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<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes" name="viewport"/>
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<title>18 May, 2021</title>
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<title>Daily-Dose</title><meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport"/><link href="styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><link href="../styles/simple.css" rel="stylesheet"/><style>*{overflow-x:hidden;}</style><link href="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.css" rel="stylesheet"/><script src="https://unpkg.com/aos@2.3.1/dist/aos.js"></script></head>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
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<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Saying Her Name</strong> - Remains that were found to be those of a Black teen who was killed by Philadelphia police in 1985 were treated as an anthropological specimen. How was her identity known and then forgotten? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/saying-her-name">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Policing Politics Takes Over the New York City Mayoral Race</strong> - With the spectre of crime suddenly top of mind for many voters, the language of “defund the police” has been deemed a political liability. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/policing-politics-takes-over-the-new-york-city-mayoral-race">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Japan’s Olympic-Sized Problem</strong> - The government’s inept response to the coronavirus pandemic has led to widespread discontent about hosting the Games. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/japans-olympic-sized-problem">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit</strong> - In the nineties, a frustrated artist in Berlin went on a crime spree—building bombs, extorting high-end stores, and styling his persona after Scrooge McDuck. He soon became a German folk hero. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-strange-story-of-dagobert-the-ducktales-bandit">link</a></p></li>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Why Jerome Powell and the Fed Should Ignore the Inflation Hawks</strong> - Strong growth and a tight labor market are helping workers make sustained wage gains. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-jerome-powell-and-the-fed-should-ignore-the-inflation-hawks">link</a></p></li>
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</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
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<ul>
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<li><strong>Seriously, just tax the rich</strong> -
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<figure>
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<img alt="A mobile billboard parked with the Capitol building in the background features a picture of Amazon CEO Jef Bezos and reads, “Tax me if you can!”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qSRyA07CLfyLXyb20O-VwTy5Png=/300x0:2967x2000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69304214/GettyImages_1232953214.0.jpg"/>
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<figcaption>
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A mobile billboard calling for higher taxes on the ultra-wealthy, to mark Tax Day, parked near the US Capitol on May 17. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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What the debate about paying for infrastructure misses.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dqtJxE">
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Whether the government should tax rich people more to pay for spending priorities is a source of endless debate. Here’s another idea: Tax the rich because it’s the right thing to do.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vHHdfc">
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Most recently, this debate has popped up around President Joe Biden’s aspirations to invest in infrastructure, jobs, child care, and other items. The White House and many Democrats in Congress are wondering how (and whether) to pay for it. Some are <a href="https://www.axios.com/treasury-biden-tax-plan-infrastructure-c66280e2-c67f-43a8-8434-133bc06d30da.html">pushing to increase taxes</a> on the wealthy and corporations, arguing that they at least need to raise some revenue if they want to send so much money out the door.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tiSPuG">
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Others in the more progressive vein, however, question whether Democrats need to bother to come up with “pay-fors” at all. After all, Republicans didn’t worry much about the deficit when they passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut back in 2017. Plus, they note, concerns about the debt can be widely overblown; interest rates are low and may be for a while, so if there’s a moment to take on debt, it’s now. It’s a politically useful stance because some moderate Democrats are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/05/11/biden-taxes-democrats/?itid=ap_jeffstein">reportedly nervous</a> about the idea of raising taxes.
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</p>
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<div class="c-wide-block">
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<figure class="e-image">
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<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/qHP930WhKsQjf46mkSzakPrADvg=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22521344/GettyImages_1256735037.jpg"/> <cite>Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite>
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<figcaption>
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A “March on Billionaires” rally on July 17, 2020 in New York City. Organizers called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to pass a tax on billionaires to fund workers excluded from unemployment and federal aid programs.
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</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8EOUwd">
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Sometimes, the haggling and hemming and hawing over what to do about the debt overshadow a point that <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/polls-show-broad-support-tax-hikes-wealthy-big-corporations-n1263833">many Americans find obvious</a>: It’s simply a good, fair idea to tax the wealthy. They have disproportionately reaped the benefits of economic growth and the stock market in recent years, contributing to increasing inequality in the United States. The divide <a href="https://www.axios.com/treasury-biden-tax-plan-infrastructure-c66280e2-c67f-43a8-8434-133bc06d30da.html">has become even more obvious during the Covid-19 pandemic</a>, during which billionaires have managed to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-added-4-trillion-to-their-wealth-during-the-pandemic-2021-4">add heaps of dollars</a> to their wealth even as millions of people were knocked on their heels. Some ultra-rich people in the US <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/1/20941440/tech-billionaires-rich-net-worth-philanthropy-giving-pledge">keep getting richer</a> no matter how much of their money they give away. They literally cannot stop adding to their coffers.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TTU0pi">
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“The market has produced an increasingly unequal distribution of income, and tax policy — and spending as well — are the way that we use government policy to push back and restrain those market-driven increases in inequality,” said David Wessel, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and the director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. “The fact is that the market forces producing more inequality seem to be growing, and the government’s willingness to use its power to push against that seems to be waning.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jxxPeY">
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The chips of the economy are stacked in rich people’s favor, and they’re getting handed more chips constantly. So why not take a few chips away?
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</p>
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<h3 id="0S4oLv">
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The wealthy are grabbing a big share of prosperity. The government can grab it back.
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</h3>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZCpM4E">
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Rich people have done very well in the economy in recent decades. According to the <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55413">Congressional Budget Office</a>, the share of before-tax income captured by the richest 20 percent of households increased from 46 percent in 1979 to 54 percent in 2016. For the top 1 percent, income share went from 9 percent to 16 percent — <a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-taxes-affect-income-inequality">more than the entire income</a> brought in by the bottom 40 percent of households. The 2017 tax cut bill <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tax-plan-consequences/">disproportionately benefited</a> rich people and corporations. During the pandemic, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/05/a-year-into-the-pandemic-long-term-financial-impact-weighs-heavily-on-many-americans/">many high-income Americans say</a> that their financial situation has improved<em> </em>over the past year. They saved money they would have ordinarily spent on vacations and going out to eat, and as the stock market soared, so did their net worth.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IBHxNf">
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The wealthy are simply the group best able to afford to pay higher taxes. (Though to be sure, most people define the wealthy as “people who make more than me.”)
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="o2rCWL">
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“We ought to start with the people who have benefited the most over the last couple of decades,” Wessel said.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2lMBlT">
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The US tax code is already somewhat progressive, though <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/inequality-and-tax-rates-global-comparison">several other rich countries have significantly higher top income tax rates</a>, and <a href="https://taxfoundation.org/some-historical-tax-stats/#:~:text=The%20top%20marginal%20tax%20rate,taxed%20at%20the%20top%20rate.">the top income tax rate in the US used to be much higher, too</a>. According to a <a href="https://www.jct.gov/publications/2021/jcx-24-21/">recent report</a> from the Joint Committee on Taxation, people making more than $1 million in 2018 paid an average tax rate of 31.5 percent, and those making upward of $500,000 paid an average rate of 28.9 percent, combining income, payroll, excise, and corporate taxes. Still, there are plenty of ways that the wealthy use the tax code to their advantage — an advantage the White House is seeking to cut off.
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</p>
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<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang">
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<aside id="EDhsd5">
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<q>“When you have such a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of so few, that ultimately leads to a greater concentration of power in the hands of so few”</q>
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</aside>
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BbeWxA">
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As it stands currently, long-term capital gains on investments such as stocks are <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capital_gains_tax.asp">taxed at a lower</a> rate than income. In other words, if you make money off of the sale of a stock you’ve had for a while, it’s taxed at a lower rate than if you’d made the same amount of money through working. The Biden administration <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-22/biden-to-propose-capital-gains-tax-as-high-as-43-4-for-wealthy">is eyeing overhauling</a> the capital gains rate for people making $1 million or more, so that those gains would be taxed at the highest individual rate, which the president’s tax plan would put at 39.6 percent. (The 2017 tax bill lowered the highest rate to 37 percent). The White House is also pushing Congress to close the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/business/dealbook/carried-interest-biden.html">carried interest loophole</a> that lets private equity and hedge fund managers have their gains taxed at a lower rate.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jny1wN">
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Democrats are also looking at changing how inherited wealth is taxed, including the “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/your-money/estate-tax-biden.html">stepped-up basis</a>” tax code provision. As it stands, if a rich person sees their wealth go up by $1 billion in, for example, stock, when they sell that investment, they’ll be taxed on their $1 billion gain. But if they never sell and the investment gets passed to their heirs when they die, their heirs are taxed at the baseline of what it’s worth when they get it. If and when they sell, they’re only taxed on new gains.
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“We don’t collect as much as we ought to from rich guys because they could hold their stock until death, and then their heirs get a stepped-up basis, and all the gains, all the appreciation over their lifetimes, is simply income taxes avoided,” said Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EyVQ56">
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Biden has also proposed trying to raise taxes on the wealthy without really touching the tax code and just trying to more fully collect what they already owe. He <a href="https://www.vox.com/22405898/joe-biden-irs-funding">wants Congress to direct</a> some $80 billion to the IRS over the next decade to try to beef up enforcement and close the “tax gap” — the difference between what the IRS gets in taxes versus what it is owed. IRS chief Charles Rettig <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-treasury-irs/irs-chief-says-1-trillion-in-taxes-goes-uncollected-every-year-idUSKBN2C0255">has estimated</a> that it could amount to $1 trillion every year.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="w3om5O">
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A <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26475/w26475.pdf">2019 paper</a> from Natasha Sarin, now deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, and economist Larry Summers estimated that the tax gap would total $7.5 trillion from 2020 to 2029, with most benefits going to the wealthy. (<a href="https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-releases-new-tax-gap-estimates-compliance-rates-remain-substantially-unchanged-from-prior-study#:~:text=The%20average%20gross%20tax%20gap,was%20estimated%20at%20%24381%20billion.">Official IRS estimates</a> from 2011 to 2013 put the tax gap at about $441 billion each year.)
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oaPOmv">
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In March this year, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth published a <a href="https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/tax-evasion-at-the-top-of-the-income-distribution-theory-and-evidence/">paper</a> on tax evasion that estimated the top 1 percent of earners underreport about one-fifth of their income. The research suggested that collecting all unpaid federal income tax from the richest Americans would increase revenues by $175 billion each year. However, tax enforcement is difficult and takes a long time. (<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21492209/donald-trump-income-taxes-ny-times-evasion-avoidance">Remember Donald Trump’s taxes and endless audits</a>?) IRS agents with the adequate experience and know-how to deal with complex audits <a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/america-we-have-problem-irs-brain-drain">can take years</a> to train and replace. And even once the IRS is staffed up, it’s unlikely it will be able to capture all the money that’s owed.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4prTh0">
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Rosenthal has <a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/if-congress-wants-irs-collect-more-tax-rich-it-needs-pass-better-laws">expressed concerns</a> about the estimates from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth paper and says he believes the answer is to beef up the tax code with simpler laws that require additional reporting. It is true that the IRS could collect more in taxes, but rich people are pretty good at avoiding that. He prefers to raise taxes on corporations — Biden has proposed increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent — as a way to tax the rich. <a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreigners-and-rich-americans">Wealthy people and foreigners disproportionately own stocks</a> and benefit from slashes to the corporate tax rate.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nSR0IU">
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“When we increase taxes on corporations, which falls on shareholders, it falls on those who have already benefited from Trump’s tax cuts and who have overwhelmingly benefited from the run-up in the stock market,” Rosenthal said.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6c2Zvj">
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Beyond what’s on the White House’s agenda, there is a plethora of proposals for taxing the wealthy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) ran on <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/24/18196275/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax">a wealth tax</a>, which would tax the fortunes of the super-rich, though <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/30/biden-elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax-478642">Biden has not embraced it</a>. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/25/bernie-sanders-introduces-bills-to-hike-corporate-taxes-estate-tax.html">recently rolled out his own proposal</a> to tax corporations and the rich as well.
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One challenge to making any changes to the tax law is making sure they are robust enough that people don’t just find a way to avoid them. “If you spend a lot of political capital on taxing the rich and you spend a lot of time setting up something … and then you discover the people you want to tax are extremely good at finding ways not to pay the tax, then have you really accomplished anything?” Wessel said.
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Some Republicans and business leaders fear that if the US taxes rich people and companies too much, it will make the country less competitive, or the wealthy will flee. Democrats <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/14/22375306/salt-tax-deduction-repeal">pushing to get rid of the cap on the state and local tax deduction</a> — which generally impacts well-off people in blue states — argue that the cap will encourage wealthy people to go to lower-tax states. But there’s <a href="https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/pdf/pathways/summer_2014/Pathways_Summer_2014_YoungVarner.pdf">not a lot of evidence of millionaire migration</a> from blue states to red states over the tax code. And many rich people and corporations prefer to live and do business in the US, even if it means a slightly higher tax liability.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EfUJIZ">
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“The Republicans think every time you tax someone who’s rich … somehow, they’ll work less hard, invest less, and we’ll all suffer. And Democrats say that’s simply not true,” Wessel said. “I think the evidence is on the Democrats’ side, as long as you don’t overdo it.”
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<h3 id="dSHS9e">
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Taxing the rich makes the economy feel fairer
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EKWJ0d">
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Lots of people right now say the economy seems unfair. It feels like the system is rigged in favor of the people who need help the least. And that makes many people lose faith in the economy — it’s easier to believe in America when you feel like America isn’t stacked for winners.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Gnx1fx">
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That’s part of why taxing rich people and corporations is so popular. Like, really, really popular. Eight in 10 Americans <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/30/top-tax-frustrations-for-americans-the-feeling-that-some-corporations-wealthy-people-dont-pay-fair-share/">say they are bothered</a> by some corporations and the wealthy not paying their fair share in taxes, according to Pew Research Center. A <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/31/biden-infrastructure-plan-raising-taxes-wealthy-corporations/">recent Morning Consult/Politico poll</a> found that paying for infrastructure by increasing taxes on those groups made Biden’s infrastructure plan more popular, not less.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="dZhklo">
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|
Taxing rich people can’t pay for everything Democrats would perhaps like to, but for many progressives, that’s beside the point.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="v1U4ae">
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|
“We do not have to tax to have nice things, we tax for predistribution and redistribution. In order to have nice things, we print money and we invest in the things that we need,” said Solana Rice, co-founder and co-executive director of Liberation in a Generation, which pushes for economic policies that reduce racial disparities. “We almost couldn’t tax enough to really pay for all the things that we need, so it’s a ruse.”
|
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</p>
|
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<div class="c-wide-block">
|
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<figure class="e-image">
|
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|
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/N5DZKGUPmQyMEUdOlP1tn1mXPcE=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22521358/GettyImages_1256734950.jpg"/> <cite>Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite>
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<figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
One challenge to making any changes to the tax law is making sure they are robust enough that people don’t just find a way to avoid them.
|
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</figcaption>
|
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</figure>
|
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</div>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ztgOFQ">
|
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With money comes power, and taxing those who can afford it more fairly could result in a more even distribution of that. “When you have such a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of so few, that ultimately leads to a greater concentration of power in the hands of so few,” said Dana Bye, campaign director of the Tax March, a progressive tax group. Overhauling the tax code won’t fix all of the country’s issues, but it might not hurt, either, and could address some egregious imbalances. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html">claimed to pay a lower tax rate than his secretary</a> for years; former President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21492209/donald-trump-income-taxes-ny-times-evasion-avoidance">bragged about his low tax liability</a>.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OKAILJ">
|
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|
|
What happens to revenue from potential tax increases matters — if Democrats want to tax the wealthy in order to help people at the bottom of the income spectrum or pay for infrastructure, it is important that they’re deliberate about that. And raising taxes is never easy: There are plenty of constituents, from business groups to lobbyists to voters, who push back.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="76BSyb">
|
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|
|
“That’s why Congress has been doing all of these deficit spending bills,” Rosenthal said. “It’s hard to get anyone to agree on taxes.”
|
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|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="y5TmB7">
|
|||
|
|
But just because it is hard to tax rich people doesn’t mean Democrats shouldn’t do it. Biden has promised to go big and bold on the economy and push the country in a more progressive, broadly beneficial direction. This is a way to help him get there.
|
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|
|
</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><strong>Brett Kavanaugh’s latest decision should alarm liberals</strong> -
|
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|
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<figure>
|
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|
|
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/pY-M04zwp-CRuTHoL_7n8PlMS3Q=/259x0:4506x3185/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69304096/1068141116.jpg.0.jpg"/>
|
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<figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
Justice Brett Kavanaugh at a ceremony for the late President George H.W. Bush at the Capitol in 2018. | Jabin Botsford/Getty Images
|
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|
|
</figcaption>
|
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|
</figure>
|
|||
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
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|
|
The Court’s new median justice really doesn’t care about precedent.
|
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|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gCF4jf">
|
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|
|
The Supreme Court took two actions on Monday that hint that many Democrats’ worst fears about the Court’s 6-3 Republican majority might come true.
|
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|
|
</p>
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eIHZZN">
|
|||
|
|
The first was the Court’s announcement that it will hear <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/dobbs-v-jackson-womens-health-organization/"><em>Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization</em></a>, a challenge to a Mississippi law banning nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. <em>Dobbs</em> is potentially an <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/17/22233440/supreme-court-abortion-roe-wade-dobbs-jackson-womens-health-amy-coney-barrett">existential threat to the constitutional right to an abortion</a>, and it tees up the question of whether this Court is willing to overrule venerable decisions like <em>Roe v. Wade</em>, which are beloved by liberals and loathed by conservatives.
|
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|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BrjOJN">
|
|||
|
|
The second action involved a more obscure case. Last year, in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7527212875137340599&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Ramos v. Louisiana</em></a>, the Supreme Court held that no one could be convicted of a “serious crime” unless a jury voted unanimously to convict them. On Monday, the Supreme Court held in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-5807_086c.pdf"><em>Edwards v. Vannoy</em></a> that <em>Ramos</em> is not retroactive — meaning that nearly all people convicted by non-unanimous jury verdicts before <em>Ramos</em> was decided will not benefit from the <em>Ramos</em> decision.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YzDHsK">
|
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|
|
On the surface, the Court’s decision to hear a major abortion case, and its decision not to apply one of its criminal justice precedents retroactively, may appear to have little in common. But taken together, they foreshadow a world where the Court’s new majority is willing to overturn longstanding precedents, potentially with little justification for doing so other than that the Court’s Republican majority would prefer to overrule liberal decisions such as <em>Roe</em>.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XrAMdJ">
|
|||
|
|
Because here’s the thing: <em>Edwards</em> did not simply limit the scope of <em>Ramos</em>. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion also overruled a 32-year-old decision governing when the Supreme Court’s precedents apply retroactively. Kavanaugh did so, moreover, without following the ordinary procedures that the Court normally follows before overruling one of its previous decisions. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in dissent, no one asked the Court to overrule anything in <em>Edwards</em>, and the Court “usually confines itself to the issues raised and briefed by the parties.”
|
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|
|
</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I9CgEe">
|
|||
|
|
<em>Edwards</em>, moreover, is the second time in less than a month that Kavanaugh authored a majority opinion that overrules a prior decision without following the Court’s normal procedures. In late April, Kavanaugh handed down a decision in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-1259_8njq.pdf"><em>Jones v. Mississippi</em></a> that effectively overruled a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9236378392139374560&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr">2016 decision</a> establishing that nearly all juvenile offenders may not be sentenced to life without parole.
|
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|
</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eAShsH">
|
|||
|
|
But <em>Jones</em> overruled this 2016 decision in such an oblique and underhanded way that several of Kavanaugh’s colleagues came very close to accusing him of lying about what he was doing. Even Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s most conservative member, chided Kavanaugh for overruling a previous decision “in substance but not in name.”
|
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|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WU1ADe">
|
|||
|
|
The Court historically has been <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21192320/supreme-court-comcast-decision-civil-rights-mixed-motive-lawsuits">very reluctant to overrule precedents</a>, both because past justices understood that the law should be predictable, and because strong norms against overruling past decisions help prevent the Supreme Court from becoming a purely partisan prize — tossing out decades’ worth of settled doctrines every time a different political party gains control of the Court.
|
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|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="krjRRj">
|
|||
|
|
But Kavanaugh does not appear to share his predecessors’ reluctance to overrule past decisions.
|
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|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oBBZ1Y">
|
|||
|
|
All of this matters because Kavanaugh is the median vote on the Supreme Court. Last week, SCOTUSBlog published an analysis finding that Kavanaugh voted with the majority in <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/05/on-a-new-conservative-court-kavanaugh-sits-at-the-center/">97 percent of cases</a> decided so far this Supreme Court term — more than any other justice. If you want to win a case before the Supreme Court, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you if you can’t secure Kavanaugh’s vote.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="I4G7yK">
|
|||
|
|
And yet, Kavanaugh is signaling in <em>Edwards</em>, <em>Jones</em>, and in a few other significant opinions that he does not particularly care about precedent, and that he is willing to overrule prior decisions for reasons that previous Supreme Courts would have deemed trivial and unwarranted.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CAdycu">
|
|||
|
|
With conservatives holding a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, that’s terrible news for liberals. And it doesn’t just mean that precedents like the Court’s pro-abortion decision in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113"><em>Roe v. Wade</em></a> (1973) are in danger.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nsXBCl">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh, the closest thing that this Supreme Court has to a “swing” justice, is telling us that he’s very willing to overrule a wide range of precedents. And a majority of the Court appears to agree with his approach. That’s potentially disastrous news for anyone hoping that this Supreme Court would honor past decisions that protect liberal democratic values.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<h3 id="PLQ79J">
|
|||
|
|
So what happened in <em>Edwards</em>, exactly?
|
|||
|
|
</h3>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Kg0MWL">
|
|||
|
|
<em>Edwards</em> involved a question that comes up fairly often in the Court’s criminal justice decisions: When the Court announces a new constitutional rule governing criminal convictions or sentences, does that rule apply retroactively to people whose convictions or sentences were already final when the new rule was handed down?
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MAKrBk">
|
|||
|
|
In <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9178485170219770923&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Teague v. Lane</em></a> (1989), the Supreme Court identified a few limited circumstances when a new rule should apply retroactively. The first circumstance is if the new rule places “certain kinds of primary, private individual conduct beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe.” Thus, for example, if the Supreme Court were to hold that it is unconstitutional to convict someone for marijuana possession, then that rule would apply retroactively because it places the act of possessing marijuana “beyond the power of the criminal law-making authority to proscribe.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YdDOr5">
|
|||
|
|
Subsequent Supreme Court decisions clarified that a new criminal justice rule also applies retroactively if it forbids “a certain category of punishment for a class of defendants <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9236378392139374560&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr">because of their status or offense</a>.” Thus, for example, when the Supreme Court held in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2043469055777796288&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Atkins v. Virginia</em></a><em> </em>(2002) that intellectually disabled people are not eligible for the death penalty, that rule was retroactive because it determined that a certain class of people could not receive a certain category of punishment.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gZPStA">
|
|||
|
|
<em>Teague</em> held that “<a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9178485170219770923&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr">watershed rules of criminal procedure</a>” are also retroactive. The <em>Edwards</em> case asked whether the rule announced in <em>Ramos — </em>the rule that no one can be convicted of a serious crime unless the jury verdict is unanimous — was such a watershed rule.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RPyOAO">
|
|||
|
|
In holding that <em>Ramos</em> did not announce such a “watershed” rule, Kavanaugh explains that the bar for determining what constitutes a watershed rule is quite high. Indeed, in the Court’s entire history, it’s only identified one such rule: the decision in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/372/335"><em>Gideon v. Wainwright</em></a> (1963) holding that indigent criminal defendants are entitled to defense counsel paid for by the state.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jo5DAQ">
|
|||
|
|
And yet, rather than just holding that <em>Ramos</em> did not announce a watershed rule and leave it at that, Kavanaugh’s opinion goes much further. “Some 32 years after <em>Teague</em>,” Kavanaugh writes, it’s now clear that “no new rules of criminal procedure can satisfy the watershed exception.” Thus, he concludes, “we cannot responsibly continue to suggest otherwise to litigants and courts.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SqBV1N">
|
|||
|
|
<em>Edwards</em> holds that no new watershed rules exist, no matter what the circumstances. <em>Teague</em>’s verdict on watershed rules is now overruled.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<h3 id="cSPS9M">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh’s shifting justifications for overruling prior decisions
|
|||
|
|
</h3>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AjgmH5">
|
|||
|
|
The Court’s decision to overrule part of <em>Teague</em> is surprising for several reasons. For one thing, as Kagan notes in her dissent, no one asked the Court to do so. Typically, before the Court overrules a precedent, it seeks out briefing from the parties on whether that precedent should be overruled — that way, if there will be some disastrous or unexpected consequence if the precedent is overruled, the parties can warn the justices about it in advance.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MLciTH">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh also does not appear to have followed his own rules governing when a previous Court decision should be overruled. In <em>Ramos</em>, the Court effectively overruled another decision, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17083848214568933382&hl=en&as_sdt=6,47&as_vis=1"><em>Apodaca v. Oregon</em></a> (1972), which permitted states to convict criminal defendants via a non-unanimous jury vote. Kavanaugh agreed with this result in <em>Ramos</em>, but he also wrote a separate opinion laying out when he thinks it is acceptable for the Supreme Court to overrule a prior decision.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IjLqfU">
|
|||
|
|
When deciding whether to overrule a precedent, Kavanaugh wrote, the Court should consider whether the previous decision is “not just wrong, but grievously or egregiously wrong.” It should consider whether “the prior decision caused significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences,” and it should ask whether overruling the prior precedent would upset “legitimate expectations of those who have reasonably relied on the precedent.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="STcZWQ">
|
|||
|
|
But Kavanaugh engaged in none of this analysis in <em>Edwards</em>, and it’s hard to see how <em>Teague</em> would qualify as worthy of being overruled under the standard Kavanaugh articulated in <em>Ramos</em>. Kavanaugh doesn’t claim in <em>Edwards</em> that <em>Teague</em> was egregiously wrong or that it’s led to “significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences.” Indeed, he claims the exact opposite — that <em>Teague</em>’s holding regarding “watershed” rules should be overruled because it’s had no jurisprudential or real-world consequences whatsoever.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ks0Qqe">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh also ignored the standard he laid out in <em>Ramos</em> in his opinion in <em>Jones v. Mississippi, </em>the decision involving whether juveniles who commit homicide crimes can be sentenced to life without parole.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="s7BOeH">
|
|||
|
|
In <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6291421178853922648&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Miller v. Alabama</em></a> (2012), the Supreme Court held that most people who commit a crime before their 18th birthday may not be sentenced to life without parole, even if the crime is murder. And, in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9236378392139374560&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr"><em>Montgomery v. Louisiana</em></a> (2016), the Court held that <em>Miller</em> applies retroactively because it prohibited a certain category of offenders (nearly all juvenile offenders) from receiving a certain punishment (life without parole).
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Cuwd4Y">
|
|||
|
|
<em>Miller </em>and <em>Montgomery</em> did, however, suggest that a very small category of juvenile offenders, “those whose crimes reflect permanent incorrigibility,” are still eligible for life without parole. The issue in <em>Jones</em> was whether a sentencing judge must explicitly determine that a particular juvenile offender is “permanently incorrigible” before sentencing them to life without parole.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YdSwOn">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh’s decision in <em>Jones</em> doesn’t simply hold that sentencing judges do not need to make this determination; it eliminates <em>Montgomery</em>’s holding that nearly all juvenile offenders are categorically ineligible for life without parole. Kavanaugh’s opinion in <em>Jones</em> establishes that all juvenile homicide offenders may be sentenced to life without parole, so long as they are sentenced in a “discretionary” proceeding where the judge has the option to impose a lighter sentence.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EO1GlV">
|
|||
|
|
“In a case involving an individual who was under 18 when he or she committed a homicide,” Kavanaugh wrote for the new, more conservative majority that decided the <em>Jones</em> case, “a State’s discretionary sentencing system is <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-1259_8njq.pdf">both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient</a>.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fhGRFc">
|
|||
|
|
Four justices called Kavanaugh out for overruling <em>Montgomery</em> without being entirely honest about what he was up to. Though Thomas agreed with Kavanaugh that <em>Montgomery</em> should be overruled, he wrote that the Court should be more candid when it overrules a prior precedent. Hence his dig at Kavanaugh for overruling <em>Montgomery</em> “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-1259_8njq.pdf">in substance but not in name</a>.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7NoEjP">
|
|||
|
|
Meanwhile, the Court’s three liberal justices joined an opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that walked right up to the line of accusing Kavanaugh of lying about what he was up to in his majority opinion. “The Court simply rewrites <em>Miller</em> and <em>Montgomery</em> to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court,” she added, “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-1259_8njq.pdf">knows what it is doing</a>.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5twyME">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh’s loose approach to precedent, in other words, isn’t simply being noticed by legal experts and court-watchers. It’s being noticed by Kavanaugh’s colleagues to his right and to his left — and four of them recently called him out for it.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<h3 id="JglmX0">
|
|||
|
|
Kavanaugh’s views on precedents endanger American democracy
|
|||
|
|
</h3>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FgB514">
|
|||
|
|
There’s at least one other important case where Kavanaugh revealed that he is eager to toss out several longstanding precedents — and that case has tremendous implications for whether the United States will have anything resembling free and fair elections in the future.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nExM6q">
|
|||
|
|
In election years, state election officials and state court judges often hand down decisions implicating how the election will be run — and who will be allowed to vote in that election. This was <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/28/21539169/supreme-court-pennsylvania-republican-party-samuel-alito-mail-in-ballots-boockvar">especially true in 2020</a>, as many state election boards and state courts tried to accommodate voters who were afraid to visit a polling place during a pandemic.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BAMGtn">
|
|||
|
|
Many Republicans did not like many of these decisions by election officials and state courts, which made it easier for many voters to cast a ballot, so they brought a series of lawsuits arguing that these efforts to expand access to voting were unconstitutional. The crux of these Republicans’ arguments was that the Constitution <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/28/21539169/supreme-court-pennsylvania-republican-party-samuel-alito-mail-in-ballots-boockvar">only permits state <em>legislatures</em></a>, and not state courts or other state election officials, to determine how a state conducts a federal election.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0KmAhU">
|
|||
|
|
This is not a new argument, but it’s one that the Supreme Court has <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/11/3/21546419/supreme-court-2020-election-question-pennslyvania-minnesota-texas-north-carolina">repeatedly rejected</a> in a long line of decisions that stretch back more than a century. The Court most recently rejected this argument in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/13-1314#writing-13-1314_OPINION_3"><em>Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission</em></a> (2015), which reaffirmed that a state’s power to enact election laws is “to be performed in accordance with the State’s prescriptions for lawmaking.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hAUkW2">
|
|||
|
|
So, if a state’s constitution protects the right to vote, these protections may be enforced by the state’s courts. And if the state constitution allows statewide boards to be given the power to interpret state laws, then a state election board may be given the power to interpret state election law.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4O1ZbR">
|
|||
|
|
Nevertheless, in <a href="https://utexas.app.box.com/s/pd70m6vmah3xf3h7je69pgmnunwuscbm"><em>Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature</em></a> (2020), Kavanaugh joined an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch that would have overruled <em>Arizona State Legislature</em> as well as a line of Supreme Court decisions <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/241/565">stretching back at least as far as 1916</a> — though it’s worth noting that Gorsuch’s opinion was not joined by a majority of his colleagues.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GbGjsu">
|
|||
|
|
“The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules,” Gorsuch claimed in his opinion.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="39jzmH">
|
|||
|
|
Taken to its logical extreme, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s approach would have profound implications for future elections. It could mean that Democratic state governors in states with Republican legislatures — such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — are not allowed to veto most state election laws, including congressional gerrymanders.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XwvKA3">
|
|||
|
|
It could also mean that state courts are not allowed to enforce state constitutional provisions protecting the right to vote or forbidding gerrymandering. And it could invalidate independent redistricting commissions that take the power to draw congressional districts out of the hands of a partisan state legislature.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qsoUn7">
|
|||
|
|
To date, four justices — Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, plus Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito — have <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/10/28/21539169/supreme-court-pennsylvania-republican-party-samuel-alito-mail-in-ballots-boockvar">endorsed the approach</a> Gorsuch and Kavanaugh took in <em>Democratic National Committee</em>. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was not on the Court when <em>Democratic National Committee</em> was handed down, and has thus far not weighed in on the question of whether state legislatures have unchecked power over how states conduct federal elections — so the decision whether to implement this rule likely rests in her hands.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="So0VBo">
|
|||
|
|
In any event, Kavanaugh, the median justice on most contentious issues that arise before the Court, is perfectly willing to overrule more than a century worth of precedent. And he’s willing to do so even when overruling those precedents would upend fundamental assumptions about how state election laws work — and who is in charge of deciding how our elections are conducted.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="B3mFel">
|
|||
|
|
More broadly, much of American law — the <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-393">constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act</a>, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/6/29/21306895/supreme-court-abortion-chief-justice-john-roberts-stephen-breyer-june-medical-russo">right to an abortion</a>, the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/11/26/20981758/brett-kavanaughs-terrify-democrats-supreme-court-gundy-paul">power of the EPA to protect the environment</a>, the power of states to <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_j4el.pdf">require businesses not to discriminate</a> against LGBTQ workers and customers, and numerous other laws — hinges on the Supreme Court’s willingness to honor past decisions that Republicans don’t like very much.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XKfEpH">
|
|||
|
|
Liberals, in other words, are depending on the doctrine of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/6/29/21306895/supreme-court-abortion-chief-justice-john-roberts-stephen-breyer-june-medical-russo">stare decisis</a> — the idea that courts should typically be bound by their prior decisions — to stave off a conservative legal revolution.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7OKN6z">
|
|||
|
|
And as liberals shout for stare decisis to save them, the Court’s median justice is looking down upon them, and <a href="https://www.superverbose.com/2015/11/21/the-annotated-annotated-watchmen-18-a-real-rain/">whispering “no.”</a>
|
|||
|
|
</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><strong>The battle for the future of “gig” work</strong> -
|
|||
|
|
<figure>
|
|||
|
|
<img alt="An illustration of a ride-share driver behind the wheel of a car." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wktcXsBiuEwHCtyksWZ2rYP8364=/72x0:1512x1080/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69265597/Vox_Final.0.jpg"/>
|
|||
|
|
<figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
Kailey Whitman for Vox
|
|||
|
|
</figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
</figure>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
Ride-sharing companies are pushing to make a third category of “independent” worker the law of the land. Drivers say the notion of independence is little more than a mirage.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Lkb7qc">
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<div class="c-float-left">
|
|||
|
|
<figure class="e-image">
|
|||
|
|
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YYgW4HsU995yniG4Y5QuEoQvF0Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21899595/VOX_The_Highlight_Box_Logo_Horizontal.png"/>
|
|||
|
|
</figure>
|
|||
|
|
</div>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="U5gRuI">
|
|||
|
|
Part of <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22424892/the-fairness-issue">The Fairness Issue</a> of <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight"><strong>The Highlight</strong></a>, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="kwgfCa"/>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hfzE3F">
|
|||
|
|
Erica Mighetto has been a driver for ride-hail platforms for four years, and has stories, she says, that span the spectrum “from being solicited for sex to meeting some great people that are still my friends to this day.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LMBGR5">
|
|||
|
|
When she got started, she expected it to be a transitional thing, a gig between more permanent jobs. She’d worked in accounting for 15 years and was employed by a property management company where, she says, “a lot of my role became evicting people from their homes, and I just wasn’t happy there.” But she actually liked being a driver more than she’d thought, and at first, with Lyft, she was making decent money — an average of $40 an hour.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JZCmGb">
|
|||
|
|
“I really enjoyed getting away from the cubicle and into the world and sharing people’s experiences,” she says. “I always said that I really loved having the word on the street. You find out not just the best places to eat but the best person to do your taxes, everything that’s going on in your community. You have a real finger on the pulse.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KM6Pxa">
|
|||
|
|
Mighetto, 39, is from Sacramento, California, and she used to drive to the Bay Area every now and then to work for a long weekend and make more money; she could bring in as much as $80 an hour on a holiday or during a big event. The company offered bonuses for many things: a hot streak — say, $15 for three rides in a row in a prescribed time frame, or sign-on bonuses if they referred another driver, or weekly bonuses for a certain number of rides. But as time went on, she says, echoing many drivers from both Lyft and Uber, she found that her bonuses were lower, and suddenly, she was making the hour-and-a-half drive every weekend just to get by. “They kept moving the goalposts,” she says.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="N4NeaU">
|
|||
|
|
The experience was much the same for Seydou Ouattara, a driver for Uber in New York. When he began driving in 2016, he was doing pretty well, but over the years, he says, “I was working more hours for Uber, but I was making less money.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="C6a50S">
|
|||
|
|
Mighetto’s and Ouattara’s experiences — of both promised freedom and frustration — are increasingly common in the United States as the “gig economy” grows. Companies like Uber and <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lyft.com%2Fimpact%2Feconomic-impact-report%2F%2Fstats%2Fstates%2Fcalifornia&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fthe-highlight%2F22425152%2Ffuture-of-gig-work-uber-lyft-driving-prop-22" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Lyft</a> have argued that gig workers need to be excluded from employee status to preserve their flexibility, and that most of their drivers are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-ab5-fight-reveals-dependence-full-time-drivers-2020-8">part-time</a> hustlers, not full-time professional drivers.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aVC03a">
|
|||
|
|
Since Uber launched in 2011 as “<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-old-app-new-york-city-ipo-2019-5#heres-what-it-looked-like-when-requesting-a-pickup-in-ubers-app-back-when-it-launched-in-new-york-in-2011-the-interface-is-much-simpler-and-the-design-language-is-completely-different-1">UberCab</a>” with the aim of “disrupting” the taxi industry, the gig economy has exploded into a variety of fields and classified swaths of workers as independent contractors rather than employees. That allows companies to avoid minimum wage and overtime laws as well as unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and payroll taxes.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jcB3Cj">
|
|||
|
|
This is billed as innovation, but it’s actually a tactic that goes back more than a century. US labor law history is rife with different groups of workers being carved out of protections because their work wasn’t really seen as work.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="J5ET9g">
|
|||
|
|
Modern-day gig workers such as Mighetto and Ouattara have been pushing back, arguing that the amount of control the apps exercise over them (not to mention the big money they make for the gig companies) means that the work they do should come with the benefits of being an employee.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TTXp9U">
|
|||
|
|
Last November, California passed a ballot initiative called Proposition 22, cementing Mighetto and her colleagues in <a href="https://prospect.org/labor/prop-22-is-here-already-worse-than-expected-california-gig-workers/">semi-employee status</a>. They still don’t get state unemployment, discrimination protections, sick leave, or collective bargaining rights, though they do have some bare-minimum guarantees of pay while actually carrying a passenger. The minimums were sold as a baseline that increased driver rights, but one <a href="https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-uber-lyft-ballot-initiative-guarantees-only-5-64-an-hour-2/">study by University of California Berkeley</a> researchers found that the guarantee could actually only be “the equivalent of a wage of $5.64 per hour.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<figure class="e-image">
|
|||
|
|
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7qYi_e5XwucJE8d-K7XLbQpbiA8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22499270/GettyImages_1133000006.jpg"/> <cite>Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images</cite>
|
|||
|
|
<figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
An iPhone with the Lyft ride-hailing app on it shows cars in the area.
|
|||
|
|
</figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
</figure>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XMcb46">
|
|||
|
|
“I’m a driver,” Mighetto says, “and that doesn’t give anyone license to treat me like a third-class citizen.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9sy7it">
|
|||
|
|
In response to requests from Vox for comment, representatives for Uber and Lyft defended their model and practices, offering surveys and articles they contend show that drivers prefer their independent contractor status. “Driver earnings are currently at an all-time high in many of our markets,” a spokesperson for Lyft wrote in an email.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Aj8oQP">
|
|||
|
|
Workers across the country are now worried that the effects of Prop 22 will spread, institutionalizing a “third category” of workers well beyond Uber and Lyft drivers who have fewer rights than regular employees but also lack the real autonomy of actual freelancers — and that it might happen under a Democratic administration, and with the sign-off of some labor unions.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="epI7ZY">
|
|||
|
|
In other words, we’re at an inflection point, potentially for the entire American working class. Will labor figure out how to organize workers in dire conditions across the broad spectrum of “tech”-enabled jobs, from Amazon to Uber? Or are workers going to continue to see their conditions deteriorate, even as executives at the top <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-ceo-other-execs-saw-pay-cuts-in-2020-but-still-raked-in-millions-11615593162">just get richer</a>?
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="FT1PM1"/>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rObgPM">
|
|||
|
|
In 2019, the clutch went out on Mighetto’s car, so she was driving for Lyft in a rental car to make the $1,500 she needed for the repair. (Lyft, she explains, has a <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lyft.com%2Fexpressdrive&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fthe-highlight%2F22425152%2Ffuture-of-gig-work-uber-lyft-driving-prop-22" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">rental partnership</a> so drivers can get rentals to use for work.) Mighetto thought she could offset the cost of the rental with a particular bonus, but the number of rides she needed to do to get that bonus seemed to keep creeping upward.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LScOrI">
|
|||
|
|
“I had six rides left, and I thought, ‘I’m sacrificing my own safety and the safety of my passenger. I just can’t do it. I’m exhausted.’ I was so infuriated that I took to the internet, looking for other people who were as outraged as I was. And there was this action the following day. I took it as a sign I needed to be there.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lNP422">
|
|||
|
|
It happened to be the night before Uber’s initial public offering, and drivers around the world had organized a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/technology/uber-strike.html">day of protest</a>. Mighetto had found her people.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OuvqVr">
|
|||
|
|
“I’d never, never done anything like that,” she says of the protest. “In our cars, we’re really isolated, and we don’t have a lot of interaction with our fellow workers. So it was really wonderful to be in a community and to realize that I wasn’t the only one out there that was feeling mistreated.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="biVQTD">
|
|||
|
|
As Mighetto got involved in driver organizing and eventually became a member of <a href="https://www.drivers-united.org/">Rideshare Drivers United</a>, an organization of Uber and Lyft drivers fighting for legal rights and unionization, California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) was moving through the legislature. An attempt to expand protections for gig workers that predated Prop 22, the bill codified the three-part “ABC test” that the state supreme court had <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2018/s222732.html">recently laid out</a>, making it <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/business/economy/gig-economy-ruling.html">harder</a> for gig economy companies to classify workers as independent contractors.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YmrT5r">
|
|||
|
|
The ABC test laid out three requirements that must be met in order for a worker to qualify as an independent contractor. Labor lawyer Brandon Magner <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/will-the-pro-act-hurt-freelancers">explains</a> it as a three-pronged test: “The A prong is that you have to be free from the company’s control. The B prong says you have to be doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business. And the C prong says you’re an independent business in that industry.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="40mxyX">
|
|||
|
|
For Mighetto and other drivers, who have their rates set and rides assigned by an Uber- or Lyft-controlled app and who are carrying out the company’s main — indeed, only — service, the ABC test meant that they’d be seen as employees under wage and hour laws, eligible for minimum wage and overtime protections. So Mighetto took to organizing. She even made her own flyers explaining what AB 5 would do for drivers.
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DmoM0y">
|
|||
|
|
When AB 5 became law in 2019, Mighetto says, “It was a huge victory for workers.” And she began to see changes — she switched to driving for Uber after the company added new features in its app. “They would tell you where you were going all of a sudden; you were able to see how much you stood to make on a particular ride. At that point, you have the ability to choose whether or not you wanted to take that ride.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JiZx6v">
|
|||
|
|
Uber was <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-california-driver-independent-contractors-pricing-destinations-prop-22-passage-2021-4">trying to prove</a> that the drivers were truly independent. But at the same time, Mighetto says, the companies were also ramping up campaigning against the law, telling drivers that they would lose their independence if they became employees.
|
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When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Mighetto was able, because of AB 5, to get unemployment benefits. She has a heart condition, and between fears for her safety and the drop in traffic, she needed to stop working. Even then, getting unemployment was complicated — the federal expansion of unemployment benefits lapsed, and she and her partner, also a driver, struggled to pay the bills as benefits waxed and waned. “We don’t have basic protections,” she says. “And that’s a glaring reality during a pandemic.”<strong> </strong>(A Lyft spokesperson tells Vox, “The pandemic is an unprecedented situation for all industries and communities, and our focus has been on helping keep our drivers, riders, and team members safe. Drivers do quality for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which we advocated for.”)
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|
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|
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<img alt="A driver in a car that has a sign in the back window that reads “Uber/Lyft owes me $495,949.”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YZnxaHLvIyy76cQ0-ZlFtcmDsY4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22499243/GettyImages_1219235755.jpg"/> <cite>Mario Tama/Getty Images</cite>
|
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<figcaption>
|
|||
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|
A “caravan protest” by Uber and Lyft drivers with Rideshare Drivers United and the Transport Workers Union of America in April 2020 called on California to enforce the AB 5 law so that they could qualify for unemployment insurance during Covid-19.
|
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</figcaption>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="zsYbuD">
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And then came Prop 22, an effort funded by Uber and Lyft, along with the delivery service DoorDash, which together poured <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html">$200 million</a> into the project of exempting themselves from regulation. Prop 22 was the most expensive initiative in state history, and when it passed last fall just as the pandemic began its ferocious second wave, it carved the gig companies out of the protections of AB 5 and threw Mighetto back into limbo, with <a href="https://www.nelp.org/publication/prop-22-rolls-back-rights-women/">drastically shrunken protections</a> against sexual harassment, wondering whether she’d get her unemployment and which rules the companies would change next.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JGXEO0">
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Uber <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-california-driver-independent-contractors-pricing-destinations-prop-22-passage-2021-4">yanked back</a> the control it had given drivers in the app. An Uber spokesperson tells Vox, “While these changes gave drivers more freedom than any other ride-share app provides, they also led to a third of drivers declining more than 80 percent of trip requests, making Uber very unreliable in the state. As the recovery from the pandemic picks up steam, we want to make sure riders can get a ride when they need one, and all drivers get more trips on a regular basis.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Gnc1fn">
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When we spoke the first week of April, Mighetto and her partner were in Mexico because they’d effectively been homeless. “We spend every week looking to make sure that we have a roof over our heads and something to eat,” she says. “I’ve been three weeks without pay. And in three weeks, I don’t know where I’m going to be sleeping. We’re glad to hear that the weather is turning in California because we’re going to be going back to camping soon.”
|
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<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="nrr1Pv"/>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MwA1uI">
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Uber and Lyft executives have long argued that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2013/02/06/lessons-from-uber-why-innovation-and-regulation-dont-mix/?sh=3fba1cdede94">regulations</a> hold them back. Current Uber <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/big-tech-regulation-shouldnt-sweep-up-startups-uber-ceo-says/articleshow/71304432.cms?from=mdr">CEO Dara Khosrowshahi</a> told an audience at Bloomberg’s Global Business Forum that regulations are “tougher on startups” and could stifle innovation; previous CEO and founder Travis Kalanick once argued that he was a “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/why-silicon-valley-loved-uber-more-everyone-else/590203/">trustbuster</a>” and the trust in question was the taxi industry. In Lyft’s IPO filing, it <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8a55de94-414e-11e9-b896-fe36ec32aece">claimed</a> “Lyft has the opportunity to deliver one of the most significant shifts to society since the advent of the car.”
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0bnYE3">
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But the model “is not innovative or exciting at all,” argues Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, who researches gig economy work.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7kLlb3">
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To Dubal, the work conditions for Mighetto and others like her are, rather than innovations, a throwback to old models of labor exploitation like piecework and sharecropping. “Drivers are living in a scenario where they cannot predict how much they’re going to make, because how much they’re going to make is determined by algorithmic allocation, which often becomes personalized and then becomes a form of punishment,” she says. “Although [the companies] applied algorithmic science to allocating fares and rides, it is piecework that ultimately only pays when [drivers] are allocated work.”
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gJSsVD">
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In the 19th and 20th century, she says, immigrant women who sewed shirts at home and were paid by the shirt “at least knew how many pieces they were going to work, and they knew how much they were going to be paid per piece.” With algorithms, she says, it’s completely unpredictable.
|
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="75sEZy">
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The <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/08/what-people-hate-about-being-managed-by-algorithms-according-to-a-study-of-uber-drivers">algorithms</a> are designed, she explains, to “figure out what your income goal is and will push you to work longer to reach that income goal to keep more demand out there on the streets for consumers.” It recalls sharecropping because the drivers have to shoulder all the costs of car upkeep; Dubal points to a <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/technology/315172-uber-agrees-to-20-million-settlement-with-ftc">$20 million settlement</a> Uber paid in 2017 to the Federal Trade Commission after the FTC found that the company had exaggerated the money drivers could make and steered drivers into financing options for buying or leasing cars that were worse than they might have received otherwise.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UAr4qq">
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Prop 22 locks this model in place — and the companies are now looking to scale up the legislation. They’re calling it “IC+,” for “independent contractor-plus,” and <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/uber-brands-gig-companies-efforts-to-reshape-labor-laws-as-ic-11605138662">Khosrowshahi has said</a> he intends “to advocate for the IC+ model not only around the nation but also the world.”
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wsysch">
|
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In order to head off more Prop 22s, there’s been talk recently from <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-17/gig-economy-coming-for-millions-of-u-s-jobs-after-california-s-uber-lyft-vote">companies</a>, <a href="https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5fa42ded15984eaa002a7ef2/5fa42ded15984e2b9d2a8061_Executive%20Summary_Clean%20Slate%20for%20Worker%20Power.pdf">researchers</a>, and some within the labor movement of a sort of grand bargain with Lyft and Uber, whereby drivers would accept that third-category worker status and, in return, be granted what’s known as “sectoral bargaining.” Workers would be granted the right to organize and bargain with the companies — something that, legally, independent contractors cannot do. But Dubal and labor economist Marshall Steinbaum of the University of Utah worry that the unions have latched onto sectoral bargaining as a quick fix in a moment where the labor movement is weak, hoping that a deal can bring numbers and ward off total war.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NWKMHI">
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Sectoral bargaining, Steinbaum explains, is the idea that all workers across a given sector could be represented by a collective agreement, regardless of who their employer is. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/how-to-win">described it</a> in 2019 as “social bargaining with the state on behalf of all workers,” where some public institution is created to bring together stakeholders in a given industry to bargain.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pafes4">
|
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The gig economy, Steinbaum notes, is less a sector and more the part of the economy that is outside of labor relations. And what makes sectoral bargaining actually a terrible fit for gig companies, he explains, is that “where sectoral bargaining has a lot to offer, it’s exactly where you have a fragmented sector.” It works when it raises the floor for lots of different companies at the same time. In <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/worker-buyouts-germany-ig-metall">Germany</a>, for instance, unions primarily negotiate with employers’ associations across many firms in a sector. But even there, the model has atrophied.
|
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</p>
|
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<figure class="e-image">
|
|||
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|
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/57M1F4NalDrzTKuN-GYib3870uw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22499296/GettyImages_1286017879.jpg"/> <cite>Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress/Getty Images</cite>
|
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|
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<figcaption>
|
|||
|
|
A car marked with Uber’s insignia, left, keeps pace with a yellow cab in New York’s Times Square in November 2020. Drivers for ride-hail services are organizing with taxi workers in the state.
|
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</figcaption>
|
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</figure>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="X25mJk">
|
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|
With Uber and Lyft, it’s the opposite situation: The two companies make up, essentially, a duopoly, and have used that power to avoid any kind of regulation. Without real worker power behind that bargaining regime, he says, it would simply solidify and legalize the existing lopsided power relationship between the companies and the drivers.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fmRhFq">
|
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|
Locking the drivers into a third category — not really employees, not really independent — would wind up, Dubal says, replicating old patterns of inequality. “When they say that we need a third category of work for a new economy,” she says, “what they’re really saying is that they just don’t want to have to provide these basic protections and rights and safety nets and they think that people now should be willing to survive without all of these protections that we’ve long come to understand as being normal and necessary.”
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UVf6EE">
|
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|
It’s precisely the most marginalized workers that minimum wage laws were designed to protect, and according to <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jzJt3QI8yvw9dDms3eyk4LH2ejuiHhVM/view">Lyft’s own economic impact report</a> for 2021, 69 percent of its drivers are members of racial or ethnic minority groups — drivers like Ouattara, who came to the US from the Ivory Coast. “We’re talking about a majority people-of-color workforce,” Dubal says, “and saying that this workforce shouldn’t have the same rights and benefits of other workforces of people is really a recipe for entrenched racial inequality.”
|
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</p>
|
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<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="NZx1NF"/>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MKoJwD">
|
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|
Prop 22 played up the idea<strong> </strong>that workers needed to be excluded from employee status in order to have flexibility, and the companies often argue that most of their drivers are part-timers doing it for a little extra on the side. According to that same Lyft economic impact report, 95 percent of drivers work fewer than 20 hours per week. But, Steinbaum notes, this argument also goes back well before the supposed innovation of the apps.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xaHUMl">
|
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|
The companies will say it’s not <em>real </em>work — something, he says, that echoes the debates around minimum wage that trot out teenagers at part-time jobs to argue that the minimum wage shouldn’t be raised. This, Steinbaum points out, is the origin of exclusion of much service and caring work from the National Labor Relations Act in the first place, and though the law has been <a href="https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/basic-page/node-1536/NLRB%2080th%20Anniversary.pdf">expanded</a> over the decades to include some of those it originally left out, others — like Mighetto and Ouattara — are still excluded.
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YmFCME">
|
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And, Dubal adds, the companies might say that most of the drivers work just a few hours, but the reality, according to her research, is that “most of the work is done by people who are working more than full-time.” A <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-ab5-fight-reveals-dependence-full-time-drivers-2020-8">Seattle study</a>, for example, found that 55 percent of trips were done by the 33 percent of drivers who worked more than 32 hours a week. The companies contest this but are notoriously unwilling to make their data public, sharing it only with particularly chosen researchers, meaning it’s hard to verify study results.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QxD0nM">
|
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So who wants such a deal? Unions such as the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union have signaled that they’d be open to it.
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qTJPoB">
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<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-17/gig-economy-coming-for-millions-of-u-s-jobs-after-california-s-uber-lyft-vote">Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson wrote</a>, “Unions that are trying to head off more Prop 22 scenarios and also expand their ranks will have to weigh the uncertain potential for better treatment from President Biden against the risk of losing or being cut out of the conversation entirely. If they play things wrong, traditional employment could end for millions more Americans.” Uber, he notes, has already backed a compromise with unions when it agreed to support the creation of the Independent Drivers Guild by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VndMRi">
|
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|
But any dealmaking frustrates many drivers because, well, those unions don’t yet represent these workers. They would, in essence, be making a decision to support legislation that workers like Mighetto themselves don’t want. And such high-handed behavior is exactly what employers point to when they run anti-union campaigns. If all that workers get out of a deal is nominal union membership but no material changes to their circumstances, it’s only going to make them angry — at the union. “And that’s damaging for the broader labor movement, not just the sector,” Dubal notes.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JKzrqT">
|
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|
Even unions sometimes seem to forget that what makes unions powerful is not dues money but people acting together to challenge unjust power. It is not the ability to file a grievance but the implicit understanding that behind that grievance lies the principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all,” which Uber and Lyft have countered with a story of individual independence and flexibility. But that story of flexibility is pitting drivers against one another; to defeat it, drivers must be united.
|
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</p>
|
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<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="ioJStF"/>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NtCoPr">
|
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|
Ouattara started driving for Uber<strong> </strong>in July 2016 in New York City. When New York put new rules into effect guaranteeing a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/5/18127208/new-york-uber-lyft-minimum-wage">minimum wage</a> for drivers — drivers must make at least $17.22 an hour — Ouattara says the app changed how drivers worked, exerting <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/technology/uber-wages-new-york.html">more control</a> over their hours while still asserting that workers like him were independent contractors.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AlPbOC">
|
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|
Ouattara explains that he must put in a request for the time he wants to work a week in advance in order to get in the queue for a work assignment. Drivers have different ratings in the app, and the drivers who are “platinum” rated get first crack at the hours, then “gold” drivers, and so on.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7aceqx">
|
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|
Because the wage must be paid for the time the driver is active on the app, not just the time that they have a fare, Uber moved to tighten its control over New York workers to avoid paying them for idle time. “They just drastically limited the length of their queue by deciding who’s in and who’s out,” Steinbaum says.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RExv1m">
|
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|
It’s a system not that different, though automated, from the “shape-up” that longshore workers faced for decades on the docks, where the number of workers needed would vary based on how many ships came in and what they carried. When the longshore workers on the West Coast organized with the radical International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they divided up the crews into “A-men” and “B-men”; A-men were full-timers who were assigned work first, and B-men got a crack at the work when all the A-men were employed. The difference was that the union, not the boss, decided who got which rating, and the assignments.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7dnrkz">
|
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With Uber, Ouattara says, there are all sorts of arbitrary rules that go into your rating. There are the ratings customers give drivers, but there are also things the app tracks, such as the driver’s speed and braking. “They sent you a report based on how many times you had to brake hard. But they don’t know why you brake hard. It might be because someone was about to run in front of your car and then you have to brake hard not to hit that person,” he says. “If you stop to prevent an accident, that would make you a bad driver.”
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ynJPEC">
|
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The worst part, he says, is that the rules aren’t transparent. “Every year there’s some new regulation in place to stress drivers out.”<strong> </strong>
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wgemTY">
|
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When the pandemic hit, Ouattara, too, stopped work for a time. He had a newborn child at home and didn’t want to bring the virus home, so he applied for unemployment. But he was denied. So he reached out to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a labor organization that started organizing yellow cab drivers and has since expanded to include ride-hail drivers like him.
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pRM4tn">
|
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He’d heard about NYTWA when he first became a driver as a place that drivers could go to get help, and he wound up one of the lead plaintiffs in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/business/economy/uber-drivers-unemployment-benefits.html">lawsuit</a> demanding the state give the drivers regular unemployment insurance rather than the lower payments associated with the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance plan for independent workers. In July, a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/economy/lyft-uber-drivers-unemployment.html">judge</a> ruled that Ouattara and other drivers were eligible for unemployment.
|
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|
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|
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One of the reasons for the holdup, Ouattara says, was that Uber and Lyft <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/business/economy/uber-drivers-unemployment-benefits.html">were not submitting</a> the required data on drivers to the state. Without that data, he and others were denied. “I did my best when I had to work at Uber,” he says. “It’s not like I’m going to work at different things. It’s at Uber every day, 70 hours a week. How would you tell me I’m not your employee when it comes to helping me out when we have a pandemic?”
|
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</p>
|
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<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="rt6HcK"/>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="etWhbQ">
|
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So far, no sectoral bargaining deal<strong> </strong>has been forthcoming. In <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-26/connecticut-shelves-gig-bargaining-bill-amid-union-divisions">Connecticut</a>, a proposed bill, spearheaded by the Independent Drivers Guild, was shelved when neither labor nor Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash supported it. <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-18/lawmakers-look-to-spruce-up-gig-work-rather-than-replace-it">Lyft said</a> the bill would risk “the flexibility and control that drivers currently enjoy,” and a Lyft spokesperson notes to Vox, “The Connecticut Department of Labor testified against that proposal, citing its incompatibility with the [National Labor Relations Act].”
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6sWCxS">
|
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“The companies opposed it because it was too independent even for them,” Steinbaum says. “They didn’t exert total control, and I think that reflects the absence of middle ground here that such a compromise would have to be able to inhabit were it to take shape.”
|
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</p>
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The bill would have established a sectoral bargaining system in which representatives of the companies and of the workers would negotiate over rules for the industry, while agreeing that the workers were not employees. And in <a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/labor/after-prop-22-new-york-still-split-gig-worker-reforms.html">New York</a>, negotiations have stalled. The taxi workers’ union, Ouattara’s organization, is advocating for something similar to AB 5 that would apply the ABC test to workers. He says, “You have to look at the control Uber has over drivers. It’s absolutely control of the relationship of employee and employer. Everything you’re doing is under their control.”
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Tem48y">
|
|||
|
|
Seattle was the first city, in 2015, to attempt to put a <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/15000008/uber-seattle-driver-union-lawsuit-failed">bargaining regime</a> in place for ride-hail drivers. Steinbaum, who briefly consulted for the city of Seattle on litigation that followed from the attempt, describes it as “an agency that the city government recognized as the bargaining agent for ride-sharing drivers in the city, and then that agent would be empowered to essentially collectively bargain on their behalf with ride-sharing firms under the auspices of the city.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="z8vQxf">
|
|||
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|
But the companies — and the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying organization — fought it, using antitrust laws (arguing that the drivers would be unfairly colluding because they were not employees). Eventually, the city shifted gears, <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2020/uber-seattle-u-s-chamber-end-legal-dispute-union-law-city-plans-minimum-wage-drivers/">passing a law closer to New York’s</a>, allowing drivers to be covered by minimum wage protections, and the city to establish a Driver Resolution Center to arbitrate disputes between the companies and the workers.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RAyvt5">
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Thus far, the Biden administration seems to be uninterested in federal grand bargains. Just recently, prominent <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-weil-uber-lyft-employees-contractors-20190705-story.html">Uber critic</a> David Weil was <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/biden-aims-to-pick-uber-critic-weil-for-return-as-dol-wage-chief-17">nominated</a> to resume his Obama-era post at the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, and the Labor Department withdrew a Trump-era rule around independent contractors that made it harder to classify drivers like Mighetto and Ouattara as employees.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VJPg0i">
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Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, points out that in its statement, the department “skewers” the argument from gig companies around flexibility, <a href="https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-09518.pdf">saying</a>, “[F]lexible work schedules can be made available to employees as well as independent contractors, so any determination of or shift in worker classification need not affect flexibility in scheduling.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qJCKYC">
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And the president is backing the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/03/09/975259434/house-democrats-pass-bill-that-would-protect-worker-organizing-efforts">PRO Act</a>, which includes the ABC test for the purposes of collective bargaining (though notably not for wage and hour law, as AB 5 did). While passing anything through <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/03/24/pro-act-labor-senate-vote-filibuster/">the Senate</a> is a tall order, labor has unsurprisingly made it a top priority to pass the act, a top-to-bottom reform of existing labor law that would, for example, include penalties for the kind of anti-union behavior demonstrated recently by Amazon in <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22320009/amazon-bessemer-union-rwdsu-alabama">Bessemer, Alabama</a>.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Duw8aW">
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With the PRO Act, Dubal thinks that both Rideshare Drivers United and the taxi workers’ group could potentially form a real union of ride-hail workers. Rideshare Drivers United, she says, “want to be a bargaining unit for Lyft and for Uber and the potential is 100 percent there.” There’s currently organizing taking place across the gig economy, including drivers figuring out how to “strike” on the apps; she points to <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/3anwdy/organized-doordash-drivers-declinenow-strategy-is-driving-up-their-pay">DoorDash drivers</a> using Facebook to organize and selectively declining cheap orders in order to push up their wages.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="e4CgYj">
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Unsurprisingly, Uber and Lyft, alongside other gig companies DoorDash and Instacart, are pouring money into fighting to stop PRO. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/05/06/pro-act-uber-lyft-doordash-instacart-lobbying/">The Intercept</a> reported that the companies spent “at least $1,190,000 on 32 lobbyists to persuade members of Congress on the PRO Act” in 2021 so far. Uber itself spent $540,000, and its annual SEC filing notes, “If a significant number of Drivers were to become unionized and collective bargaining agreement terms were to deviate significantly from our business model, our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flows could be materially adversely affected.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xrIo5X">
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A union for ride-hail drivers, Steinbaum notes, could look something like the longshore workers’ model. Rather than the app mysteriously assigning work and tweaking algorithms, drivers could set rules themselves while maintaining flexibility — longshore workers famously treasured the ability to work or not depending on their needs on a given day — and without giving up their power.
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MgOP1P">
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The drivers could agree on seniority or another system of deciding who gets offered work first, which, Steinbaum says, “would enhance labor power because the most experienced workers would be the ones that get the work and the dynamic where the casual workers are the ones that the company wants to bring in and undermine the power of the workers on the job would be counteracted.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mTxVFF">
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The other outcome is that more industries start to move to the Uber model of on-demand workers not classified as employees, and more people’s conditions start to look like those of Mighetto and Ouattara. Shortly after Prop 22 took effect in California, delivery drivers for grocery stores under the umbrella of <a href="https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e899ee24ffd0/">Albertsons</a> were told they would be fired and replaced with app-based “independent” drivers. Based on what venture capitalists have signaled after Prop 22, Dubal says, “I think what is going to happen now is that they’re going to start trying to gig-ify other sectors. And that’s where this stuff becomes more about the broader labor movement.”
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</p>
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XFNgYz">
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“One thing that is gratifying about [this moment] is that what I consider to be primary concerns about control, power, and autonomy are back in the forefront,” Steinbaum says. Back in 1950, when Walter Reuther, legendary head of the United Auto Workers, negotiated what became known as the “<a href="https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/05/day-labor-history-may-23-1950">Treaty of Detroit</a>,” labor agreed to stop fighting to dismantle the capitalist economy and build something else. Instead, the union agreed — and most of labor followed suit — to limit bargaining to getting their particular slice of the pie. But, Steinbaum notes, employers never really held up their end of the bargain, and in this moment they’ve abandoned any commitment to their workers’ well-being. “Now these larger questions are back on the table.”
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IM3aem">
|
|||
|
|
To Ouattara, the pandemic was a clarifying moment, proving that Uber wasn’t interested in helping the drivers. And to Mighetto, Prop 22 undid 100 years of progress. “It rolls back the New Deal; it rolls back all the work that’s been done to get us worker’s compensation. For me, it rolls back the Me Too movement.” The only choice, she says, is to keep fighting, because the amount the companies spent on Prop 22 is a reminder that they have no intention of changing their model. “If you think about it, $200 million is a small investment if you plan to continue exploiting people indefinitely.”
|
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hjol1G">
|
|||
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<em>Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist and the author of </em>Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone<em>. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and elsewhere.</em>
|
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</p>
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<div>
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<div id="plmVfu">
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<div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div></li>
|
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</ul>
|
|||
|
|
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
|
|||
|
|
<ul>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Bereaved Veda thanks BCCI, Jay Shah for extending support</strong> - The middle-order India batter lost her mother and elder sister to COVID-19.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>‘We Are The People’: UEFA EURO 2020 anthem is out</strong> - Twenty-five year-old Dutch DJ Martin Garrix ropes in legendary U2 bigwigs Bono and The Edge for the song</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>COVID-19 | Wriddhiman Saha recovers, fit for England tour</strong> - The wicketkeeper-batsman reached his home in Kolkata after completing over a fortnight-long quarantine at a Delhi hotel</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Delhi Police announces ₹1 lakh reward for info on Sushil Kumar</strong> - The two-time Olympic medallist is wanted in connection with a brawl that led to the death of a wrestler in New Delhi.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Me, Rafa and Roger are reinventing the Next Gen: Djokovic</strong> - World No.1 Novak Djokovic took a swipe at all the talk about the younger generation of tennis players, saying rival Rafael Nadal and himself were the</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
</ul>
|
|||
|
|
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
|
|||
|
|
<ul>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Severe Cyclonic Storm Tauktae to weaken into Depression in next 12 hours: INCOIS-IMD</strong> - Tidal wave above astronomical tide is likely to inundate coastal areas in the next three hours</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Coronavirus | Daily COVID-19 recoveries more than 4 lakh for first time in country</strong> - Average daily recovery of more than 3,55,944 cases has been recorded in the last 14 days, the Health Ministry said</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>COVID-19: CBSE extends deadline till June 30 for schools to tabulate marks for class 10</strong> - “CBSE accords highest priority to safety and health of teachers.”</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Floodplain fishing continues unabated in Kerala</strong> - It is a serious threat to survival of many inland fishes, say experts</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>40 U.K. docs of Mysuru origin join telemedicine initiative</strong> - Details of ‘COVID-19 Mitra’ shared with Centre, says DC, after participating in PM’s video conference on pandemic situation</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
</ul>
|
|||
|
|
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
|
|||
|
|
<ul>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Migrants reach Spain’s Ceuta enclave in record numbers</strong> - At least 6,000 people arrive in Ceuta from Morocco, many swimming in using rubber rings and rafts.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Lost village emerges from Italian lake</strong> - Repair works at a reservoir in Italy have revealed the remains of a village submerged for decades.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Belarus raids top news site in widening crackdown</strong> - Major independent site Tut.by goes offline and its editor’s home is raided.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Russia spy chief suggests West behind SolarWinds cyber-attack</strong> - Sergei Naryshkin speaks to the BBC in a rare interview about 2020’s SolarWinds cyber-attack in the US.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>RHS Bridgewater: Europe’s ‘biggest horticultural project’ opens</strong> - The new 154-acre RHS Bridgewater opens in Salford a year later than planned, due to the pandemic.</p></li>
|
|||
|
|
</ul>
|
|||
|
|
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
|
|||
|
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<ul>
|
|||
|
|
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>McLaren goes with a clean-sheet chassis and engine for Artura supercar</strong> - There’s a new carbon-fiber monocoque and a 120-degree V6. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765657">link</a></p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Demeo is the best multiplayer, virtual-reality D&D clone ever made</strong> - Issues aside, it already feels like sharing a real-life dice-and-minis table with friends. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1763983">link</a></p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Biden pledges to share 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses with the world</strong> - The 20 million will be in addition to 60 million AstraZeneca doses already pledged. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765579">link</a></p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Apple’s M1 is a fast CPU—but M1 Macs feel even faster due to QoS</strong> - Howard Oakley did an excellent deep dive on M1 scheduling and performance. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765494">link</a></p></li>
|
|||
|
|
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Apple Music subscribers will get lossless and spatial audio for free next month</strong> - New features will launch with iOS 14.6, macOS 11.4 in June. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1765499">link</a></p></li>
|
|||
|
|
</ul>
|
|||
|
|
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
|
|||
|
|
<ul>
|
|||
|
|
<li><strong>A frustrated wife goes to the doctor (long)</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
|
|||
|
|
<div class="md">
|
|||
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“Doctor, you have to help me. I’ve been married 30 years to my husband and I feel he’s lost all interest in me. You know, phisically speaking. He barely looks at me, let alone have sex with me. Oh, I really miss the good old times where we had wonderful sex multiple times a week, there must be something you can do to help me…”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
“Well, it’s not very ethical, but there’s this experimental drug we need to test” the doctor takes a vial from a drawer “this is a very potent aphrodisiac. Just one drop in a glass of water is enough to awaken the libido of a dying man. When you feel it’s a special night and you want to have sex with your husband, try and pour one drop in his glass, and I can guarantee that you will see a new life in him”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
“Oh thank you doctor, thank you so much. Tomorrow it’s our anniversary, what better night to try it out?”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
|
|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
Two days pass. The morning after the fated night, the woman goes back to the doctor. She appears disheveled, barely being able to walk.
|
|||
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</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
“Wh-what happened?” Asks the doctor, visibly worried
|
|||
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</p>
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“Oh, doctor, I feel so sad… Yesterday, while we were having dinner, I waited for him to go to the toilet and, as you suggested, I hastily poured one drop of the drug in his water glass. But then I thought: what if this is not enough? It’s been a LONG time since he’s shown any passion towards me. So I poured another drop.”
|
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</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“Wait, two drops?? But it’s dangerous, we don’t know what can happen if more than one drop is used!”
|
|||
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|
</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“But then I felt so insecure, what if he doesn’t like my body anymore? Is two drops really enough? I panicked, and I emptied the whole vial in the glass of water.”
|
|||
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|
</p>
|
|||
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|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
“……”
|
|||
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</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
|
|
“He came back from the toilet, sat down and took a good sip from the glass. He froze, eyes wide. The glass fell from his hand. He stared at me like a predator stares at its prey. Then it happened. He violently threw away everything that was on the table, snorting and roaring. Grabbed me, slammed me on the bare table, tore my clothes as well as his and proceeded to have his way with me, making animal sounds I had never heard him make.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
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|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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“I’m so sorry for you, it must have been terrible”
|
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</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“Oh no, doctor. It was the best sex I’ve ever had in 30 years of marriage. I orgasmed multiple times in a matter of minutes, I saw a rough, untamed side of my husband that I thought didn’t exist.”
|
|||
|
|
</p>
|
|||
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|
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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|
“Wait, you enjoyed it? Then why did you say you were sad?”
|
|||
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</p>
|
|||
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
|
|||
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“Well, it was our favourite restaurant, I doubt we’ll be able to show our faces again there…”
|
|||
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</p>
|
|||
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</div>
|
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<!-- SC_ON -->
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/PurplMaster"> /u/PurplMaster </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nevr4o/a_frustrated_wife_goes_to_the_doctor_long/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nevr4o/a_frustrated_wife_goes_to_the_doctor_long/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
|
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<li><strong>I tell dad jokes all the time even though I’m not actually a dad</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
|
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|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
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I’m a faux pa.
|
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</p>
|
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</div>
|
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<!-- SC_ON -->
|
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/nita1568"> /u/nita1568 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nedrj4/i_tell_dad_jokes_all_the_time_even_though_im_not/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nedrj4/i_tell_dad_jokes_all_the_time_even_though_im_not/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>Guy : Doctor, my Girlfriend is pregnant but we always use protection and the rubber never broke. How is it possible?</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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Doctor : Let me tell you a story: "There was once a Hunter who always carried a gun wherever he went. One day he took out his Umbrella instead of his Gun and went out. A Lion suddenly jumped infront of him. In order to scare the Lion, the Hunter used the Umbrella like a Gun, and shot the Lion, then it died!
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</p>
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Guy : Nonsense! Someone else must have shot the Lion..
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</p>
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Doctor : Good! You understood the story. Next patient please..
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</p>
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</div>
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<!-- SC_ON -->
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Genius_Mate"> /u/Genius_Mate </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nef1f7/guy_doctor_my_girlfriend_is_pregnant_but_we/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nef1f7/guy_doctor_my_girlfriend_is_pregnant_but_we/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>A mother in law said to her son’s wife when their baby was born:</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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“I don’t mean to be rude but he doesn’t look anything like my son.” The daughter-in-law lifted her skirt and said: “I don’t mean to be rude either, but this is a pussy, not a fucking photo-copier.”
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</p>
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</div>
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<!-- SC_ON -->
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/My_Balls_Itch_123"> /u/My_Balls_Itch_123 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nf7g4z/a_mother_in_law_said_to_her_sons_wife_when_their/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/nf7g4z/a_mother_in_law_said_to_her_sons_wife_when_their/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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<li><strong>Who swore the most in star wars?</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
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R2-D2, they beeped out every word he said
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</p>
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</div>
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<!-- SC_ON -->
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/itsaveryshittyname"> /u/itsaveryshittyname </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/necqxe/who_swore_the_most_in_star_wars/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/necqxe/who_swore_the_most_in_star_wars/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
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</ul>
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