Entries from May 2003 ↓

My previous post was concerned with the screwing employees are gonna get if a couple of new bills become law. Under the guise of helping families, the Senate and House versions of the bills will most likely kill the 40-hour workweek which has served us pretty well since it was enacted in 1938.

What I didn’t mention in that rant was that the bills were introduced and sponsored by Republicans. The Senate bill is sponsored by 6 Republicans, while the House bill is sponsored by 82 Republicans and 3 Democrats (William Lipinski of Illinois, Jim McDermott of Washington and Charles Stenholm of Texas — Shame on all of them.)

It’s not usually this clear-cut, but, while the Republicans are introducing bills to screw the worker, the Democrats are introducing a bill help families by expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act. The new bill would extend the Act’s provisions to Federal workers and to workplaces with at least 25 (opposed to the current 50) employees. It would also address one of the most problematic aspects of the current law: “3.5 million people who qualified for family and medical leave in the year 2000 were not able to take it. Seventy-eight percent of that group did not take leave because they could not afford to do so.”

The new, expanded law would create funding for a pilot program to assist states in designing “…ways to offer six weeks of partial or full paid leave, which would count toward the FMLA-allowed 12 weeks of leave….” The funding for the leave could come from state short-term disability programs, or unemployment insurance, or some other mechanism.

Finally, in a section of the bill called the “Time for Schools Act of 2003“, this legislation would entitle an eligible employee “to a total of 24 hours of leave during any 12-month period to participate in an academic activity of a school of a son or daughter of the employee, such as a parent-teacher conference or an interview for a school, or to participate in literacy training under a family literacy program.”

This is unpaid leave, but unlike the Republican-sponsored bills, it doesn’t require the employee to make up the time by working more than 40 hours. Sometimes, the time is more valuable than the money. Write your Senator encouraging him or her to pass this bill.

This one snuck under the radar, while we were being barraged by war news: In an article entitled “Fleecing The Family“, Molly Ivins reports on a pair of bills making their way through Congress which, in the guise of providing flexibility in working hours to employees, actually serve to undermine many of the goals of the New Deal-era Fair Labor Standards Act. The Senate bill (S.317), entitled The Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act and the House bill (H.1119), entitled the Family Time Flexibility Act, amend the law requiring employers to pay time-and-a-half for hourly workers who work more than 40 hours in a given week.

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Ernie the Attorney posted an interesting (as usual) entry yesterday regarding another unexpected effect of the internet’s incursion into our daily lives. In this case, the internet is affecting one of the cornerstones of our legal system: the impartial jury. As Ernie says,

Ernie speculates that jurors might have always been curious, but the print and broadcast media can’t cover every single trial. It was most likely the inaccessibility of information which kept jurors from doing their own research. But, with a broadband connection…

He also cites the “increasing prevalence of multi-day trials”*, where the jurors go to their homes at the end of the day with an admonition from the judge not to talk about the case. I suspect that it is the rare juror who keeps a spouse or a loved one in the dark about the events of the courtroom. It is even easier — and less likely to bring a scolding from a conscientious spouse — to type a defendant’s name into the Google toolbar.

But the most important point in this article is the observation that “When faced with a new disruptive situation, most organizations (and most people) don’t try to gain insight; they try to control the problem.” This is especially true when we are talking about the law. Congress is trying to control the spread of pr0n by restricting public access to nearly any material not suitable for minors. The Justice Department is trying to control the use of encryption on the internet. RIAA and MPAA are using legislation to try and control what their listeners can and can’t do with music and movies. None of these actions are enjoying great success. (Thank heavens!)

Meanwhile, a company such as Apple, by approaching its customers without heavy-handed restrictions, controls and caveats sells 1,000,000 songs from its new music store in one week. I don’t have firm numbers, but I am certain that this probably surpasses the entire download history of the major labels’ iron-fisted music “services”. There are other similar successes: in the open-source software arena, companies are making money selling service and support for freely available programs; Cory Doctorow’s novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” is currently ranked 4,481 in sales at Amazon, despite being freely available for download on the web.

Apple and Red Hat and Cory D. are certainly taking risks in jumping into these forms of business ventures, but what they are risking is their own fortunes. The situation with curious jurors is different, in that the risk is borne by the parties to the trial. It is the job of the attorneys and the court to limit the universe of knowledge about the parties to the narrow sphere of the issue at hand; lawyers are required to critically establish the veracity and reliability of all sources of evidence. The web undermines this because there are no filters between the keyboard and the rest of the world.

So, how can the courts relinquish control over the jurors’ research, while still maintaining the broadly-constructed rules for protecting defendants? As in so many other fields, it may be necessary to stop relying on “secrecy through obscurity.” Perhaps opening up all the data to the jury on specially-constructed websites will be the solution to incomplete or biased information. Perhaps judges and juries will deliberate together — the judge acting as an expert in the law, while the jury acts as the hand of justice. Perhaps we will have to rethink the voir dire process, since, in a highly networked society, the only people uninformed enough about cases will likely be those people least desirable for jury service.

I’m glad Ernie brought this up, and I hope its the beginning of some serious thought and discussion by the legal profession.

*I’m curious about Ernie’s statement about multi-day trials: are they truly on the increase? Is there research on this topic, or is it based on Ernie’s own observations?

Apple’s new iTunes-enabled music store sold 1 million songs in its first week of operations, shattering all records and expectations. Unlike the restrictive music services run by the major music labels (MusicNet and Pressplay):

Apple is rumored to be developing a version of iTunes for Windows. Considering that the Mac represents only 8% of the PC market, the potential sales are enormous once Windows and Linux users — as well as users from anywhere else in the world besides the US — are allowed into the store.

This article at c|net had me checking the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fools’ Day. MSN UK is introducing the iLoo, a web-enabled porta-potty slated to make its debut on the UK festival circuit this summer. It’s got a plasma display, Wi-Fi connection “and a waterproof wireless keyboard can be placed on the lap for comfort.” Yecchh!! Not too unsanitary…

And just to prove that those MS folks forget no potential feature, “MSN UK is negotiating with toilet paper manufacturers for special rolls with Web addresses, or URLs, printed on them.”

(Gotta wonder about the name “iLoo”… do you think Apple will sue for trademark violation?)