Misc Economic Thread

[AnBr]

[LFC]

Another billionaire who gets what they want just by refusing to do what they legally have to. His company voted to unionize. He dragged his feet for over 2 years. Now he's whining that he doesn't understand why they're striking.

Since mid-April, the United Metro Energy facility in Brooklyn has had a squadron of oil workers stationed outside—alternating shifts so that men are there 24 hours, seven days a week—striking for better pay and benefits from the company’s owner: grocery store billionaire, twice-failed mayoral candidate, and right-wing shock jock John Catsimatidis.

The workers, a coalition of mechanics, terminal operators, and service technicians, elected to go on strike on April 19, following years of delayed negotiations on a union contract, which they voted to form back in 2018. “We are out there every single day, around the clock,” said Assaf John, who has been working as a service technician at the company for 12 years. “I’m here until 3 o’clock, then we have guys coming in at 3 p.m., and some who are there overnight until the morning.”

Catsimatidis told The Daily Beast by phone that the picket line was a first for him. “All I can say is that I’m a New Yorker for 70 years, and in 51 years of doing business I’ve never had a strike before, and contrary to what you hear we have never, ever refused to sit down,” he said. “I am always available.”

But the executive and frequent political donor, whose fortune hovers around $2.8 billion, according to Forbes, has been skittish about labor demands in the past. (Neither United Metro Energy nor its parent company, Red Apple Group, immediately responded to requests for comment.)

In 2015, the Gristedes CEO backed out of an opportunity to buy the New York Daily News, in large part due to the paper’s pension plans. Two years before that, he was court-ordered to pay more than $8 million in legal fees and back pay to Gristedes workers who sued him for unpaid overtime, according to reports in the News. At the hearing, Catsimatidis reportedly showed up more than two hours late.

On Wednesday, union representatives from Teamsters Local 553 will meet with United Metro for another round of negotiations. Due to the pandemic, the negotiations have taken place on Zoom for the past year, and Catsimatidis has attended many of them.

The local’s executive officer, Demos Demopoulos, told The Daily Beast that a quick resolution was unlikely. Late last month, United Metro filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. Around the same time, some 150 union members turned out for a protest rally.

“They’ve been on strike for 15 days now,” Demopoulos said. “We hope we’ve been making headway, but one of the stumbling blocks is that the company is refusing to pay the industry standards.”

The striking workers earn as much as 50 percent less than their peers in the union, and haven’t received a raise in three years, Demopoulos said. Andre Soleyn, a fuel terminal operator who spent five years at the company, said he made $20.50 per hour, when the industry standard for his position hovered around $36 to $38 per hour. Some of his coworkers made just above $15, the state minimum wage.

[andydp]

Just came across this article.  Seems there's a library in Scotland dedicated to the study of "mistakes" by economists.

Library of Mistakes

Edinburgh, Scotland

A library where thousands of books explain how to avoid another Great Recession.

IN BOTH 1929 AND 2008, economic experts everywhere claimed to know exactly what they were doing, yet not a single person could fix the series of mistakes that crashed the world’s economy. To avoid future financial catastrophes, a library in Edinburgh, Scotland has compiled a collection of sensible economic literature that aims to educate the next generation of economists.



The Library of Mistakes contains over 2,000 books, all relating to economics and finance. The small, cozy room that makes up the library is packed with books by writers like Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Michael Lewis. Cumulatively, the collection addresses every country on the planet.


www.atlasobscura.com/places/library-of-mistakes

NOTE: There is a link to a free podcast about the library in the article

[LFC]

May 26, 2021 15:23:48 GMT andydp said:

Just came across this article.  Seems there's a library in Scotland dedicated to the study of "mistakes" by economists.

So they have a portrait gallery with a painting of Art Laffer on prominent display?

[AnBr]

[AnBr]

[LFC]

Amazon's injury rate is nearly double that of the industry as a whole. That's how you externalize costs.

Amazon’s serious injury rate at its warehouses was nearly twice as high as the rest of the industry in 2020, newly released Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data shows in reports from both The Washington Post and the Strategic Organizing Center (a collection of unions that represent over 4 million workers around the country).

According to both groups’ analyses of the OSHA data, which spans 2017 through 2020, Amazon workers suffered 5.9 “serious” injuries — defined as incidents where workers received time off or a change in work responsibilities while recovering — per 200,000 hours worked (a metric that encompasses 100 workers working full time for the year). That’s compared to 3.3 injuries for that same metric across the rest of the warehousing industry. Walmart, one of Amazon’s largest retail competitors, had a rate of 2.5 serious injuries per 200,000 hours, more than half of Amazon’s rate of serious injury.

On the one hand, the new data represents an improvement from 2019, when a report from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting showed that Amazon had an overall rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees. And that lower rate is despite the surge in overall Amazon shipping in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, a potentially promising trend to see. In fact, the 5.9 serious injuries per 100 employee rate — while still nearly twice as high as the rest of the industry — is actually Amazon’s best year in some time, considering that The Washington Post and Reveal noted that the company had markedly higher overall injury rates in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

[LFC]

Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

As transit researcher Alon Levy writes in a report for the Niskanen Center, “This is not about our wealth: there is no correlation between a country’s GDP per capita and its subway construction costs. Nor is it about geological factors: the biggest factor behind a project’s cost is what country it is in, and costs are fairly consistent even across different geologies ... This is purely institutional.”

And when it comes to roads and the bulk of the high costs — “the new construction bit” — Turner says even though he has “no idea why those prices are increasing,” he can “eliminate a lot of things.” Turner explains that common theories like unions or the way we’re building roads or where we’re building them (for example, in more urban areas) are not supported by statistical evidence.

NIMBY is a more and more powerful force, especially coming from the rich.

Any major project will incur harms on some group of people — construction can impede traffic, new structures can obstruct a view from your porch, things that reasonable people would agree are annoying or costly. But transportation projects have to go somewhere, and one only has to look at the housing market to see the costs of allowing individual citizens to derail projects due to real or fabricated harms.

Brooks, the George Washington University economist, explained that the case of the Purple Line might explain many of the cost increases we’ve seen over the decades. What does she call this phenomenon? “We call this the rise of citizen voice.”

Brooks ruled out the “perfectly reasonable explanations” like paying workers more or the increased cost of highway materials as driving much of the cost increase. Instead, she says, judicial, statutory, and administrative changes — in particular the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1970 — have led to increased power for citizens.

This isn’t inherently an issue — while it raises costs to engage with lawsuits, if it stops the government from taking harmful action, that could be a good thing! Sometimes costs are rising because we’re paying for something valuable, for instance higher safety standards and accessibility infrastructure like elevators.

But often, we’re just paying for wealthy individuals to exert their preferences over everyone else.

Interstate 476 just west of Philadelphia was held up for years by Swarthmore College because they had rich, connected alumni. When if finally opened they managed to take the 6-lane highways and force it to squeezed down to 4 lanes. That narrowing point is now the cause of near daily traffic jams. But hey, Swarthmore got to keep a little extra land and not have a highway so close and that's really what's important, right?

[LFC]

I don't remember hearing about the PRO Act but apparently it passed in the House and was of course blocked by the minority party in the Senate. Dems are looking at how much of it they could put into the reconciliation bill.

The PRO Act will be included in the massive reconciliation bill currently under consideration by Senate Democrats.

At least, part of it will be. The question is, how much?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) told reporters this month that the historic, $3.5 trillion, all-encompassing reconciliation package will include the PRO Act.

The House passed the PRO Act in March. In its entirety, the law aims at becoming the biggest expansion in protections for organized labor in more than a generation.

The bill would make a number of sweeping changes to American labor law, including giving independent contractors the ability to unionize, granting the National Labor Relations Board the ability to impose civil monetary penalties, and giving individuals standing to sue to enforce their own labor rights, among other things.

But the proposal, like much else in the reconciliation package, faces two hurdles: Garnering the votes of 50 Senate Democrats, and the Senate parliamentarian.

That, policy analysts told TPM, has whittled down the scope of the elements of the law likely to be included in the Senate’s version of the reconciliation bill, though they emphasize that advocates of the bill do not consider the reconciliation bill the end of the line, and remain committed to passing the full PRO Act.

“This legislation is absolutely critical in its entirety,” said Liz Shuler, a secretary-treasurer for the AFL-CIO, last week.

But any larger effort at passing the full PRO Act will likely wait until after reconciliation, Jobs with Justice Director of National Policy Adam Shah told TPM.

“We understand that the Senate has various arcane rules to thwart the will of the majority,” Shah said. “It’s rigged against working people, but nevertheless, there are parts of the PRO Act that would probably pass muster with the parliamentarian.”

[LFC]

How the US made affordable homes illegal
The rules that keep American housing expensive. (In full since it's so short.)

Over the past year, housing prices rose precipitously, shattering the dreams of many would-be homeowners and highlighting the underlying inequalities in the housing market. Low interest rates and millennials’ entry into the market spiked demand across the nation, leading housing prices to increase by more than 20 percent in some cities.

But while this year was unique in many ways, and demand is a big part of the story, what’s often ignored is the biggest reason it’s increasingly difficult for Americans to find affordable housing: We don’t have enough houses. According to one estimate, we are now facing a shortage of nearly 4 million homes in the United States. And the primary reason for that shortage? Exclusionary zoning.

Zoning laws are the rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. While this can be innocuous, exclusionary zoning is anything but. These rules have a dark history in the United States as a tool of racial and economic segregation, used explicitly to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of certain neighborhoods. And while the explicit racism has been wiped from the legal text, the effect of many of these rules remains the same: to keep affordable housing, and the people who need it, away from the wealthiest Americans. In the majority of the country, and particularly in cities with good jobs, it’s illegal to build more affordable types of housing, and that’s created a widespread affordability crisis. Watch the video above for more.

[LFC]

Why don't they just pay better? Because that would be guaranteed payout and we can't have that.

As Amazon struggles to staff its warehouses, it’s joining other large employers by offering to pay for college tuition in an attempt to attract and retain hourly employees.

The e-commerce giant announced Thursday that it would be broadening its education benefits by offering more than 750,000 employees the opportunity to attend college or finish high school for free. Employees only have to work at the company for 90 days to be eligible, and if they leave, they do not have to reimburse Amazon for any tuition or fees paid during their time with the company.

Notably, it’s not a reimbursement program—Amazon is paying tuition and fees up front so employees don’t have to dip into savings to enroll. The company expects to roll out the new benefits in January. In addition to bachelor’s and associate’s degrees and GEDs, the program will cover English as a second language certifications. Amazon also announced skill training and apprenticeship programs for entry-level employees working in AWS and other IT positions. So long as an employee works for Amazon, they'll be able to use the benefit, potentially earning multiple degrees or certifications if they so choose.

So how bad is Amazon's turnover rate? Pretty goddam bad.

The move comes as Amazon has encountered high turnover at its front-line operations, particularly its warehouses. Since the pandemic began, Amazon says that it has hired 400,000 new workers who are eligible for the perk. Some of that has come as a result of expanded operations, but much of it is the result of people quitting. Among hourly employees, the turnover rate is 3 percent per week or about 150 percent per year, according to a New York Times investigation. In other words, in a single year, Amazon has to hire the equivalent of one-and-a-half times its entire hourly staff.

[AnBr]

.

Attachments:

[Bact PhD]

This piece in the Atlantic presents an interesting intersection between local economic power and MAGA. I've observed some of this both on a macro level with a prominent local developer, a noteworthy realtor, and a construction company owner and among some personal acquaintances of mine (the husband proudly proclaimed once that he was born into being related to half of a local county (lots of farmland holdings), and then married into the other half (car dealership owners, among other holdings).

The reality of American wealth and power is more banal. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern daily life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group’s existence and its importance, acting, as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his “beautiful boaters,” lauding the flotillas of supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6 crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets, he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.

[snip]

Yakima isn’t a tiny hamlet; it has a population of about 90,000 and sits at the heart of an extended metropolitan area that’s home to nearly a quarter of a million people. Millions of Americans live in small metropolitan areas much like it: exurban, surrounded by rural territory and wilderness, but not exactly isolated in the middle of nowhere. Seattle is only a two-hour drive away through the towering Cascade mountains, but it’s an entirely different world culturally, politically, and economically.

[snip]

Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, the cold-storage units, the processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. The owners have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the like—members of the educated professional-managerial class that my close classmates and I have joined—but the large majority of their employees are lower-wage laborers. The owners are mostly white; the laborers are mostly Latino, a significant portion of them undocumented immigrants who often work under brutally difficult circumstances. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes in Hawaii, Palm Springs, and the San Juan Islands.

These elites’ wealth derives not from their salary—this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, such as doctors and lawyers—but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi; a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas; a construction company in Billings, Montana; commercial properties in Portland, Maine; or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, it has an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, it’s important but not all-powerful.

[snip]

Forget the skyscrapers and opulent country mansions, the elite family dynamics of Succession and the antics of the Kardashians and Kardashian-adjacent; look instead to the far more numerous multimillion-dollar planned golf-course communities and their controlling homeowners’ associations. Think about the informal property-development deals struck between sweating local grandees at the country-club bar in Odessa, Texas, or Knoxville, Tennessee.

Power resides in gated communities and local philanthropic boards, in the ownership of staggering numbers of fast-food franchises, and in the smooth transmission of a large construction company’s assets to a new generation of small-yacht owners. Power can be found in group photos of half-soused, overweight men in ill-fitting polo shirts, and in the millionaires ready and willing to fly their private jets to Washington, D.C., in support of a certain would-be authoritarian. The yeoman developer of luxury condominiums, the single-digit-millionaire meatpacking-plant owner, the property-management entrepreneur: These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again. As much as the United States loves to think of itself as an egalitarian paradise open to talent of any stripe, hierarchy and local power are no less the American way.

These folks are the ones having the collective freakout over discussions about estate taxes, as they hold these assets that are worth just more than what gets excluded, but the heirs are holding the bag for the tax bill when the (usually) patriarch dies. There's not quite enough in the pot (or the owners aren't quite tax-savvy enough) to have enough in liquid assets set aside for the tax bill...Hmmm...

[goldenvalley]

There was a time in the 1990s that the estate tax had what now appears to be an unreasonably low dollar amount that triggered estate tax on things like half section small farm that my grandparents owned. That limit was increased over the years but the memory of that is kept alive by the totally anti tax types. It might be time to increase the limits again.

[LFC]

Sept 29, 2021 17:21:36 GMT goldenvalley said:

There was a time in the 1990s that the estate tax had what now appears to be an unreasonably low dollar amount that triggered estate tax on things like half section small farm that my grandparents owned. That limit was increased over the years but the memory of that is kept alive by the totally anti tax types. It might be time to increase the limits again.

The limit is already ridiculous. For 2021 it's $11.7 million per person or $23.4 million per couple. Plus if the first person in a couple dies and doesn't use their exclusion then it can be passed onto the survivor via the DSUE (deceased spousal unused exclusion) also known as "portability." That's a fair chunk of appreciated assets that escape taxation.

When the gift and estate tax provisions of the TCJA (Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017) expire at the end of 2025 this will drop back to effectively half but nearly $6 million per person of never taxed assets is still a lot.

[LFC]

Vox has a piece on the not quite richest 9.9% of the nation (i.e. the 90% - 99.9% of the richest in America). It's interesting to see some of the attitudes.

There’s a space between that 0.1 percent and the 90 percent that’s often overlooked: the 9.9 percent that resides between them. They’re the group in focus in a new book by philosopher Matthew Stewart (no relation), The 9.9 percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.

There are some defining characteristics of today’s American upper-middle class, per Stewart’s telling. They are hyper-focused on getting their kids into great schools and themselves into great jobs, at which they’re willing to work super-long hours. They want to live in great neighborhoods, even if that means keeping others out, and will pay what it takes to ensure their families’ fitness and health. They believe in meritocracy, that they’ve gained their positions in society by talent and hard work. They believe in markets. They’re rich, but they don’t feel like it — they’re always looking at someone else who’s richer.

They’re also terrified. While this 9.9 percent drives inequality — they want to lock in their positions for themselves and their families — they’re also driven by inequality. They recognize that American society is increasingly one of have-nots, and they’re determined not to be one of them.

[LFC]

The DeVos family lost $100M in the Theranos scam. Maybe if Betsy had a decent education...[snicker]

Things moved quickly from there. Peterson, Tubergen, and members of the DeVos family flew to California for a meeting at Theranos’ headquarters. There, they heard a pitch and received a demo of the company’s proprietary testing device—one of the DeVoses had her finger pricked for testing. Peterson told the prosecution that she and the others went into the meeting expecting to invest $50 million. But after the meeting, where they heard that others were investing nine-figure sums, they huddled in the parking lot and decided to increase their commitment to $100 million.

[AnBr]

Robert Reich said:

I'll say it again, there is no "free market" without government. Even the basic building blocks of the market depend on government decisions:
(1) Property – There are rules about what can be owned, and for how long? (Think about how patent laws have changed over time.)

(2) Contracts – There are rules about what can be sold, and under what terms. (Consider the debate about human organs, or opioids for that matter.)

(3) Market power – There are rules about how much is permissible. (Keep in mind that big tech is still not broken up despite the massive market share.)

(4) Default – There are rules about what happens if you can’t pay up. (Consider that people who default on student loans almost never qualify for declaring bankruptcy.)

(5) Enforcement – There are rules about how are all these enforced. (Think about how much companies are required to pay in fines when they've broken a rule and whether that disincentivizes that behavior or not.)

[LFC]

I put this here because it shows the kind of life or death decisions workers can be forced to make. It's normally about a less dramatic safety issue but the concept is still the same: take the risk or get out.

As a catastrophic tornado approached this city Friday, employees of a candle factory — which would later be destroyed — heard the warning sirens and wanted to leave the building. But at least five workers said supervisors warned employees that they would be fired if they left their shifts early.

For hours, as word of the coming storm spread, as many as 15 workers beseeched managers to let them take shelter at their own homes, only to have their requests rebuffed, the workers said.

Fearing for their safety, some left during their shifts regardless of the repercussions.

At least eight people died in the Mayfield Consumer Products factory, which makes scented candles. The facility was leveled, and all that is left is rubble. Photos and videos of its widespread mangled remains have become symbols of the enormous destructive power of Friday’s tornado system.

[LFC]

Vox has a good piece on bank fees. It pays to shop.

Banks are in the business of making money, and a lot of it — even if that means charging you to deal with money that’s yours.

From ATM fees to overdraft fees to maintenance fees, banks have all sorts of ways of extracting funds out of consumers. You go to an out-of-network ATM for cash and wind up paying a few extra dollars. You don’t have a ton of money in your checking account and notice your bank is charging you each month just to hold onto your (dwindling) funds. Maybe you screw up, accidentally try to spend money that isn’t in your account, and you get slapped with a $35 overdraft fee. Or you don’t have a bank account, need to cash a check, and the place where you do it winds up keeping a cut.

The whole thing can feel a little gross. Sure, banks are private businesses beholden to shareholders. At the same time, it’s hard not to look at the ways big and small they’re scooping up extra cash and think wait, what? Banks made $279.1 billion in 2021, up $132 billion from the year before.

Of course the poor are hit pretty hard.

People hit hardest by fees on checking accounts and other random bank fees are often more vulnerable. According to Bankrate, Black consumers pay double the bank fees white consumers do, and Hispanic consumers triple. Bank fees are often hardest to navigate for people with the least means, who can’t keep enough in their accounts to avoid maintenance fees or from time to time accidentally spend a little more than they have. Flat out-of-network ATM fees mean someone who is only able to take out $40 at a time is paying a higher rate to do that than someone who can take out $400.

“We have this distorted cross-subsidy where the biggest revenue on checking accounts is coming from the people with the least money, and they’re subsidizing the checking accounts of those with more money,” said Mike Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending.

The situation is often worse for people without a bank at all — being unbanked in America is very expensive.

[AnBr]

[AnBr]

Must keep them in debt or they won't fight our wars.

[goldenvalley]

So the Titans of Wall Street rushed to a bear market and are rebounding a bit today.  Now I read:

The Federal Reserve’s policy meeting today and Wednesday remains center stage, as the central bank is expected to again raise rates in an effort to tamp down surging prices. The Fed had long been expected to raise rates by half a percentage point, but a JPMorgan Chase research note issued Monday raised speculation the Fed could move even more aggressively and go with three-quarters of a percentage point, or more. The note suggested that a sense of urgency could be settling in at the central bank.

“Investors look as if they increasingly fear the central bank will become more aggressive with the pace of interest rates to try and curb inflation, given May’s cost of living figures were higher than expected,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said in commentary Tuesday. “A decision to raise rates by more than half a percentage point could cause chaos on the markets and put a bigger dent into investors’ portfolios than they’ve already seen this year.”

While a .75 rate increase means a lot to someone trying to buy a house, I don't see why the big money folks are so worried about it.  They'll make money no matter what and they've been making money hand over fist for two years.

As to housing...the prices are absurdly high in my neck of the woods and the folks buying them are going to end up underwater if the coming recession is deep and long lasting.  I guess Titans make dumb emotional decisions like home buyers???

[LFC]

Ugh.

In a complaint filed Wednesday that reads straight out the Great Depression, the feds requested a temporary injunction on a massive sanitation company that’s accused of employing children as young as 13 in “dangerous” overnight shifts at food processing plants.

Packers Sanitation Services, known as PSSI, is under investigation by the Department of Labor after a credible tip uncovered that at least 31 children were employed to clean industrial equipment, the complaint said.

At least two of the child workers suffered caustic chemical burns and other injuries while working on the “kill floor”—where cattle are butchered—at a plant operated by JBS Foods in Grand Island, Nebraska, the complaint said.

PSSI hires local workers throughout the country to sanitize industrial plants, like food processing facilities, often in overnight shifts that includes “work with and around dangerous machinery” and use of “strong chemicals,” according to an employee onboarding video on YouTube. The company’s website says it has 17,000 employees.

The Department of Labor said it discovered child laborers at the Grand Island location and at two Minnesota plants—one operated by JBS Foods in Worthington, the other by Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall.

None of the children mentioned in the complaint were identified, but the filing listed their working hours as far exceeding what’s permitted under federal law for minors. All of the minors involved were Spanish speakers, the complaint said.

The Fair Standards and Labor Act, enacted in 1938, established that minors under 14 be barred from working altogether. Teens between 14 and 15 aren’t permitted to work past 9 p.m. in the summer and past 7 p.m. during the school year.

Labor laws are more lax for those 16 and older, but still ban working more than three hours on a school day and more than 18 hours a week. The legislation also bars children from operating with or around “hazardous” equipment.

The feds say these laws were brazenly ignored by PSSI, with one child worker—a 14-year-old student at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island—working from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., five to six days a week between December and April.

Investigators said the child’s work ID matched that of their student ID. The complaint alleges the student regularly fell asleep in class and missed school because of a chemical injury he sustained at the plant.

[goldenvalley]

Nov 11, 2022 20:30:03 GMT LFC said:

Ugh.

In a complaint filed Wednesday that reads straight out the Great Depression, the feds requested a temporary injunction on a massive sanitation company that’s accused of employing children as young as 13 in “dangerous” overnight shifts at food processing plants.

Packers Sanitation Services, known as PSSI, is under investigation by the Department of Labor after a credible tip uncovered that at least 31 children were employed to clean industrial equipment, the complaint said.

At least two of the child workers suffered caustic chemical burns and other injuries while working on the “kill floor”—where cattle are butchered—at a plant operated by JBS Foods in Grand Island, Nebraska, the complaint said.

PSSI hires local workers throughout the country to sanitize industrial plants, like food processing facilities, often in overnight shifts that includes “work with and around dangerous machinery” and use of “strong chemicals,” according to an employee onboarding video on YouTube. The company’s website says it has 17,000 employees.

The Department of Labor said it discovered child laborers at the Grand Island location and at two Minnesota plants—one operated by JBS Foods in Worthington, the other by Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall.

None of the children mentioned in the complaint were identified, but the filing listed their working hours as far exceeding what’s permitted under federal law for minors. All of the minors involved were Spanish speakers, the complaint said.

The Fair Standards and Labor Act, enacted in 1938, established that minors under 14 be barred from working altogether. Teens between 14 and 15 aren’t permitted to work past 9 p.m. in the summer and past 7 p.m. during the school year.

Labor laws are more lax for those 16 and older, but still ban working more than three hours on a school day and more than 18 hours a week. The legislation also bars children from operating with or around “hazardous” equipment.

The feds say these laws were brazenly ignored by PSSI, with one child worker—a 14-year-old student at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island—working from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., five to six days a week between December and April.

Investigators said the child’s work ID matched that of their student ID. The complaint alleges the student regularly fell asleep in class and missed school because of a chemical injury he sustained at the plant.

Ya see!  This is why employers have to hire undocumented immigrants.  The socialists in the federal government won't let'um work the 14 year olds the way they should be worked.   

I had no idea any 14-15 year old could get a work permit.