NLRB Joint Employer Ruling, Good for Workers and Businesses

The National Labor Relations Board in the Browning-Ferris Industries case revised standards for determining joint-employer status on Thursday. The Board found that Browning-Ferris Industries was a joint-employer of workers hired by a contractor to staff the company's recycling center. The joint-employer designation gives workers stronger employment protections and enhanced collective bargaining rights with large corporations that play a role in determining salaries, working conditions, and hours.

I strongly support the NLRB's amended standard for determining joint-employer status. Workers should not be prevented from bargaining with the companies that help set their wages, benefits, schedules and workplace conditions. This ruling will restore workers' rights.

The rise of franchising, contracting and other similar employment practices has made it harder to enforce worker protections like minimum wages, overtime pay and the right to unionize. This ruling is a win for nearly three million workers, their families, and their communities.

With this decision, workers will be able to bargain with every employer who helps to determine the rules of their employment. Employers who help set those rules will no longer be able to utilize temp agencies or contractors to evade their responsibilities to workers who provide services or create goods on their behalf.

This isn't just a win for workers - it's a win for businesses that do right by their employees because it requires their competitors to rise to their standard.

Again, I commend the NLRB for this important definition change. I am disappointed - although not surprised - that some of my Republican colleagues have already announced their intention to block this rule, which could result in higher wages and better working conditions for all our constituents. I will continue to do all that I can to ensure and enhance worker protections, including the right to bargain collectively.

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Michael Jordan's Tune Squad Uniform From 'Space Jam' Is Hitting The Auction Block

Michael Jordan's most important uniform -- you know, the one he wore while saving the earth -- is hitting the auction block this fall.

Starting on Oct. 1, fans of Jordan and the 1996 sports entertainment classic "Space Jam" can bid on the actual Tune Squad uniform Jordan wore during the making of the movie. Despite there being "signs of wear" and "minor staining" on the uniform, it'll be available for bidding through online auction house Invaluable via Los Angeles-based auction house Profiles In History.

Invaluable estimates the price to fall between $10,000 (the starting bid) and $15,000, but in the past, Jordan memorabilia has been auctioned off for upwards of $100,000. 

Think you can afford it? 

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'Uptown Girls' Jennifer Lawrence And Amy Schumer Dance On Billy Joel's Piano

We didn't start the fire; Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer did.

The pair burned up the stage dancing at Billy Joel's concert at Wrigley Field on Thursday. (As the girl on fire, Katniss Everdeen, JLaw should be pretty used to that.) Lawrence and Schumer started out in a group before ditching their shoes and dancing on the piano during Joel's performance of "Uptown Girl."

Schumer tweeted out an even closer look at the performance along with a pretty fitting message:

Uptown girls http://pic.twitter.com/zBY0q1wVB1

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) August 28, 2015

JLaw fan accounts are also sharing another angle, which appears to show Lawrence kissing Schumer's foot when she gets on the piano:

Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer dancing on stage at the Billy Joel concert in Chicago last night (via @jlawspanish) http://pic.twitter.com/Ss1qFbJtXk

— Jennifer Lawrence (@JLdaily) August 28, 2015

Yeah, that's a little weird. But they are playing sisters in an upcoming movie together, so they can probably get away with that stuff. And besides, to paraphrase Joel, we like them "just the way they are."

H/T Billboard

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Illinois' comptroller position gets exciting for Leslie Munger

Earlier this week I wrote that the race for Illinois comptroller might be one of the hottest contests of next year's election.

I contrasted the sizzle of the election -- which will pit incumbent Leslie Geissler Munger against either state Sen. Daniel Biss, D-Evanston, or Chicago City Clerk Susana Mendoza -- with the relatively mundane nature of the office. The comptroller keeps the state's checkbook but doesn't make the policy that decides what goes into and out of the checking account.

Maybe I spoke too soon. This week in federal court in Chicago, we're learning that even being the state's check-writer can generate controversy and political intrigue. At issue is why the comptroller's office didn't make court-ordered payments to providers of services for the disabled. This started Aug. 6 when a group of service providers filed a lawsuit alleging that the comptroller had failed to make the payments and was putting care for thousands of developmentally disabled Illinoisans in jeopardy.

The comptroller's office this week said the state didn't have enough cash on hand to make the payments, and that's where the controversy started. A lawyer for one of the plaintiffs said at a hearing on Wednesday that he believes Munger's office and Gov. Bruce Rauner deliberately manipulated payments for political advantage in the state budget impasse. The Chicago Tribune reported on the hearing:

The judge also said she understood the comptroller's predicament. Without a budget, state government has been spending at a rate billions of dollars beyond what it is set to take in, mostly because of a series of maneuvers by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Democrat-controlled legislature and a number of court orders requiring it to continue paying for services during the impasse.

Read the rest at Reboot Illinois.

To check out a more complete back story on Munger's interactions with a judge this week, check out Mark Fitton's article at Reboot Illinois.

NEXT ARTICLE: Editorial: Let Rauner do what he was elected to do

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Lindeman pounces on Cousin's mistake to win 7th Vuelta stage

Bert Lindeman pounces on Jerome Cousin's mistake to win 7th Vuelta stage, Chaves leads overall

      

 

 

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Starting Today, Your Favorite River Is Better Protected

Credit: MNStudio, Shutterstock


This weekend Americans will head to our local river for a float trip or fishing excursion, to our favorite lake for a refreshing swim, or to the beach to ride the waves and soak up the last of the summer sun.

Our enjoyment of these waterways will be particularly sweet over the next few days, not just because we'll mark one of the last hurrahs of the summer season, but also because our favorite rivers and lakes are now better protected from pollution than ever before.

Thanks to the Obama administration's Clean Water Rule that takes effect today (in most places), polluters can no longer dump into our streams and developers can no longer pave over our wetlands unheeded. Before today's rule, 2 million miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands, which flow into our favorite waterways, from the Puget Sound to the Chesapeake Bay, had lacked clear safeguards under the Clean Water Act, following a pair of polluter driven lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2001 and 2006.

Court decisions in these two cases had left the streams and wetlands that feed our rivers, lakes, and the drinking water supplies for 1 in 3 Americans vulnerable to polluters and developers, who could use these waters as dumping grounds or pave over them without any federal oversight or limits. In fact, in a four-year period following the decisions, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had to drop more than 1500 investigations against polluters, according to one analysis by The New York Times. Similarly, an investigation by Pro Publica found oil companies and other polluters dumping into streams without consequence.

The Clean Water Rule, adopted in May following a decade-long push by Environment America and many others, ensures that such pollution cases can be prosecuted. On the front end, federal officials can now protect these waters with enforceable limits on pollution.

The joint rule by EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is backed by robust scientific review and has gained broad support across a wide range of constituencies, including mayors, brewers, kayakers, anglers, small businesses, and small farmers.

The public strongly backs the rule. In May a Hart Research Associates poll showed that 80 percent of voters surveyed across party lines favored it. Americans submitted more than 800,000 comments in support of the restored protections.

Despite the public's backing of the Clean Water Rule, oil and gas companies, developers, and other polluters have waged a bitter campaign against it. Congress has largely sided with the polluters, with the U.S. House and key Senate committees passing bills to undo the restored protections.

Moreover, polluters and their allies have turned once again to the courts. Those bringing lawsuits against the Clean Water Rule now include Murray Energy (the largest privately held coal company in the U.S.), agribusiness interests, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and several state attorneys general.

Yesterday, a federal judge in North Dakota granted a motion to halt the rule in 13 states pending the outcome of litigation by their attorneys general. It's frustrating to see clean water delayed and denied to the people of these (mostly Western) states, including Colorado and New Mexico.

Yet we know that the Clean Water Rule is on solid legal ground and backed by more than 1,000 scientific studies showing how streams and wetlands are vital to the health of our rivers, lakes, and bays.

And so, with enough support from key senators and continued strong backing from the Obama administration, we're confident that the restored protections for our streams and rivers will survive and thrive. That way, our favorite places for swimming, boating, and fishing will be cleaner today, this weekend, and for many summers to come.

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Roanoke: He Was Not One of Us

I imagine I am Alison Parker, doing a live shot, yet another live shot, one of a dozen that will fill the work week.

I imagine how the sun rises behind her in the moments before it happens, how her photographer Adam has to adjust his camera to accommodate the encroaching fingers of light.

Maybe she learned her assignment that morning, when she walked into her newsroom at 3:30 AM and a producer told her she would be interviewing a woman about business redevelopment.

Maybe they were lucky to be able to park their truck near somewhere with a bathroom, so they could drink coffee in between live shots and stay awake until the show ended and they got their next assignment for the day.

Maybe they chatted between their two to four live shots, sharing the sort of intimacy that comes from spending the majority of your waking hours together.



Maybe Alison already knew, even in her short time in the business, that if news broke, the chamber of commerce story was out the window and she was off to the shooting/car crash/fire/robbery.

I can barely stand to think about the seconds leading up to the shooting. I have been her, hundreds of times in 23 years, ignoring the person I see walking up out of the corner of my eye. I cannot look at or be distracted by the passersby, the lookie loos or the rabble rousers, because I am on live television.


Live from Russia

But I see you. And I hope that you let me finish my live report before you do whatever it is you've walked up to do.

Sometimes they simply want to say hello. Sometimes they want to cause a scene or get behind me and attract attention for themselves. I have been spit at and spit on and cursed at and yelled at and shoved and goosed and grabbed over the course of my career.

I have been frightened. I have heard gunshots, witnessed fights, have had photographers fend people off for me while I am still making coherent complete sentences on live television.

The live aspect of our business is just one of the many reasons that television news is not for the faint of heart.

Nor is it for the thin-skinned.

And in the hours after we found out that Adam and Alison's killer was someone who had been a journalist, I had one thought -- he wasn't one of us.

The evil that slithered up behind them as they tried to simply do their job was not one of us.

I consider myself somewhat of an expert on us.

I do not delude myself. We are not curing cancer. Some of us have egos the size of Donald Trump. Some of us just really, really like being on TV.

But most of us, the VAST majority of us are the same.


People who try mightily to get it right

We are the same in that we will never get rich doing this. Many of us qualified for food stamps in our first TV jobs and spent a decade trying to hit the $40,000 mark.

We are the same in that we will live in cheap, crappy apartments in cities where we don't know a soul, schlepping off to work in our TJ Maxx clearance TV clothes, hoping to do a good job, so we can move up to the next slightly better paying job, where maybe we can afford to shop at Macy's.

We are the same in that we miss major life events. You name it. Funerals and births, first words and first steps, Christmas and Thanksgiving, reunions and anniversaries.

We are the same because we are used to people calling us the mainstream, lame stream, left wing, right wing media.

People swear we have an agenda, a bias, a slant, an angle. They stop us at the grocery store and give us a piece of their mind about us, critiquing our looks and our reporting, telling us we need to fire this one or that one. As we're trying to find a cereal on sale, they accuse us of being in bed with the Mayor/Obama/FOX News/Muslims/Christians/CNN.

It's enough to make you wonder, who in the hell would want to do a job like that?

Us.

Because deep down inside, we are the same in believing that we can make a difference.

We can change things.

We can expose rot.

We can give a voice to the voiceless.

We can make people happy.

We can make them angry.

We can be the catalyst for change.

We are the ones at the shooting, the city council meeting, the hospital bedside, the big high school game, the war zone, the grieving family's living room.

We take what we hear and I swear we do our damndest to regurgitate it back to you the best we can.

We want you to know what we know.

I didn't know Alison Parker or Adam Ward, but I would bet they entered this business with an idealized, deep desire to make the world a better, more informed place. They wanted to tell good stories. They wanted to be part of the change.

One person, a Glock and possible GoPro-toting person, stole the promise of their lives, ensuring they would experience no more 'firsts,' of any kind.

I beg of you to remember one thing.

He was not one of us.

This post was originally published on Jaye Watson Online.

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