In a significant victory for workers, federal labor officials have determined that McDonald's Corp. is the official employer of all McDonald's workers.

The post McDonalds Loses Ability To Shield Itself From Worker Lawsuits appeared first on ThinkProgress.

McDonald’s Hamburglar character steals imaginary food from other characters. The company steals real wages from its workers.

CREDIT: Flickr user sortofbreakit

In a ruling that raises the stakes for numerous fast food worker efforts, the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) top lawyer said on Tuesday that McDonald’s Corp. is responsible for the actions of the owner-operator franchisees who run the vast majority of its stores.

The arrangements McDonald’s makes with its franchisees have long been understood to insulate the corporation from worker lawsuits. Because the buck stopped with individual owner-managers rather than with at the company’s Illinois headquarters, worker lawsuits and unionization efforts were limited in scope and unable to seek remedies from the company’s $5.6 billion in annual corporate profits.

Workers have repeatedly challenged that interpretation of the franchisee relationships, most recently in a slew of class-action wage theft lawsuits this spring. Those cases centered on a computer system installed by McDonald’s at franchisee stores that compares labor costs to money coming in in real-time, encouraging managers to fiddle with workers hours and timesheets as necessary to keep that expenses ratio as low as possible at all times.

The suits named both franchisees and McDonald’s itself, and workers and attorneys were optimistic that the legal challenges would poke holes in the company’s claims to legal indemnity. Tuesday’s ruling did just that, though it stemmed from separate, older claims involving workers who had attempted to unionize and were fired in retaliation.

“McDonald’s has tried to avoid the obligations associated with employing the vast majority of the people who prepare and serve their food,” worker attorney Micah Wissinger said on an afternoon press call, “but the reality is they require franchisees to adhere to strict rules.” Wissinger, whose clients brought the initial lawsuits over alleged retaliatory firings at New York City stores in 2012, explained that the decision does not make it any more or less likely that the labor board will find merit in any of the 113 individual allegations of which he is aware. But in cases where regional NLRB officials do find complaints have merit, “they are to name McDonald’s as an employer” in their rulings. An NLRB spokesperson confirmed the decision to ThinkProgress.

McDonald’s told the Associated Press that it had been notified of the general counsel’s ruling earlier Tuesday afternoon. Senior vice president of human resources Heather Smedstad told the wire service that Tuesday’s ruling “is such a radical departure that it should be a concern to business men and women across the country.”

Cathy Ruckelshaus of the National Employment Law Project disputed that assessment of the ruling on Tuesday’s press call. “Holding McDonald’s accountable will not portend the death of franchising as many argue,” Ruckelshaus said. “All it means is that corporations that exercise control over their workers cannot feign ignorance” of those workers’ rights and complaints.

A man named Richard who has worked in the same Kansas City McDonald’s for 18 years agreed that franchisees will be better able to care for employees’ well-being if the corporation is held accountable for wages and working conditions. “Some may think that who my boss is is just a technicality, but it matters,” Richard said on Tuesday’s call, because in order to adhere to the rules of their franchising contracts “the only thing franchisees can skimp on is wages.”

“They would pay more if they could, I’m sure of it,” he said, “but they’re hamstrung. This will help us hold McDonald’s accountable for wage theft and other violations, and make it easier to form a union.”

The fast food worker campaign for a $15 wage and the ability to unionize began with strikes in New York City in late 2012 and has spread to more than 150 U.S. cities and dozens of other countries as of this spring. No matter how hard McDonald’s and other chains with similar business models fight before judges and NLRB panels, the workers are prepared to intensify their efforts. At a convention last weekend, over a thousand worker attendees voted to add civil disobedience to the list of tools they will use to press for changes in an industry where CEOs earn 1,200 times what frontline workers do and grown-ups with families work full-time but still cannot escape poverty.

The post McDonalds Loses Ability To Shield Itself From Worker Lawsuits appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) blocked a Senate resolution that would have simply stated that climate change is real, citing various reasons and conspiracies. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) provided a thorough debunking.

The post Senator Denies Climate Change On Senate Floor And Gets A Science Lesson From His Colleague appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) rips into Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) for blocking a resolution that would have acknowledged the reality of climate change.

CREDIT: CSPAN

Here at ClimateProgress, we spend a lot of time debunking politicians who deny climate change based on scientifically murky grounds. On Thursday, it looked as though we’d have to do it again, after Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) blocked a Senate resolution that would have simply stated that climate change is real. Inhofe said he objected to the resolution because the earth had experienced “no warming for the last 15 years;” and because 9,000 scientists had signed a petition expressing doubt that greenhouse gases cause global warming.

Fortunately, however, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) did the debunking for us, just seconds after Inhofe finished his tirade against the Obama administration for having his federal agencies “collude” together to promote a “global warming agenda.”

“I appreciate very much having had the opportunity to hear those words, from what I can only describe as an alternate reality,” Whitehouse began, before getting into detailed specifics rebutting each one of Inhofe’s points.

Watch it here:

Whitehouse began by addressing one of Inhofe’s most oft-used arguments against the existence of climate change — that the earth’s atmospheric temperature has not risen in the last 15 years.

That “little rhetorical device” Inhofe is using fails to consider two things, Whitehouse said. One, is that more than 90 percent of the heat generated from increased carbon emissions gets absorbed into the ocean, not into the atmosphere. Two, is that any changes in ocean temperature will eventually have “a pronounced effect” on atmospheric temperature. Indeed, recent studies show that global temperatures are set to rise rapidly in the face of our increasingly warm and acidic oceans.

“To say that we have no warming is just not factual,” he said.

Next, Whitehouse took on Inhofe’s assertion that federal government agencies — The Department of Defense, NASA, and NOAA, for example — were colluding to promote environmentalists’ agendas. “Colluding together. That’s a fairly tough word to use,” he began.

Whitehouse: Let me tell you some of the government agencies who are so-called colluding together. How about NASA? We trust them to send our astronauts into space. We trust them to deliver a rover the size of an S.U.V. to the surface of Mars safely and drive it around, sending data and pictures back from Mars to us. You think these people know what they’re talking about? … How about the United States Navy? The commander in chief of our Pacific Command? Is he colluding when he says that? …

If you want to ignore the federal government, if you live in a world in which you think the federal government colludes with itself to make up things that aren’t true, okay. But look at the property casualty insurance and reinsurance industry. They’re the people with the biggest bet on this. They have billions of dollars riding on getting it right, and they say climate change is real, carbon pollution is causing it, we’ve got to do something about it. So does the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because they care about the poor and the effect this will have on the people who have the least. So does every major U.S. scientific society. Every single one.

Whitehouse then ripped into Inhofe for citing the Petition Project, which purportedly features over 31,000 scientists –9,000 with PhDs — signing a petition stating “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere.”

“I’m told that among the names on that petition are the Spice Girls,” Whitehouse said, “It’s almost a comedic effort.”

“The fact you can’t find 9,000 people who think the earth is flat is a bit of a stretch, and the idea that we should base our policy on a petition that imaginary people are on rather than on what NASA and NOAA and the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and every major scientific society and the entire property casualty reinsurance industry are telling us, it’s just extraordinary,” he added.

Despite Whitehouse’s argument, however, the resolution — which required unanimous consent — failed with Inhofe’s objection. So as demonstrated by that non-action, the Senate has no official position on whether climate change is real or not, much less whether it poses a threat to American citizens.

Klobuchar told The Hill that she would keep trying to pass the resolution, saying the Senate looks “silly” for arguing with scientific consensus.

The post Senator Denies Climate Change On Senate Floor And Gets A Science Lesson From His Colleague appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Clinton is the latest prominent politician to speak out against the name.

The post Hillary Clinton: Redskins Should Change Their ‘Insensitive’ Name appeared first on ThinkProgress.

CREDIT: AP

Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined the chorus of political leaders speaking out against the name of Washington’s professional football team Tuesday, calling the team’s continued use of its “Redskins” moniker “insensitive” during an interview with Fusion TV’s Jorge Ramos.

“I think it’s insensitive,â€� Clinton said in the interview that will air Tuesday night. “And I think that there’s no reason for it to continue as the name of a team in our nation’s capital. I would love to see the owners think hard about what they could substitute.”

“I haven’t though a lot about that,” Clinton said when Ramos asked if she had any suggestions for a new name.

Clinton, who is considering a run for president in 2016, joined a growing list of political officials that have spoken out against the name in the last year, including President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Attorney General Eric Holder. Reid and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the former chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, led 50 members of the Senate in sending a letter to the NFL and Washington owner Daniel Snyder calling for a change. The co-chairs of the Congressional Native American Caucus, Reps. Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Tom Cole (R-OK), have long opposed the name and organized a letter to the NFL and Snyder in June 2013.

Native American groups have challenged the name for more than 50 years. The National Congress of American Indians, the largest Native American organization in America, and the Oneida Indian Nation of New York ramped up their Change The Mascot campaign last year, running radio ads, writing letters to team, and targeting the organization’s sponsors. The groups promise that their fight is now a “permanent campaign,” though Snyder said in May 2013 that he would “NEVER” change the name that has existed since 1933.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in June canceled the team’s federal trademark protections, ruling that the term is “disparaging to Native Americans.”

The post Hillary Clinton: Redskins Should Change Their ‘Insensitive’ Name appeared first on ThinkProgress.