You've heard about the #GreatResignation, the legions of American workers who have reached a breaking point with their abusive, underpaid jobs and jumped ship. 1/
It's a remarkable, spontaneous, uncoordinated uprising that sees Alice quitting her job and Bob quitting his, and then Alice getting Bob's old job at a better wage, and Bob getting Alice's old job at a better wage, too. 2/
After 40 years of wage stagnation, workers are finally starting to claim back some of the share of the profits that had been diverted from people who do things to people who own things.
But as great as the Great Resignation is, it could be greater. 3/
Many workers who would like to switch jobs can't, because they are bound by "non-compete agreements" that ban them from working for rival companies. Noncompete agreements are a way to make sure that bad companies can retain good workers. 4/
Wherever we find noncompetes, we find sluggish economies dominated by incompetent and malicious firms. California's tech sector only exists today because the state constitution bans noncompetes. 5/
Without that ban, the industry would have died in its cradle, strangled by the founder of the first microchip company, a brooding paranoiac who devoted his life to eugenics.
It's ironic, because people think of noncompetes as being necessary to creating a thriving innovation sector, and the most innovative sector of the past 40 years is legally enjoined from using them. 7/
The reality of noncompetes is that they are mostly used in low-waged sectors, primarily fast food, to prevent cashiers and cooks from moving between franchises. 8/
Writing in @Newsweek, @OpenMarkets Institute legal director @sandeepvaheesan explains how noncompetes have chained these workers to dead-end jobs and deprived them of the bargaining power revolution of the Great Resignation.
One angle Vaheesan delves into is Amazon's use of noncompetes for its low-waged warehouse workers, including seasonal temps. These workers have to promise not to take a competing job for 18 months after their employment: 10/
"Engag[ing] in or support[ing] the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon... 11/
"(or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or supported" for 18 months after leaving Amazon."
Think about that for a second. 12/
What product or service does not compete with something Amazon is currently doing or might do in the future? 13/
Amazon is essentially saying that if you work for the company for six weeks over Christmas, it reserves the right to block you from working for anyone else for the next year and a half. 14/
Many states prohibit noncompetes and more are coming on board, but companies are doing end-runs around these bans. For example, many companies actually *charge you to quit your job* (it's called #LiquidatedDamages):
Others bill you for "training repayment" - they subject you to sham trainings with artificially inflated price-tags, then insist that you repay these costs when you quit.
And even where noncompetes aren't enforceable, employees often don't know it. Employers intimidate these employees into staying in dead-end jobs and not fighting for higher wages and better conditions. 17/
Last July, the Biden admin dropped a sweeping, powerful executive order on antitrust that takes aim at noncompetes in all their guises. In December, the FTC published a "statement of regulatory priorities" promising to take action:
The Great Resignation is pretty great indeed, but it could be a *lot* greater. 19/
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The covid vaccine picture is awfully confusing. The current vaccines are doing a great job of preventing serious illness (at least, for people who are boosted), but they're not nearly so effective at preventing infection and transmission. 1/
What's more, the new variants are more contagious and less likely to cause severe infection, but they also appear to confer less immunity against re-infection:
At the same time, #VaccineApartheid continues to reign supreme: the WTO's vaccine waiver initiative stalled in the face of opposition from Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation, and the world's poorest people are forced to serve as reservoirs and incubators for new variants. 3/
If you've spent much time around cryptocurrency people, you've probably heard a rant or two about "sound money" and the need to "depoliticize money." 1/
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is a foundation of blockchainism: the belief that money is born separate from states, and states invade on the private realm when they "meddle" in the money system. 3/
"Political economy" may sound like an obscure technical matter, but it's a really very simple (and incredibly important) idea: That the economy is inevitably political, and there is no way to depoliticize economic theory. 1/
That is, every aspect of economics - taxation, antitrust, contract and labor law, etc - is fundamentally political. There is no objective perch on which an economist can stand and decide which tradeoffs are empirically best. 2/
What's more, any claim to about such a neutral test of economics is itself political: when economists assert that "Pareto optimal" is the same as "fair," they're saying that the people who lose in a Pareto optimal arrangement *should* lose. 3/
Inside: To fight inflation, fight monopolies; How noncompetes shackle workers to dead-end jobs; Agricultural right to repair law is a no-brainer; and more!
John Deere was once an American icon, beloved by workers for good wages and job security, and by farmers, who co-innovated new agricultural techniques and technologies. Today, it's a case-study in the horrors of finance capitalism. 1/
If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Today, the company is rotten to the core. Despite skyrocketing profits, the company has continued to grind down its workers, sparking a strike by all 10,000 of its workers. 3/