FTC and that her views on US antitrust laws were “wildly out of step with a prudent approach to the law”.But her appointment coincides with a growing drive among lawmakers to take on the major tech companies, Allensworth said. “Politicians, small businesses and the academic establishment are clamoring for it,” she added.Shortly after naming Khan as chair, Joe Biden signed an executive order calling on federal regulators to prioritize action promoting competition in the American economy – including in the tech space. “Let me be very clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation,” he said regarding the order, which contained 72 initiatives to limit corporate power. Biden asked the FTC to better vet mergers and acquisitions and to establish rules on surveillance. He also called for easing of restrictions on repairing tech devices and data collection on consumers.‘A different set of rules’In her first hearing as chair in July, Khan indicated that she was ready to get started, saying the US needs “a different set of rules”.She cited bad mergers – in the past she had criticized Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram, Giphy and WhatsApp as anti-competitive – as potentially fueling large tech monopolies: “In hindsight there’s a growing sense that some of those merger reviews were a missed opportunity.”One of Khan’s first tasks as chair is likely to be rewriting an FTC antitrust complaint against Facebook that was dismissed in June after the agency failed to demonstrate that the tech giant maintains a monopoly.Meanwhile, Apple and others are set to face FTC scrutiny over repair policies that restrict third-party companies from fixing devices. The agency voted unanimously in July to ramp up enforcement of the right to repair.The attempts by Amazon and Facebook to force Khan’s recusal are signs that big tech won’t go down without a fight. But critics say these efforts amount to intimidation tactics and not much more. Khan does not have any conflicts of interest under federal ethics laws, which typically apply to financial investments or employment history, and the requests are not likely to go far.This is “a PR move”, said Allensworth. “She has made a lot of very public, extremely influential arguments about exactly how tech suppresses competition and now she’s the chairperson of the largest and most important federal agency to do with competition,” she said.“They should be worried,” she added.TopicsUS politicsFacebookAppleGoogleAmazonfeaturesReuse this content More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden stakes claim to being America’s most pro-union president ever

      by

      Just over 100 days into his presidency Joe Biden is showing that he is one of the most pro-union presidents in American history, declaring the “unions built the middle class” in his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.Union membership has declined precipitously in the US and accounted for about 10.8% of US employees last year, just over half the rate in 1983. Unions have also suffered notable setbacks in recent years, mostly recently failing to get the votes to unionize at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama.None of this has dampened Biden’s ardor for organized labor, or Republican opposition to it.Last Monday, Biden issued an executive order establishing the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, a move that aims to help unions expand their ranks. On Tuesday, Biden named Celeste Drake, to head his new “Made in America” program, which is designed to steer more federal money to US manufacturers. Drake is longtime trade expert at AFL-CIO, the US’s largest union federation.Also last week, the White House issued a fact sheet saying that Biden’s proposed $2.3tn infrastructure plan would create many union jobs in construction, clean energy and other fields – by, for instance, requiring companies that receive money under the legislation not to oppose unionization efforts.Biden’s new taskforce is seen as an important pro-union move – headed by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it includes most cabinet members and aims to have the entire executive branch promote unionizing and collective bargaining. In this way, Biden is undertaking an extraordinary effort to help reverse the decades-long decline in labor unions’ membership and power.In announcing the taskforce, the White House said “the shrinking of America’s middle class [is] associated with the declining percentage of workers in unions”.The taskforce, officials say, will recommend ways to use existing policies and programs to promote organizing and will also explore new policies to further that goal. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the president’s council of economic advisers, told the Guardian. “The marching order from the president is everything we do in the job market space needs to reflect the importance of unionization.”One White House official noted that the percentage of federal workers in unions, 28%, is lower than the percentage of state and local government workers. He said the administration might seek to increase that percentage by communicating with federal employees on the advantages of joining unions.Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, called Biden’s creation of the new taskforce “a significant historical step”. “The idea of the White House using this as a platform – it seems every cabinet member is on the taskforce – is a pretty profound statement about the importance the Biden administration places on collective bargaining and organizing workers.”A White House fact sheet seemed to acknowledge the complaints of many labor leaders who argue Democratic presidents have done too little to strengthen unions. “No previous administration has taken a comprehensive approach to determining how the executive branch can advance worker organizing and collective bargaining,” the fact sheet said.During his first 100 days, Biden has acted repeatedly to promote unions. On his very first day, he fired the National Labor Relations Board’s anti-union general counsel. On 28 February, he issued a video that some historians say was the most pro-union statement ever by a sitting president, one that many saw as indirect support for the unsuccessful Amazon unionization drive. Biden has vigorously supported the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, (Pro Act), the most pro-union legislation to advance in Congress since the 1930s. The House approved it in March, but it faces a filibuster in the Senate. Among other things, the Pro Act would take away some of corporate America’s most effective tactics in fighting unionization and give state and local employees in all 50 states the right to unionize.Biden has backed other legislation that labor strongly supports. He has pushed to lift the federal minimum wage to $15, and after a $15 minimum lacked the votes to pass the Senate, he issued an executive order on Tuesday setting a $15 minimum for federal contractors. Unions also applaud Biden’s efforts to create 12 weeks’ paid leave for new parents and workers who need to care for sick family members.“Biden has a long record of being very pro-union. The challenge now is figuring out what he can do with Congress, what he can do without Congress and what he’s willing to do without Congress,” said Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers. “Supporting organized labor is a win-win for him. It builds on his electoral base. It addresses what he sees as the key problems ailing our country, not the least of which is economic equality, and it builds broader support for Democrats up and down the ballot across the country.”Some labor experts say Biden may prove to be even more pro-union than Franklin D Roosevelt, who signed landmark legislation creating a minimum wage and giving workers a federal protected right to unionize. Givan said that for Biden to be arguably as pro-labor as FDR, he will need to go beyond rhetoric and take some far-reaching pro-labor actions and enact some important pro-labor legislation.Seth Harris, a White House labor adviser, told the Guardian: “In the past we’ve had very good-faith efforts by some presidents to do individual things, like executive order and regulatory actions [to help unions]. The question is, what about a whole-of-government approach? We never sit down and think about what it would be like if the whole government was organized around the principle that worker organizing was a good thing and not a bad thing.”Biden appears eager to use multiple tools and tactics to promote unions, including his procurement powers, through $600bn in annual federal contracting. That power might be used to organize the lightly unionized clean energy industry, officials said.“We know that about two-thirds of Americans approve of unions from a 2020 Gallup poll,” said Bernstein of the council of economic advisers. “We know that only 6% of private-sector workers are union members. There is a huge gap between the number of working Americans who want to be represented by unions and have collective bargaining and the number who are in unions. It could make a very big difference in this space to have a president who uses the bully pulpit to make this a front-and-center preference.”None of this has sat well with Republicans. Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the House education and labor committee, criticized Biden for creating the new taskforce, saying that move “further solidified his cushy relationship with union bosses; the same people responsible for swindling workers’ hard-earned paychecks and pushing radical, unworkable policies that lead to lower economic growth”.But for all his talk of bipartisanship, Biden seems keen to promote unions despite the potential blowback and is actively courting working Americans in his efforts. “Union workers earn roughly 13% more than non-union workers on a similar job site,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “They also experience drastically lower rates of labor standards violations,” like wage theft or safety violations. The fact sheet noted that 60% of the nation’s 16 million union members are women and/or people of color.In an interview, a senior White House official said Biden was very concerned about the weakened state of worker power and sees unions as the best method of increasing it. “His framing of worker power and unionization has always been a matter of getting a fair shake at the bargaining table,” the official said. “He looks at the bargaining table and sees a woman of color in the healthcare sector and on the other side of the table, a bunch of people with a lot more power than she has, and that’s what he wants to balance out.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to come

      by

      Antitrust is hot. In February, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021. Weeks later, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley proposed the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. Both bills are pending before the Senate judiciary committee.Hawley and Klobuchar have both published books. Hawley offers The Tyranny of Big Tech, and Klobuchar Antitrust. There is plenty of overlap but the substantive and stylistic differences are glaring.Hawley takes pride in owning the libs. Klobuchar criticizes the Trump administration’s lack of antitrust enforcement. His book is barbed. Hers methodical.On 6 January, Hawley gave a clench-fisted salute to pro-Trump militants and voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. On the page, he doubles down.Two weeks after the Capitol attack, Klobuchar told the presidential inauguration: “This is the day our democracy picks itself up, brushes off the dust and does what America always does.” She remains angry with Hawley and “Flyin’” Ted Cruz for the insurrection and its aftermath.Playing to type, Hawley has also provided the sole vote against a bill to crack down on anti-Asian hate crime and opposed renaming military bases named for Confederate generals. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s senior senator and the No 4 member of GOP Senate leadership, parted ways with Hawley on both. In the civil war, Missouri was a border state. A century and a half later, it looks like Hawley has picked the losing side.In his book, he upbraids corporate America, “woke capitalism”, Amazon, Google and Facebook. He demands that Google “be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market”.He would also have Facebook “lose” Instagram and WhatsApp, and accuses Amazon of destroying Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter funded by Rebekah Mercer, a Hawley donor along with her father, Robert Mercer and other Trump acolytes.Hawley’s embrace of antipathy toward big business – even that in which he invests – is not exactly new.In 2008 he published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness and approving of the 26th president’s relentless support for the little guy.Almost a decade later, as Missouri attorney general, Hawley launched an antitrust investigation of Google. Shortly after that, as a Senate candidate, he told Bloomberg News: “We need to have a conversation in Missouri, and as a country, about the concentration of economic power.”But Hawley is buffeted by contradictions. He has for example feted Robert Bork as a conservative martyr, even as Bork’s legal writings have served as intellectual jet fuel for those developments in the marketplace Hawley professes to abhor.The Tyranny of Big Tech makes no mention of the professor who wrote an influential anti-antitrust book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978, nine years before he was blocked from the supreme court.Klobuchar, by contrast, gives Bork plenty of face time.“For Bork,” she writes, “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not a relevant consideration for antitrust law.”Bork had issues with civil rights too. In 1963, when Jim Crow was still in full force, he branded what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority”.In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley also blasts corporate abuse of personal data and data mining – all while he looks to Peter Thiel of Palantir for donor dollars.Left unstated is that Palantir was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Cambridge Analytica was owned by the Mercer family and Thiel was an early funder and board member of Facebook. The circle is complete.Hawley’s book can be viewed as plutocrat-populism in print. Tucker Carlson’s praise is blurbed on the jacket. Inside, Hawley defends Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from purported predations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Both Murdoch and Zuckerberg are billionaires many times over.Hawley is on stronger ground when he revisits the nexus between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Google. Eric Schmidt, then head of the company, was Obama’s chief corporate ally. On election night 2016, Schmidt, wore a Clinton staff badge, having spent months advising her campaign.In her book, Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of US anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy.In a footnote, she commends Hawley for addressing the “turf wars” between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and their negative impact on antitrust enforcement. Unlike Hawley, however, Klobuchar vehemently disapproves of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision and characterizes it as opening “the floodgates to dark money in our politics”.In 2016, Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, wrote an op-ed titled: “Josh Hawley for [Missouri] Attorney General”. In his maiden Senate race, Hawley’s campaign received $10,000 from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund.Unfortunately, Klobuchar goes the extra mile and calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Her would-be cure is worse than the disease – an attack on free speech itself.The proposed amendment would expressly confer upon “Congress and the states” broad power to curtail campaign fundraising and spending. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press”.Not so curiously, it is silent about “abridging the freedom of speech”, an existing constitutional protection. Media barons rejoice – all others start sweating.In 2020, Klobuchar came up way short in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, she chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, where Hawley is a member.Both senators were law review editors: she at the University of Chicago, he at Yale. If Hawley has written a sort of campaign manifesto for the Republican presidential primary in 2024, Klobuchar’s book reads at times like an application for supreme court justice. It contains hundreds of pages of footnotes and pays repeated tribute to the late justice Louis Brandeis.Klobuchar also heaps praise on Stephen Breyer, a member of the court appointed by Bill Clinton and a former Harvard Law professor who in 1982 authored Regulation and Its Reform, a counter to Bork and the “Chicago School”.Klobuchar extends an array of “thank yous”. There is one for Jake Sullivan, her former counsel, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser; another for Matt Stoller, a former staffer to Bernie Sanders on the Senate budget committee and a sometime Guardian contributor; and another for Paul Krugman of the New York Times. All three come with definite viewpoints and are strategically placed.Increased antitrust enforcement by the DoJ, the FTC and the states appears to be more likely than wholesale legislative change. A government antitrust case against Google proceeds. Furthermore, Biden has already appointed two critics of big tech to key slots at the White House and the FTC. Who will lead DoJ’s antitrust division is an open question. Finding a suitable non-conflicted pick appears difficult.Klobuchar and Hawley will be heard from. Their books matter. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Amazon’s sales up 44% as US economy soars 6.4% in first quarter

      by

      Amazon’s sales increased 44% to $108.5bn in the first three months of the year as the company’s pandemic boom continued into 2021.The sales figures from the online shopping and web services giant came after the release of slew of positive economic reports that suggest the US is shaking off the worst of the pandemic recession.Amazon made a profit of $8.1bn for the quarter – $2.7bn a month – beating analysts’ forecasts after a series of better than expected results from tech companies and others.While Amazon profited throughout the coronavirus downturn, there are now signs that the economic recovery is spreading.The news came after the commerce department said the US economy took off in the first quarter, soaring 6.4% on an annual basis as rising vaccinations, a massive round of government stimulus and a steady recovery in the jobs market helped reverse some of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.The annualized rate suggests the US economy is firmly on the road to recovery. In normal times US gross domestic product (GDP) – the broadest measure of the economy – grows at about 2-2.5% a year, but the pandemic triggered wild swings as the country went into lockdown and businesses shuttered.The news comes amid a flood of good news for the US economy. The corporate earnings season has seen many sectors of the economy from banking to automotive bouncing back from the pandemic. Apple too reported bumper results on Tuesday, the latest tech company to record booming sales during the pandemic. New York City, the center of the US pandemic last year, will fully reopen on 1 July, while 43% of the population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and more than a quarter of the US is now fully vaccinated.US stock markets set record highs again after the GDP report and copper prices, seen as key indicator of economic demand, rose to $10,000 a tonne for the first time since 2011.The outpouring of good news is all the more remarkable given the scale of economic woe the pandemic heaped on the US economy.A year ago US unemployment hit a post-second world war high of 14.8%, it has since fallen to 6%. The economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction in history last year, shrinking 32.9% on an annualized basis. It grew at 4.3% in the last three months of 2020 after recording a remarkable annual growth rate of 33.4% in the previous three months.“The increase in first-quarter GDP reflected the continued economic recovery, reopening of establishments, and continued government response related to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the commerce department said.Problems remain, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits each week is still high. On Thursday the labor department said 553,000 people filed for benefits last week. The number has been falling sharply but remains close to twice as high as pre-pandemic levels and the jobs market is still down 8.4m jobs.Racial disparities also remain. Black and Latino Americans suffered the hardest as the pandemic closed businesses across the US and their unemployment rates remain elevated in comparison with white Americans. Women, too, have been pushed out of the workforce by the shutdowns, triggering what some economists have dubbed a “shecession”. Lack of childcare and other issues have meant that 1.8 million women have left the workforce entirely.But the fast rollout of vaccines, the reopening of businesses and the Biden administration’s $1.9tn stimulus bill have boosted consumer confidence and fueled an impressive recovery.The US government sent cheques to 90 million Americans in March and consumer confidence is approaching pre-pandemic levels having risen for four months in a row. Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of US economic activity.Consumption growth surged 10.7% over the quarter and the US savings rate grew to 21.0% from 13.0%. Capital Economics expects those savers to start spending now that Covid-19 restrictions are lifting.“With the elevated saving rate, households are still flush with cash and, now that restrictions are being eased as the vaccination program proves a success, that will allow them to boost spending on the worst-affected services, without needing to pull back too much on goods spending,” the economic forecasting group wrote in a note to investors. More

    • 213 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      In space, no one will hear Bezos and Musk’s workers call for basic rights | Robert Reich

      by

      Elon Musk’s SpaceX just won a $2.9bn Nasa contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Jeff Bezos.The money isn’t a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7bn. Bezos, $197.8bn. Together, that’s almost as much as the bottom 40% of Americans combined.And the moon is only their stepping stone.Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the survival of our species.“If we make life multi-planetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars,” he tweeted.Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. He envisions “very large structures, miles on end” that will “hold a million people or more each”.Back on our home planet, Musk is building electric cars, which will help the environment. And Bezos is allowing us to shop from home, which might save a bit on gas and thereby also help the environment.But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining upLast spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeting “FREE AMERICA NOW”, Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it was safe to do so. Almost immediately, 10 workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least 450 Tesla workers had been infected.Musk’s production assistants, as they’re called, earn $19 an hour – hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk is virulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.Bezos isn’t treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks – often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the US median family income. And no paid sick leave.Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned they’d have to pay union dues (untrue – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the country’s fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17th century, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity – in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of today’s super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.But as earthly hazards grow – not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality – escape will become more difficult. Bunkers won’t suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.I’m grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish they’d set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.It’s understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But there’s really no escape. If they’re serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working people here on terra firma. More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Amazon and unions: an unfair fight, but not yet over | Editorial

      by

      Goliath beats David isn’t half as good a story, but it is the usual way of the world. So last week’s news that Amazon has fended off an attempt by workers to form its first ever US trade union is unsurprising, if sad. What intrigues is the volume and variety of support that the struggle won across the US and the world, from faith leaders to the NFL players association to Republican ever-hopefuls such as Marco Rubio. In that intensity of interest lies the real surprise: the change in popular politics towards both big business and workers.As battles go, it was always ridiculously lopsided. In one corner you had the world’s richest man sitting atop corporate America’s second-largest employer, in perhaps the most anti-union country in the rich world. Opposing him were workers and activists in Alabama, one of the most conservative of all US states, trying something never attempted before in the land of the free: to unionise an entire Amazon warehouse, those hangars full of consumer goods and crushing conditions for workers that together define our way of life. No wonder Jeff Bezos won last week, with workers at the Bessemer warehouse voting more than two to one against forming a union. That result allows Amazon to continue hiring and firing at will. It also brings to a halt perhaps the most watched union drive in the US in years. The future of industrial relations inside a giant warehouse in the Deep South became a subject of debate across Europe, so vast is Amazon’s empire. In the UK, the GMB and Unite are both looking to organise more Amazon employees.Just why the defeat was so large is a question that has prompted much soul-searching among American progressives, with some blaming poor strategic choices by the activists and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union claiming Amazon pursued “egregious and illegal” anti-union tactics, allegations that the company denies. But perhaps the fairest assessment is that from the longstanding labour writer and activist Jane McAlevey: “If the rules for unionization in the US came close to being fair, they [pro-union workers] would have won. But the rules aren’t fair. Quite the opposite: they are outrageously unfair.”But there are two hopeful lessons that America and the rest of the world can take from this story of disappointment. First, it is now convention to argue that societies need strong unions. Last month, Joe Biden gave that message in a video address, but he is only catching up with some of his neighbours in Washington. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund have long pointed out the links between inequality and financial crises, and argued that “restoration of the lower income group’s bargaining power is more effective” than a crash in righting a giant wealth gap. In that battle between the billionaire Mr Bezos and the Alabama workers, it’s clear who those IMF researchers would have rooted for.Second, the excitement around that Alabama ballot shows how far sentiment in the capitalist heartland is moving against big business and towards labour. Opinion polls suggest American public approval for trade unions is the highest it has been in almost 20 years, at 65%. This is not a shift in mood that has been led by Mr Biden; rather, the president is being compelled to channel it, often under the tutelage of politicians and advisers further to the left. This is a very different kind of politics than seen in the era of Barack Obama. Where it goes next will be worth watching. More