Fire clouds spark 710,117 lightning strikes

 in western Canada in 15 hours

Amy Graff, SFGATE
July 1, 2021


The North American Lightning Detection Network detected 710,177 lightning events across British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in about 15 hours, between 3 p.m. on June 30 and 6 a.m. on July 1.Chris Vagasky/Vaisala

Storm-producing fire clouds threw out hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes over wildfire-stricken British Columbia and northwestern Alberta provinces in Canada Wednesday and Thursday, bewildering meteorologists.

Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist with the company Vaisala, which maps lightning strikes around in the world, said the North American Lightning Detection Network sensed 710,177 lightning events across British Columbia and northwestern Alberta in about 15 hours, between 3 p.m. on June 30 and 6 a.m. on July 1.


Of those, 597,314 were in-cloud pulses, meaning the strikes didn't hit the ground. "Each in-cloud lightning 'strike' can be made up of multiple in-cloud pulses," Vagasky explained.

There were 112,803 cloud-to-ground strokes detected over the same area, he said.

Vagasky called the numbers "surprising" for Canada. "In studying lightning, there is always something interesting that comes up, whether it is lightning in a hurricane or volcano, or large numbers of lightning," he said. "As a whole, Canada doesn’t generally see a lot of lightning — about 90% less than the United States. In fact, the counts from yesterday are more what you would expect to see in a big day over lightning-prone regions like Texas or Oklahoma."

The numbers coming out of the lightning siege seem too big to be true, but Vagasky said the activity is measured with precision equipment.

Data produced by North American Lightning Detection Network is monitored nonstop and validated against rocket-triggered lightning, lightning to tall towers, and other lightning references.

"The network detects more than 95% of cloud-to-ground flashes with 100-meter accuracy," said Vagasky.

The majority of the strikes in western Canada were the result of pyrocumulonimbus clouds forming over the wildfires tearing across western Canada, which has also suffered from a sweltering heat wave in the past week.

On Thursday morning the British Columbia Wildfire Service listed 47 blazes across the region. In a fire burning 95 miles northeast of Vancouver, the entire village of Lytton evacuated. The mayor of the town of 250 people told CBC News on Thursday the whole town was on fire. Large blazes also burned north of Big White as well near Sparks Lake, according to CBC.

"Absolutely mind-blowing wildfire behavior in British Columbia," Dakota Smith, a scientist in Colorado, tweeted along with satellite imagery. "Incredible & massive storm-producing pyrocumulonimbus plumes."

"I've watched a lot of wildfire-associated pyroconvective events during the satellite era, and I think this might be the singularly most extreme I've ever seen," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, wrote on Twitter. "This is a literal firestorm, producing *thousands* of lightning strikes and almost certainly countless new fires."

These massive, mushroom-shaped clouds of hot, smoky air towering thousands of feet into the sky are caused by a natural source of heat such as a wildfire or volcano, according to NASA. Rising warm air from the fire carries water vapor, ash and smoke up into the atmosphere, forming clouds.

BC Wildfire Service shared an image of massive smoke plumes over the province: "#BCWildfire Service is responding to 2 wildfires ~18 km N of Big White. The Long Loch wildfire (K51040) and the Derrickson Lake wildfire (K51041) are in close proximity and estimated to be 300 ha combined in size. Smoke and fire behavior is making it difficult to confirm size."BC Wildfire Service

These clouds can become so intense that they create their own weather and emit lightning that can start new wildfires on the ground.

Neil Lareau, who studies wildfire-generated weather, said this appears to be the biggest pyrocumulonimbus event he has seen.

"At face value, I’m tempted to say this might be the upper end of what I’ve ever seen," said Lareau, a professor of atmospheric sciences in the department of physics at the University of Nevada at Reno. "There have been some significant pyrocumulonimbus clouds in British Columbia in 2017 as well as the Australian outbreak of 2020 and then the Creek Fire here in California."

Lareau closely followed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that developed over the Creek Fire on Sept. 5, 2020, between Shaver Lake, Big Creek and Huntington Lake, Calif. Using data from the National Weather Service’s network of Doppler radars, Lareau created a model of the smoke plume that soared 55,000 feet in elevation.

He said the fires in western Canada have produced several clouds of this magnitude.

"Every year it’s one upping the year before, which is really horrifying," he said.

Lightning strikes surge in British Columbia

Yacob Reyes AXIOS


Wildfire burns above the Fraser River Valley near Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, on July 2. Photo: James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Lightning strikes in Western Canada have surged over the past few days, triggered in part by an unprecedented heatwave that also induced wildfires, Reuters reports.

The big picture: British Columbia, which usually accounts for about 5% of Canada's yearly lightning strike total, reported its annual number in less than 48 hours.

A meteorologist, who tracks lightning, noted about 710,000 lightning events in British Columbia and Alberta Wednesday.

Driving the news: The onslaught of wildfires enduring in the area has resulted in a high moisture level in the atmosphere.

The moisture ultimately fuels its own towering thunderstorms and a surge of lightning strikes that itself has caused several forest fires, per Reuters.

The fires are expected to burn through 247,105 acres by the end of the weekend, a higher figure than in previous years.

Go deeper: Ferocious wildfires destroy British Columbia town amid historic heat

Robots were supposed to take our jobs. Instead, they’re making them worse.

The robot apocalypse is already here, it just looks different than you thought.

By Emily Stewartemily.stewart@vox.com  Jul 2, 2021

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NAO, the first built humanoid robot, at a trade fair in Germany in 2018. This is the type of robot 

that might take your job someday — but a lot of robots right now are just watching you at work.

 Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

This story is part of a group of stories called

The robot revolution is always allegedly just around the corner. In the utopian vision, technology emancipates human labor from repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing us to be more productive and take on more fulfilling work. In the dystopian vision, robots come for everyone’s jobs, put millions and millions of people out of work, and throw the economy into chaos.

Such a warning was at the crux of Andrew Yang’s ill-fated presidential campaign, helping propel his case for universal basic income that he argued would become necessary when automation left so many workers out. It’s the argument many corporate executives make whenever there’s a suggestion they might have to raise wages: $15 an hour will just mean machines taking your order at McDonald’s instead of people, they say. It’s an effective scare tactic for some workers.

But we often spend so much time talking about the potential for robots to take our jobs that we fail to look at how they are already changing them — sometimes for the better, but sometimes not. New technologies can give corporations tools for monitoring, managing, and motivating their workforces, sometimes in ways that are harmful. The technology itself might not be innately nefarious, but it makes it easier for companies to maintain tight control on workers and squeeze and exploit them to maximize profits.

“The basic incentives of the system have always been there: employers wanting to maximize the value they get out of their workers while minimizing the cost of labor, the incentive to want to control and monitor and surveil their workers,” said Brian Chen, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “And if technology allows them to do that more cheaply or more efficiently, well then of course they’re going to use technology to do that.”

Tracking software for remote workers, which saw a bump in sales at the start of the pandemic, can follow every second of a person’s workday in front of the computer. Delivery companies can use motion sensors to track their drivers’ every move, measure extra seconds, and ding drivers for falling short.

Automation hasn’t replaced all the workers in warehouses, but it has made work more intense, even dangerous, and changed how tightly workers are managed. Gig workers can find themselves at the whims of an app’s black-box algorithm that lets workers flood the app to compete with each other at a frantic pace for pay so low that how lucrative any given trip or job is can depend on the tip, leaving workers reliant on the generosity of an anonymous stranger. Worse, gig work means they’re doing their jobs without many typical labor protections.

In these circumstances, the robots aren’t taking jobs, they’re making jobs worse. Companies are automating away autonomy and putting profit-maximizing strategies on digital overdrive, turning work into a space with fewer carrots and more sticks.

A robot boss can do a whole lot more watching

In recent years, Amazon has become the corporate poster child for automation in the name of efficiency — often at the expense of workers. There have been countless reports of unsustainable conditions and expectations at Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Its drivers reportedly have to consent to being watched by artificial intelligence, and warehouse workers who don’t move fast enough can be fired.

Demands are so high that there have been reports of people urinating in bottles to avoid taking a break. The robots aren’t just watching, they’re also picking up some of the work. Sometimes, it’s for the better, but in other cases, they may actually be making work more dangerous as more automation leads to more pressure on workers. One report found that worker injuries were more prevalent in Amazon warehouses with robots than warehouses without them.

COMPANIES ARE AUTOMATING AWAY AUTONOMY AND PUTTING PROFIT-MAXIMIZING STRATEGIES ON DIGITAL OVERDRIVE, TURNING WORK INTO A SPACE WITH FEWER CARROTS AND MORE STICKS

Amazon is hardly the only company that uses automation to keep tabs on workers and push them to do more. In 2020, Josh Dzieza at the Verge outlined the various ways artificial intelligence, software, and machines are managing workers at places such as call centers, warehouses, and software development shops. He described one remote engineer in Bangladesh who was monitored by a program that took three pictures of him every 10 minutes to make sure he was at his computer, and a call center worker who learned to say “sorry” a lot to customers in order to meet an artificial intelligence-based empathy monitor. A web of technologies has enabled the management of every minute of the working day.

“It would have been prohibitively expensive to employ enough managers to time each worker’s every move to a fraction of a second or ride along in every truck, but now it takes maybe one,” Dzieza wrote. “This is why the companies that most aggressively pursue these tactics all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid, easily replaced, often part-time or contract workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.”

A 2018 Gartner survey found that half of large companies were already using some type of nontraditional techniques to keep an eye on their workers, including analyzing their communications, gathering biometric data, and examining how workers are using their workspace. They anticipated that by 2020, 80 percent of large companies would be using such methods. Amid the pandemic, the trend picked up pace as businesses sought more ways to keep tabs on the new waves of workers working from home.

This has all sorts of implications for workers, who lose privacy and autonomy when they’re constantly being watched and directed by technology. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, warned that they’re also losing money. “Some of these new digital technologies are not simply replacing workers or creating new tasks or changing other aspects of productivity, but they’re actually monitoring people much more effectively, and that means rents are being shared very differently because of digital technologies,” he said.

He offered up a hypothetical example of a delivery driver who is asked to deliver a certain number of packages in a day. Decades ago, the company might pay the driver more to incentivize them to work a little faster or harder or put in some extra time. But now, they’re constantly being monitored so that the company knows exactly what they’re doing and is looking for ways to save time. Instead of getting a bonus for hitting certain metrics, they’re dinged for spending a few seconds too long here or there.

The problem isn’t technology itself, it’s the managers and corporate structures behind it that look at workers as a cost to be cut instead of as a resource.

“A LOT OF THIS BOOM OF SILICON VALLEY ENTREPRENEURSHIP WHERE VENTURE CAPITAL MADE IT VERY EASY FOR COMPANIES TO CREATE FIRMS DIDN’T EXACTLY PRIORITIZE THE WELL-BEING OF WORKERS AS ONE OF THEIR MAIN CONSIDERATIONS”

“A lot of this boom of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship where venture capital made it very easy for companies to create firms didn’t exactly prioritize the well-being of workers as one of their main considerations,” said Amy Bix, a historian at Iowa State University who focuses on technology. “A lot of what goes on in the structure of these corporations and the development of technology is invisible to most ordinary people, and it’s easy to take advantage of that.”

The future of Uber isn’t driverless cars, it’s drivers

Uber’s destiny was supposed to be driverless.

In 2016, former CEO Travis Kalanick told Bloomberg making an autonomous vehicle was “basically existential” for the company. After a deadly accident with an autonomous Uber vehicle in 2018, current chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi reiterated that the company remained “absolutely committed” to the self-driving cause. But in December 2020 and after investing $1 billion, Uber sold off its self-driving unit. A little over four months later, its main competitor, Lyft, followed suit. Uber says it’s still not giving up on autonomous technology, but the writing on the wall is clear that driverless cars aren’t core to Uber’s business model, at least in the near future.

“Five or 10 years from now, drivers are still going to be a big piece of the mix on a percentage basis [of Uber’s business], and on an absolute basis, they may be an even bigger piece than they are today even with autonomous in the mix because the business should get bigger as both segments get bigger,” said Chris Frank, director of corporate ratings at S&P Global. “In addition, drivers will need to handle more complex conditions like poorly marked roads or inclement weather.”

In other words, they’re going to need workers to make money — workers they would very much like not to classify as such.

Gig economy companies such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are fighting tooth and nail to make sure the people they enlist to make deliveries or drive people around are not considered their employees. In California last year, such companies dumped $200 million into lobbying to pass Proposition 22, which lets app-based transportation and delivery companies classify their workers as independent contractors and therefore avoid paying for benefits such as sick leave, employer-provided health care, and unemployment. After it passed, a spokesman for the campaign for the ballot measure said it “represents the future of work in an increasingly technologically-driven economy.”

It’s a future of work that might not be pleasant for gig workers. In California, some workers say they’re not getting the benefits companies promised after Prop 22’s passage, such as health care stipends. Companies said that workers would make at least 120 percent of California’s minimum wage, but that’s contemplating the time they spend driving only. Before the ballot initiative was passed, research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated that it would guarantee a minimum wage of just $5.64 per hour.

Companies say they’ve been clear with drivers about how to qualify for the health care stipend, which is available to drivers with more than 15 engaged hours a week (in other words, if you don’t have a job and are waiting around, it doesn’t count). In a statement to Vox, Geoff Vetter, a spokesperson for the Protect App-Based Drivers + Services Coalition, the lobbying group that championed Prop 22, said that 80 percent of drivers work fewer than 20 hours per week and most work less than 10 hours per week, and that many have health insurance through other jobs.

Gig companies have sometimes been cagey about how much their workers make, and they’re often changing their formulas. In 2017, Uber agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $20 million over charges that it misled prospective drivers about how much they could make with the app. The FTC found that Uber claimed some of its drivers made $90,000 in New York and $74,000 in San Francisco, when in reality their median incomes were actually $61,000 and $53,000, respectively. DoorDash caused controversy over a decision to pocket tips and use them to pay delivery workers, which it has since reversed.

Even though Uber is charging customers more for rides in the wake of the pandemic, that’s not directly being passed onto their drivers. According to the Washington Post, Uber changed the way it paid drivers in California soon after Prop 22 passed so that they were no longer paid a proportion of the cost of the ride but instead by time and distance, with different bonuses and incentives based on market and surge pricing. (This is how Uber does it in most states, but it had changed things up during the push to get Prop 22 passed.) Uber’s CEO pushed back on the Post story in a series of tweets, arguing that decoupling driver pay from customer fares had not hurt California drivers and that some are now getting a higher cut from their rides.

In light of a driver shortage, Uber recently announced what it’s billing as a $250 million “driver stimulus” that promises higher earnings to try to get drivers back onto the road. The company acknowledges this initiative is likely temporary once the supply-demand imbalance works itself out. Still, it’s hard not to notice how quickly Uber and Lyft have been able to corner most of the ride-hailing app market and exert control over their drivers and customers.

“When a new thing like this comes on, there’s huge new consumer benefits, and then over time they are the market, they have less competition except one another, probably they’re a cartel at this point. And then they start doing stuff that’s much nastier,” said David Autor, an economist at MIT.

One of the gig economy’s main selling points to workers is that it offers flexibility and the ability to work when they want. It’s certainly true that an Uber or Lyft driver has much more autonomy on the job than, say, an Amazon warehouse worker. “People drive with Lyft because they prefer the freedom and flexibility to work when, where, and for however long they want,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to Vox. “They can choose to accept a ride or not, enjoy unlimited upward earning potential, and can decide to take time off from driving whenever they want, for however long they want, without needing to ask a ‘boss’ — all things they can’t do at most traditional jobs.” The spokesperson also noted that most of its drivers work outside of Lyft.

But flexibility doesn’t mean gig companies have no control over their drivers and delivery people. They use all sorts of tricks and incentives to try to push workers in certain directions and manage them, essentially, by algorithm. Uber drivers report being bothered by the constant surveillance, the lack of transparency from the company, and the dehumanization of working with the app. The algorithm doesn’t want to know how your day is, it just wants you to work as efficiently as possible to maximize its profits.

Carlos Ramos, a former Lyft driver in San Diego, described the feeling of being manipulated by the app. He noticed the company must have needed morning drivers because of the incentives structures, but he also often wondered if he was being “punished” if he didn’t do something right.

“Sometimes, if you cancel a bunch of rides in a row or if you don’t take certain rides to certain things, you won’t get any rides. They’ve shadow turned you off,” he said. The secret deprioritization of a worker is something many Lyft and Uber drivers speculate happens. “You also have no way of knowing what’s going on behind there. They have this proprietary knowledge, they have this black box of trade secrets, and those are your secrets you’re telling them,” said Ramos, now an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.

Companies deny that they secretly shut off drivers. “It is in Lyft’s best interests for drivers to have as positive an experience as possible, so we communicate often and work directly with drivers to help them improve their earnings,” a Lyft spokesperson said. “We never ‘shadow ban’ drivers, and actively coach them when they are in danger of being deactivated.”

The future of innovation isn’t inevitable

We often talk about technology and innovation with a language of inevitability. It’s as though whenever wages go up, companies will of course replace workers with robots. Now that the country is turned on to online delivery, it can be made to seem like the grocery industry is on an unavoidable path to gig work. After all, that’s what happened with Albertsons. But that’s not really the case — there’s plenty of human agency in the technological innovation story.

“Technology of course doesn’t have to exploit workers, it doesn’t have to mean robots are coming for all of our jobs,” Chen said. “These are not inevitable outcomes, they are human decisions, and they are almost always made by people who are driven by a profit motive that tends to exploit the poor and working class historically.”

Chase Copridge, a longtime California worker who’s done the gamut of gig jobs — Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Flex, Uber, and Lyft — is one of the people stuck in that position, the victim of corporate tendencies on technological overdrive. He described seeing delivery offers that pay as little as $2. He turns those jobs down, knowing that it’s not economically worth it for him. But there might be someone else out there who picks it up. “We’re people who desperately need to make ends meet, who are willing to take the bare minimum that these companies are giving out to us,” he said. “People need to understand that these companies thrive off of exploitation.”

“TECHNOLOGY OF COURSE DOESN’T HAVE TO EXPLOIT WORKERS, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO MEAN ROBOTS ARE COMING FOR ALL OF OUR JOBS”

Not all decisions around automation are ones that increase productivity or improve really anything except corporate profits. Self-checkout stations may reduce the need for cashiers, but are they really making the shopping experience faster or better? Next time you go to the grocery store and inevitably screw up scanning one of your own items and waiting several minutes for a worker to appear, you tell me.

Despite technological advancements, productivity growth has been on the decline in recent years. “This is the paradox of the last several decades, and especially since 2000, that we had enormous technological changes as we perceive it but measured productivity growth is quite weak,” Autor said. “One reason may be that we’re automating a lot of trivial stuff rather than important stuff. If you compare antibiotics and indoor plumbing and electrification and air travel and telecommunications to DoorDash and smartphones or self-checkout, it may just not be as consequential.

Acemoglu said that when firms focus so much on automation and monitoring technologies, they might not explore other areas that could be more productive, such as creating new tasks or building out new industries. “Those are the things that I worry have fallen by the wayside in the last several years,” he said. “If your employer is really set on monitoring you really tightly, that biases things against new tasks because those are things that are not easier to monitor.”

It matters what you automate, and not all automation is equally beneficial, not only to workers but also to customers, companies, and the broader economy.

Grappling with how to handle technological advancements and the ways they change people’s lives, including at work, is no easy task. While the robot revolution isn’t taking everyone’s jobs, automation is taking some of them, especially in areas such as manufacturing. And it’s just making work different: A machine may not eliminate a position entirely, but it may turn a more middle-skill job into a low-skill job, bringing lower pay with it. Package delivery jobs used to come with a union, benefits, and stable pay; with the rise of the gig economy, that’s declining. If and when self-driving trucks arrive, there will still be some low-quality jobs needed to complete tasks the robots can’t.

“The issue that we’ve faced in the US economy is that we’ve lost a lot of middle-skill jobs so people are being pushed down into lower categories,” Autor said. “Automation historically has tended to take the most dirty and dangerous and demeaning jobs and hand them over to machines, and that’s been great. What’s happened in the last bunch of decades is that automation has affected the middle-skill jobs and left the hard, interesting, creative jobs and the hands-on jobs that require a lot of dexterity and flexibility but don’t require a lot of formal skills.”

But again, none of this is inevitable. Companies are able to leverage technology to get the most out of workers because workers often don’t have power to push back, enforce limits, or ask for more. Unionization has seen steep declines in recent decades. America’s labor laws and regulations are designed around full-time work, meaning gig companies don’t have to offer health insurance or help fund unemployment. But the laws could — and many would argue should — be modernized.

“The key thing is it’s not just technology, it’s a question of labor power, both collectively and individually,” Bix said. “There are a lot of possible outcomes, and in the end, technology is a human creation. It’s a product of social priorities and what gets developed and adopted.”

Maybe the robot apocalypse isn’t here yet. Or it is, and many of us aren’t quite recognizing it, in part because we got some of the story wrong. The problem isn’t really the robot, it’s what your boss wants the robot to do.

The US Supreme Court just handed down disastrous news for unions

The Court’s new union-busting decision reads like something out of Ayn Rand’s darkest fantasies.

By Ian Millhiser Jun 23, 2021, VOX

Then-President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chief Justice John Roberts in 2017. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Since 1956, the Supreme Court has applied a well-established framework to businesses that wished to exclude union organizers from their property. On Wednesday, however, the Court effectively scrapped that framework — one that was already fairly restrictive of union organizing — and replaced it with something far more restrictive.

In the process of deciding Wednesday’s case, Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the Court also rewrites much of its existing Fifth Amendment law. Then it adds caveats to its new rule that resemble the reasoning behind an infamous anti-labor decision from more than a century ago. The Court’s decision is rooted in value judgments about what sort of regulations are desirable and what should be forbidden — namely, those protecting workers’ rights. And it was handed down on a party-line, 6-3 vote.

Thus far, the Supreme Court’s first term since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave conservatives a supermajority has been a fairly mixed bag. The Court rejected a frivolous attack on the Affordable Care Act and has sent mixed messages about how fast it plans to move its religion jurisprudence to the right.

But Cedar Point is a sign the radical new conservative regime that many Republicans crave and that liberals fear could actually be upon us. The Court fundamentally reshaped much of American property law in Cedar Point. It did so in a party-line vote. And it did so in a case involving labor unions — institutions that are often celebrated by liberals and loathed by conservatives.

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The case involves a nearly half-century-old California regulation, which gives union organizers limited, temporary access to farm worksites. Under this regulation, a union may enter such a worksite for up to 30 days at a time, and it may invoke this right up to four times a year. On the days when the union is permitted to enter, it may only speak to the workers for three hours a day — the hour before the start of work, the hour after the end of work, and the workers’ lunch break.

Thus, union organizers are allowed on a farm’s property for a maximum of 120 days a year, and for a total of only three hours per day. And the union also must notify the employer when it wishes to invoke this right.

But the right of unions to enter onto a California farm to organize workers is now in deep trouble. In an opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court held that California’s longstanding regulation violates the Constitution’s “takings clause,” which provides that no one shall have their property taken from them by the government “without just compensation.”

And, in order to reach this result, Roberts rewrites decades of law interpreting that clause.
The Court’s new interpretation of the takings clause is extraordinarily deferential to property owners

Before Wednesday, the Court distinguished between two different types of violations of the takings clause. “Per se” takings involved unusually severe intrusions on private property — such as if the government strips a plot of land of all of its economic value — and were treated with particular skepticism by courts. Less severe intrusions, meanwhile, were classified as “regulatory” takings.

Property owners subject to a per se taking nearly always prevail in court, while property owners alleging a regulatory taking are much less likely to succeed — even when the government imposes fairly strict limitations on how they can use their property. In one famous regulatory takings case, the Court upheld a New York City law preventing the owners of Grand Central Terminal from constructing a high-rise office building on top of the station.

Because the Court views per se takings with such extraordinary skepticism, past decisions held that very few intrusions on private property qualify as such. A per se taking did not occur unless the government deprived a property owner of “all economically beneficial or productive use” of their property, or subjected the property owner to a “permanent physical occupation” of their land.

Thus, California’s regulation did not qualify as a per se taking prior to Cedar Point, as the presence of union organizers does not strip a worksite of all of its economic value, and the regulation did not allow those organizers to permanently occupy a worksite. It only allowed them to enter the property for three hours a day, and for only about a third of the year.

Roberts’s opinion didn’t eliminate this distinction between regulatory and per se takings altogether, but it significantly blurred the line. Under the new rule announced in Cedar Point, any law or regulation that “appropriates a right to invade” private property amounts to a per se taking. If California allowed union organizers to enter an employer’s land for a single minute, then California committed a per se taking.

“The right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” Roberts writes. And much of his opinion suggests that any intrusion on this right to exclude amounts to a taking.

But then Roberts’s opinion takes an unusual turn, in an apparent effort to ward off some of the radical implications of its expansive vision of per se takings.
Roberts isn’t willing to live with the implications of his opinion for cases that don’t involve unions

One problem with Roberts’s expansive view of the takings clause is that it could prevent the government from performing very basic functions, such as health and safety inspections.

Suppose, for example, that a restaurant has a disgusting, rat-infested kitchen that violates numerous local health ordinances. The restaurant’s owners obviously do not want these violations to be discovered, so they refuse to admit any government health inspectors. Under Roberts’s reading of the takings clause, it’s not clear why the restaurant owner should not be allowed to do so — or why it shouldn’t be able to, at the very least, demand compensation from the government before health inspectors can be allowed on their property.

After all, if “the right to exclude is ‘one of the most treasured’ rights of property ownership,” why should an employer be allowed to exclude union organizers but not health inspectors?

Indeed, as California warned in its brief, the expansive vision of the takings clause laid out in much of Roberts’s opinion “would also imperil a wide variety of health- and safety-inspection regimes” (including “food and drug inspections, occupational safety and health inspections, and home visits by social workers”) as well as a federal law providing that “underground mines must be inspected ‘at least four times a year.’”

Roberts’s opinion recognizes that it would be untenable to hold that health and safety inspections violate the Constitution, so he carves out a special rule allowing such inspections to stand. “The government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits,” such as a license to operate a business, Roberts writes, so long as that condition “bears an ‘essential nexus’ and ‘rough proportionality’ to the impact of the proposed use of the property.”

Those are some very large and very vague words, and it’s not entirely clear what it means for an inspection requirement to be roughly proportional to “the impact of the proposed use of the property.” Nor is it clear why, if the government can require restaurants to admit health inspectors as a condition of doing business, it can’t also require that restaurant to admit union organizers as a condition of employing workers.

The Court has simply made a value judgment here. It views health inspections as sufficiently important to justify creating an exception to its new understanding of the takings clause, but it doesn’t view protecting a worker’s right to organize as important enough to justify a similar exception.

There is precedent for this kind of thinking. In Lochner v. New York (1905), an infamous Supreme Court decision often taught in law schools as an example of how judges should not behave, the Court drew a similar line between laws intended to protect health and laws intended to protect workers from abuse.

Lochner struck down a New York state law limiting the number of hours that bakery workers could work in a given day or week (at the time, workers were typically paid by the day or by the week, so working additional hours did not mean more pay). In reaching this conclusion, the Court held that laws intended to “conserve the morals, the health, or the safety of the people” are typically valid, but laws intended to regulate working conditions are far more suspect.

But Lochner is now widely viewed as a terrible misstep by the Supreme Court, and even Roberts accepts this view of Lochner. Dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Roberts denounced “the unprincipled tradition of judicial policymaking that characterized discredited decisions such as Lochner v. New York.”

And yet, just six years after his opinion in Obergefell, Roberts is engaged in the very same kind of “judicial policymaking” — judging rooted in a judge’s personal value judgments rather than in law or precedent — that he once decried.
So what happens now?

There is one potential silver lining for the unions impacted by Cedar Point. The takings clause does not forbid the government from restricting property rights, it merely requires the government to compensate property owners when it violates the clause. And it’s not at all clear how much compensation the farm owners should be due here.


Indeed, at oral argument, Barrett suggested that farm owners may only be entitled to as little as “50 bucks” to compensate them for the cost of having people present on their land whom they’d rather exclude.

Maybe Barrett’s view will prevail. But another way to look at how much these property owners should be compensated is to ask how much money they stand to lose if unions are allowed on their land. A union that enters onto a worksite might successfully unionize that site, and then secure a collective bargaining agreement that requires the employer to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional compensation to its workers. Perhaps the state should have to compensate the employer for all of these costs?

In any event, the question of how much compensation is due to these farm owners will no doubt be litigated — at considerable cost to both the unions and to the state. And it’s far from clear how that litigation will end. Because of this uncertainty, California is likely to stop enforcing its pro-union regulation, at least for now, because it has no way of knowing how much enforcing it will cost the state.

And at the very least, the Court has revolutionized its understanding of the takings clause. And it did so in an opinion that applies an extremely skeptical rule to pro-union regulation while it simultaneously creates carveouts for regulations that the Court’s conservative majority supports.

CHICAGO

Dill Pickle Co-Op Workers Go On Strike: ‘At The End Of The Day, It’s Standing Up For What’s Right’

The walkout comes after years of strife between Dill Pickle management and workers.

Mina Bloom
1:40 PM CDT on Jul 2, 2021

Dill Pickle workers on strike outside of the grocery store Friday morning.

Mina Bloom/Block Club Chicago

Credibility:
Original Reporting
On the Ground
Sources Cited

LOGAN SQUARE — Dill Pickle Co-op workers walked off the job Friday morning after months of battling with management over issues like hazard pay and the firing of employees.

Several workers formed a picket line outside of the Logan Square grocery store at 2746 N. Milwaukee Ave., holding signs that read, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” More workers are expected to join the walkout, which is expected to continue Saturday, during a typically busy holiday weekend. The co-op had about 65 workers as of May 2020.

At issue are unfair labor practice complaints the workers filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The workers — represented by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — accuse management of bad faith bargaining, improperly disciplining employees and changing the terms of the union contract without authorization. The workers have three open cases against management, according to the board’s website.

The workers also say management has rejected a settlement proposed by the National Labor Relations Board and is instead planning to take the workers to federal court Sept. 21 to fight the charges.

The co-op’s general manager, I’Talia McCarthy, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Friday. But McCarthy has previously said the board has dismissed previous charges against management.

One complaint from April 2020 accused management of cutting workers’ hours for participating in the union. That was dismissed, according to a letter on the labor board’s website.

McCarthy also insisted store leaders are doing everything they can to keep workers safe — even as the grocery store faces a “financial crisis.” She said the store was $4.2 million in debt as of April, partly because previous leaders failed to raise enough money to move to the Milwaukee Avenue location. The store is also still feeling the effects of an embezzlement incident in October 2019 in which a former interim general manager and employee stole $170,000, she said.

“We’re in a really rocky position. We’re barely hanging on,” McCarthy previously said.

But workers say management’s unwillingness to settle the labor disputes is the latest in a long line of affronts stretching back years.

Val Vergara, a clerk who works in the store’s cheese and meat section, pushed back against McCarthy’s claim that the store can’t afford to meet workers’ demands. They questioned why store leaders cut hazard pay but then bought a large billboard to advertise the store.

“It’s really disrespectful that they don’t have enough money to give to their employees who keep the store up and running, but they have enough money for all of these other, miscellaneous things,” they said.

Kevin Taylor, who works in the store’s produce department, also walked off the job Friday.

“At the end of the day, it’s standing up for what’s right,” Taylor said. “In my opinion, they used left-speak to try to get people in here and put money into the co-op, and for what? For them to break the law and not pay us correctly? Fire people without investigation?”

The strike comes after years of strife between Dill Pickle workers and store leaders, starting in 2017 when workers first sought to be represented by IWW. The conflict escalated during the pandemic, with workers demanding union recognition and hazard pay. The workers also protested the firing of two employees.

After weeks of negotiations, management signed a contract with the Dill Pickle workers’ union November 2020. But that agreement hasn’t eased the tension the union voted to authorize a strike in May 2021, steward Alex Thomas said.

Thomas, who works in the store’s produce section, said they hope store leaders will work with them to create a better future for the neighborhood grocery store.

“We want this place to survive, we like working here. We just want a better place. We want them to honor our contract,” Thomas said. “We want to be bargaining in good faith with them. And we’ve tried to make them listen multiple times, and now that’s why we’re out here. This is what we’ve gotta do to get them to listen.”

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More than 1,200 Waterloo Region workers take step closer to strike

By Waterloo Region Record
Wed., June 30, 2021

WATERLOO REGION — After more than a year of talks, more than 1,200 unionized workers at the Region of Waterloo are closer to a strike.

The workers, represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees locals 5191 and 1883, are requesting what is known as a no-board report, which can take a few days to be issued. Once that happens, workers would be in a legal strike position 17 days later.

The workers include 300 paramedics and logistics staff, and more than 900 inside workers in public health, child care, social services, finance, IT, housing, administration, museums, libraries, bylaw enforcement, engineering, airport, landfill and transportation.

Negotiations have stalled after more than a year of “unproductive” talks, the union says in a news release.

Noelle Fletcher, president of CUPE 1883, said her members are concerned about job security, lack of investment in mental health and possible layoffs as the region continues to cut services.

“Paramedics are burnt out,” said Luke McCann, president of paramedics local.