ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing at BUFFALO STREET BOOKS on Sept 11 and at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS on Sept 13. I'll also be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21:
The most ENSHITTIFICATION-PROOF way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
Trump's stolen a lot of workers' wages over the years, but this week, he has become history's greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompetes "agreements," a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
The argument for noncompetes is this: modern industry is IP-intensive, and IP-intensive businesses need noncompetes, otherwise workers will take proprietary information with them when they walk out the door and bring it to a competitor. Who would invest in an IP-intensive firm under those circumstances?
I'll tell you who would: Hollywood and Silicon Valley. These are two most IP-intensive industries in human history, both of which were incubated in California, a state whose constitution prohibits noncompetes and has done so through the entire history of those two industries.
Indeed, we wouldn't have a Silicon Valley if California had noncompetes. Silicon Valley was founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the silicon transistor (hence Silicon Valley). Shockley was a paranoid, virulent racist who couldn't produce a working chip because he was consumed by eugenic fervor and spent all his time on the road offering shares of his Nobel prize money to Black women who would agree to have their tubes tied.
Lucky for (literally) everyone (except William Shockley), California doesn't have noncompetes, so eight of his top engineers ("The Traitorous Eight") were able to quit Shockley Semiconductor and start the first successful chip business: Fairchild Semiconductor. And then two of Fairchild's top engineers quit to found Intel:
It's not just Silicon Valley that's rooted in wresting IP away from asshole control-freaks: that's Hollywood's story, too. Ever wonder how it was that movies were invented at Edison Labs in New Jersey, but the film industry was incubated in California, literally as far away from Edison as you could possibly get without ending up in Mexico?
In short: California got the motion picture industry because Edison was an asshole who used his patents to control what kinds of movies could be made and to suck rents out of filmmakers to license those patents. So the most ambitious filmmakers in America fled to California, where Edison couldn't easily enforce his patents, and founded Hollywood:
And Hollywood stayed in Calfornia, a place where noncompetes couldn't be enforced, where "IP" could hop from one studio to another, smuggled out between the ears of writers, actors, directors, SFX wizards, prop makers, scenepainters, makeup artists, costumers, and the most creative professionals in Hollywood: accountants.
Empirically speaking, the function of noncompetes is to trap good workers and good ideas in companies controlled by asshole bosses who can't get anything done. Any disinvestment that can be attributed to the absence of noncompetes is completely swamped by the dividends generated by good workers and good ideas escaping from control-freak asshole bosses and founding productive firms. As ever, money talks and bullshit walks.
Today, one in 18 US workers is trapped by a noncompete, and those aren't the knowledge workers of Silicon Valley workers or Hollywood. So who is captured by this form of contractual indenture? The median US worker under noncompete is a fast-food worker stuck with the tipped minimum wage, or a pet groomer making the regular minimum wage. The function of the noncompete in America isn't to secure investment for knowledge-intensive industries – it's to stop the cashier at Wendy's from getting an extra $0.25/hour working the fry-trap at the McDonald's across the street.
Noncompetes are an integral part of the conservative project, which is the substitution of individual power for democratic choice. As Dan Savage puts it, the GOP agenda is "Husbands you can't leave [ed: ending no-fault divorce], pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate [ed: banning contraception and abortion], politicians you can't vote out of office [ed: gerrymandering and voter suppression."
Add to that: jobs you can't quit.
It's not just noncompetes that lock workers to shitty bosses. When Biden's FTC investigated the issue, they revealed a widespread practice called "training repayment agreement provision," (TRAPs) that puts workers on the hook for thousands of dollars if they quit or get fired:
A TRAPped worker – often a pet-groomer at a private equity-owned giant like Petsmart – is charged $5,500 or more for three weeks of "training" that actually amount to one or two weeks of sweeping up pet-hair. But if they leave or get fired in the next three years, they have to pay back that whole amount:
These fees trap workers in dead-end jobs by forcing anyone who hires them away to pay massive fees to their former employers. It's just another way to lock workers to businesses.
The irony here is that conservatives claim to worship "voluntarism" and "free choice," and insist that the virtue of markets is that they "aggregate price signals" so that companies can respond to these signals by efficiently matching demand to supply.
But though conservatives say they worship free choice as an engine of economic efficiency, they understand that their ideas are so unpopular that they can only succeed if people are coerced into adopting them, hence voter suppression, gerrymandering, noncompetes, and other heads-I-win/tails-you-lose propositions.
Noncompetes aren't about preventing the loss of IP – they're about preventing the loss of process knowledge, the know-how to turn ideas into products and services. Bosses love IP, because it can be alienated, hoarded and sold, while process knowledge is ineluctably vested in the bodies, minds and relations of workers. No IP law can keep employees from taking process knowledge with them on their way out the door, so bosses want to ban them from leaving:
FTC economists estimated that killing noncompetes would result in $400b in wage gains for the American workforce over the next decade, as good workers migrated to good bosses.
Of course this was challenged by the business lobby, which sued to get the rule overturned. Trump's FTC has not only declined to defend the rule in court, they've also decided to stop trying to enforce it.
Trump is now the king of wage-theft, and MAGA is a relentless engine of enshittification. After all, the thesis of enshittification is that companies make their products and practices worse for suppliers, users and business customers only when they calculate that they can do so without facing punishment – from regulators, competitors, or workers.
Trump's regulators are all either comatose or so captured they wear gimpsuits and leashes in public. They're not keeping companies in line. And his antitrust shops have turned into pay-for-play operations, where a $1m payment to a MAGA influencer gets your case dropped:
Trump neutered the National Labor Relations Board and now he's revived indentured servitude nationwide, formalizing the idea of government-backed jobs you can't quit.
If you can't quit your job or vote our your politicians, why wouldn't your boss or your elected representative just relentless fuck you over? Not merely for sadism's sake (though sadism undoubtedly plays a part here), but simply to make things better for themselves by making things worse for you? It's exactly the same logic of platform lock-in: once you can't leave, they don't have to keep you happy.
Formalizing the legality of noncompetes will only lead to their monotonic spread. When Antonin Scalia greenlit binding arbitration waivers in consumer contracts, only a tiny number of companies used them, forcing customers to sign away their right to sue them no matter how badly, negligently or criminally they behaved. Today, binding arbitration has expanded into every kind of contract, even to the point where groovy, open source, decentralized, federated social media platforms are forcing it on their users:
Same for noncompetes: as private equity rolls up whole sectors – funeral homes, pet groomers, hospices – they will stuff noncompetes into the contracts of every employer in each industry, so no matter where a worker applies for a job, they'll have to sign a noncompete. Why wouldn't they? If workers can't leave, they'll accept worse working conditions and lower pay. The best workers will be stuck with the worst employers.
And despite owing their existence to bans on noncompetes Silicon Valley and Hollywood will happily cram noncompetes down their workers' throats. If you doubt it, just read up on the "no poach" scandal, where the biggest tech and movie companies entered into a criminal conspiracy not to hire away each others' employees:
The conservative future, folks: jobs you can't quit, politicians you can't vote out of office, husbands you can't divorce, and pregnancies you can't prevent or terminate.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Chomp chomp! Two halves of a 13th century English indenture. The same text was written on both halves, then cut (across the word "Cirograffia") so they could be matched should either party later challenge the document.
See the digitized manuscript on our website here: https://bit.ly/3cdNh5O
'1794' by Marcus Rodriguez
Via Flickr:
As winter approaches and the evenings draw in, the lower light levels outside interact differently with the oil lamp to produce a much darker and warmer scene than you get during the lighter part of the year. I love the warmth that oil lamps or candles produce in a scene. (The title — ’1794' comes from the date of the old parchment document, which I managed to catch in the magnifying glass).
'I was sixteen when I came to Fiji. I was unmarried and an orphan; my parents had died in some epidemic. In India I had made a living out of grazing cattle and getting food and a place to stay but no money in. return. I lived a life which was not one of great hardship except when there was sickness about. I used to get sores but there were no doctors there to provide treatment.
I came to Fiji because I was lured. I met a man who asked me if I was looking for work. I answered in the affirmative and he told me that I would have to go by train from place to place carting and unloading goods. When I was offered the job I did not go back to tell anybody, I accepted it. I had nothing, neither money nor kinsmen.
I travelled a day and a night before arriving in Calcutta. There were a lot of people at the depot there; men, women and even children. I stayed there for a week and was examined medically. All one did at the depot was to eat and stay in one’s own place. Blankets were provided for sleeping. There persons of all castes ate and mixed together, unlike in the village where people of different castes ate separately. I was told the distance from Calcutta to Fiji. wanted work and I would have come had I been accurately informed that it was a month’s journey by sea. I was also told that I would get twelve annasa day.
There were around 200 migrants on my ship. I had quite a good trip and did not bet sick. On board we were required to scrub the ship each day. I was busy for about half an hour performing this chore. Some people sang and danced.
Once we reached Fiji I was sent to Cuvu via Lautoka. In Cuvu we were given our work tools. I was set the task of cutting grass, a chain long and a chain wide. In this work of weeding we often pulled out the grass and our hand- used to get cut. If we did not finish our task our money was not paid because we had not completed our work. We also had to dig drains: for this purpose we were paired off, one new and one old hand. The old hand with me refused to show me how to dig drains. The sardar told me that I had made a mess. My shipmate, who made a similar blunder, was given a thrashing by the overseer.
Sardars used to give the task. If we did not complete them thesardars used to give us a rough time. If one could not do one ‘s work, then one got a beating. I was beaten by sardars but never was I able to beat up one of them. I do not recollect anyone on my estate hitting a sardar or an overseer.
There was a South Indian with us. He used to do a lot of singing and dancing but he was not able to work and he used to get a terrible beating from the overseer. So he took off into the bush and hanged himself. I know of two persons who committed suicide because they could not do the work and were regularly beaten by the overseer.
The sardars used to wake us up at 2am. At 3am we had to line up and go to our task. One had to fill up one’s billy-can with food and pick up one’s tools and then move out. They gave us a very rough time in those days.
We used to think of home. But what was the purpose of it. Home was so far away and if we wanted to go we could not because we had no money. I saved no money during my indenture. Besides, in any case I had nobody in India, so for me there was no place or person to return to.
I once stayed in hospital because I had a sore on my leg. I was well treated there. The doctor there suffered hardship sometimes. He often used his own money to feed people.
During week-ends I used to visit time-expired migrants living in the neighbourhood. There were a lot of Indians nearby who were devoted cultivators. And I used to spend a lot of time at my friend’s place. I used to spend all day there and then return in the afternoon to my room. The ‘free’ were very good to us; they used to give us milk, yoghurt and food, in return we used to help these people a little with their work.
When we first saw Fijians we called them junglees. Some of the Indian indentured labourers from the early times used to regard them as such.
We used to get a holiday for Holi but not for Diwali. Those who knew how to read and write sometimes taught us to do likewise.
Hindus and Muslims got on well. They did not fight. There was no conflict over Muslims slaughtering cows. Each person ate his own food. We went to each other’s place and were not concerned about any religious taboos.
Once I was urinating outside the toilet, the overseer,, apparently, caught me in the act through his binoculars from his bungalow. He came down to the stables and called me out. Then he locked me in a room and asked why I had urinated outside and not in the toilet; he then beat me by kicking me all over the place. This is how we suffered during the indenture period.'
http://girmit.org/the-girmitiya-stories/mahadeo/
more about Fiji Indian Indenture: TheIndentureHistory (ig)
it's now been more than 2 weeks since ZOM-FAM has been published.⠀ ⠀ i've spent most of the past 2 weeks hard at work, doing long hours in studio with my team of creative collaborators as we gear up for the premiere of ZOM-FAM, the interdisciplinary solo performance, at @mtlartsinter which is now just 2 weeks away. i haven't quite had the space to process the arrival of this book into the world.⠀ ⠀ i dedicate ZOM-FAM to both my grand-mothers. i haven't known any of them, as they passed away many years before i was born. but i don't think any these stories would have been written if it were not for them, if it were not for the parts of them that live in me. at the core of my trans-feminine identity, at the core of my gender travels lies the spiritual journey of honouring my grandmothers & the parts of them that live inside my breastbone. ⠀ ⠀ the little i know of Rita & Dana-Pakion is that they were two extremely resilient women who lived an endless life of woes & hardship under the colonial regime of plantation life & who died very young of a bruised heart. i can only hope that in writing this poetry, in healing my own femme bruised heart, i have managed to bring some peace & rest to their spirit, to the longings, hauntings & silences that have been passed on from generation to generation within the lineages of my family.⠀ ⠀ i am very happy i wrote this book. this is the book i have dreamed of birthing & i couldn't be more grateful for this 5+ years process. it fills my heart with joy & love, & i can only hope that you will read it too & that it will fill your heart with joy & love as well.⠀ ⠀ i have also been very blessed to have just the right people to accompany me, support me & bear witness along the years. & for that, for all of you, my heart is filled with gratitude 💖 ⠀ #zomfam #poem #poetry #poet #lyric #literature #canlit #storytelling #performance #performer #art #montreal #montrealart #mtlart #queermtl #indenture #mauritius #island #ancestors #queer #qtbipoc #lgbt #gay #transgender #femme #queerart #lamackerel #kamalamackerel #mauritian #gratitude (at Mauritius) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFpCFf4Ame_/?igshid=3t0oqtca4iic
Master: Graves, Daniel. Town of Master: Sunderland.
Fragment with signature of Daniel Greaves, certificate of Sunderland. Selectmen of the town of Sunderland autograph document signed to the Overseers of the Poor of the town of Boston: Endorsement Certificate for Danuel Graves. Second party: Bourne, William, 1724-1770 First party: Boston (Mass.). Overseers of the Poor Date: February 7, 1759
An English 1811 original Indenture on vellum still with wax seals, great piece as a gift for a lawyer , will look amazing framed. Can’t read the whole thing but something about a farm and £ 2000.
Item No. E4563
Dimensions: 28″ x 23″
List Price: $ 175
Please contact LBNO for further information or trade consideration.
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
This is huge: yesterday, the FTC finalized a rule banning noncompete agreements for every American worker. That means that the person working the register at a Wendy's can switch to the fry-trap at McD's for an extra $0.25/hour, without their boss suing them:
The median worker laboring under a noncompete is a fast-food worker making close to minimum wage. You know who doesn't have to worry about noncompetes? High tech workers in Silicon Valley, because California already banned noncompetes, as did Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington.
The fact that the country's largest economies, encompassing the most "knowledge-intensive" industries, could operate without shitty bosses being able to shackle their best workers to their stupid workplaces for years after those workers told them to shove it shows you what a goddamned lie noncompetes are based on. The idea that companies can't raise capital or thrive if their know-how can walk out the door, secreted away in the skulls of their ungrateful workers, is bullshit:
Remember when OpenAI's board briefly fired founder Sam Altman and Microsoft offered to hire him and 700 of his techies? If "noncompetes block investments" was true, you'd think they'd have a hard time raising money, but no, they're still pulling in billions in investor capital (primarily from Microsoft itself!). This is likewise true of Anthropic, the company's major rival, which was founded by (wait for it), two former OpenAI employees.
Indeed, Silicon Valley couldn't have come into existence without California's ban on noncompetes – the first silicon company, Shockley Semiconductors, was founded by a malignant, delusional eugenicist who also couldn't manage a lemonade stand. His eight most senior employees (the "Traitorous Eight") quit his shitty company to found Fairchild Semiconductor, a rather successful chip shop – but not nearly so successful as the company that two of Fairchild's top employees founded after they quit: Intel:
Likewise a lie: the tale that noncompetes raise wages. This theory – beloved of people whose skulls are so filled with Efficient Market Hypothesis Brain-Worms that they've got worms dangling out of their nostrils and eye-sockets – holds that the right to sign a noncompete is an asset that workers can trade to their employers in exchange for better pay. This is absolutely true, provided you ignore reality.
Remember: the median noncompete-bound worker is a fast food employee making near minimum wage. The major application of noncompetes is preventing that worker from getting a raise from a rival fast-food franchisee. Those workers are losing wages due to noncompetes. Meanwhile, the highest paid workers in the country are all clustered in a a couple of cities in northern California, pulling down sky-high salaries in a state where noncompetes have been illegal since the gold rush.
If a capitalist wants to retain their workers, they can compete. Offer your workers get better treatment and better wages. That's how capitalism's alchemy is supposed to work: competition transmogrifies the base metal of a capitalist's greed into the noble gold of public benefit by making success contingent on offering better products to your customers than your rivals – and better jobs to your workers than those rivals are willing to pay. However, capitalists hate capitalism:
Capitalists hate capitalism so much that they're suing the FTC, in MAGA's beloved Fifth Circuit, before a Trump-appointed judge. The case was brought by Trump's financial advisors, Ryan LLC, who are using it to drum up business from corporations that hate Biden's new taxes on the wealthy and stepped up IRS enforcement on rich tax-cheats.
Will they win? It's hard to say. Despite what you may have heard, the case against the FTC order is very weak, as Matt Stoller explains here:
The FTC's statutory authority to block noncompetes comes from Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans "unfair methods of competition" (hard to imagine a less fair method than indenturing your workers). Section 6(g) of the Act lets the FTC make rules to enforce Section 5's ban on unfairness. Both are good law – 6(g) has been used many times (26 times in the five years from 1968-73 alone!).
The DC Circuit court upheld the FTC's right to "promulgate rules defining the meaning of the statutory standards of the illegality the Commission is empowered to prevent" in 1973, and in 1974, Congress changed the FTC Act, but left this rulemaking power intact.
The lawyer suing the FTC – Anton Scalia's larvum, a pismire named Eugene Scalia – has some wild theories as to why none of this matters. He says that because the law hasn't been enforced since the ancient days of the (checks notes) 1970s, it no longer applies. He says that the mountain of precedent supporting the FTC's authority "hasn't aged well." He says that other antitrust statutes don't work the same as the FTC Act. Finally, he says that this rule is a big economic move and that it should be up to Congress to make it.
Stoller makes short work of these arguments. The thing that tells you whether a law is good is its text and precedent, "not whether a lawyer thinks a precedent is old and bad." Likewise, the fact that other antitrust laws is irrelevant "because, well, they are other antitrust laws, not this antitrust law." And as to whether this is Congress's job because it's economically significant, "so what?" Congress gave the FTC this power.
Now, none of this matters if the Supreme Court strikes down the rule, and what's more, if they do, they might also neuter the FTC's rulemaking power in the bargain. But again: so what? How is it better for the FTC to do nothing, and preserve a power that it never uses, than it is for the Commission to free the 35-40 million American workers whose bosses get to use the US court system to force them to do a job they hate?
The FTC's rule doesn't just ban noncompetes – it also bans TRAPs ("training repayment agreement provisions"), which require employees to pay their bosses thousands of dollars if they quit, get laid off, or are fired:
The FTC's job is to protect Americans from businesses that cheat. This is them, doing their job. If the Supreme Court strikes this down, it further delegitimizes the court, and spells out exactly who the GOP works for.
This is part of the long history of antitrust and labor. From its earliest days, antitrust law was "aimed at dollars, not men" – in other words, antitrust law was always designed to smash corporate power in order to protect workers. But over and over again, the courts refused to believe that Congress truly wanted American workers to get legal protection from the wealthy predators who had fastened their mouth-parts on those workers' throats. So over and over – and over and over – Congress passed new antitrust laws that clarified the purpose of antitrust, using words so small that even federal judges could understand them:
After decades of comatose inaction, Biden's FTC has restored its role as a protector of labor, explicitly tackling competition through a worker protection lens. This week, the Commission blocked the merger of Capri Holdings and Tapestry Inc, a pair of giant conglomerates that have, between them, bought up nearly every "affordable luxury" brand (Versace, Jimmy Choo, Michael Kors, Kate Spade, Coach, Stuart Weitzman, etc).
You may not care about "affordable luxury" handbags, but you should care about the basis on which the FTC blocked this merger. As David Dayen explains for The American Prospect: 33,000 workers employed by these two companies would lose the wage-competition that drives them to pay skilled sales-clerks more to cross the mall floor and switch stores:
In other words, the FTC is blocking a $8.5b merger that would turn an oligopoly into a monopoly explicitly to protect workers from the power of bosses to suppress their wages. What's more, the vote was unanimous, include the Commission's freshly appointed (and frankly, pretty terrible) Republican commissioners:
A lot of people are (understandably) worried that if Biden doesn't survive the coming election that the raft of excellent rules enacted by his agencies will die along with his presidency. Here we have evidence that the Biden administration's anti-corporate agenda has become institutionalized, acquiring a bipartisan durability.
And while there hasn't been a lot of press about that anti-corporate agenda, it's pretty goddamned huge. Back in 2021, Tim Wu (then working in the White wrote an executive order on competition that identified 72 actions the agencies could take to blunt the power of corporations to harm everyday Americans:
Biden's agency heads took that plan and ran with it, demonstrating the revolutionary power of technical administrative competence and proving that being good at your job is praxis:
In just the past week, there's been a storm of astoundingly good new rules finalized by the agencies:
A minimum staffing ratio for nursing homes;
The founding of the American Climate Corps;
A guarantee of overtime benefits;
A ban on financial advisors cheating retirement savers;
Medical privacy rules that protect out-of-state abortions;
A ban on junk fees in mortgage servicing;
Conservation for 13m Arctic acres in Alaska;
Classifying "forever chemicals" as hazardous substances;
A requirement for federal agencies to buy sustainable products;
Closing the gun-show loophole.
That's just a partial list, and it's only Thursday.
Why the rush? As Gerard Edic writes for The American Prospect, finalizing these rules now protects them from the Congressional Review Act, a gimmick created by Newt Gingrich in 1996 that lets the next Senate wipe out administrative rules created in the months before a federal election:
In other words, this is more dazzling administrative competence from the technically brilliant agencies that have labored quietly and effectively since 2020. Even laggards like Pete Buttigieg have gotten in on the act, despite a very poor showing in the early years of the Biden administration:
Despite those unpromising beginnings, the DOT has gotten onboard the trains it regulates, and passed a great rule that forces airlines to refund your money if they charge you for services they don't deliver:
The rule also bans junk fees and forces airlines to compensate you for late flights, finally giving American travelers the same rights their European cousins have enjoyed for two decades.
It's the latest in a string of muscular actions taken by the DOT, a period that coincides with the transfer of Jen Howard from her role as chief of staff to FTC chair Lina Khan to a new gig as the DOT's chief of competition enforcement:
Under Howard's stewardship, the DOT blocked the merger of Spirit and Jetblue, and presided over the lowest flight cancellation rate in more than decade:
All that, along with a suite of protections for fliers, mark a huge turning point in the US aviation industry's long and worsening abusive relationship with the American public. There's more in the offing, too including a ban on charging families extra for adjacent seats, rules to make flying with wheelchairs easier, and a ban on airlines selling passenger's private information to data brokers.
There's plenty going on in the world – and in the Biden administration – that you have every right to be furious and/or depressed about. But these expert agencies, staffed by experts, have brought on a tsunami of rules that will make every working American better off in a myriad of ways. Those material improvements in our lives will, in turn, free us up to fight the bigger, existential fights for a livable planet, free from genocide.
It may not be a good time to be alive, but it's a much better time than it was just last week.
And it's only Thursday.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
