The Labor Department on Tuesday unveiled a proposal that would make it more likely for millions of janitors, home-care and construction workers and gig drivers to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Companies are required to provide certain benefits and protections to employees but not to contractors, such as paying a minimum wage, overtime, a portion of a worker’s Social Security taxes and contributions to unemployment insurance. The proposed rule is essentially a test that the Labor Department will apply to determine whether workers are contractors or employees for companies. The test considers factors such as how much control workers have over how they do their jobs and how much opportunity they have to increase their earnings by doing things like offering new services. Workers who have little of either are often considered employees. The new version of the test lowers the bar for that employee classification from the current test, which the Trump administration’s Labor Department created. The proposal is intended as a so-called interpretive rule that doesn’t have the legal force of a regulation specifically authorized by Congress, and it applies only to laws that the department enforces, such as the federal minimum wage. States and other federal agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, set their own criteria for employment status, and the rule would not directly affect what they decided about the status of gig workers. But many employers and regulators in other jurisdictions are likely to consider the department’s interpretation when making decisions about worker classification, and many judges are likely to use it as a guide. As a result, the proposal is a potential blow to gig companies and other service providers that argue their workers are contractors, though it would not immediately affect the status of those workers.

STANDING ROCK INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — Ray Taken Alive had been fighting for this moment for two years: At his urging, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council was about to take the rare and severe step of banishing a nonprofit organization from the tribe’s land. The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks. But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks. “No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive, who teaches Lakota to elementary school students, told the tribal council in April.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) presents itself as the nonpartisan “voice of small business.” Yet it has a track record of overwhelmingly supporting conservative causes, and has taken millions from right-wing groups. Over the past year, the trade association has teamed up with a bevy of companies to lobby for state-level bills to erode child labor protections, citing the “labor shortage” as justification. The bills—in Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey—have all been aimed at expanding the number of hours teenagers are allowed to work, despite evidence that too many hours can harm children. A 2011 study published in the journal Child Development found that teenagers who work more than 20 hours per week during the school year may, as a result, face poorer school performance and loss of interest in class, alongside behavioral problems. While NFIB is not the only entity pushing for these bills, its involvement is eye-catching, given the trade association’s reputation. NFIB, whose sticker you can see displayed in numerous small-business establishments, uses its mom-and-pop image to advocate for policies that benefit corporate America. “They have a long history of manipulating data to push a far-right, anti-regulatory agenda,” Rick Perlstein, historian and author of a book about the United States’ right turn in the 1970s, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect.

It’s one of the seafood industry’s most gruesome hunts. Every year, the fins of as many as 73 million sharks are sliced from the backs of the majestic sea predators, their bleeding bodies sometimes dumped back into the ocean where they are left to suffocate or die of blood loss. But while the barbaric practice is driven by China, where shark fin soup is a symbol of status for the rich and powerful, America’s seafood industry isn’t immune from the trade. A spate of recent criminal indictments highlights how U.S. companies, taking advantage of a patchwork of federal and state laws, are supplying a market for fins that activists say is as reprehensible as the now-illegal trade in elephant ivory once was.

In a Supreme Court case scheduled for oral argument on October 11, pro-business justices could curb the power of liberal states to pass regulations with economic consequences for large industries across the country. Meat lobbyists in National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) v. Ross argue that California’s new agribusiness regulations force them to overhaul pork production practices nationwide. They say that the Golden State cannot lift standards for its own consumers if those changes affect the whole sector—an argument which, if upheld, could have far-reaching impact on state regulation of issues like energy policy, public health, and worker pay. As America’s most populous state, California has long used regulation to raise standards in industries with impacts on public health and the environment. Its vehicle emission standards have jump-started the national market for electric cars. Now, the pork industry is casting California as obnoxiously imposing its “philosophical preferences” on all Americans. It argues that the Court should resist “allowing a State to export its social experiments extraterritorially.” A general trend toward greater state-led progressive regulation may be precisely why the Court agreed to hear this relatively obscure case. Justices who typically defend federalism, or states’ rights, where it serves conservative interests, could weigh in on NPPC v. Ross in order to foil state-led economic regulation “It’s preordained what they’re going to do. They’re going to find this had an undue impact on interstate commerce,” John Coffee, a corporate law professor at Columbia, told the Prospect. “It’s the most inconsistent thing that the Court has done. They are great protectors of federalism—they live and die for federalism. But now, they are stomping on federalism.”

DENVER (AP) — Colorado’s secretary of state office says it mistakenly sent postcards to about 30,000 noncitizens encouraging them to register to vote, blaming the error on a database glitch related to the state's list of residents with driver's licenses.

Students and faculty at the University of Florida gave U.S. Sen Ben Sasse a raucous welcome to campus Monday, greeting the Nebraska Republican with biting questions and a loud protest as he sought to introduce himself as the school’s likely next president. Introduced last week as the only finalist for the job, the 50-year-old Sasse faced opposition to his stances against same-sex marriage, his past efforts to do away with tenure and a decision by UF leaders to keep much of the selection process secret. During the second of three public forums, about 200 student protesters crowded into the lobby of Emerson Alumni Hall and refused to leave, waving signs and chanting “Hey hey, ho ho. Ben Sasse has got to go.” Their shouts could be heard inside the President’s Ballroom, where Sasse was addressing students after an earlier forum with faculty.

Members of Mexico’s military also offered tactical equipment, ammunition, and information about rival gang members and government officials, to the cartels for the right price.

“Half American,” by the historian Matthew F. Delmont, provides a fresh account of the war, stressing the particular challenges — from segregation to racist violence — confronted by Black service members. At the time, it should have been an easy argument to make: World War II was a total war, requiring an enormous mobilization of resources; therefore anything impeding the efficient deployment of American forces had to be renounced — including the military’s policy of segregation and, most glaringly, the brutal Jim Crow regime in the South. But as Matthew F. Delmont details in “Half American,” his new book about African Americans and World War II, even the bluntest appeals to the national interest couldn’t get some white Americans to budge. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to desegregate private defense contractors, he would continue to resist desegregating the military. This was despite the obvious costs. Redundant buildings continued to be built and maintained; troop transportation continued to be a logistical nightmare. Racist violence in the South meant that even something as basic as the homeland safety of Black soldiers couldn’t be secured. As one of those soldiers put it in a letter to the N.A.A.C.P., the mighty federal government seemed to cower before local sheriffs and lynch mobs — the petty tyrants of Jim Crow: “It’s odd that the U.S. govt. would let a small town of a few thousand people rule them like that.” Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth whose previous books include “Why Busing Failed” (2016), points out how so much of World War II “looks different when viewed from the African American perspective” — even the start date. For many Black Americans, the real war began several years before Pearl Harbor, with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. “Half American” begins with a chapter on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an integrated battalion of Americans who fought against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. In August 1936, a headline in The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s Black newspapers, announced: “WORLD WAR SEEN AS DUCE, HITLER AID FASCISTS IN WARTORN SPAIN.”

A divided U.S. appeals court has rejected a challenge by Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd to a Florida law barring businesses from requiring customers to show documentation proving they received a COVID-19 vaccine.

The industry used to honor India’s secular ideals—but, since the rise of Narendra Modi, it’s been flooded with stock Hindu heroes and Muslim villains.

GloriFi CEO Toby Neugebauer won over A-list investors to build a bank that would cater to people who consider Wall Street firms too liberal. Within months it was nearly bankrupt, and it missed launch dates amid layoffs and alleged workplace turmoil.

A new study has concluded what many Americans have long suspected: The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more Republicans than Democrats. In a detailed examination of data from Ohio and Florida, the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that “political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19,” and that significantly more Republicans than Democrats have died from the virus since the introduction of vaccines in early 2021 to protect against the disease. By cross-referencing voter registration data and mortality figures, the study found that “excess death rates” — the number of deaths above pre-pandemic levels — for registered Republicans were significantly higher than for registered Democrats after the introduction of Covid-19 vaccines. “If these differences in vaccination by political party affiliation persist, then the higher excess death rate among Republicans is likely to continue through the subsequent stages of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the study, which was published in September, concluded.

Decades of cost-cutting takes a toll. The United States averted a national freight rail strike a few weeks ago, when the Biden administration stepped in to broker a deal between rail companies and their union employees. Rail workers have not yet ratified that agreement, and a strike is still on the table. According to a railway trade group, a shutdown could cost the economy more than $2 billion a day. Among the disasters that could ensue, power plants would lack the coal needed to produce electricity and water treatment plants would lack the chemicals needed to provide clean water. If the companies don’t come to an agreement with rail workers, eventually, grocery shelves would go empty. Rail workers’ demands are not outrageous — union members have little to no predictability in their schedules and are subjected to draconian attendance policies. But the current standoff is about more, and is the result of a deliberate, half-century-long conversion of the nation’s rail system from a network that could deliver many kinds of goods to market (while also hosting hundreds of passenger train lines), to a fleet of land barges that are good for coal and containers — not much else. After World War II, railroad companies ceded freight including mail and perishables to semi trucks and instead favored goods like newsprint, chemicals and steel coils, which could sit in rail yards for days. Many freight companies made this change enthusiastically; trucking’s rise gave them a strong reason to stop servicing goods that were financial and logistical pains to ship. So long to the rail cars full of livestock. Despite shifting to nonperishable goods, railroads did not stay profitable. By 1976, several railroad companies had gone bankrupt, threatening to collapse rail shipping along with them. Sensing disaster, Congress stepped in to create Conrail, a mostly government-owned company to keep service functional in the Northeast and Midwest. Its executives saw austerity as the way to profitability.

Housing markets in the United States today are rapidly changing. We are bombarded in the news about corporations purchasing homes across sunbelt metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Phoenix. Reporting and research highlight the challenges faced by renters in private equity-backed properties, from maintenance requests gone unfulfilled to evictions as a core part of a fee-based business model. During the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, homebuyers fought over a limited supply of for-sale housing, often finding out that they were beat by all-cash corporate offers. Now we wonder: will these homes ever come back on the market, and what happens to the tenants who live in these new rental properties?

Three Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council and a top county labor official held a conversation last fall that included racist remarks, derisive statements about their colleagues and council President Nury Martinez saying a white councilman handled his young Black son as though he were an “accessory,” according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The Times. Martinez, while discussing Councilman Mike Bonin’s child, said, “Parece changuito,” or “He’s like a monkey,” soon afterward. A few minutes after Martinez discussed Bonin’s son, the topic of conversation moved to Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón, who was facing growing political opposition. “F— that guy,” Martinez said, followed by something inaudible. “He’s with the Blacks.”

Five California tribes will reclaim their right to manage coastal land significant to their history under a first-in-the-nation program backed with $3.6 million in state money. The tribes will rely on their traditional knowledge to protect more than 200 miles of coastline in the state, as climate change and human activity have impacted the vast area. Some of the tribes’ work will include monitoring salmon after the removal of a century-old defunct dam in the redwood forests in the Santa Cruz mountains and testing for toxins in shellfish, while also educating future generations on traditional practices. The partnership comes three years after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom apologized for the state’s previous violence and mistreatment against Indigenous peoples. Newsom said the state should allow for more co-management of tribes’ ancestral lands.

The storm is poised to be one of the largest insured loss events in U.S. history.

Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post…

A number of Easter Island's iconic 'Moai' stone statues suffered irreparable damage after a wildfire swept through the island earlier this week, the island's mayor told Reuters on Friday.