In a Monday court filing, the Justice Department asked a federal court not to unseal the affidavit showing probable cause for the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, giving reasons that underscore the hot water Donald Trump appears to be in.
Disclosing the affidavit now would, according to the filing, “cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is making a statement at 2:30 PM ET on Thursday, following days of public silence since the FBI searched Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Monday. That search was reportedly for classified documents Trump had taken with him when he left White House, and it has given rise to huge amounts of Republican conspiracy theories, as well as broader public pressure for the Justice Department to offer up information.
Amid Starbucks’ vicious union-busting campaign, which has involved the firing of at least 70 pro-union workers—more than 50 of them since April, in what’s clearly an escalating effort—the company tried to convince the National Labor Relations Board that union activists in Phoenix, Arizona, violated labor law by “threatening and coercing employees and the public.” Starbucks claimed workers surrounded a store and pounded on the windows during an action.
The July jobs report crushed both expectations and Republican hopes for bad economic news. The economy added 528,000 jobs, defying predictions of 250,000 new jobs. Unemployment fell to 3.5%—or, economist Justin Wolfers tweeted, more precisely 3.46%, which would be “THE LOWEST UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IN OVER HALF A CENTURY.”
Remarkable number.
Republicans greeted the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade with talk of going still further, not just allowing states to ban abortion but passing legislation in Congress to ban abortion nationwide. Can someone ask them about that again in the wake of the overwhelming Kansas vote to protect abortion rights?
House Republicans have been talking about a 15-week ban—and that isn’t all.
Supply chain problems could get much, much worse in September if 115,000 railroad workers go on strike. The workers have gone more than two years without a contract, dealing with one cut after another, including job cuts that have led to serious understaffing.
Trader Joe’s Hadley, Massachusetts, store became its first to unionize after workers voted 45 to 31 to form an independent union, Trader Joe’s United.
“This victory is historic, but not a surprise,” the union said in a statement after the votes were counted.
Get your expressions of stunned awe ready here, because the Starbucks union has reached a truly amazing milestone: 200 unionized Starbucks stores. Of those, 52 voted unanimously to unionize, labor reporter Steve Greenhouse notes, with the union winning about five out of six stores to vote.
Last summer, when the organizing drive kicked off in Buffalo, unionizing one corporate-owned Starbucks seemed like a long shot.
Former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress on Friday by a jury that apparently didn’t have to deliberate too hard—the verdict came back in just three hours.
The Bannon verdict came as the media was chewing over the revelations of Thursday night’s Jan.
The first union representation election in Trader Joe’s history will happen this month, as workers in Hadley, Massachusetts, vote on July 27 and 28. There are 81 workers in the store eligible to vote, according to organizer Maeg Yosef.
“We’re just really thrilled to finally have an election date and we’re really excited to get the final vote total,” Yosef told the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s Brian Steele. “We’re feeling good right now.
The people who spent the past several decades working toward overturning Roe v. Wade believe that the embryos created in fertility labs are human beings. Which means that people who have undergone fertility treatments and have embryos stored, or people who might in the future need fertility treatments, are wondering just how worried they should be.
Enter The New York Times.
A key abortion rights battle is going on in Michigan, where a court has blocked a 1931 abortion ban from going into effect and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has said, “we’re pulling out all the stops” to preserve legal abortion despite a Republican-controlled state legislature. There’s an urgent deadline coming up in another part of this fight, though.
This week, the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights. This is a workers’ issue, in a country where many struggle to afford an abortion and lack the paid leave needed to take multiple days off work to travel out of state for abortion access as state bans go into effect. The Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz points out research showing that people who want but cannot get an abortion experience long-term financial consequences and increased poverty.
The school year has ended in much of the country, with its final weeks bringing closures due to overheated classrooms in some cities—yet more evidence of the impact climate change is already having.
But wait, you may be saying. This isn’t new—I remember heat days when I was young.
Not this many, you don’t.
Microsoft entered a neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America, saying it would not get in the way of Activision Blizzard workers’ union rights if it acquires the video game company. This is believed to be the first such neutrality agreement in the tech industry, and it is a major one, affecting most of Activision Blizzard’s nearly 7,000 U.S. workers.
The Jan. 6 committee promised never-before-seen footage in its first public hearing Thursday night, and it delivered. In addition to interviews with members of Donald Trump’s inner circle (Hi, Ivanka!), the committee showed a powerful video that included not just footage of the mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol, but stitched together a narrative of the day that shows cause and effect.
It was a gutting day on Capitol Hill as survivors of gun violence, including a child who covered herself in her dead friend’s blood to survive the Uvalde mass shooting and the parents of a child who died, testified before a House committee.
“Today we stand for Lexi and as her voice, we demand action,” Kimberly Rubio said in her daughter’s honor. “We seek a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
The week began after another weekend of mass shootings and with Senate Republicans successfully jerking Senate Democrats around on gun legislation.
The 100th Starbucks store went union on May 27, and the momentum has not let up. On May 31, the union won votes in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania—the first of those unanimously. On June 1, the union won three stores in Maryland. June 2 saw another unanimous win in South Carolina and three wins in Oregon. June 3, it was four unanimous votes at four Massachusetts stores, along with the first Starbucks union win in Texas.
Following the slaughter of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, teachers and school staff around the country started speaking up on social media about their experiences preparing for a mass shooter to come to their school. Because this is the United States of America in 2022: Teachers and students alike have had to think about what they will do if someone bent on mass murder comes to their school with assault weapons and body armor.
With Republican-controlled states in a highly competitive race to the bottom in looking for ways to take away rights, strip supports from struggling families, and gut public education, wouldn’t it be nice if states controlled by Democrats would bring a fraction of that urgency to improving government and helping people?
Wells Fargo is once again making headlines for being a terrible, unethical company even by the poor standards of the financial industry. Just over two years after the bank paid a $3 billion fine for opening millions of fake accounts in the names of actual customers, current and former employees are alleging that they were told to conduct fake interviews to fulfill Wells Fargo’s diversity policies.
How nasty has Starbucks’ anti-union campaign been? So nasty that a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) official says that one of the union’s few losses was so tainted by Starbucks’ illegal actions that a do-over election wouldn’t be enough to fix it. Instead, management should have to bargain with the workers as if the union won the vote to begin with.
The April jobs report was strong, with 428,000 new jobs and unemployment holding steady at 3.6%. Black unemployment ticked down to 5.9%, which, while it’s far above white unemployment the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould notes is the first time it’s been under 6% in the pandemic recovery.
That’s the good news. There are key areas of weakness:
The private sector has now gained back 97.
Workers in New York could gain new protections through separate bills in New York City and in the state legislature—but the New York City measure was delayed Thursday for five more months, despite having been passed by lawmakers four months ago. That bill would require many job listings to include salary information, a move that could help crack down on pay inequities. It would apply only to employers with four or more employees.
Wednesday brought news of a surprise prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Russia, with Russia releasing former Marine Trevor Reed as the U.S. released Konstantin Yaroshenko. The decision to make the exchange came amid the relentless advocacy of Reed’s parents and news of his deteriorating health, with President Joe Biden ultimately making the decision to trade Yaroshenko, who was convicted of drug trafficking in 2010.
Top Starbucks executives are really butt-hurt about the so-far overwhelmingly successful union organizing drive in their stores. In a leaked video call with managers, CEO and founder Howard Schultz included the company’s own employees in a list of “obstacles and challenges” the company has “managed to overcome,” describing them as “a new outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company.
Following the Amazon Labor Union’s huge win in Staten Island, they’re going for it again. Workers at another, smaller warehouse—called LDJ5—will begin voting on April 25, and Amazon is once again going hard with its union-busting campaign.
Even in the worst of times, Congress can usually get its act together to name federal buildings. It’s kind of a joke about Congress, actually. But House Republicans just got to the point of divisive extremism where they won’t even reliably do that.
Every member of Florida’s congressional delegation had co-sponsored a bill to name a federal courthouse after Justice Joseph W.
Captive audience meetings are one of the major tools of corporate union-busting efforts, in which management intimidates workers in person, on the clock, with the knowledge that their responses are being watched. Now, Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, is asking the board to classify most captive audience meetings as an unfair labor practice based on coercion in violation of workers’ rights.