- “A refuge for drunks”: the Los Angeles city council’s war against tamale wagons, popular food carts of their day, 1900-1925 [Gustavo Arellano, Reason]
- Yet another study punctures “food desert” myth, but will government listen? [L.A. Times, earlier]
- To make a point, members of Congress dine on steak, eggs, and raw milk that can’t be shipped across state lines per USDA regs [Scott Shackford, Reason]
- “New Rockstar Lawsuit: Consuming Massive Amounts of Caffeine (x4) Allegedly Leads To Heart Attack” [Abnormal Use; related, Jacob Sullum]
- Four-day Mumbai ban on sale of meat during religious festival “part of a creeping invasion into the private lives of citizens” [Tanmaya Nanda, Business Standard; Pradap Bhanu Mehta, Indian Express]
- “A brief history of the dairy lobby’s unwholesome influence on the U.S. Supreme Court” [Damon Root, Reason]
- “New Jersey Federal Baked Goods Fraud Class Actions Are Toast” [Steve McConnell, Drug and Device Law]
“BMW settles EEOC criminal background check suit for $1.6 million”
Automaker BMW in Spartanburg, S.C. began conducting criminal background checks on logistics workers and dismissed about 100 existing employees under guidelines that “excluded from employment all persons with convictions in certain categories of crime” not distinguishing misdemeanor from felony or recent from long-ago convictions. About 80 percent of the dismissed employees were black, and the EEOC sued, saying that because the application of the check program had a disparate impact, BMW was obliged to, but had not, properly validated its policy in detail for “business necessity.” A federal judge declined to dismiss the case and BMW has now agreed to pay $1.6 million and offer jobs to 56 discharged employees as well as up to 90 who had applied but not been hired under the policy. [Judy Greenwald, Business Insurance via Jon Hyman] The EEOC in recent years has led a crackdown on employer use of criminal background checks.
Tucson’s two-tiered shaming
“Tucson PD releases names of people possibly connected to prostitutes — after removing those who happen to be cops.” That’s the headline atop a Radley Balko post about a decision by authorities in the Arizona city to do a splashy public release of the names and numbers of persons found on cellphones confiscated from massage parlors, despite the police chief’s own confirmation that the “inclusion of information in this list is in no way indicative of involvement in criminal activity”:
…before releasing the names of hundreds of people who appeared in the phones, the city police checked the names against the city’s roster of police officers. They then redacted those names, and released all the others. The police officers’ information won’t be released until they’ve had a chance to clear their names through an internal investigation. As for everyone else, well, good luck explaining…
P.S. But note that according to an anonymous commenter below, the general release of names wasn’t something up to city authorities’ discretion:
the names weren’t “released”, the Arizona Daily Star requested the names from police records (under a public records transparency law.) The police redacted the officer names because under the law they were under active investigation, which is a legal exception carved out due to unions.
If this account is accurate, while the episode had the effect of splashily shaming various Tucsonians who did not benefit from the special privacy protection available to cops, it’s misleading to suggest that that was the city’s intent.
“Union leaders are livid”
Scott Walker has announced a far-reaching package of labor reforms going far beyond the cautious Republican norm, including abolishing the NLRB and transferring its power to other agencies, eliminating federal unions, making right-to-work the default federal labor law regime unless states opt out, repealing Davis-Bacon, and more. [Reason, Associated Press, Hot Air interview] Union leaders, quite understandably from their perspective, lost no time in speaking out loudly against Walker’s ideas. Why, one wonders, don’t more business people speak out as loudly against the ideas of Bernie Sanders?
Ninth Circuit: rights holders must consider fair use before issuing DMCA takedowns
Copyright holders “must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification,” rules a Ninth Circuit panel, allowing a lawsuit to go forward against Universal Music Group, which had fired off a takedown notice over a mother’s 2007 YouTube posting of a home video showing her baby dancing to a song whose rights Universal owns. “To be successful at trial, Universal doesn’t have to prove that the video wasn’t fair use. It just has to show that it considered fair use before sending the notice. Otherwise, it could be liable for ‘nominal’ damages to [Stephanie] Lenz — which wouldn’t be much, since her video went back up after a short period and has been available since.” The common use of computer programs to generate takedowns, so long as it is governed by the right sorts of algorithms, appears to be consistent with the good faith required by DMCA, the court suggested. [Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica]
“GM will pay $900M to end US criminal probe over ignition-switch issues”
Details at ABA Journal. The settlement inevitably invites comparison with Toyota’s agreement to pay the federal government $1.2 billion to settle criminal charges over alleged coverup on the sudden acceleration issue. One difference that comes to mind is that GM’s use of a flimsy ignition switch was a genuine design flaw that appears to have contributed to numerous accidents and deaths, while the Toyota “flaw” was imaginary.
P.S. “Apparently, there is no Vice President In Charge Of Going To Jail at General Motors.” [Daniel Fisher]
Wage and hour roundup
- “No unpaid internship in the for-profit sector ever has or ever will satisfy these [USDOL] rules” [Bryan Caplan]
- Obama wage/hour czar David Weil doubles as a key ideologist of the kill-outsourcing crowd [Weekly Standard, related earlier on NLRB move against franchise and subcontract economy]
- “A $15-hour minimum wage could harm America’s poorest workers” [Harry Holzer, Brookings] Alderman Antonio French, a key Ferguson protest figure, opposes minimum wage hike in St. Louis [Washington Post “WonkBlog”]
- “Andrew Cuomo’s leftward lurch: Calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage is his latest out-of-character move” [Bill Hammond, NY Daily News] Since minimum wage hike, mini-recession has hit employment in Los Angeles hotel sector [Ozimek]
- Court ruling: Yelp reviewers volunteer their reviews and are not entitled to be paid for them [Courthouse News]
- 400 Uber drivers: don’t let them take away our independent contractor status [Daniel Fisher, Forbes] Mandated benefits and the “Happy Meal Fallacy” [Tabarrok]
- “Bill Would Make Maryland Employers Set Work Schedules Earlier” [WAMU on Del. David Moon’s “Fair Work Week Act”; related on national “Schedules That Work” Democratic legislation, Connor Wolf/Daily Caller]
Cato’s Constitution Day today
Ker-bang! “You may be entitled to compensation”
The Florida Bar Board of Governors, overruling a committee and staff recommendation, says that a lawyer’s targeted text message does not violate an ethical prohibition on unsolicited phone calls in the immediate aftermath of an accident. [AP/WKMG] Next step: auto-send when a sensor detects that an airbag has gone off.
Live-tweeting the CNN debate
More than a dozen of us from Cato will be live-tweeting the CNN debate tonight at hashtag #Cato2016. Or subscribe to this Twitter list. Results are here.