This article, featuring Government Accountability Project, was originally published here.
Immigrant Insurance Mandate Blocked
COURT BLOCKS IMMIGRANT INSURANCE MANDATE: A federal judge in Oregon blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deny immigrants visas unless they purchase health insurance or otherwise show they can cover their medical costs. The ruling came just days before it was to take effect on Dec. 1, POLITICO’s Susannah Luthi reports. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon had already issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month, but that was merely a 28-day delay.
“The proclamation is anticipated to affect approximately 60 percent of all immigrant visa applicants,” Simon wrote. “The president offers no national security or foreign relations justification for this sweeping change in immigration law.” The Trump administration is expected to appeal. More from POLITICO’s Susannah Luthi.
USCIS UNION SAYS EMAIL WAS WHISTLEBLOWER INTIMIDATION: AFGE Council 119, which represent thousands of USCIS workers, says a recent email threatening to fire agency employees if they leak information to the media “was an illegal attempt to intimidate whistleblowers,” BuzzFeed News’ Hamed Aleaziz reports. Mark Koumans, who may or may not be acting USCIS director (more on that here), said in an email last week that “recent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive, for official use only, and internal use only information by USCIS personnel to media outlets have brought this issue to the forefront.”
The union and the Government Accountability Project answered in a letter sent Tuesday to Koumans and acting DHS deputy Ken Cuccinelli that Koumans’ email “was intended to illegally intimidate whistleblowers from lawfully reporting ongoing abuses.” Koumans failed to include “the necessary language to inform USCIS employees of their whistleblower rights,” they wrote. More from BuzzFeed News.
UNITE HERE TO HOST 2020 CANDIDATES: Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will court union members next month during town halls organized by UNITE HERE, POLITICO’s Ian Kullgren reports. The three events, open only to union members and the media, will take place Dec. 9-11 at the union’s culinary hall in Las Vegas.
“Support from UNITE HERE members is expected to be critical in February’s Nevada Caucuses, which are an early litmus test for Latino support,” Kullgren writes. “In 2018 the union helped mobilize support for then-Rep. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Dean Heller.”
MORGAN BROKE ETHICS RULES: DOJ’s internal watchdog concluded that Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan broke ethics rules while working at the FBI in 2015 “by seeking sponsors to buy alcohol and fancy food for FBI happy hours,” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Tal Kopan reports. Morgan “continued asking the outside entities to pay for the social events even after being warned it was against federal rules,” the report found.
“In an interview with investigators, Morgan acknowledged that he had seen the lawyers’ written warning but disregarded it,” Kopan writes. “That’s an opinion. It’s rarely set in stone,” he said.
The report was never released publicly, according to Kopan, and she “obtained it from congressional offices, which were recently given copies.”
“Although Morgan’s role is typically subject to Senate confirmation, Trump has not nominated him for the job,” Kopan points out. “That has circumvented the traditional review by the Senate — leaving it unclear whether the ethical lapse was ever known to the administration.”
ICYMI…. JARED’S NEW PROJECT: “President Trump has made his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the de facto project manager for constructing his border wall, frustrated with a lack of progress over one of his top priorities as he heads into a tough reelection campaign,” Josh Dawsey and Nick Miroff reported for The Washington Post. “Kushner convenes biweekly meetings in the West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress on the wall, including updates on contractor data, precisely where it will be built and how funding is being spent.”
DENVER PASSES MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE TO $15.87: The Denver City Council Monday unanimously approved a minimum wage increase to $15.87 over the next two years. This marks Colorado’s first increase since a state regulation prohibiting wage minimum hikes was lifted earlier in the year. The Denver Post’s Conrad Swanson reports that the city’s ordinance will bump the hourly minimum wage twice in the next two years — to $12.85 on Jan. 1, and to $14.77 one year later.
Wage minimums set by city or county governments were a rarity as recently as 2015, when there were only five. Today there are 50. These ordinances, along with about two dozen increases at the state level, are making a difference — the National Employment Law Project estimates that in 2012-2018 increases in state and local wage minimums translated into $8 billion in raises.
POWELL’S NOT HITTING BRAKES YET: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Monday that the central bank will allow inflation to continue moving toward its 2 percent target, POLITICO’s Victoria Guida reports, leaving interest rates where they are, for now. Touting an uptick in labor force participation among people between the ages of 25 and 54, and higher incomes for lower-earning households, Powell said in a speech delivered in Rhode Island that “there is still plenty of room for building on these gains.”
The economy has seen low sustained unemployment, but “it’s not sparking inflation,” Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at DOL and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told POLITICO recently. “We actually still have slack in the labor market.” Even when people are able to find work, Shierholz explained, the jobs that are available “don’t have family-sustaining wages and benefits.” To address this paradox, researchers from Cornell Law School recently introduced a monthly “job quality index” that measures the ratio of high-quality jobs to low-quality jobs. More from Guida.
GOOGLE FIRES WORKERS SPARKING MORE UNREST: “Google announced Monday it had fired four employees for what it said were violations of its policies around accessing and sharing internal documents and calendars,” Greg Bensinger reports for The Washington Post, including two employees who participated in worker demonstrations at the tech giant. On Friday roughly 200 employees gathered outside Google headquarters to protest the company’s placing two of the now-fired employees on administrative leave.
One of the fired employees, Rebecca Rivers, circulated a petition against Google’s work for Customs and Border Protection. Another, Laurence Berland, protested the company’s hate speech policies on YouTube. According to a memo obtained by the Washington Post, Google said the workers were fired for “searching for, accessing, and distributing business information outside the scope of their jobs.” But Rivers said Friday that an HR official who questioned her focused on her “involvement in a Customs and Border Protection petition and social media usage outside of work.” More from The Post.
NEW COALITION TAKES ON AMAZON: Three dozen grass-roots groups concerned about digital surveillance and working conditions at Amazon are forming a coalition “to encourage and unify the resistance to Amazon that is now beginning to form,” David Streitfeld reports for The New York Times. “We’re learning from what makes Amazon back down, and looking to replicate that as much as possible with as many people as possible,” Dania Rajendra, director of the coalition Athena, told the Times. Members of the coalition say it’s “not planning a boycott of Amazon” but is more “interested in trying to sway it — including its employees and customers.”
HOTELS MOVE TOWARD GREEN PRACTICES TO SAVE GREEN: “Many hotels have begun offering guests incentives like loyalty program points or food and beverage vouchers to skip their daily room cleaning, promoting the program as a ‘green’ choice that reduces the use of cleaning products, energy and water,” Julie Weed writes for The New York Times. But industry experts say cost is motivating the shift, “because fewer rooms to clean means fewer housekeeping hours are needed.”
Facing a historically tight labor market and shifting immigration policies, hotels can’t find workers, Weed reports, “and need to pay more when they do,” Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality industry consultant told her.
Tiffany Ten Eyck, a spokeswoman for UNITE HERE, which represents more than 50,000 housekeepers, told the Times that when guests opt out of several days’ cleaning, it “can mean extra work later — like heaps of extra towels to wash and overflowing trash containers.” But Ten Eyck said that when guests reuse towels and linens under such programs, “it can benefit housekeepers in another way: Changing sheets, including repeatedly lifting heavy mattresses, is one common contributor to repetitive stress injury.” More from the Times.