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The mucus and hairs in your nose can trap larger particles, and the mucus and cilia in your upper airway can catch some as well, said Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University. But some PM2.5 or smaller particles can bypass these defenses and penetrate the deepest parts of your lungs. Dr. Montrose […] More
Wonderful Nurseries, owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, has sued the state to overturn a labor organizing law championed by the United Farm Workers.The allegations ricocheted through the agricultural fields and into a Central Valley courthouse, where one of California’s most powerful companies and an iconic union were trading charges of deception and coercion in a fight over worker representation.Some farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries — part of the Wonderful Company, the conglomerate behind famous brands of pomegranate juice and pistachios, as well as Fiji Water — said they had been duped into signing cards to join a union. On the other side, the United Farm Workers, the union formed in the 1960s by labor figures including Cesar Chavez, contends that the influential company, owned by the Los Angeles billionaires and powerhouse Democratic donors Stewart and Lynda Resnick, is trying to thwart the will of workers through intimidation and coercion.For months, the back and forth has played out before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which arbitrates labor fights between workers and growers, and in a courthouse not far from Wonderful’s sprawling fields.In May, the company filed a legal challenge against the state that could overturn a 2022 law that made it easier for farmworkers to take part in unionization votes.After vetoing a previous version over procedural concerns, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure following public pressure from President Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker. The U.F.W. heralded the bill’s enactment as a critical victory, but several big growers said that it would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process.The law paved the way for farmworkers to vote for union representation by signing union authorization cards, a process known simply as card check. Its passage coincided with an era of greater mobilization to unionize workers during the pandemic and a willingness to press demands for better working conditions and respect from employers, said Victor Narro, project director and labor studies professor at the U.C.L.A. Labor Center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Under a $45 million settlement, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust its policy around pregnancy. Some women say the agency has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation.When Roberta Gabaldon was ready to share news of her pregnancy with her colleagues at Customs and Border Protection in 2015, she brought in pink and blue doughnuts with a sign that read: “Pink and blue. Pink and blue. Somebody’s pregnant, guess who?”But her palpable excitement, particularly after a miscarriage months earlier, quickly dissipated.“My boss came into my office and he’s like: ‘You have to leave. You have to get a note about your pregnancy, and you have to go on light duty,’” Ms. Gabaldon, an agriculture specialist in the El Paso office, recalled, describing how she was told she needed to be reassigned to a post with fewer responsibilities regardless of whether she or her doctor believed it was necessary.Her experience reflects that of hundreds of female employees at the agency who have filed suit against Customs and Border Protection, saying that since at least 2016, they were denied equal treatment once they disclosed they were expecting. No matter the physical demands of their jobs, many were transferred to another post, typically centered on administrative or secretarial work and usually unrelated to what skills they had developed in their existing roles. The policy, they say, hurt their opportunities for advancement, and others add that they weathered pay cuts because light duty meant no more overtime.But under a $45 million settlement reached on Monday, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation as women try to hide their pregnancies at work for as long as possible.The agreement, which is not final until the end of September, requires C.B.P. to draft a new policy for pregnant women, and lawyers representing the women will monitor the agency’s compliance for three years. C.B.P. will also be required to train all managers and supervisors about the rights of pregnant employees.C.B.P. declined to answer questions about its policy toward pregnant women as described in the lawsuit and in interviews, citing its practice of not commenting on pending litigation. The terms of the settlement agreement state that the agency does not admit wrongdoing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The well-connected attorney, who founded a powerhouse firm at the dawn of the #MeToo era, has faced complaints that she mistreated and insulted other lawyers.Roberta A. Kaplan, the celebrated lawyer who took on former President Donald J. Trump, and helped win marriage equality for gay Americans, is stepping down from the law firm she founded after clashing with her partners over her treatment of colleagues.Ms. Kaplan, a hard-charging civil rights lawyer, announced that she was leaving the firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which she formed in 2017, to start a new one.Her departure followed months of internal frustration over Ms. Kaplan’s conduct toward other lawyers, according to people familiar with the matter. Those concerns led her colleagues to remove her from the firm’s management committee and precipitated her departure.Ms. Kaplan’s former firm will be renamed Hecker Fink effective Monday. “Robbie brought us together and for that we owe her a debt of gratitude,” the firm’s remaining partners said in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.“It was Robbie’s decision to leave the firm,” the firm’s two named partners, Julie Fink and Sean Hecker, said in a statement. “We wish her the very best and look forward to working with her and her new firm in the future.”Ms. Kaplan said in an interview with Bloomberg that she was leaving with a colleague because Kaplan Hecker & Fink had grown “in size and complexity beyond what I had in mind and I wanted to get back to something nimbler.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
The eight workers say they were wrongfully fired after circulating a memo raising concerns about sexual harassment at the rocket company led by Elon Musk.Eight former employees of Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, sued the company and Mr. Musk on Wednesday, contending they were wrongfully fired for raising concerns about sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace.The employees were fired in 2022 after they circulated an open letter urging SpaceX executives to condemn Mr. Musk’s comments on Twitter, later renamed X, which amounted to “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us.” After being made aware of the letter, Mr. Musk ordered the terminations, according to the complaint.“Our eight brave clients stood up to him and were fired for doing so,” Laurie Burgess, a lawyer representing the former SpaceX employees, said in a statement. “We look forward to holding Musk accountable for his actions at trial.”The plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of compensatory damages. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The lawsuit, filed in California state court in Los Angeles, called SpaceX’s workplace an “Animal House” filled with inappropriate and sexually suggestive behavior. Several plaintiffs said they had experienced harassment from other SpaceX employees that “mimicked Musk’s posts,” which created “a wildly uncomfortable hostile work environment.”The lawsuit contends that executives at SpaceX were regularly made aware of grievances about Mr. Musk’s explicit social media messages, but that the complaints were routinely dismissed, even after a “sexual harassment internal audit” conducted by Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer.After the employees were fired, Ms. Shotwell wrote in an email to SpaceX employees that there was “too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.The same eight employees are already pursuing charges against SpaceX with the National Labor Relations Board. In January, SpaceX sued the labor board to dispute the charges, arguing that the complaint should be dismissed because the structure of the agency is unconstitutional.The lawsuit was filed a day before Tesla shareholders are expected to conclude a vote on a pay package for Mr. Musk that’s worth about $45 billion. It also followed a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal detailing Mr. Musk’s history of sexual relationships with co-workers.The lawsuit is the latest in a list of grievances between employees and Mr. Musk. In 2022, Business Insider reported that SpaceX had paid $250,000 to settle a claim that he exposed himself to an employee on a private plane. (Mr. Musk later denied the “wild accusations.”) In 2022, he laid off roughly half of Twitter’s work force after acquiring the company, later firing another two dozen of the company’s internal critics. And last August, the Justice Department sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and asylum seekers in its hiring.“We hope that this lawsuit encourages our colleagues to stay strong and to keep fighting for a better workplace,” Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. More
Inmates had complained about a monthslong lockdown that cut them off from family members and timely medical care.The former warden of a Wisconsin prison and eight other prison employees were charged on Wednesday in connection with multiple inmate deaths over the last year, the local sheriff said.The prison, Waupun Correctional Institution, about 70 miles northwest of Milwaukee, was the subject of a 2023 report by The New York Times and Wisconsin Watch that found that inmates had been confined to their cells for months and denied access to medical care.The prison’s former warden, Randall Hepp, had left his job earlier this week. He was charged with misconduct in public office, a felony. Mr. Hepp’s arrest was first reported by The Associated Press. His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.The other prison employees, most of whom worked as correctional officers and registered nurses, were charged with abuse of an inmate. Two of the correctional officers and a sergeant were also charged with misconduct.In announcing the arrests during a Wednesday news conference, Dale J. Schmidt, the sheriff for Dodge County, Wis., said Mr. Hepp and the other employees had failed to adequately care for inmates in their custody. Sheriff Schmidt described in detail four deaths, including one involving a prisoner who had not eaten in days and was “drinking sewage water” and “played in the toilet.” The medical examiner said the cause of death was malnutrition and probable dehydration, and ruled it a homicide.Randall Hepp, former warden of Waupun Correctional Institution.Dodge County (Wis.) Sheriff’s OfficeDo you, or does anyone you know, work for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections?
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The Teamsters union has made little headway in organizing workers at Amazon and FedEx despite wage and other gains it secured at UPS last year.Last year, two unions representing workers at three large automakers and UPS negotiated new labor contracts that included big raises and other gains. Leaders of the unions — the United Automobile Workers and the Teamsters — hoped the wins would help them organize workers across their industry.The U.A.W. won one vote to unionize a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee last month and lost one this month at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama. The Teamsters have made even less progress at UPS’s big nonunion rivals in the delivery business, Amazon and FedEx.Polling shows that public support for unions is the highest it has been in decades. But labor experts said structural forces would make it hard for labor groups to increase their membership, which is the lowest it has been as a percentage of the total work force in decades. Unions also face stiff opposition from many employers and conservative political leaders.The Teamsters provide an instructive case study. Many of the workers doing deliveries for Amazon and FedEx work for contractors, typically small and medium-size businesses that can be hard to organize. And delivery workers employed directly by FedEx in its Express business are governed by a labor law that requires unions to organize all similar workers at the company nationally at once — a tougher standard than the one that applies to organizing employees at automakers, UPS and other employers.Some labor experts also said the Teamsters had not made as forceful a push as the U.A.W. to organize nonunion workers after securing a new contract with UPS.“You didn’t have that energy that you saw with the U.A.W.’s leaders,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
For more than two years, a group of health experts, economists and lawyers in the U.S. government has worked to address a growing public health crisis: people dying on the job from extreme heat.In the coming months, this team of roughly 30 people at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected to propose a new rule that would require employers to protect an estimated 50 million people exposed to high temperatures while they work. They include farm laborers and construction workers, but also people who sort packages in warehouses, clean airplane cabins and cook in commercial kitchens.The measure would be the first major federal government regulation to protect Americans from heat on the job. And it is expected to meet stiff resistance from some business and industry groups, which oppose regulations that would, in some cases, require more breaks and access to water, shade and air-conditioning.But even if the rule takes effect, experts say, the government’s emergency response system is poorly suited to meet the urgency of the moment.Last year was the hottest in recorded history, and researchers are expecting another record-breaking summer, with temperatures already rising sharply across the Sun Belt. The heat index in Miami reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit last weekend, shattering daily records by 11 degrees.The surge in deaths from heat is now the greatest threat to human health posed by climate change, said Dr. John M. Balbus, the deputy assistant secretary for climate change and health equity in the Health and Human Services Department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
