Workplace

Lawmakers are seeking answers from the United States Coast Guard regarding a years-long, suppressed rape and sexual assault probe launched within the Coast Guard Academy beginning nearly a decade ago, CNN exclusively reports.

Per CNN, "Internal records and interviews with those involved in" Operation Fouled Anchor prove then-Commandant Karl L. "Schultz and his second-in-command, Admiral Charles W. Ray, failed to act on plans to share the findings with Congress and the public, and maintained a veil of secrecy around the investigation."

According to the report, "Schultz's silence on Fouled Anchor stands in contrast with public statements he made when he led the agency about the importance of preventing sexual assault. He called such crimes 'a direct attack on our people' in a 2018 video and met with Coast Guard Academy cadets in 2020 to discuss the issue."

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U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the decision to suppress findings from the investigation "probably the most shameful, disgraceful incident of cover-up of sexual assault that I have seen in the United States military ever," while a congressional aide told the news outlet "it seems Schultz and Ray made a 'political calculation' to withhold the information."

The aide emphasized, "They knew. They read it. They signed off on it. It seems like the most logical reason is that they didn't want to have controversy under their leadership."

CNN reports:

By keeping the investigation secret, the Coast Guard avoided further scrutiny of how alleged rapists and other attackers were not held accountable at the academy. In the wake of CNN's reporting and the congressional outrage that followed, other alleged victims have reached out to CNN and congressional offices, saying they too were assaulted as cadets at the academy, but were not included in the Fouled Anchor investigation. The victims, some who attended as recently as a few years ago, said their alleged assaults drastically affected their mental health, personal relationships and careers, while some of their attackers went on to have impressive careers in the Coast Guard and other military agencies.

Linda Fagan, who now serves as commandant after Shultz retired in 2022, according to the report, "has apologized to the victims of the sexual assaults and pledged to be more transparent about the agency's problems.

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CNN notes Fagan said during a recent congressional hearing, "Just like on a ship when you have rust, we've got pockets of rust that need to be eliminated from the organization."

Similarly, the agency's former chief counsel Melissa Bert — the first woman in the role — said "At some point it was not the top thing on somebody's mind. There is so so much going on in the Coast Guard."

She contended that "a lack of transparency does not equate to a lack of action or responsiveness," arguing "While it should have been a huge deal to let people know that the Coast Guard had responded, it just went with the past. There is always a new problem every day."

Admiral Paul Zukunft, who proceeded Schultz and launched Operation Fouled Anchor in 2014, told CNN he originally "planned to issue a public apology to the victims the investigation identified," but the news outlet reports "he retired before the probe was over," saying "he briefed Schultz on the matter."

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Zukunft said he was 'incredulous' that officials didn't brief Congress and publicize the findings after the final report was issued in January of 2020."

The probe was a "big deal," the former commandant added, "because sexual assault victims faced 'betrayal up the chain of command. At a bare minimum, we owed it to these victims to provide some sense of emotional closure. We can't just sweep it under the carpet. I'm a big believer that bad news, like dead fish, don't get better with time."

READ MORE: Florida state GOP rep. deems 'vile' sexual harassment claims against him 'frivolous and meritless': report

CNN's full report is available at this link.

The freight truck company Yellow, formerly known as YRC Worldwide, is soon expected to declare bankruptcy "after monthslong negotiations between" the company's leaders and the Teamsters union led to a shut down, The New York Times reports.

Per the NYT, "After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused 'irreparable harm' by halting its restructuring plan."

However, the publication reports:

[The company] received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases. Government watchdogs have scrutinized the loan because of the company's financial turmoil and close ties to the Trump administration, which awarded the loan.

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"It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business," Chief Executive Darren Hawkins said in a statement. "We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics. The Teamsters union 'was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them.'"

Furthermore, transportation analyst Jack Atkins said that the company had faced adversity for some time, citing that "in the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate," and "the demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable."

He said, "Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive. It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed."

Teamsters union General President Sean O’Brien, who called Yellow's leadership "'dysfunctional' and 'greedy'" said, "Teamster families sacrificed billions of dollars in wages, benefits and retirement security to rescue Yellow. The company blew through a $700 million government bailout.”

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He urged them to "take responsibility for squandering all that cash."

The 99-year-old company, which "employed about 23,000 union employees" according to the report, says its "seeking bankruptcy protection so it could wind down its business in an 'orderly' way."

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The New York Times' full report is available at this link (subscription required).

Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called “godfathers” of AI: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

You might ask how such existential fears are supposed to play out. One famous scenario is the “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment articulated by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The idea is that an AI system tasked with producing as many paper clips as possible might go to extraordinary lengths to find raw materials, like destroying factories and causing car accidents.

A less resource-intensive variation has an AI tasked with procuring a reservation to a popular restaurant shutting down cellular networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table.

Office supplies or dinner, the basic idea is the same: AI is fast becoming an alien intelligence, good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won’t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators. And, in its most extreme version, this argument morphs into explicit anxieties about AIs enslaving or destroying the human race.

A paper clip-making AI runs amok is one variant of the AI apocalypse scenario.

Actual harm

In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the impact of engagement with AI on people’s understanding of themselves, and I believe these catastrophic anxieties are overblown and misdirected.

Yes, AI’s ability to create convincing deep-fake video and audio is frightening, and it can be abused by people with bad intent. In fact, that is already happening: Russian operatives likely attempted to embarrass Kremlin critic Bill Browder by ensnaring him in a conversation with an avatar for former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Cybercriminals have been using AI voice cloning for a variety of crimes – from high-tech heists to ordinary scams.

AI decision-making systems that offer loan approval and hiring recommendations carry the risk of algorithmic bias, since the training data and decision models they run on reflect long-standing social prejudices.

These are big problems, and they require the attention of policymakers. But they have been around for a while, and they are hardly cataclysmic.

Not in the same league

The statement from the Center for AI Safety lumped AI in with pandemics and nuclear weapons as a major risk to civilization. There are problems with that comparison. COVID-19 resulted in almost 7 million deaths worldwide, brought on a massive and continuing mental health crisis and created economic challenges, including chronic supply chain shortages and runaway inflation.

Nuclear weapons probably killed more than 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, claimed many more lives from cancer in the years that followed, generated decades of profound anxiety during the Cold War and brought the world to the brink of annihilation during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. They have also changed the calculations of national leaders on how to respond to international aggression, as currently playing out with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

AI is simply nowhere near gaining the ability to do this kind of damage. The paper clip scenario and others like it are science fiction. Existing AI applications execute specific tasks rather than making broad judgments. The technology is far from being able to decide on and then plan out the goals and subordinate goals necessary for shutting down traffic in order to get you a seat in a restaurant, or blowing up a car factory in order to satisfy your itch for paper clips.

Not only does the technology lack the complicated capacity for multilayer judgment that’s involved in these scenarios, it also does not have autonomous access to sufficient parts of our critical infrastructure to start causing that kind of damage.

What it means to be human

Actually, there is an existential danger inherent in using AI, but that risk is existential in the philosophical rather than apocalyptic sense. AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves. It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.

As algorithms take over many decisions, such as hiring, people could gradually lose the capacity to make them.

AndreyPopov/iStock via Getty Images

For example, humans are judgment-making creatures. People rationally weigh particulars and make daily judgment calls at work and during leisure time about whom to hire, who should get a loan, what to watch and so on. But more and more of these judgments are being automated and farmed out to algorithms. As that happens, the world won’t end. But people will gradually lose the capacity to make these judgments themselves. The fewer of them people make, the worse they are likely to become at making them.

Or consider the role of chance in people’s lives. Humans value serendipitous encounters: coming across a place, person or activity by accident, being drawn into it and retrospectively appreciating the role accident played in these meaningful finds. But the role of algorithmic recommendation engines is to reduce that kind of serendipity and replace it with planning and prediction.

Finally, consider ChatGPT’s writing capabilities. The technology is in the process of eliminating the role of writing assignments in higher education. If it does, educators will lose a key tool for teaching students how to think critically.

Not dead but diminished

So, no, AI won’t blow up the world. But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills. Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking.

The human species will survive such losses. But our way of existing will be impoverished in the process. The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs. Recall T.S. Eliot’s famous closing lines of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Although Amazon was the world's #1 e-commerce company long before COVID-19, the pandemic made Amazon even more prosperous. The New York Times reported, in April 2021, that Amazon's profits had increased by 220 percent.

But Amazon's working conditions have drawn a great deal of criticism.

On February 1, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had given citations to three Amazon warehouses for "exposing workers to ergonomic hazards." The Labor Department has found high injury rates in Amazon warehouses.

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Amazon drivers have also complained about working conditions.

Three Amazon delivery drivers in Colorado, CBS News reports, have filed a 16-page lawsuit in which they claim that they had to "urinate in bottles and defecate in dog waste bags" in order to keep up with the schedule that was expected of them. Amazon has denied those allegations.

Ryan Schilling, an Iraq War veteran and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, complained, "I fought for this country in Iraq, but I had an easier time going to the bathroom in a combat zone than I did while working for Amazon. Twice, I've had to defecate so badly that I've had to use dog waste bags in the back of delivery vans. I knew that if I tried to stop to go to a gas station, I'd get yelled at and maybe lose my job. What choice do Amazon drivers have?"

Leah Cross, another plaintiff, told CBS News, "As a woman, I can't just easily pee in a bottle. When I worked for Amazon, I had to bring a change of clothes in case I peed my pants while trying to hit Amazon's delivery metrics. I was told I couldn't even stop to pick up some sanitary products. With this lawsuit, I'm fighting for Amazon to treat humans like humans."

READ MORE: 'They need to take these injuries seriously': OSHA investigating Amazon for 'failing to keep workers safe'

Find CBS News' entire report at this link.

Decrying the "national disgrace" of poverty wages in the world's richest country, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of five years.

Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, lamented that Congress hasn't raised the federal minimum wage in more than a decade, leaving tens of millions of workers with what the senator described as "starvation wages."

"Now is the time to raise the minimum wage," Sanders (I-Vt.) said at a Capitol Hill press conference alongside union leaders and service workers. "Let's be clear: This is not a radical idea. The overwhelming majority of Americans support raising the minimum wage to a living wage."

"It is not acceptable today that nearly 35 million American workers earn less than $17 an hour," the senator added.

Sanders pledged to push his legislation "as quickly and as hard" as possible in the Senate, where the bill faces long odds given likely opposition from several members of the chamber's Democratic caucusand every Republican. The Senate HELP Committee will hold a mark-up hearing for the new legislation on June 14, Sanders announced Thursday.

The full text of the bill is not yet available.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said during Thursday's press conference that "we are going to be watching any congressperson—senator or in the House—that dares to say that they are not going to vote yes for Senator Sanders' bill."

"They need to be held accountable at the ballot box," said Henry.

More than a decade has passed since Congress last raised the federal minimum wage, and efforts in recent years to enact a $15-an-hour wage floor nationally have fallen short amid opposition from the GOP, corporate-friendly Democrats, and the business lobby.

While some lawmakers are sure to balk at the idea of more than doubling the federal minimum wage, a working paper released this week showed that counties that have enacted large minimum wage increases have seen higher employment, higher earnings for workers, and lower inequality.

"Nobody in this country can survive on $7.25 an hour," Sanders said Thursday. "Maybe some of my colleagues in Congress might want to live for a month on seven-and-a-quarter an hour and see what that's like."

As Congress has failed to act, many states, cities, and counties across the U.S. have raised their minimum wages substantially, with progress continuing this year. According to a recent report by the National Employment Law Project, a record 86 U.S. jurisdictions are set to raise their minimum wages in 2023.

But 15 states have their minimum wages set at the federal floor of $7.25 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute's Minimum Wage Tracker, and five other states have no minimum wage laws—meaning the federal minimum applies.

"As it becomes more and more expensive to get by in America, $15 is no longer an adequate goal. We need to go higher to reflect what it actually costs to live in America."

In an analysis earlier this year, EPI estimated that "a worker in one of the 20 states with a $7.25 minimum wage is 46% more likely to make less than $15 an hour than a worker in the other 30 states or District of Columbia with higher minimum wages."

"There is no part of this country where even a single adult without children can achieve an adequate standard of living with a wage of less than $15 an hour," EPI noted. "With the lack of congressional action, the federal minimum wage has lost more than a third of its value since its inflation-adjusted high point of 1968."

Sanders said Thursday that with living costs rising across the country, a $15 minimum wage would still be insufficient—a point that supporters of the new legislation echoed.

"As it becomes more and more expensive to get by in America, $15 is no longer an adequate goal," Stephen Prince, vice chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "We need to go higher to reflect what it actually costs to live in America. Sanders is right to revise his minimum wage push to $17 an hour to save workers across the country from further suffocation."

"On a larger scale, raising the minimum wage would give millions of people more money to buy more products and services from businesses around the country, which is good for our bottom lines," said Prince. "From a business standpoint, 60% of the country living paycheck to paycheck is unsustainable and precarious. Sanders' $17 minimum wage will change this reality and I’m all for it."

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) signed legislation Friday repealing the state's right-to-work law for the first time in nearly 60 years, HuffPost reports.

Per Detroit Free Press, Democratic State Sen. Darrin Camilleri said, "Today is a historic win for workers everywhere. We're entering a new chapter in Michigan."

According to HuffPost, unions celebrated the repeal, along with Rob Bieber, head of the Michigan AFL-CIO, who asserted "the state had 'restored the balance of power' for workers."

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“After decades of attacks on working people, it’s a new day in Michigan, and the future is bright,” Bieber said.

The state's Republican lawmakers insist "repealing right-to-work jeopardizes state efforts to attract businesses to locate to the state," as they believe "companies don't want to set up shop in places where workers could lose their jobs if they refuse to pay union dues or fees."

However, HuffPost reports:

Right-to-work laws forbid unions and employers from entering into agreements that require every worker under the contract to pay fees to cover the cost of bargaining and representation. Unions despise the laws and say they lead to 'free-riding,' in which workers choose not to pay union dues but still enjoy the benefits of a union contract.

Democratic Michigan State Rep. Regina Weiss said earlier this month, "Back in November, voters sent a clear message when they elected a pro-worker and pro-working families majority," according to The New York Times.

Detroit Free Press reports:

Democrats disagree and contend that right-to-work is unfair because it allows "free riders" who benefit from the contracts negotiated on their behalf without paying into the union. The law has led to weakened unions and chipped away at their ability to negotiate better employment terms, they argue.

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"Today we are coming together to restore workers' rights, protect Michiganders on the job, and grow Michigan's middle class," Whitmer said.

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HuffPost's full report is available at this link. Detroit Free Press' report is here. The New York Times' report is here.

More than 56,000 people, including Congress members and their families, were hit by a data breach of an online Washington, D.C., healthcare marketplace, exposing social security numbers and other personal information, Rolling Stone reports.

More than 100,000 people utilize D.C. Health Link marketplace's services, which includes "11,000 members of Congress and Capitol Hill staffers," according to Rolling Stone.

Per Rolling Stone, the House Administration Committee confirmed it would "launch an investigation" into the breach, tweeting, "Chairman [Bryan] Steil is aware of the breach and is working with the CAO to ensure the vendor takes necessary steps to protect the PII of any impacted member, staff, and their families."

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NYT reports:

The investigation has found that 56,415 customers were affected, and the data stolen includes names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, health plan information and other personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, ethnicity and citizenship status.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), in an email earlier this week — which Rolling Stone reports Politico received — wrote, "This breach significantly increases the risk that members, staff, and their families will experience identity theft, financial crimes, and physical threats — already an ongoing concern."

The email continued, "Right now, our top priority is protecting the safety and security of anyone in the Capitol Hill community affected by the cyber hack."

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Rolling Stone's full report is available at this link (subscription required). The New York Times' full report is here (subscription required).

To the average European, the United States is a country of workaholics who have an unhealthy work/life balance. Americans generally work longer hours, have less paid vacation time and are more likely to work on weekends. And despite all those long hours, Americans don’t even have universal health care — although the Affordable Care Act of 2010, also known as Obamacare, has greatly reduced the number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance.

Journalist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. examines the conditions that U.S. workers have been facing in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on Labor Day 2022. Navarrette identifies some problems, but he also notes some positive developments for U.S. workers.

“This Labor Day,” Navarrette writes, “there is a hell of a lot going on in the ‘work space.’ Thanks to a labor reform bill that was recently passed by the legislature and which is now headed to the desk of Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature, fast-food workers in California could soon earn as much as $22 per hour. And given that Newsom is a prospective candidate for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, the rest of the country can expect to hear much more about this salary boost over the next several months.”

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Navarrette continues, “A new Gallup poll finds public support for organized labor in the U.S. to be the highest it’s been in more than a half-century, 57 years to be exact. Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of unions — the highest the polling firm has recorded since 1965. The current figure is so high, in fact, that it is closing in on the percentage of Americans who backed unions in the 1950s — when three out of four Americans approved of them.”

The journalist notes that in recent years, unions have been “popping up in the darndest places” and that employees of Amazon, Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and Apple have been “organizing or advocating to start unions.”

“Many Americans are in the ‘grudge’ phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, mindful of how badly many companies and corporations behaved two years ago when U.S. workers were at their most vulnerable,” Navarrette observes. “Millions of U.S. workers lost their jobs and health insurance, and they had to figure out how to provide childcare and avoid homelessness. Now that workers have the leverage in an ‘employee market,’ they’ve become hard-nosed negotiators. And we’re suffering a hangover from the so-called Great Resignation. In 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 47 million Americans quit their jobs.”

Navarrette points out that some members of Generation Z “aren’t actually ditching their job” but are “no longer putting in 110 percent,” which “means no more working weekends or holidays, or logging 80 hours per week.” The journalist adds that as a “workaholic” who comes from a “long line of workaholics” and had his first job when he was 13, he is “rooting for Generation Z” and hopes that Zoomers “succeed in readjusting Americans’ work-life balance.”

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“My paternal grandfather, Roman, the immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, used to show up to work a half-hour early and give his boss that extra 30 minutes of hard labor in the fields as a gift to say gracias to the employer — for giving him a way to feed his family,” Navarrette notes. “My maternal grandfather, Samuel, who moved his entire family from Texas to California on a rumor that farmers in the Golden State were paying one dollar more per hour, broke his hand once, but kept picking lettuce with his one good hand rather than lose his job.”

Navarrette continues, “And my grandmothers, Esperanza and Aurora, worked even harder than their husbands because — besides toiling side by side with them as equals in the fields — they also did most of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other household chores. Respect, ladies! Respeto…. You see, my family — like many American families, and virtually all Latino families — worship at the altar of work…. It’s clear that maintaining a healthy and balanced approach to work is a good thing for Americans to strive for.”

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Vishal Garg, CEO of the online mortgage company Better.com, is now admitting that he handled things badly during a mass firing on Wednesday, December 1. That day, during a Zoom call, Garg brought around 900 employees together online and announced that all of them were being fired — a move he now admits has “embarrassed” the company. But Fox News’ Emily Compagno is not only defending Garg — she is outright praising him for the mass firing.

During a December 8 broadcast of “Outnumbered” — which features mostly or entirely female panels and is often described as a right-wing version of “The View” — Compagno insisted that Garg had nothing to apologize for. The attorney told others on the panel, which also included host Harris Faulkner and Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (the former MTV veejay known for hosting “Kennedy” on Fox Business), “I loved this, actually. I loved this so much…. So, for me, good riddance. And I feel bad that he’s now having to capitulate to the other execs at this company and apologize for it. Sorry guys, bye!”

Compagno, who is never shy about making over-the-top comments to drive ratings, added, “For all of them, they’re snowflakes. They’re probably Millennials and Zs. They need to learn work ethic.”

But even fellow members of the right-wing “Outnumbered” panel disagreed with Compagno’s strident defense of Garg, including host Harris Faulkner, libertarian/conservative Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (the former MTV veejay known for hosting “Kennedy” on Fox Business), “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade (the panel’s lone male) and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Words like “classless” and “embarrassment” were used by the other “Outnumbered” panelists.

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McEnany commented, “This guy, in court documents, it was alleged that he wanted to staple someone to the wall or door or whatever it was. I mean, this guy has some pretty big issues.”