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by Steve Coll December 9, 2013

In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine. The restructuring was a common episode in America’s recent experience of inequality. In the decade after 2000, Seattle’s median household income rose by a third, lifted by the stock-vested, Tumi-toting travellers of its tech economy. But at the bottom of the wage scale earnings flattened.

Sea-Tac, the airport serving the Seattle-Tacoma area, lies within SeaTac, a city flecked by poverty. Its population of twenty-seven thousand includes Latino, Somali, and South Asian immigrants. Earlier this year, residents, aided by outside labor organizers, put forward a ballot initiative, Proposition 1, to raise the local minimum wage for some airport and hotel workers, including baggage handlers. The reformers did not aim incrementally: they proposed fifteen dollars an hour, which would be the highest minimum wage in the country, by almost fifty per cent. A ballot initiative so audacious would normally have little chance of becoming law, but Proposition 1 polled well, and by the summer it had turned SeaTac into a carnival of electoral competition. Business groups and labor activists spent almost two million dollars on television ads, mailings, and door knocking—about three hundred dollars per eventual voter. (Alaska Airlines…

CT sc-nw-1016-medical-device-tax MJW

Johnson & Johnson will pay more than $4 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits over its recalled defective hip implants, Bloomberg reported late on Tuesday, citing three people familiar with the deal.

Johnson & Johnson declined to comment on the report.

The deal will resolve more than 7,500 lawsuits brought against J&J’s DePuy orthopedics unit in federal and state courts by patients who have already had the defective devices removed, the report said.

De Puy recalled thousands of its metal ASR hip systems due to higher-than-expected failure rates. Plaintiffs claim that defective metal-on-metal devices caused pain, discomfort and more serous complications, including increased levels of metal ions in the bloodstream.

The devices were introduced in the United States in 2005, and DePuy recalled the product in 2010 after selling an estimated 93,000 units worldwide. Data from the UK at the time showed that about 12 percent of the implants needed to be replaced after five years.

Metal implants were developed to be more durable than traditional hip implants, which combine a ceramic or metal ball with a plastic socket. All-metal implants can shed metallic debris, potentially damaging bone and soft tissue, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Macy’s Inc. (M), whose annual Manhattanparade is a cherished Thanksgiving tradition for millions, isstarting a new holiday ritual: It’s asking its employees to showup for work.

Pressured by competition, a shorter shopping season andlackluster consumer spending, at least a dozen U.S. mega-retailers are opening for the first time on Thanksgiving Day,such as Macy’s, or opening earlier that day than in previousyears. They are following Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest U.S.employer, which has been open for business on Thanksgiving formore than 25 years.

“Another holiday bites the dust in favor of retailers,”Candace Corlett, president of New York consulting firm WSLStrategic Retail, said in a Nov. 12 phone interview. “Ourculture now is to shop, and to get the best deals. Thanksgivingas a day of rest was another culture, another time, not today.”

The expansion of hours will take more than a millionemployees away from their families during the holiday. Organizedlabor has been encouraging low-wage employees to join unions foryears to stem membership losses, and now wants to use theThanksgiving hours to encourage workers to band together toimprove working conditions.

“It plays into the larger themes that we’ve been pushingaround low-wage workers who don’t have a lot of job security,”Amaya Smith, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO, said in aninterview. “Thanksgiving, Black Friday is one example of oneholiday…

A group of irate reviewers have sued Yelp, claiming that they are unpaid writers who are vital to the company’s existence.

The plaintiffs filed a California class action lawsuit in Los Angeles on October 22, referring to themselves as writers and non-wage paid employees at the review site who have earned the company huge sums of money.

“The practice of classifying employees as ‘reviewers’ or ‘Yelpers’ or ‘Elites’ or ‘independent contractors’ or ‘interns’ or ‘volunteers’ or ‘contributors’ to avoid paying wages is prohibited by federal law, which requires employers to pay all workers who provide material benefit to their employer, at least the minimum wage,” the lawsuit reads.

The plaintiffs also claim to have been unjustly “fired” by Yelp when their accounts were suspended, and that they were pressured by the site to write more reviews in order to remain “Elite” Yelpers, a designation the site awards its most active and followed reviewers.

“In order to maintain her ‘Elite’ status, (plaintiff Lily Jeung) was often directed to write more reviews if in Yelp’s opinion her production seemed to slack off,” the lawsuit contends. “Ms. Jeung was fired from her position with no warning, a flimsy explanation, and no opportunity for recourse or appeal rights. Her license to write reviews was revoked; the awards she had attained were taken away;…

On Easter Sunday in 2008, the phantom noises in Robert De Mong’s head dropped in volume — for about 15 minutes. For the first time in months, he experienced relief, enough at least to remember what silence was like. And then they returned, fierce as ever.

It was six months earlier that the 66-year-old electrical engineer first awoke to a dissonant clamor in his head. There was a howling sound, a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard sound, “brain zaps” that hurt like a headache and a high frequency “tinkle” noise, like musicians hitting triangles in an orchestra.

Many have since disappeared, but two especially stubborn noises remain. One he describes as monkeys banging on symbols. Another resembles frying eggs and the hissing of high voltage power lines. He hears those sounds every moment of every day.

De Mong was diagnosed in 2007 with tinnitus, a condition that causes a phantom ringing, buzzing or roaring in the ears, perceived as external noise.

When the sounds first appeared, they did so as if from a void, he said. No loud noise trauma had preceded the tinnitus, as it does for some sufferers — it was suddenly just there. And the noises haunted him, robbed him of sleep and fueled a deep depression. He lost interest in his favorite hobby: tinkering with his ‘78 Trans Am and his two Corvettes. He stopped going into work.

That month, De Mong visited an ear doctor, who told him he had high frequency hearing loss in both ears. Another doctor at the Stanford Ear,…

A Tennessee state senator has been named in court papers as the physician who injected a victim of the fungal meningitis outbreak with the tainted spinal steroid that led to her lengthy illness.

In a suit filed in U.S. District Court, attorneys for Joan M. Peay of Nashville wrote that Dr. Steven Dickerson, a member of the Tennessee Senate, was the one who injected her with the steroid.

Dickerson, who is not named as a defendant in the case, injected Peay with contaminated methylprednisolone acetate on Sept. 7, 2012, at the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgical Center, the 31-page complaint states.

Dickerson, a Nashville Republican serving his first term, has declined to respond to questions about his role at the neurosurgical center.

The Tennessean reported Sunday that records showed Dickerson, who is an anesthesiologist, injected at least two other patients with the same drug at the same clinic in August and September of last year, just before the fungal meningitis outbreak became public.

An aide issued a brief comment late last week stating that Dickerson did not want to comment out of concern for the victims and their privacy.

Like all Nashvillians, Dr. Dickerson is focusing his concerns and thoughts on the well-being of the patients in Tennessee and throughout the United States who developed fungal meningitis, the aide wrote in an email.

The senator did not respond to a second request for comment Tuesday.

The Peay suit was one of several to be filed as a statutory deadline…