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1 min read
Water Break Killed in Committee
Read more . . . →On July 21st, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted 18-15 to pass a bill that would ban OSHA from finalizing a federal heat safety standard. The proposed rule — the one they killed — would have required employers to provide water and a cool place to rest when it hits 80 degrees. Water. Shade. That’s the government overreach they gutted. The same month, a heat wave had already killed dozens of people across the country. Rep. Mark Messmer from Indiana sponsored it. Committee chair Tim Walberg from Michigan backed it. They called a water-and-shade requirement “one-size-fits-all,” which is a...
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1 min read
They Fired You and Blamed the Robot
Read more . . . →Almost six out of ten companies now admit they frame layoffs as “AI-driven” when the real reason is financial. Straight up. Into a survey. Block fired forty percent of its workforce and the stock jumped twenty-four percent the same day. Dorsey posted $2.87 billion in gross profit that quarter. Cloudflare axed eleven hundred people — a fifth of the company — while reporting record revenue up thirty-four percent. These aren’t companies in trouble. These are companies doing better than ever who figured out Wall Street pays you more per share when you have fewer employees. Meta’s internal memos said the...
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1 min read
The Tariff Refund Only Flows One Direction: Up
Read more . . . →So the Supreme Court finally struck the tariffs down, 6-3, and ruled that Trump never had the authority to impose them in the first place. Good. Except the customs agency already collected about $133 billion before anyone made him stop. That money came out of the country one checkout line at a time — the average household paid somewhere north of a thousand bucks last year, manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs, and the whole thing was sold as toughness. Now a court has confirmed it was illegal the entire time. You’d think the obvious next step is giving...
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1 min read
SoFi's Workers Had to Threaten the World Cup to Get Paid
Read more . . . →The people who run concessions at SoFi Stadium — the cooks, the dishwashers, the bartenders, the cashiers — voted 96 percent to strike a week before the World Cup rolled into town. Days later they had a tentative deal with Legends Hospitality. Quick, clean, almost civilized. Until you stop and ask why it took the single biggest event that building will ever host to get a few thousand people a contract they should have had already. They didn’t get heard because someone in management woke up fair. They got heard because they happened to be standing on the one patch...
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1 min read
Executive bonuses are tariff-proof. Yours isn't.
Read more . . . →The 2026 proxy season is the clearest look yet at how this economy actually works. Companies are quietly rewriting their executive bonus metrics mid-cycle to exclude tariff impacts — adjusted EBITDA, adjusted operating income, adjusted until the payout math works again. Axon did it. Caleres did it. More are coming. The tariff uncertainty was apparently too unpredictable to hold executives accountable for. The same uncertainty has hit small businesses for 13 consecutive months of job losses. The average American household is paying $1,500 more this year in tariff taxes. There’s no adjustment committee for that. These are the same companies...
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1 min read
No Tax on Overtime. Also No Overtime.
Read more . . . →The Big Beautiful Bill is bragging about “no tax on overtime.” Zero percent tax on overtime pay — a real thing they announced as a worker win. What they didn’t announce, in the same breath, is that the Department of Labor just proposed a rule making it dramatically easier to call your employees “independent contractors.” Independent contractors don’t get overtime. They don’t get minimum wage. They don’t get workers’ comp or unemployment. There’s no tax on overtime when there’s no overtime to tax. This isn’t an accident. The rule rolls back Biden’s 2024 contractor classification protections — the rule that...
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1 min read
Record Profits. Fire the Measurers.
Read more . . . →Cloudflare posted record revenue last quarter — $639.8 million, up 34%, best quarter in the company’s 16-year history — then fired 1,100 people. Twenty percent of the company, out. CEO Matthew Prince needed a word for these people, so he invented one: “measurers.” Accountants, auditors, middle managers, legal. The people who make sure the company doesn’t eat itself from the inside. Gone. Prince and his co-founder insisted this wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It was the “agentic AI era.” They released a statement so thick with future-speak it barely registers as English. The stock dropped 24% after the announcement — Wall...
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1 min read
The Factories Were Going to Roar Back
Read more . . . →Trump said the factories would come roaring back. He said it a lot — roaring back, coming back, bigger than ever. Seventy-two thousand manufacturing jobs gone since Liberation Day, and the Whirlpool plant in Iowa runs with 1,300 workers now. It had 3,000. The rest are in Mexico. That’s the part nobody’s saying straight: the tariffs were supposed to stop companies from offshoring. Whirlpool heard that, did the math, and offshored anyway. John Deere took $300 million in tariff costs and handed out layoff notices in Illinois and Iowa. Because that’s how it works — the tariff hits the company...
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1 min read
Two Courts Down, Still Searching for a Legal Tariff
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court said Trump’s tariffs were illegal. Then a trade court struck down the replacement tariffs too. Now the administration is launching “forced labor” investigations into 58 countries — the EU, Canada, Brazil, basically anyone who trades with America — as the next legal vehicle to reimpose the same tariffs under a different statute. This is not economic policy. It’s a man running out of courtrooms. While the lawyers scramble, 98,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished since the tariff push started. The factories are not roaring back. The towns built around those jobs are not roaring back. What is roaring...
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1 min read
LIRR Workers Are on Strike and Good for Them
Read more . . . →3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight, shutting down the country’s busiest commuter rail for the first time in over 30 years. The MTA offered 9.5% over three years. The workers asked for 16% over four years to keep up with inflation. Everyone’s going to tell them they should feel bad about this. The MTA runs on a $21 billion annual budget. It took a full service shutdown to get wages taken seriously. These workers went thirty years without striking, kept the trains running through the pandemic and every fare hike that followed. The city...
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