The Obama administration has moved the focus on illegal immigration from workplace raids to indictments against people who hire unauthorized workers.
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A Crackdown on Employing Illegal Workers
Rules governing levels of compensation for workplace discrimination, and how long firms have to consult staff over job losses, are to be reviewed.
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Redundancy rules could be relaxed
It’s impossible to logically oppose the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which protects orientation and gender-identity rights, without opposing the Civil Rights Act Does federal civil-rights law unduly infringe upon First Amendment freedoms of speech, association, and religion? The officially settled answer to that question (the only politic answer) is “no,” as Rand Paul discovered when he tactlessly revealed his opposition to regulating private-sector discrimination at the outset of his 2010 senate campaign. Within 24 hours he took it back, stressing his unqualified support for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, citing its prohibition of the “abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws.” (Paul may have forgotten or maybe didn’t know that this seminal statute also prohibited sex discrimination in employment.) Of course, precisely because the Act barred race discrimination in public accommodations and the workplace, it was vehemently opposed by Southern Democrats, who mounted a two-month filibuster against it. Barry Goldwater also opposed it, out of the concern for individual freedom briefly espoused by Rand Paul. But toward the end of his life , in 1994, Goldwater was advocating for federal legislation prohibiting employment discrimination against gay people, who have “a constitutional right to be gay.” If religious freedom includes a right to discriminate against gay people, why, for example, doesn’t it include a right to discriminate against women? Goldwater would not be considered a conservative today (as he observed, he was eventually condemned as a liberal for supporting abortion rights), and relatively few Republicans would join him in supporting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Recently reintroduced in Congress, with a little bipartisan Senate support, ENDA has virtually no chance of passing the ultra-conservative Republican House. Today’s conservatives are selectively resurrecting libertarian arguments against civil-rights laws in their fight against the dreaded “homosexual agenda.” Bans on racial, religious, and sexual discrimination, in general, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in particular, still require political obeisance, but bans on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity are condemned by the religious right as flagrant violations of religious freedom. ENDA “wages war on freedom of religion in the workplace,” Congressman Mike Pence declares . Right-wing advocacy groups agree: “ENDA is a dangerous, blatantly unconstitutional bill that would pit the government directly against the free exercise of religion,” according to Alliance Defense Fund President, Alan Sears. There are principled, moral, and pragmatic libertarian arguments for unregulated markets unhampered by civil-rights laws. The laws do infringe on freedom of association, and if you consider the associational rights of corporate employers equal to the associational rights essential to private groups and intimate relations (which I do not), then you agree with Rand Paul’s 2002 statement that “a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination.” That’s the moral argument against civil-rights laws. The pragmatic argument rests on the view that free markets are rational and discrimination irrational. Free markets are more effective than civil-rights laws in “promoting tolerance and reducing bigotry,” Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby asserts . But if this were true, then the 1964 Civil Rights Act would have been redundant. If this were true, then the end of segregation in public accommodations and decline of gross employment discrimination against women and minorities that followed passage of landmark civil-rights legislation would have been mere coincidence. Libertarian arguments against civil-rights laws are, in my view, unpersuasive and ahistorical, but they are not unprincipled. There are, however, no consistent, principled libertarian distinctions between “good” anti-discrimination laws that protect racial or religious minorities and women and “bad” laws that protect gay and transgendered people. If civil-rights laws unconstitutionally restrict individual freedom to discriminate, they restrict it regardless of the group they seek to protect. If religious freedom includes a right to discriminate against gay people, why, for example, doesn’t it include a right to discriminate against women? Why shouldn’t an employer who deems it sinful or a violation of some divine order for women to work outside the home or in traditionally male jobs have the same First Amendment right to discriminate as an employer who considers homosexuality a sin? If your answer is “religious beliefs that require women to stay home are wrong and held only by small minorities of employers while belief in the sinfulness of homosexuality is right,” then you’re the one advocating religious discrimination — insisting that laws should respect your beliefs or beliefs favored by the majority while disrespecting minority beliefs or beliefs you disdain. Religious opponents of ENDA are apt to attack it for extending “special rights,” but if there’s nothing special about protecting women and racial minorities from discrimination, then there’s nothing special about protecting gay people. Enacting ENDA would not extend any special equality rights to gay and transgendered people. Instead, religious opposition to its enactment demands special rights to discriminate against them. Image: mattymatt/flickr
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The Fallacy in the Religious, ‘Libertarian’ Argument Against ENDA
Months after a state law was passed with wage and workplace rules for caregivers and housekeepers, those who would benefit are still learning they have rights.
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A Boon for Nannies, if Only They Knew
From early in their investigation of the slaying of Jayna Murray in a Bethesda store, detectives could see problems with the story of the other woman initially believed to be a victim. But they still don’t have a motive, investigating whether it was related to a workplace dispute over stolen merchandise.
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Motive sought in Bethesda yoga shop slaying
Workplaces with ‘significant risk’ may go unchecked as government cuts hit Health and Safety Executive inspections, the BBC has learned.
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No checks at ‘risky’ workplaces
Do you fall prey to any of these common nonverbal pitfalls that undermine your workplace image?
By Mark Bernstein A lot conventional wisdom about software is mistaken. It’s probably a mistake to try to tackle these misconceptions in too much detail in a blog post, but my time here is limited and perhaps a short catalog of common mistakes might help some of you think more critically about the programs you use every day. Results are what matter We all know that small computers have transformed the workplace. The world of The Apartment and Mad Men has vanished. Companies know that they wouldn’t be more profitable if they discarded their PCs and hired lots of secretaries and typists. Yet the productivity gains from using computers have been remarkably hard to identify. It turns out that lot of the work we do with business computers involves dressing up our ideas to impress managers and clients. Where a typed page was once sufficient, we now dispatch an elegantly typeset document and a deck of presentation slides. This might not help the company serve customers, but it helps individuals impress their managers. Much of the real contribution that software makes to your thinking happens in the course of the work. What may matter most in the long run are the ideas you discover while preparing a management report or a client presentation. Process matters. Software should be polished We spend too much time perfecting the way our programs look, just as in the previous century we spent far too much time perfecting our books. We are accustomed to a very high standard of editing and typesetting in publishing, a standard that originally was possible only because a vast number of educated women were for the first time entering the work force and were, for a time, willing to accept very low wages. Today, we look for the same sort of surface polish in our software. All this polish comes with substantial costs. Some costs are evident because they appear in the price. Others are hidden. How do you measure the cost of terrific software that never gets written, or that remains locked in a laboratory? Software developers have long struggled to reduce the riskiness of development, its delays and failures, by working to build a software factory that would make software construction more systematic. This hasn’t worked well. “We software creators woke up one day,” I wrote in 2007 , “to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. We are unhappy with our modern computing and alienated from our work, we experience constant, inexorable guilt.” We’ve been here before. In 1853, John Ruskin inserted a long aside in The Stones Of Venice to advise to the Victorian consumer and art buyer. What sort of things should one buy? Ruskin suggests the following: 1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works. Brush marks are not signs of sloth, and pixel misalignments are not an indicator of moral laxity. The software creator should make intention clear, but excessive polish is slave’s work unredeem’d. Software should be friendly The program is not your friend. It does not understand you, or care about you. Computers should be intuitive We are often told that computers should be information appliances, that you don’t need to know about anything under the hood. Many things we want to do, however, are far from simple; the real work of real people is surprisingly complex. Learning to use tools well sometimes takes times, but you are only a beginner once and you may use your tools every day. Programs should never crash, hang, or do surprising things Homer nods, and most of us aren’t Homer. Human collaborators sometimes make mistakes, lose things, or drop them on the floor. With computers as well as people, take sensible precautions and hope for the best. On her first trip to New Mexico, Linda was astonished to find that National Park trails frequently ran close beside spectacular cliffs, with no guard rails in sight. Back east, you’d put up a guard rail and spoil the view — or you might close the trail because it might be dangerous. If we do not trust users, we deprive people of abilities they need. No one wants to read on screens People still say this, even though we spend our days reading and writing on the screen. It is now clear that the future of serious reading and writing lies on screens and on the displays that will replace them. Hypertext is distracting; the Internet is ruining kids today Life is distracting. Ideas are complicated and densely interconnected. There is too much to do and we have too little time. Kids know this, too, and make choices accordingly. Computers don’t wear out Computers you depend on last three years, laptops a bit less. A three-year-old computer, even if in pristine condition, is sufficiently obsolete that replacing it is nearly mandatory. If you don’t use your computer much, or you want to use an old computer for an occasional chore, you can keep it for a few years more. Web pages should (or can) say one thing, and should mean what they say Dreams of the semantic Web often rest on the assumption that we can (and will) express the meaning of a Web page in a simple and concise format. Everything we know about writing, everything we know about meaning , suggests this is a fantasy. In despair over their perception of the intellectual dishonesty of the Bush administration and the epistemic closure of the American Right, Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz wrote The Zodiac of Paris . It’s describes once-famous controversies in the early 19th century over some Egyptian inscription that suggested the world was older than Genesis allows. The book is, in a very real sense, about the lies Curveball told Colin Powell, but that meaning is not on the page. Steve Jobs matters The American business press is obsessed with CEOs. If a stock increases, the firm’s leaders are brilliant fellows. If shares plummet, the CEO must be a buffoon. Steve Jobs, once regarded as a fool, is now hailed as the one true software visionary, the indispensible force. Jobs is, in fact, a good software critic and an executive who is willing to trust his judgment and endure the consequences. The customer, the usability lab, or the marketplace will tell you what is good; crowds are wise From the user-generated content of Wikipedia to mass recommendation systems and user-written product reviews, my colleagues assume that crowds are wise and that, on average, sensible opinions prevail. That this is often true is fortunate, but crowds can be wildly wrong .. Almost all software designers believe that customers, clinical studies, or the marketplace will reveal what works and what doesn’t, but everything we know about art (and software is an art form ) argues this cannot be right. Best-seller lists sometimes contain good books, but they list bad books aplenty. Popular movies are not always great. We know that an intelligent critic can sometimes recognize a great work when she sees it. No individual’s taste or judgment is infallible , but the marketplace is often wrong, too. Mark Bernstein is chief scientist at Eastgate Systems , where he crafts software for new ways of reading and writing.
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Software Mistakes and Mistakes About Software
Workplace raids by gun-wielding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that resulted in the mass arrests of dozens and sometimes hundreds of employees have ceased under the Obama administration. But “silent raids,” or audits of companies’ records by federal agents, that replaced them have resulted in the firing of thousands of undocumented workers. The administration defends these “softer, gentler” operations, yet the result is the same: workers who are here to support their families are out of work. read more
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The Rise and Fall of Employer Sanctions
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Crackdown on Organized Labor: States Call for Wage And Benefits Cuts, Urge Laws to Curb Union Influence (Video)
Can we fool ourselves and others into feeling good in the workplace, asks Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times.
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Should you strike a powerful pose?
The Fallacy in the Religious, ‘Libertarian’ Argument Against ENDA
Friday, April 15th, 2011
