News & Commentary

January 19, 2018

Maddy Joseph

Maddy Joseph is a student at Harvard Law School.

NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb may be seeking to reorganize the NLRB’s field offices, Bloomberg reported yesterday.  His proposal involves consolidating regional offices and placing at the top of each an official who would report directly to him.  This could strengthen central control over regional offices and reduce the number of officials who have the authority to issue complaints and decisions regarding union representations.

The results of the union election at the LA Times are expected today.  Although workers at many major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are unionized, this is the first time that the LA Times’‘s journalists have voted on a union.

El Salvador announced earlier this week that it is working on a deal with Qatar to take as temporary workers Salvadorans who will lose their temporary protected status (TPS) in the United States in September 2019. On January 8, the Trump Administration said that it would terminate TPS for around 200,000 Salvadorans.

CNBC gives in-depth instructions to gig workers, most of whom do not have taxes withheld, on calculating and making estimated tax payments.  In other gig-related news, The Boston Review has an essay, “The Gig Economy’s Great Delusion,” which critiques the way platforms and other companies have positioned gig jobs as a social safety net.

A new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute estimates that tipped workers will lose $5.6 billion–$4.6 billion of that lost by women–per year under the Department of Labor’s proposed tip rule.

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