Pressure continued mounting on corporations to cut off financial support to lawmakers who participated in last week’s challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. The Washington Post reports that three major corporate donors—Marriott, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, and Commerce Bank—committed in recent days to halt donations to the representatives and senators who voted against certifying the election results or otherwise, in Commerce Bank’s words, “impeded the peaceful transfer of power.” JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, two of the largest Wall Street banks, announced that they would pause political giving altogether. Adding to the pressure, The Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump group, pledged to launch a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at “destabilizing” these lawmakers’ remaining corporate donors by “fomenting employee rebellions.”
Meanwhile, the President and his supporters have faced increasing hostility from the digital services they rely on to raise money and communicate. Last week, e-commerce platform Shopify removed the storefronts for the Trump campaign and Trump’s personal brand while payments processor PayPal banned a pro-Trump organization that used its service to help would-be insurrectionists pay their way to Washington D.C. And on Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Stripe, another payments processor, had stopped serving the Trump campaign website. Parler, the right-wing Twitter substitute known for its rampant hate speech, received an existential threat over the weekend when Amazon Web Services, its web-hosting service, suspended the site indefinitely.
A running dispute between the Chicago Teachers Union and the city’s school district escalated over the weekend when the district’s CEO announced that teachers who do not report to work in person on Monday, the first day of in-person schooling since last March, would “be deemed absent without leave and [would] not be eligible for pay.” Many teachers have expressed concerns about returning to in-person instruction with covid cases on the rise and school facilities in disrepair from the last nine months of disuse. The two sides planned to continue negotiations over the weekend with the union seeking to delay reopening until teachers can be vaccinated.
New research by Public Citizen found that the negative effects of trade liberalization have fallen disproportionately on Black and Latino workers over the last 25 years. After a trade shock, Black and Latino workers were more likely than their white counterparts to lose their jobs and less likely to find new ones. Among these and other disproportionately negative effects, Black and Latino factory workers faced larger pay cuts when forced to take jobs in non-manufacturing sectors. Despite President Trump’s professed concern for American manufacturing, these trends worsened under his administration, the report found, with job losses continuing during the first three years of his term and accelerating markedly during the pandemic.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a review of the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division’s (WHD) FLSA enforcement efforts. The GAO found that a full 20% of FLSA complaints recorded by the division between 2014 and 2019 were concluded with no compliance action. And in some district offices, this figure exceeded 33%. As a start, the GAO recommended that WHD begin tracking the reasons why complaints are dropped without action, which the agency does not currently do. The report had been requested by three Democratic members of the House Committee on Education and Labor.
