Texas Weekly Online

Texas-trans-white
Menu
Menu

Author:

US Senate approves spending stopgap to avert government shutdown

US Senate approves spending stopgap to avert government shutdown

Short-term spending bill averts shutdown of agencies that would have kicked in on Saturday. The United States Congress has approved a short-term spending package to avoid a government shutdown, the fourth such stopgap measure in several months. The bill, which passed the Senate in a bipartisan 77-13 vote, provides funding for some federal government agencies to keep running through March 8 and others through March 22, preventing a shutdown that would have kicked in on Saturday. The funding will avert disruption to numerous government functions, including food safety inspections and air traffic controllers’ pay. US President Joe Biden must now sign the bill for it to become law. “I am happy to inform the American people that there will be no government shutdown on Friday. When we pass this bill, we will have, thank God, avoided a shutdown with all its harmful effects on the American people,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor. The Senate vote came after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives earlier voted to approve the stopgap funding. While the fiscal year began on October 1, Congress has yet to approve 12 annual spending bills that make up the federal budget. House Speaker Mike Johnson said negotiators had reached an agreement on six of the spending bills and were close to an agreement on the others. “We’ll get the job done,” Johnson said as he exited a closed-door meeting with Republican colleagues. Congress faces further battles in the coming weeks over funding levels for many programmes that Republicans want to see scaled back. Johnson had been pressed by hardline Republicans to use a shutdown as a bargaining chip to force Democrats to accept conservative policy priorities, including measures to reduce the flow of undocumented migrants across the US-Mexico border. Chip Roy, a House representative from Texas, said that Republicans in his faction hope to convince Johnson to push a new spending bill that would fund the government until the end of September but cut non-defence spending. “We believe that we could do that. We believe that actually presents a good alternative,” Roy told reporters. Adblock test (Why?)

Facebook owner Meta to stop funding news in Australia

Facebook owner Meta to stop funding news in Australia

Canberra blasts Meta’s decision as a ‘dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability’ of the media industry. Facebook partner company Meta has announced that it will not enter into any new deals to pay news publishers in Australia. To ensure that Meta can “continue to invest in products and services that drive user engagement”, the company will not renew its funding deals with traditional news content and “will not offer new Facebook products specifically for news publishers in the future”, the tech giant said in a blog post on Friday. Meta said the move would not affect existing agreements with publishers until they expire. Meta said it will also shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States in April, following the retirement of the feature last year in the UK, France and Germany. The California-based company said it was making the changes to “better align our investments to our products and services people value the most”. “As a company, we have to focus our time and resources on things people tell us they want to see more of on the platform, including short form video,” it said. “The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the US has dropped by over 80 percent last year. We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content – they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests.” Meta signed deals with numerous traditional media outlets after Australia passed landmark legislation in 2021 requiring tech platforms to pay for the news content shared on their platforms. The introduction of the News Media Bargaining Code, which has been emulated in other jurisdictions including Canada, followed accusations that platforms such as Facebook and Google exploited free news content to hoover precious advertising revenues away from struggling news organisations. Meta’s announcement was immediately criticised by the Australian government. Australian Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and Assistant Treasurer and Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones called Meta’s decision a “dereliction of its commitment to the sustainability of Australian news media”. “The Government has made its expectations clear. The decision removes a significant source of revenue for Australian news media businesses. Australian news publishers deserve fair compensation for the content they provide,” Rowland and Jones said in a joint statement. Rowland and Jones said they would seek advice on the next steps from the treasury and Australia’s competition watchdog. “We will now work through all available options under the News Media Bargaining Code. The government will continue to engage with news publishers and platforms through this process,” Rowland and Jones said. Does @Meta care about journalism at all? Facebook should compensate news organisations for making money from their journalism – if it won’t do it voluntarily, the govt should use the powers it has to force it to. https://t.co/LtlY74vwpi #MEAAmedia — MEAA (@withMEAA) March 1, 2024 The Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, Australia’s biggest union for journalists, questioned whether Meta cares about journalism. “Facebook should compensate news organisations for making money from their journalism – if it won’t do it voluntarily, the govt should use the powers it has to force it to,” the union said in a post on X. Adblock test (Why?)

How India’s Urban Company has soured gig work for women

How India’s Urban Company has soured gig work for women

Bengaluru, India — After years of working at a salon in Bengaluru, Shakeela Banu made a major life change in 2018 and joined Urban Company (UC), an app-based home services platform that has more than 52,000 workers across Indian cities, one-third of whom are women. At first, Banu was happy with the working conditions. Her manager treated her well, she said, and she got plenty of work as a beautician on call. She estimates that she’s worked with 3,000 customers since she joined the company and has turned down many requests from those who would ask for her services privately. It was her way of staying loyal to her employers. However, things have soured since then. Last year, the platform rolled out new rules including that workers maintain ratings of 4.7 or higher out of 5 and accept 70 percent of the job leads, with only four cancellations allowed in a month to avoid getting blocked. Banu was one of many UC workers whose profile was blocked due to “low” ratings. On its blog, the company said that these measures are meant to raise the operating standards for workers and improve customer experience. (There are also plans afoot for stricter rules under which workers will need to accept at least 80 percent of the jobs and only three cancellations will be allowed.) If workers miss these criteria, they receive a warning and need to attend either online or offline sessions to retrain in services where they have received poor ratings. If their metrics don’t improve after that, their profiles are blocked. Retraining online is free, but the workers have to pay a fee, ranging between 6,000 rupees and 15,000 rupees (between about $72 and $180), if they have to train at the UC office. Urban Company relies on a pay-to-work model which asserts that workers are “independent partners” who are being provided with a customer base and professional training they would not otherwise have. The workers incur multiple costs before they qualify for jobs with UC, including training fees, onboarding fees, product fees, and a monthly subscription fee to get a guaranteed quota of jobs, averaging about 50,000 rupees (about $600). Additionally, for every job, UC also takes a commission fee of up to 25 percent in service charges and taxes. Workers are not compensated for travel costs or vehicle rents. Urban Company did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comments. Bad reviews, blockings When UC launched in 2014, workers were attracted to the flexible schedule it offered. In Ghaziabad, Maya Pal, who used to run her own salon, joined UC to get some extra work in 2018. An Urban Company protest in Gurugram, India in July 2023 [Courtesy of AIGWU] “Before, we used to get 60 to 70 jobs every month. Now we get job leads once every two days if we are lucky,” said Pal, who has been working with UC for four years. “Then they ask us to maintain our acceptance rates. If you don’t give us jobs, how do we maintain the rate?” Even after being available on the app for 12 hours, the leads aren’t enough, workers say. “On the app, we have to keep our location turned on. If we move away from our marked location, they stop sending job leads,” said Pal, adding the system requires her to be housebound all day. During the lockdown, Pal had to close her salon. Then she met with a couple of accidents and had to cancel UC jobs. Her ID was blocked for four months. With no other income to support her family, Pal, a single mother of two, pulled her kids out of school. She says that only when UC workers consistently receive five-star reviews on 10 jobs do their ratings improve. It takes one bad review to make it fall again. UC partnered with the Ministry of Finance’s National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) to provide training and digital certification to skilled professionals to help them become micro-entrepreneurs. At the same time, workers have been warned against sharing their phone numbers with their clients and all orders have to be via the UC app. Violations can lead to termination or blocking. “There are seasonal blockings, too,” said Spandan Pratyush, secretary for the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)-NCR, a trade union of all app-based workers in India. “You wouldn’t have seen a lot of blocking … when there was a huge demand around the period of [the Hindu festival] Diwali.” But since then, the blockings increased, workers said. The workers think that the ongoing mass blockings since May 2023 are a step to extract money from new inductees while pruning older workers. “The new workers won’t question the new policies, new rates and whatever conditions have been applied. But older workers who have been working for years under certain conditions, they would obviously object to changes way more,” Pratyush said. All is not going well for the new trainees, either. In Gurugram on the outskirts of capital New Delhi, Deepali Khare interviewed with UC and joined as a trainee beautician in late August. The beautician training at UC costs around 45,000 rupees (about $540), which includes the training fee and money to buy products used during training sessions. Khare agreed to pay this amount in instalments. The training sessions, which started about 9:30am, were supposed to end by 6pm but would go till 9pm. Trainees also had to bring models to practise salon services on and pay for their food and transport. The company did not mention “that we need to get 45 models for 45 days of training”, Khare told Al Jazeera. Then, abruptly, in September, Khare received a message from her trainer that she need not attend more sessions. She was baffled. She had been dropped from training midway without any sort of performance review. Upon repeatedly asking why she’d been dropped, the company said that there were quality issues. “If there are quality issues, why couldn’t they give us more

Texas wildfires: how to help and how to stay safe

Texas wildfires: how to help and how to stay safe

As firefighters work to put out the largest wildfire in Texas history, here’s a guide to fire weather watches, safety tips and how to find organizations collecting donations to directly help local residents, including farmers and ranchers.