Maddy Joseph is a student at Harvard Law School.
Retailers are expected to hire slightly fewer temporary workers this holiday shopping season. Although Target plans to hire thousands, Wal-Mart plans to hire none, promising instead to increase existing workers’ hours to accommodate the anticipated surge in shoppers. According to the Times, the decline in hiring versus last year is driven by e-commerce, low industry profit margins, and a tighter U.S. job market.
A recent Bloomberg report about the retail industry, which employs eight million workers, complicates this narrative of the “retail apocalypse,” blaming the industry’s woes — including slower job and wage growth than other industries — on the fact that “long-standing [retail] chains are overloaded with debt — often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms.”
The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Samaschool, a non-profit that tries to teach people how to be gig workers. Its offerings include an online course offered for free through San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and a weeks-long in-person course “cover[ing] topics such as personal branding, customer service, setting price, taxes and finances, and networking.”
In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch reviews two recent books — Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time — about the alliance among business interests and conservative intellectuals and politicians. Attacks on and the decline of labor unions are key to the story. Lafer focuses on how the umbrella organization that coordinates business industry lobbying has been, in Ravitch’s words, “particularly interested in discrediting labor unions,” as the “only political bodies” that might be able to stymie corporate policy efforts.
Daily News & Commentary
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July 11
Regional director orders election without Board quorum; 9th Circuit pauses injunction on Executive Order; Driverless car legislation in Massachusetts
July 10
Wisconsin Supreme Court holds UW Health nurses are not covered by Wisconsin’s Labor Peace Act; a district judge denies the request to stay an injunction pending appeal; the NFLPA appeals an arbitration decision.
July 9
the Supreme Court allows Trump to proceed with mass firings; Secretary of Agriculture suggests Medicaid recipients replace deported migrant farmworkers; DHS ends TPS for Nicaragua and Honduras
July 8
In today’s news and commentary, Apple wins at the Fifth Circuit against the NLRB, Florida enacts a noncompete-friendly law, and complications with the No Tax on Tips in the Big Beautiful Bill. Apple won an appeal overturning a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision that the company violated labor law by coercively questioning an employee […]
July 7
LA economy deals with fallout from ICE raids; a new appeal challenges the NCAA antitrust settlement; and the EPA places dissenting employees on leave.
July 6
Municipal workers in Philadelphia continue to strike; Zohran Mamdani collects union endorsements; UFCW grocery workers in California and Colorado reach tentative agreements.