Obama is taking new actions to try to close the gender wage gap →

...On Friday he announced that the government is going to start collecting data on employee demographics and salaries from all large employers, not just federal contractors.

The new move is going to expand one of Obama's two April 2014 executive actions to promote equal pay.

One of those actions prohibited federal contractors from punishing employees who discuss their salaries with each other. The other required federal contractors to submit data on what they pay their employees, sorted by race, gender, and ethnicity. The latter rule is being expanded to include all businesses with more than 100 employees, not just federal contractors. The first report will be due September 2017, and the data is expected to cover about 63 million workers.

Chicago Police Have Been Sabotaging Their Dash Cams →

After the notorious video of Laquan McDonald getting shot by Chicago police officers 16 times went viral last November, investigators have been making their way through the other videos of the scene. In doing so, they've discovered that three of the dash cams pointed at McDonald that day did not record video, and others had no audio. Now a Chicago Police Department audit reveals that many of the department's dashboard cameras have been deliberately sabotaged.

Last month the CPD found that 80 percent of its 850 dash cams do not record audio, and 12 percent don’t record video either. The CPD has blamed the failures on "operator error or in some cases intentional destruction," and a close reading of that review by DNAinfo Chicagoreveals the extent of the latter. Officers frequently tampered with dash cams, stashing microphones in their glove boxes or pulling out batteries. Some dash cams were found with their antennae deliberately destroyed, and others had had their microphones removed altogether.

The Insanely Complicated Logistics of Cage-Free Eggs for All →

YOU MAY NOT have noticed while you were scarfing your avocado toast, but 2015 was the year of the egg, at least as far as the food industry was concerned. An Avian flu outbreak briefly sent egg prices soaring. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food chain and one of the biggest egg buyers anywhere, announced it would ditch its conventionally farmed eggs and sell nothing but cage-free eggs in all of its US and Canadian restaurants. By the end of the year, just about every major fast food chain and a handful of multinational food companies had followed suit, including Subway, Starbucks, Nestle and most recently Wendy’s, which joined in just this month.

But these announcements had a catch. The companies said the switch to cage-free would take anywhere from five years to a decade to complete. How could it possibly take ten years to let a bunch of chickens out of their cages?

As it turns out, going cage-free requires much more planning, money, and logistical engineering than the seemingly simple notion of setting some hens free would suggest. Ironically, this massive supply chain overhaul stems from consumer demand to return to the egg-producing practices of our pre-industrial past, but without undoing all the positive benefits of scale, affordability, and safety that were achieved through industrialization. It actually took farmers a really long time to figure out how to put the bird in the cage—and it’s going to take a while to figure out how to get it back out.

So why go cage-free?

Rose Acre Farms, one of the biggest egg producers in the US, has about 25 million laying hens. In 2014, the US as a whole produced nearly 100 billion eggs, totaling $10.2 billion in revenue. This kind of mass production depends on cages. With those tiny wire boxes, farmers can micromanage everything about a bird’s life. They can even help automate egg collection by forcing the bird to lay its eggs directly into a funnel that drops down into a collection area. Today, eggs are widely available and cheap mostly because of caging systems.

But keeping a living thing in a metal cage so small that it can’t move its wings or stand up for the duration of its short life has raised inevitable questions about animal suffering and welfare. It’s no longer enough to churn out cheap eggs. Especially in recent years, consumers have increasingly demanded to know more about their food’s origins—where it’s from, how it was raised, and under what conditions.

Obama bans solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons →

President Obama on Monday announced a ban on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prison system, saying the practice is overused and has the potential for devastating psychological consequences.

In an op-ed that appears in Tuesday editions of The Washington Post, the president outlines a series of executive actions that also prohibit federal corrections officials from punishing prisoners who commit “low-level infractions” with solitary confinement.

The new rules also dictate that the longest a prisoner can be punished with solitary confinement for a first offense is 60 days, rather than the current maximum of 365 days.

The president’s reforms apply broadly to the roughly 10,000 federal inmates serving time in solitary confinement, though there are only a handful of juvenile offenders placed in restrictive housing each year. Between September 2014 and September 2015, federal authorities were notified of just 13 juveniles who were put in solitary in its prisons, officials said. However, federal officials sent adults inmates to solitary for nonviolent offenses 3,800 times in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2014, suggesting that policy change will have more sweeping ramifications.

Russian airstrikes are working in Syria — enough to put peace talks in doubt →

The gains are small-scale, hard-won and in terms of territory overall don’t add up to much, in keeping with the incremental nature of war.

But after 3½ months of relentless airstrikes that have mostly targeted the Western-backed opposition to Assad’s rule, they have proved sufficient to push beyond doubt any likelihood that Assad will be removed from power by the nearly five-year-old revolt against his rule. The gains on the ground are also calling into question whether there can be meaningful negotiations to end a conflict Assad and his allies now seem convinced they can win.

All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class →

Great article. One of the few I might label a Must Read. It walks through a number of the main reasons for the shrinking of the (especially white) middle class. If you read it, I suggest thinking about the ways politics have decided how each of the factors have played out, and how things might have been different otherwise. We can't reverse time on some, but there's no reason we have to ignore current trends. Inaction itself is a political decision.

Who Turned My Blue State Red? Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net. →

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

The Supreme Court Case That Could Gut Public Sector Unions →

On Monday, January 11, the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that began working its way through California courts in the spring of 2013. Ostensibly concerned with protecting the free speech rights of public sector workers, Friedrichs’s outcome will in reality decide the viability of public sector unions in the future.

It challenges a key piece of funding unions:

At the core of the case are “agency fees,” sometimes called “fair share fees.” Agency fees work like this: Public sector unions are required to cover all employees in a given bargaining unit, whether the employees opt into union membership or not. Public sector employees (which include EMTs, firefighters, public school teachers, social workers, and more) thus pay agency fees to their respective unions even if they are not union members, because public sector unions work on behalf of everyone in their bargaining unit, not just union members. 

Agency fees do not fund unions’ political activities, but rather strictly the costs of union grievance-handling, organizing, and collective bargaining. In the 1977 caseAbood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court upheld the right of public sector unions to extract agency fees from public sector workers, and found that agency fees do not violate employees’ freedom of speech, so long as they do not fund unions’ political activities.

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In other words, though Friedrichs has been brought on behalf of teachers in the cause of free speech, its implications involve all public sector workers, and the matter at hand is really the weakening of public sector unions. If the court rules against unions’ right to collect agency fees, unions would still be obligated to bargain on behalf of and represent entirely non-paying employees. At that point, it would be reasonable for union members to leave their unions and keep their dues and representation, which would collapse unions under the weight of so many free riders. In essence, this case threatens to bleed unions’ financial resources while giving workers the option of contributing nothing to them.