Unfortunately, changing most of those programs is political suicide, particularly anything health care related.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/1-generation...
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/01/17/generat...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/07/09/the-polit...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/29/gen-z-mil...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/03/millennia...
https://archive.is/iRyQE/f34b0a039aef880774f7d7d1dac5c0f5545...
Will and work ethic are weakly necessary for success, but they are not at all sufficient for it. (not successful) -> (not work ethic) is denying the antecedent: (successful) -> (work ethic) is, if not always true, at least often true, but that doesn't imply its converse.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
People's objection to social safety nets mostly isn't their desire to keep their money. It's a perception that the people who need those safety nets are lazy bums who don't deserve help. That's a particularly common perception among hard-working professionals, whose logic is "I worked hard to get where I am, so if others worked hard, they wouldn't need help". What they miss in that analysis, of course, is that their hard work combines with talent, luck, privilege, and health, things that many people who suffer lack. As a relative newcomer to the economic elite, I find it pretty distressing to hear how wealthy people talk about the poor when I myself was homeless less than five years ago.
Well, thats not surprising but at same time not default for most people. Universities have been leaning left since at least 60's and 70's . If all the people who attended university remained influenced by those ideas over the years. Most of the people with higher income and influential positions in society would be overwhelmingly left but that has not happened. It just shows a lot of people become conservative after leaving colleges.
Obama lost the white non-college educated vote by 26 points to Romney, by the way.
I’m sorry what??
It was the complete opposite. Obama won the “high-school dropout” vote overwhelmingly. Had narrow majority amongst those who graduated and actually lost college graduate vote to Romney by 4%…
Romney also won every income bracket above 50k
Less educated people started voting for the Republicans in 2016 but not quite to the extent they voted for Obama.
Some college educated white voters shifted to the Democrats in 2020 so the gap was a bit wider so I wouldn’t say “incredibly” unless you think 3% is incredible..
It’s a different matter for postgraduates though (62-37% in 2020)
Uh what? higher educational attainment correlates with voting Democratic https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/education...
Universities are also not the leftist indoctrination camps that right-wingers have deluded themselves into believing they are. There are lots of conservatives on campus, especially the faculty.
It's suggested that they fear that a (small) fraction of people are lazy and parasitical and will manipulate and abuse these systems. In some ways, I'm more cynical, and believe the cause is more deeply rooted: Since these people were hazed at some point in their lives (even if they're middle class, e.g. they took a job they hated beacuse gave them decent health insurance), they believe everyone should be hazed.
It's the old chestnut: "Do this shitty pointless thing, it builds character. (subtext: I was forced to do this shitty pointless thing, so why shouldn't you younger folks be too)."
People aren't opposed to helping people who need it. They just don't understand that people need it.
I’m actually not salty about the taxes I pay (Ontario, Canada) I’m salty that I seem to get sweet FA for them compared to similar rates in Western European countries.
Seems like a problem with governance, not taxes.
Your views of the situation disregard your observations about the situation, if you're at any way aware of the data about Sanders' popularity over the last 10 years, the popularity of his policies, the fact that he was nearly President in 2016, and the fact that instead of him, a bunch of over-35s elected a wrestler game show host, it's nuts to still pretend that people generally mature into middle-of-the-road conservatism.
He was closer in 2020. But in 2020, Democratic primary voters got a very simple choice: double down on moderate neoliberalism, or try progressivism. Democratic primary voters made a very, very clear choice, and Biden wiped the floor with Sanders from the day it became a two-man race. Biden won nearly two-to-one in vote share and in delegates and won numerous states that were Sanders' base of support in 2016.
Is there a progressive wing in the Democratic Party? Yes. Is it a lot bigger than it was ten years ago? Yes. Is the fact that we've been right all along becoming more obvious by the day? Yes. But are progressives the majority of the party? No. Are we competitive in national primaries right now? No. We have simply not convinced half of the half of the country that votes Democratic that we are in the right.
Part of that is our serious problem with the black vote - it's very hard to win a Democratic primary without it - but it goes well beyond that. Republicans have very successfully painted us as a bunch of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who want to waste all your money sending men to leer at your daughters in locker rooms, and we need strategies to convince people otherwise. We need to play politics. What that looks like, we can debate, but we have so far failed to win the game of rhetoric even though we are, objectively, right.
Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.
IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…
That's largely because both the 2016 and 2020 generals, and the 2016 and 2020 primaries, were highly split along racial and educational lines. Black voters voted overwhelmingly for moderates in primaries and Democrats in the generals in all three contests, while white voters tended towards the more radical candidates in both primaries and the general (although the Bernie -> Trump vote gets exaggerated, it certainly existed, and his massive upset in Michigan foreshadowed Clinton's weakness there).
> Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.
Well, in terms of delegates, sure. But Bernie didn't win the vote, either. Clinton beat him by 12 points, not all that much different from the margin Biden was beating him in '20 prior to him dropping out.
> IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…
The polling was a wash, ish, between the two. But of course the polling was also wrong in undersampling critical demographic groups that probably preferred Sanders to Clinton (although I'll note that Clinton won the primary in Pennsylvania, which she ultimately and decisively lost).
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Democrats would have done a lot of things differently. (I certainly would have - I was so frustrated after Bernie lost that I ultimately voted third-party, although I might not have had I lived in a competitive state.) But certainly conventional wisdom at the time for virtually anyone in the know was that Trump was very unlikely to win, even as his popularity endured through things it never should have, and I don't necessarily blame them for mis-reading an electorate whose simmering frustration was suddenly at a boil.
My point being that Bernie being right does not mean he was, even with the benefit of hindsight, the correct electoral choice, nor does it mean there's some silent majority of Democrats who want progressive action but aren't voting for it.
Fix roads, improve access to mental health, etc., etc.? Sure. Raise my taxes (I moved to the US from a country where I was taxed at a higher rate than now.
Make empty promises, divert to pork, enrich the 0.1%, increase military spending? No, don't raise my taxes.
The "real" Republican party, consisting of younger voters, is by-and-large populist. Majority of them are pro-gay (though, anti-trans), pro legalization of weed, pro gun, and pro free healthcare.
The problem is that the real Republican party consists of 80 year old neoliberal sacks of garbage. These are the people making the laws. The Democrats are not different. It may seem to be a cliche that "both parties are the same" but when you observe effected policy vs proposed policy both parties fall along the neoliberal line almost perfectly. What we have a neoliberal gerontocracy. Not a democracy.
This is why internally there's a struggle for the R's to keep young voters. The same problem D's are having. While the D's are blowing their own foot off going too far off to the left socially, the R's are blowing their own foot off sticking to their dogmatic 1960s neoliberal policies.
It's far more complicated than left/right dynamics. Its absurd to me how much misinformation CNN/Fox/MSNBC/NPR put out about this. If anyone on the left actually wandered to their nearest blue collar bar and asked people what they thought on "the issues" you'd probably find they are more "liberal" than you were let on by your favorite misinformation artist.
It seems to me that the problem is that everyone wants a federal solution to healthcare and the United States is generally structured to limit federal power.
Fire departments are funded locally generally speaking, it didn't take a federal mandate to create them. If you think medical services should be provided to people as a civic service, go convince your local government to do it.
https://stateofreform.com/featured/2023/05/california-seeks-...
We'll probably end up with a public option of some kind that will somewhat function like health insurance but who knows.
I'm an American living and Germany and sadly, my GP who is also a personal friend of mine, will be shutting down their practice at the end of the year because their small practice simply isn't financially sustainable. They will instead start treating the prison population, which apparently pays more / is more consistent.
So I can also imagine how doctors in your state would feel if suddenly their rates are dramatically capped by the state.
I'm not aware of any public health care systems where medical care services are as expensive as in the United States, but perhaps it's possible to maintain relatively similar doctor pay as currently exists AND provide socialized health care benefits. I really don't know enough about this topic and the financials of American (non-public) health insurance companies to comment accurately on whether that would be feasible.
The public option would be the best in a vacuum, but if its truly affordable, we will still attract uninsured and under-insured people who come here when they get sick.
Primary care reimbursement rates also need to be raised and we need more preventative treatments that insurance is required to pay for.
* Medical-school debt is not a thing here. * Prices are low. * I know doctors who can't make a sustainable income to keep their small practices open.
Somewhat puzzlingly, for a handful of services, there can a medium length delay in getting an appointment because of how busy the doctors are.
This is definitely all much better than the situation is in Canada, where the typical person struggled even to get a GP, and friends with cancer would be forced to wait a life-imperiling year to get a routine scan that be the difference between life and death.
But in many ways California already has it if you qualify based on income (Medi-Cal / Medicaid).
It actually works well which is why it won’t be made available to everyone. Stock prices and profit margins would drop too much.
Also most people that actually do move would likely have jobs with taxable wages that helps to subsidize things.
The real risk population is maybe the homeless sick that migrate. But those tend to be in a different category entirely (e.g mental illness, addiction, trafficking etc.)
(This is the same reason the ACA had the individual mandate, and why said mandate's striking down is likely to result in the ACA's failure or needing significant amending soon.)
States seem to apply residency consideration all the time to college tuition and taxes, among others. Why would equal protection be an issue here?
Austin, TX can't implement this on its own without state support, but cities don't have any federal constitutional rights apart from their containing states, so that's too bad
Because you're either going to have to pick some fairly short period of time - a year or less - which won't be that much of an obstacle to folks seeking healthcare (especially if private healthcare remains available in that interim period), or you'll run afoul of Zobel v. Williams if you try to make a permanent or long-lived distinction.
Then you get a situation where the wealthy, even (and sometimes especially) the diehard leftists who voted for the situation, turn up their nose at what’s shown up in their backyard, and fuck off from California to Colorado or Texas. This reduces the tax resource pool, stressing the residents and businesses that can’t afford to leave further. This creates resentment.
Coupled with the overly dramatic and personal shitshow that is local politics, frankly I see local initiatives as a fantastic way to fail tens of thousands of times.
Fixes have to take place at least at the state level, and even that is less than ideal, because expenses have to be spread out (especially in regards to the wealthiest 1% that pay a huge chunk of income tax, and are not equally distributed across local towns) without creating an attractive hotspots for tax resource competition.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-income-t...
Note: this article is from 2019, which is obviously pre-Covid. I still think it’s too early to predict any trend on post-Covid migrations (which would really be captured and 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, assuming you started planning to leave mid-pandemic 2021-2022)
California had its largest tax surplus in the history of a state ever the 2022 fiscal year.
Also for a more up to date perspective on migration and money: https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/08/california-is-leak...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/San-Francisco-migrati...
Regardless, this still supports my point that state level healthcare while far more durable than local gov, still can’t compare to national level stability.
Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist. You can, of course, call him whatever you want, but it won't make him identify himself differently.
Yes, and lots of people do.
People who aren’t accepted by other Democrats as part of the team don’t end up with large blocks of convention delegates and a major role in shaping the rules going forward due to that.
> they don't limit it to card carrying Democrats
No such thing exists, unless you are talking about people who pay membership fees to the DNC, but that's a pretty narrow definition.
Odds Republicans would ever do something like this with the current party are nil, a large part of republican donors are big businesses that would never back anything that empowers workers.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/17/902626429/wall-streets-big-mo...
Till we all realize that both parties are the problem and stop calling the party we don’t support the boogey man, we will be stuck in this hamster wheel of absurdity.
Which plan would we be talking about for government coverage? I assume barebones plans.
In that case, it still matters who you work for, because some employers still provide much better coverage.
About 1.28% of US gross domestic product is spent subsidizing employer health plans: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-06/57962-health-insura...
But just want to point out that "low end" Medicaid plans are frequently better in many ways in states where the program is well supported as far as coverage vs middle-of-the-road employer plans. Zero out-of-pocket expenses, and in Oregon, Washington and California they cover routine dental care as well, for example.
They typically have very restricted networks however vs employer provided plans.
Instead of your employer paying you $S salary per year + paying $M per year for the premiums for whatever group plan they use they would pay you $S + $M salary and you would buy whatever health insurance you wanted directly.
See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits.
However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...
1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.
It's also a work culture. (What can you generally expect from an employer?)
I've never worked in the US.
But it sounds like workers are not protected.
The American Dream is a story of entrepreneurship, not of employment.
With that framing, I honestly don't like "as long as we tightly control where it is spent" arguments. They all beg the question that we know where money should be spent. Where history is a great guide that, no, we didn't. We have examples to look to, to be sure. Some decent guidelines, as it were. But they are often last year's guidelines, and that year came and went.
So, I'm game to "keep our eyes open" as we increase allocation. But, by and large, I think insisting on winning bets is a fools errand that will likely cause more problems than it solves.
Earmarking everything is almost impossible to do right. Tax revenue streams go up or down from forces outside the legislature’s control. If there’s a bumper crop of corporate receipts, the right move might be to save them in a rainy day general fund for disasters, or when times are lean, etc.
Put another way, if we can’t seem to spend money well doing it in an annual budgeting process, I don’t know how we will do any better trying to do the same thing years in advance when the tax is passed.
correct. They interpret what the law says, not what it "intends." If the legislators really wanted it to say something else, they should have written it that way.
The briefs never argue "what the inventor intended." They argue about what the claims and the spec says and what those words mean. That can, indeed, leave room for argument, and that's why both sides write briefs.
"Courts interpreting laws" are the same way -- what legislators thought they were voting for is irrelevant, let alone what they would think today.
That's what "rule of law" means: a citizen can determine what's legal and what isn't.
Patents are something else entirely and not relevant to this discussion.
Maybe you need to do some research. Patents are construed in exactly the same way as any other law.
I highly recommend you educate yourself about the distinction between common law and statutory law, since you seem confused:
> A clarification of the term "common law" is in order at this point. While common law may have originally referred to a body of law thought to exist in common across jurisdictions under generally accepted standards of legal reasoning, I use the term here to distinguish statutory law made by legislators from case law made by courts. It is well understood that each state has its own common law, crafted by its courts under the supervision of the state supreme court, subject only to the supremacy of federal statutory and constitutional law.
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Corporations' relationship to their contractors is most definitely not "common law." At most, it's administrative law, and if we come to questions of interpretation, it's statutory law.
Before, you were "not trying to be rude" about "common law," and I just demonstrated that common law has nothing to do with labor laws. Common law is judge-written law developed over centuries, as those references I gave you lay out.
Labor laws are statutory law, sometimes modified by administrative rulings. As I said at the start of this, laws are construed by judges, much like patent claims are. Whether Amazon's indirect contractors are "employees" or not comes down to judges' constructions of the relevant laws, which in turn is influenced by the briefs submitted by each side. That's why California has had voter initiatives to change the laws.
So what is the dispute, again?
Within the bounds of the viable interpretations of the words actually written into the law, courts are, in fact, often guided by their reading of legislative intent in choosing which of the superficially viable interpretations is correct.
The idea that interpreting what the laws say precludes interpreting what legislators mean seems to implicitly invoke the idea that any given set of words has only one tenable interpetation to start with, so you never need to look to external context to resolve meaning.
This is a not-too-unpopular conceit, but its quite wrong.
"legislative intent" is in fact deeply controversial among judges. What counts as "intent"? Something a bill sponsor said, but other sponsors disagreed with?
the only certain thing is what the bill says, and the fact that it passed.
Do you really disagree with that claim?
If legal words only had one tenable intepretation we could resolve contract disputes so quickly...
why don't you say what language is being misinterpreted, and we'll go from there?
If even a small fraction of laws have multiple tenable interpretations then that comment is correct.
If you don't think that's the case for some laws, then I'm shocked.
And this is before introducing the concept of "legislative intent", this is just at the base level of looking at the text of laws.
The claim was that some laws have multiple tenable interpretations. So for those laws you can have multiple distinct options, none of which are wrong ways to read the text.
The thing called "wrong" was the idea that laws never do this.
GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.
I don't really want to get into the importance of it here. But I do think it's true, so I replied when you called that specific point wrong.
> GP (or GGP, or GGGP) claimed that courts were owned by the capitalists and were interpreting laws in Big Tech's favor, contrary to the legislative intent (whatever that is). Obvious nonsense.
Which comment? I don't see it.
Reply stupidly to this and you can have it again.
Because that was the opposite of the claim made that you disagreed with? Unless, you mean, “what language in a post you responded to in this thread was being misinterpreted by you”…
This is bad for the employees, bad for society and bad for competitor companies who are playing by the rules.
The solution is fairly obvious. Invest in bodies to proactively enforce the laws we already have.
Not even sure how you would go about making it illegal. What, paying money to another company is illegal? You can't contract out work? It doesn't make any sense.
You deliver their goods. They track your performance. It's your business, but from a distance, they control everything. They have zero liability for what happens...it's not their company, their employees. But they can "union bust" by cancelling your contract. If a truck driver makes Amazon look bad, they will pressure you to fire them...even it's not their employee.
This right here should get Amazon.com classified as a joint employer. A franchise model is suppose to delegate HR decisions to the local owner.
Isn't that what Universal Healthcare does? They obviously charge premiums, but they are a percentage of income that goes all the way down to 0.
Universal healthcare takes healthcare from being a concern to companies at all, and now they can just hire who they want for however long they want. It also makes the labor pool much more fluid, and makes low end jobs much more viable (morally and economically).
This is why countries like Switzerland require everyone to buy insurance. The system doesn't work if everyone freeloads.
(I guess we would still call Switzerland socialized, since the insurance prices are heavily regulated, everyone is basically in the same risk pools, and subsidies are given to those who don't meet thresholds)
The problem is, with jobs that do not require more than a driver's license and the ability to read names you are a fungible cog in the giant machinery of Amazon. It's a job that virtually everyone with a half working body can do: no need for special training, certifications, not even language - here in Germany, it's been reported that the Amazon phone app their delivery people use has like at least half a dozen languages.
Fine, you go on strike with your colleagues? Your official employer won't pay as he can't because Amazon pays shit, barely enough to keep the lights on. You keep striking. Amazon will just terminate your employer's contract. Your employer shuts down. Amazon finds someone else willing to start up a "delivery company", and that person finds another bunch of people desperate to make a pittance.
It's funny, Amazon always says "we expect that our partners comply with laws and regulations", and yet they absolutely have to know that their "partners" have to skirt the law to survive on their extremely low package rates. Hell, they probably have enough data from the delivery smartphones to be able to easily detect labor law violations (overtime beyond 10h, no / not enough long breaks).
[1] https://www.ln-online.de/lokales/stormarn/bad-oldesloe-neun-...
[2] https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/moenchengl...
[3] https://winfuture.de/news,114164.html
[4] https://www.tonight.de/koeln/schwarzarbeit-bei-amazon-razzia...
Right. Where I am, Amazon was running ads that literally said: "Need a job? Pass a background check? Apply today, start tomorrow, no interview required."
This is the same situation when independent contractors have only one client.
When companies like Amazon buy other companies and vertically integrate, people complain. When Amazon contracts with vendors instead, people complain too. I don't think there is any legitimate point to this and it's just "I hate Amazon."
They're setting up these companies as part of their DSP program to limit their liability. They're following the chicken industries playbook(which shouldn't be legal either) by requiring the DSP use Amazon equipment, with a loan from Amazon, pay back by revenue from Amazon.
They're also using this as part of an anti-unionization strategy. One of their DSPs recently unionized and Amazon just cancelled their contract.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/24/amazon-deliv...
But the government doesn't tell those companies "you cannot work for anyone but us." The government doesn't tell those companies "your employees must work these hours" (it may say "we require coverage for X period of time").
And so on.
These employees are Amazon employees in all but name.
But I don't think these kind of laws can really pass in the USA, the political will is just not there.
- laborers presumably have social security numbers
- if a laborer is working in the premises of a company (and a van is definitely that) WITH THE MARKETING, then you have a direct line between the worker and the company using its labor.
- if a laborer is working on a company's premises, it must report that labor for the hours.
- if the total labor for a company exceeds a "full time" trigger, then it triggers all that employment law about "full time employees" or "part time employees".
- you can have a cutoff amount for lucrative consulting that this doesn't apply to. So if your bill rate is like 100+/hr, you can be exempt from the tracking.
Basically, companies are going to utilize corporate law, limited liability, shell company obfuscation, and supplier relationships to obfuscate full time vs part time vs employee vs "contractor". This isn't really that new. Use the social security number system to break through this. Of course it relies on reporting and compliance, but there's numerous examples of big bad hammers that can be employed, especially if it tracks back to a big bad company like Amazon.
But the real issue is that government oversight of corporations is basically nonexistent except where the regulatory capture is valuable. The SEC and FTC are total jokes, the mortgage crisis showed that in plain view. So even if I come up with some good tieback mechanism, it won't work.
... unless there is a consortium of companies that will push it against Amazon, which I'm surprised hasn't happened. Everyone seems to be competing with Amazon in the marketplace, which at this point they are now monopolized. Walmart / Bestbuy / Target don't seem to be fighting in government regulation yet which is what they need to do. Likewise Azure and GCP aren't fighting AWS in antitrust either.
But I think at some point it will happen.
It comes down to priorities.
In the US at least, regulators are very pro jobs & job creation.
People employed contributor to society in many ways (eg purchase goods, taxes, lower crime, etc).
Which means, US wants to make it easy for someone to create a company so they can hire a people.
Now if the business that’s created to employee people is a subcontractor for a Mega Corp, the US regulators don’t care. Because again, it comes down to priorities - which is pro job creation.
Note: I’m not anti-unions. I’m just trying to depict it comes down to what’s highest priorities for regulators. And pro job creation / making it easy to create a company, is pretty high on this list.
Make sense to whom? People that have no experience with running a business and hiring subcontractors?
[0] See, for example, the J&J case, which was an even more generous form of the same.
I have put all my liabilities in one company (the trash man) and left all my assets in my company.
Now, I have a company with a few Nike assets and no liabilities. One of the pairs of shoes catches on fire and becomes a smelly, smoking liability. I sell the rest of the shoes and return the money to the shareholders, leaving the company only owning the burned shoe liability. Now all of the company's assets belong to the shareholders, and all the company has is liabilities.
Which law did I break?
Your bag of trash would still be listed on the Assets side but expenses on trash removal would be on the liabilities side.
One bag of trash magically turns into a loan that I have taken from a bank. I am obligated to repay $35 at an adjustable interest rate. Because I don't like risk, I pay another bank $45 and they take over the loan. Now I have assets and the second bank has the liability (the first bank, of course, still lists the loan as an asset).
Amazon simply decided they want to limit the extent to which they are in the the last mile delivery business.
I think you have seen a very simplified view of that situation, likely provided by the opposing lawyers. J&J has agreed to give that company 2 billion dollars and the bankruptcy filing would, essentially, be forcing the lawsuit against them to be settled for 2 billion dollars and then, most importantly to J&J, the matter wouldn't be a concern for the future. They are trying to limit being perpetually sued for the same issue.
There's also the situation where the bankruptcy judge has to accept the situation, [1] which did not happen, twice.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/j-j-is-left-wei...
Why shouldn't they be perpetually sued for the same issue, until they've fully paid their debt to society, and every person they've harmed is made whole?
I replied to point out that the attempts to limit their liability to 2 billion dollars has, so far, failed.
Georgia Pacific was faced with 62,000+ claims. They went through this same process. Spun off their subsidiary. "Pledged" to fund it with an "initial" billion dollars, and that GP would fund all claims.
Never happened. They actually only funded $175M. Less than $3,000 per claimant for asbestos related injuries. That is, less than $3,000 before legal fees.
And there was nothing defendants could do, because there was no legal obligation that could be created to force GP to fully fund. "That entity is independent and is in bankruptcy. So sad, too bad."
GP tried to limit their liabilities. Court said 'no'. GP said, "Okay, fine. We'll put an initial $1B in the pot and GP will fund all lawsuit payouts against Best Wall" (emphasis mine).
All agreed.
Then GP decided that after review, they were only going to put $175M in Best Wall's bank account, which could pay off a few of the lawsuits, and then finalized its bankruptcy.
When plaintiffs and others came to GP to get it to honor its commitment, they said "Best Wall is a fully independent entity with no legal connection to GP. So... no."
Let's not act like J&J is trying to be in any way 'fair' about making sure claimants are taken care of.
When the judge initially dismissed their bankruptcy filing, they updated the number and refiled within hours. That's taking the piss.
> Let's not act like J&J is trying to be in any way 'fair' about making sure claimants are taken care of.
Nobody is. The legal system, however, is currently doing it's part to keep them fair.
> When the judge initially dismissed their bankruptcy filing, they updated the number and refiled within hours. That's taking the piss.
Who cares, they can file whatever they want. The bankruptcy was dismissed because the company they created was not in danger of insolvency at all because they're wholly owned and funded by J&J who is not insolvent. That's what _should_ have happened in the GP case and what _is_ happening in the J&J case.
Your cynicism is completely unwarranted yet you seem very inclined to keep it up.
I have no horse in the race, and no ability to assess the law. I just thought it was a pretty interesting claim, and in general my experience has been that Levine seems pretty savvy. Though he hasn't given an update on the July 28th ruling, so shrug.
Isn't that what class actions are for?
Amazon is essentially claiming this is not the case. These are independent companies that delivery for anyone.
If Amazon were to directly run the firms, then they would be Amazon employees, which is what they're attempting to avoid.
Of course, you may notice these companies only ever deliver for Amazon, use Amazon software, etc. There is a lot of pretend going on.
edit: In the UK, we done worst of both worlds - exempted big corporations and "sub-contractors" can still be hired, but they don't have any employment rights.
What your point is however illustrating is how wrong the union legislation is. It's essentially forcing free people into organization they didn't choose. I'm not questioning the usefulness of trade unions in old days of industrialization, but now those just became cancers that suck out resources from businesses and consumers
It's common and (sort of) fine if the subcontractor has many different clients. Like a cleaning service or whatever who works for a ton of separate companies all needing to have their floors mopped.
But if the "subcontractor" only has one client? That reeks of escaping union or other labor agreements, illegal liability shielding, questionably legal tax / social security evasion schemes or other unethical behavior.