Labor

Even if members of Congress truly want to translate their current pique at institutional dysfunction into genuine deliberation, into a process of “regular order” where committees develop legislation, where would they begin? They’d need to build back a whole lot of lost capacity. Consider some responses from a new survey of senior staff from the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) titled “State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and the Senate.”

Below are the percentages of senior staff who said they were “very satisfied” with their chamber’s performance in the following benchmarks:
“The chamber’s human resource support and infrastructure is adequate to support staffers’ official duties (e.g., training, professional development, benefits, etc.)”: 5%
“Members have adequate time and resources to understand, consider, and deliberate policy and legislation”: 6%
“The technological infrastructure is adequate to support Members’ official duties”: 6%
“The chamber has adequate capacity and support (staff, research, capability, infrastructure, etc.) to perform its role in democracy”: 11%

Congress has been de-investing in its institutional capacity for decades, and congressional staff earn absurdly low salaries, leading to high turnover and consistent staff inexperience.

Apparently, President Donald Trump's administration is considering using rarely invoked US trade laws to fend off China's demands that foreign companies share their technology in return for access to the country's vast market.

The administration is discussing the use of Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which empowers Washington to launch an investigation into China's trade practices and, within months, raise tariffs on imports from China or impose other sanctions, apparently. The investigation would be focused on China's alleged "forced technology transfer policies and practices," the person said, adding that the Trump administration could move to launch such a probe this week.

Verizon is taking a different view on the one-touch make-ready (OTMR) proposals being considered by the Federal Communications Commission, saying that any new rules should not be driven by the labor agreements carriers have with unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA). In an FCC filing, the service provider said that developing OTMR rules that are in line with labor agreements could cause issues for providers seeking access to poles. “The commission should not tailor its OTMR rules to specific companies’ particular collective bargaining agreements,” Verizon said in the filing. “That approach would result in a patchwork of rules that might be subject to change every few years and would be administratively unmanageable for new attachers.” This is different than the position that has long been held by fellow telecommunication companies AT&T and Frontier.

President Donald Trump announced that the electronics manufacturer Foxconn will be building a new US plant in Wisconsin to produce LCD screens. During the White House announcement, President Trump was joined by Foxconn CEO Terry Guo, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Gov Scott Walker (R-WI). Some of the details of the project are still unclear, but the White House said during a call with reporters that Foxconn would be making a $10 billion investment and that the factory would create 3,000 jobs.

While a senior White House official deferred a number of questions about the deal to Gov Walker, he said the deal was secured by in part by the newly-created White House team tasked with modernizing government operations that’s led by Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. “This is a culmination of many months of discussion between the White House Office of American Innovation and Foxconn,” the official said. President Trump also met with Guo during the negotiations, the official added.

A bipartisan bill has been introduced to establish copyright protections for performances of pre-1972 musical works. Reps Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) are sponsoring the Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, and Important Contributions to Society (CLASSICS) Act (HR 3301).

“This an important and overdue fix to the law that will help settle years of litigation and restore some equity to this inexplicable gap in our copyright system," Issa said. “For years, we have been working to ensure royalty payments for artists who recorded many of our great musical classics before 1972," said Nadler. The new bill is an adjunct to the legislators' Fair Play Fair Pay Act music licensing bill introduced earlier this year and has been introduced in the past.

The US Department of Labor has raised concerns that Google’s strict confidentiality agreements have discouraged employees from speaking to the government about discrimination as part of a high-profile wage inequality investigation. Following a judge’s ruling that Google must hand over salary records and employee contact information to federal regulators investigating possible systemic pay disparities, a labor department official said the agency was worried that the technology corporation’s restrictive employee communication policies could impede the next phase of the inquiry.

“We have had employees during the course of the investigation express concerns about whether they are permitted by Google to talk to the government, because the company policy commits them to confidentiality,” Janet Herold, labor department regional solicitor, told the Guardian in an interview after the judge’s order. “When even a single employee expresses that, that means many more people are too concerned to make the call or have the conversation. The chilling effect is quite extreme.”

Alphabet’s high-speed internet business is undergoing another shake-up as its leader, Gregory McCray, is stepping down. The company is looking for a replacement. McCray was hired in February 2017 as chief executive officer of Access, the Alphabet unit that houses Google Fiber. He joined the tech giant after Craig Barratt, the former Access boss, exited in October 2016 when a big, expensive expansion plan he created was cut back.

“We are committed to the success of Google Fiber. The team is bringing gigabit connections to more and more happy customers,” Alphabet CEO Larry Page said. “Fiber has a great team and I’m confident we will find an amazing person to lead this important business.”

The Verizon debacle joins a lengthy list of incidents where companies and government agencies have accidentally published people’s confidential information, a problem that experts say may be getting harder to fix as more companies their storage to the cloud. Chris Vickery, director of cyber-risk research at UpGuard, found the Verizon data trove sitting in a critical data repository managed by a third vendor based in Israel. The repository had been misconfigured—a human error—leaving it unprotected. Thanks to a chronic shortage of skilled tech workers, it’s hard to find employees with the necessary skills and training to consistently avoid such mistakes, Vickery says. Tech workers setting up cloud systems or in-house servers can misunderstand the settings on the software they’re setting up, or cut corners to make data more easily accessible within the organization.

[Commentary] House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has tried to argue that ending network neutrality is good for Nashville’s musicians, but she’s flat wrong. She says that musicians would have the opportunity to negotiate “paid prioritization deals,” but this is just payola with a new name and the same ugly consequences for music.

Working musicians want to spend their time making and distributing music to their fans, not cutting special deals with big media conglomerates; allowing paid prioritization and other forms of discrimination is only good for big media companies that can afford to cut big checks. That’s why organizations like the Future of Music Coalition oppose what the Federal Communications Commission is trying to do. It’s critical that musicians stand up for net neutrality and oppose the FCC’s plan.

[E. Michael Harrington is a composer, musician, consultant, Music Business Program Faculty Chair at SAE Institute Nashville, course author and faculty at Berklee College of Music]

A group of more than 100 YouTube stars is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to preserve its network neutrality rules, which are currently in the process of being repealed. In an open letter, 132 internet entertainers said that eliminating the rules could imperil their industry. “Online video traffic already represents over 70% of all global web traffic and is estimated to grow to over 80% of all traffic by 2020,” the letter reads. “Our rapidly growing industry employs hundreds of thousands of people and yet it barely existed more than a decade ago. As creators in this fast-moving industry, changes to the existing Net Neutrality rules would have an outsized impact on our field and jeopardize our livelihood.” Among the acts signing the letter are Benny Fine of Fine Brothers Entertainment, a group that runs a popular comedy video channel on YouTube and other platforms. The Fine Brothers have 15.7 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Also signing on to the letter is Dane Boedigheimer, whose web series the Annoying Orange has nearly 6 million Youtube subscribers.