Supreme Court Sides Against Amazon Workers in Compensation Case - US News

In an unanimous decision released Tuesday, the court sided with contractor Integrity Staffing Solutions, which employed workers at Amazon.com warehouses in Nevada. Two employees had sued the agency for compensation for the 25 minutes they said they waited after each of their shifts to go through metal detector meant to root out theft.

“If the employer requires it, the work should be paid,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel at the National Employment Law Project, in a statement. “If we don’t have to pay for things, we take them for granted. Because the employer didn’t have to pay for the workers’ time, it didn’t care how long the screenings took, and had no incentive to add capacity to speed things up and be more considerate of the employees’ time.”

According to the court, since the screenings were not integral to the the principal activity the workers were hired to perform, the company was not required to compensate them for the time spent waiting for them under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“The screenings were not an intrinsic element of retrieving products from warehouse shelves or packaging them for shipment. And Integrity Staffing could have eliminated the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision, which cited Department of Labor policy and Congress’ Portal-to-Portal Act.

Thomas also said the concerns expressed by workers in the case were better suited for the employer-employee bargaining table.
The U.S. Supreme Court Building stands in Washington on Nov. 6, 2013.

But workers, especially low-wage ones, have little bargaining power in the U.S. economy, evidenced by incomes that have stagnated or declined even as the labor market has improved. And Tuesday’s decision “runs contrary to everything people are saying about the need to counter wage stagnation and improve labor standards,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Supreme Court Sides Against Amazon Workers in Compensation Case - US News

Amazon Keeps Unions Out By Keeping Workers in Fear, Says Organizer | Alternet

After Amazon vanquished a rare U.S. union effort last week in a 21-to-6 vote, keeping the retail giant union-free across the United States, a union spokesperson blamed that result on a corporate campaign to make workers fear for their jobs — and told Salon a much larger union campaign could be ahead at Amazon.

“Everything Amazon did had the underlying tone of fear,” said International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers spokesperson John Carr.

Amazon did not respond to a Tuesday request for comment on the result and the allegations. Company spokesperson Mary Osako told CNN that the January 15 “vote against third-party representation” showed workers “prefer a direct connection with Amazon,” which she called “the most effective way to understand and respond to the wants and needs of our employees.”

Carr said that the IAM is still reviewing whether it had sufficient evidence to file charges alleging law-breaking by Amazon in the lead-up to the vote among a handful of mechanics at a Delaware warehouse. Under federal law, it’s generally illegal for companies to explicitly punish or threaten workers for supporting a union, but legal to hold mandatory anti-union meetings and to make “predictions” about dire consequences that could result from unionization. With the help of the firm Morgan Lewis, contended Carr, the company used such “captive audience” meetings to “put an intense amount of pressure on these workers,” and thus “of course they feared for their jobs.”

Amazon Keeps Unions Out By Keeping Workers in Fear, Says Organizer | Alternet

The Shaman's Apprentice | Link TV

I watched this last night, The Shaman's Apprentice | Link TV, and it was fascinating, think of the movie Medicine Man (1992) with Sean Connery. The difference, this is reality,,,

In a small jungle hut, hundreds of miles from the nearest road, a man urges a frail woman to drink a brown liquid. Another man, notebook in hand, watches intently. The woman, weak from diabetes, raises the cup to her lips and swallows the bitter potion. By tomorrow her blood sugar level will be normal, and the ravages of her disease will wane for a month.

The healer is a Tirio Indian from the remote northeast corner of the Amazon in the little-known country of Suriname, South America. The man taking notes is Mark Plotkin, PhD, one of the most renowned ethnobotanists in the world. By studying the medicinal plants and healing practices of native peoples in the rain forest, Plotkin hopes to preserve the knowledge—and the ecosystems—that may lead to tomorrow's cures. His quest is a race against time: Enemies such as cancer, diabetes, AIDS, schizophrenia, deep depression, and bacterial infections are slowly gaining on the human species. Although treatments for these conditions exist, true remedies are in short supply.

Eighty-three percent of all antibiotics come from nature, Plotkin points out. Ethnobotany, the study of the relationship between people and plants, has led to the discovery of many of humankind's most important drugs: aspirin, morphine, quinine (for malaria), reserpine (for hypertension), vincristine (for pediatric leukemia), and many more. Twenty-five percent of all prescription medicines are derived from plants, and four out of five people worldwide use plants as components of their primary health care.

But botany alone rarely uncovers which plants have healing properties. Knowledge about how to use plants for healing is embedded in folklore and religious mysteries, and it's usually preserved through oral tradition. "Few, if any, therapeutic compounds from plants have been discovered by botanists," says Plotkin. "It's like Columbus—the Indians got there first." The knowledge held by natives must be sought out, and this labor can take decades.

Jungle Cure