A federal judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's administration from laying off more government employees, after the administration had already pushed to cut thousands of workers during the U.S. government shutdown. Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. district court's northern district in California made the ruling. The judge's ruling comes after a number of unions argued the firings would be illegal and motivated by political retribution, according to The New York Times.
The Hands Off NYC campaign backed by the city's largest labor unions and civic groups, including 1199SEIU, 32BJ SEIU, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York Immigration Coalition held a rally at City Hall Park alongside elected officials to unveil what organizers described as a coordinated effort to train residents, build neighborhood communication networks and mount a nonviolent defense if President Donald Trump deploys National Guard troops to the city.
At EFF, we that tech rights are worker's rights . Since the pandemic, workers of all kinds have been subjected to increasingly invasive forms of . These are the "algorithmic management" tools that surveil workers on and off the job, often running on devices that (nominally) belong to workers, hijacking our phones and laptops. On the job, digital technology can become both a system of ubiquitous surveillance and a means of total control .
In the U.S., when a publisher signs a licensing deal with an AI company, newsroom staffers don't get a cut. Many newsrooms have licensed their content to OpenAI in bulk, for example. A staff reporter's stories can be used as training data for the latest GPT model, or may surface in ChatGPT's response to a user question. Does that reporter deserve to be compensated directly for how their work is being used by OpenAI? In France, the answer is, increasingly, yes.
For unions, this represents a once-in-a-generation brand opportunity: to reintroduce themselves to the rising workforce not as relics of a bygone era, but as modern advocates who are shaping the future of work.
After a 45-minute meeting between officials from Unite and Birmingham City Council on Wednesday ended without agreement, the independent public body and conciliation service Acas will now be involved in negotiations.