05 October 20
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05 October 20
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Suddenly, Amy Coney Barrett Might Not Have the Votes
Russell Bernman, The Atlantic
Bernman writes: "Just over a week later, Trump's Rose Garden event suddenly seems far more ominous, and the idea of Barrett's preelection confirmation is in doubt. What had been a celebration now appears, in retrospect, to have been a super-spreading catastrophe."
For the moment, COVID-19 diagnoses have jeopardized three votes that Republicans can’t afford to lose.
eptember 26 was a festive day for Republicans in Washington. Under overcast skies, President Donald Trump strode to a podium in the White House Rose Garden to introduce Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his nominee to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A military band played “Hail to the Chief,” and about 150 guests, including senior members of the Republican Party, the president’s Cabinet, and the Senate, sat shoulder to shoulder and mostly without masks as they cheered the nomination of a 48-year-old conservative to a lifetime seat.
The mood was upbeat in part because Barrett appeared to have the votes for confirmation before the president ever uttered her name. In the previous few days, Senate Republicans, one after the other, had announced their support for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to ram Trump’s nominee through their chamber in the five weeks before Election Day. Barrett’s confirmation would give conservatives a 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court and a lasting insurance policy in case Trump lost his bid for a second term.
The president is hospitalized with COVID-19, and several infections of high-ranking government and Republican Party officials have been plausibly linked to the event. Among those who have taken ill are the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel; the president’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien; the current and former Trump advisers Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway; and the president of the University of Notre Dame, John Jenkins.
The coronavirus cases that could prove most problematic for the GOP’s chances of confirming Barrett are a trio of Republican senators: Mike Lee of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Lee and Tillis, who both serve on the Judiciary Committee, were at the White House last Saturday and later reported testing positive for the virus, while Johnson said in a statement today that he had been exposed to the virus in D.C. later in the week.
Republicans have a 53–47 majority in the Senate, but two of their members, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have said they oppose holding a vote to confirm a Supreme Court justice before the election. The Senate isn’t expected to hold a final vote until the end of the month, but were Lee, Tillis, and Johnson to be absent, Republicans wouldn’t have a majority to approve her without the support of Collins and Murkowski. (All 47 Democrats are likely to vote no, in part out of anger that McConnell plans to jam a nominee through after he refused to hold a vote on President Barack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland in 2016.)
It’s also possible that more Republican senators will come down with the virus in the next few days; multiple GOP lawmakers are now quarantining after having been exposed to their colleagues or others who are infected. Unlike the House of Representatives, which changed its rules because of the pandemic to allow lawmakers to cast votes remotely, senators must be physically present on the floor to vote.
McConnell has made no secret of the fact that his top priority in the coming weeks is to confirm Barrett, at seemingly any cost. Republicans have said a full Supreme Court might be needed to decide election-related cases, and in a further signal of his intentions, the majority leader said he discussed Barrett’s confirmation during a phone call with the hospitalized president today. He also announced that the Senate would recess for the next two weeks—a move apparently designed to protect his members from further exposure inside the Capitol and ensure that his conference is healthy enough to vote on Barrett before the election. At the same time, he and Senator Lindsey Graham, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, announced that even though the full Senate would be out of town, Barrett’s confirmation hearings would take place as scheduled beginning October 12. Under the Senate’s pandemic rules, Lee and Tillis could participate virtually if they were not cleared to attend in person.
Senate Democrats immediately protested, writing in a letter to Graham that “to proceed at this juncture with a hearing to consider Judge Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court threatens the health and safety of all those who are called upon to do the work of this body.” Yet the Democrats don’t have the votes, alone, to block her nomination until after the election.
The crucial step for Republicans is likely not the hearings but the committee vote, which requires senators to be physically present to achieve a quorum, according to Sarah Binder, an expert on congressional procedure at the Brookings Institution. If Lee and Tillis weren’t there, Democrats could boycott the hearing and block the vote. But Graham and McConnell could delay a committee vote until a few days before the full Senate vote at the end of the month, buying Lee and Tillis more time to recover. McConnell could try other options, such as replacing Lee and Tillis on the Judiciary Committee, or bypassing the panel entirely, but each of those would require majority votes on the Senate floor that he might struggle to win.
Until the past few days, the Democrats’ hopes of stopping Barrett’s nomination rested on a likely futile effort to shame GOP senators out of exercising the full weight of their power to cement a durable conservative majority on the Court. Republicans are trying to accelerate her nomination because they know Trump could lose the election, and their chances of cobbling together enough votes in a lame-duck session after Americans have rejected their party leader would be dicier still.
Republicans, however, now face a more complicated path to a Supreme Court confirmation, one imperiled by their own laxity toward the pandemic. Lee, Tillis, and Johnson might well recover in time to vote for Amy Coney Barrett (and the Senate COVID-19 outbreak could stop with them). But for the moment, although Barrett has the support of Republicans to win a seat on the Supreme Court, she doesn’t have the votes.
(photo: Carlos Vargas/AP)
ALSO SEE: 'This Is Insanity': Walter Reed Physician
Among Critics of Trump Drive-By Visit
Trump Declares 'I Get It,' Then Briefly Leaves Hospital for Infectious Joy Ride
Jill Colvin, Steve Peoples and Zeke Miller, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Infected and contagious, President Donald Trump briefly ventured out in a motorcade on Sunday to salute cheering supporters, a move that disregarded precautions meant to contain the deadly virus that has forced his hospitalization and killed more than 209,000 Americans."
Hours earlier, Trump’s medical team reported that his blood oxygen level dropped suddenly twice in recent days and that they gave him a steroid typically only recommended for the very sick. Still, the doctors said Trump’s health is improving and that he could be discharged as early as Monday.
With one month until Election Day, Trump was eager to project strength despite his illness. The still-infectious president surprised supporters who had gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, driving by in a black SUV with the windows rolled up. Secret Service agents inside the vehicle could be seen in masks and other protective gear.
The move capped a weekend of contradictions that fueled confusion about Trump’s health, which has imperiled the leadership of the U.S. government and upended the final stages of the presidential campaign. While Trump’s physician offered a rosy prognosis on his condition, his briefings lacked basic information, including the findings of lung scans, or were quickly muddled by more serious assessments of the president's health by other officials.
In a short video released by the White House on Sunday, Trump insisted he understood the gravity of the moment. But his actions moments later, by leaving the hospital and sitting inside the SUV with others, suggested otherwise.
“This is insanity,” Dr. James P. Phillips, an attending physician at Walter Reed who is a critic of Trump and his handling of the pandemic. “Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die.”
“For political theater,” the doctor added. “Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater.”
White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump’s trip outside the hospital “was cleared by the medical team as safe to do.” He added that precautions were taken, including using personal protective equipment, to protect Trump as well as White House officials and Secret Service agents.
Joe Biden’s campaign, meanwhile, said the Democratic presidential nominee again tested negative for coronavirus Sunday. The results come five days after Biden spent more than 90 minutes on the debate stage with Trump. Biden, who has taken a far more cautious approach to in-person events, had two negative tests on Friday.
For his part, Trump still faces questions about his health.
His doctors sidestepped questions on Sunday about exactly when Trump’s blood oxygen dropped — an episode they neglected to mention in multiple statements the day before — or whether lung scans showed any damage.
It was the second straight day of obfuscation from a White House already suffering from a credibility crisis. And it raised more doubts about whether the doctors treating the president were sharing accurate, timely information with the American public about the severity of his condition.
Pressed about conflicting information he and the White House released on Saturday, Navy Cmdr. Dr. Sean Conley acknowledged that he had tried to present a sunnier description of the president’s condition.
“I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, that his course of illness has had. Didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” Conley said. “And in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true. The fact of the matter is that he’s doing really well.”
Medical experts said Conley’s revelations were hard to square with his positive assessment and talk of a discharge.
“There’s a little bit of a disconnect,” said Dr. Steven Shapiro, chief medical and scientific officer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
According to CDC guidelines, “In general, transport and movement of a patient with suspected or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection outside of their room should be limited to medically essential purposes.”
Even before Trump's motorcade outing on Sunday, some Secret Service agents have expressed concern about the lackadaisical attitude toward masks and social distancing inside the White House, but there isn’t much they can do, according to agents and officials who spoke to The Associated Press. This close to the election, thousands of agents are engaged on protective duty so they can be subbed out quickly should someone test positive.
The disclosures about Trump's oxygen levels and steroid treatment suggested the president is enduring more than a mild case of COVID-19.
Blood oxygen saturation is a key health marker for COVID-19 patients. A normal reading is between 95 and 100. Conley said the president had a “high fever” and a blood oxygen level below 94% on Friday and during “another episode” on Saturday.
He was evasive about the timing of Trump oxygen drops. (“It was over the course of the day, yeah, yesterday morning,” he said) and asked whether Trump’s level had dropped below 90%, into concerning territory. (“We don’t have any recordings here on that.”) But he revealed that Trump was given a dose of the steroid dexamethasone in response.
At the time of the briefing, Trump’s blood oxygen level was 98% — within normal rage, Trump’s medical team said.
Signs of pneumonia or other lung damage could be detected in scans before a patient feels short of breath, but the president’s doctors declined to say what those scans have revealed.
“There’s some expected findings, but nothing of any major clinical concern,” Conley said. He declined to outline those “expected findings.”
Asked about Conley’s lack of transparency, White House aide Alyssa Farah suggested the doctors were speaking as much to the president as to the American public, “when you’re treating a patient, you want to project confidence, you want to lift their spirits, and that was the intent.”
In all, nearly 7.4 million people have been infected in the United States, and few have access to the kind of around-the-clock attention and experimental treatments as Trump.
Trump’s treatment with the steroid dexamethasone is in addition to the single dose he was given Friday of an experimental drug from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. that supplies antibodies to help the immune system fight the virus. Trump on Friday also began a five-day course of remdesivir, a Gilead Sciences drug currently used for moderately and severely ill patients. The drugs work in different ways — the antibodies help the immune system rid the body of virus, and remdesivir curbs the virus’ ability to multiply.
Garibaldi, a specialist in pulmonary critical care, said the president was not showing any side effects of the drugs “that we can tell.”
The National Institutes of Health COVID-19 treatment guidelines recommend against using dexamethasone in patients who do not require oxygen. It has only been proven to help in more serious cases. Among the concerns with earlier use is that steroids tamp down certain immune cells, hindering the body’s own ability to fight off infection.
Trump is 74 years old and clinically obese, putting him at higher risk of serious complications.
First lady Melania Trump has remained at the White House as she recovers from her own bout with the virus.
Several White House officials this weekend expressed frustration with the level of transparency and public disclosure since the president announced his diagnosis early Friday.
They were particularly upset by the whiplash between Conley’s upbeat assessment Saturday and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ more concerned outlook. They privately acknowledge that the administration has little credibility on COVID-19 and that they have unnecessarily squandered what remains of it with the lack of clear, accurate updates on Trump’s condition.
Many in the White House are also shaken and scared — nervous that they have been exposed to the virus and confronting the reality that what seemed like a bubble of safety has become a COVID-19 hot spot. It took until late Sunday for the White House to send a generic note to staffers suggesting they not come to the building if they do not feel well.
REMOVING SCIENCE!
New York City students attend school during the pandemic. The Trump administration has been pushing for schools to reopen for in-person education. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Trump Official Pressured CDC to Change Report on Covid and Kids
Dan Diamond, Politico
Diamond writes: "That request - issued by then-public affairs official Paul Alexander - came amid President Donald Trump's broader push to reopen schools, with the president issuing demands on Twitter the prior day that 'Democrats, OPEN THE SCHOOLS (SAFELY),' and holding a press conference that touted data on the relatively low risk of Covid-19 for children."
Amid Trump’s push to reopen schools, Michael Caputo’s science adviser asked that the health agency alter its warning about a study of pediatric coronavirus.
n early September, as many school districts were still deciding whether to hold in-person classes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention altered the title of a scientific report on the coronavirus and removed words like "pediatric" from its text, days after a Trump administration appointee requested similar changes, according to emails obtained by POLITICO.
"On schools, as part of our science-based approach, we want schools to safely open and stay open," Trump told reporters on Sept. 10. "Children are at extremely low risk of complications from the virus."
The Sept. 11 email exchange between Alexander and other officials centered on an embargoed CDC bulletin set to publish the following week and which Alexander — an unpaid assistant professor at Canada’s McMaster University who was recruited by longtime Trump operative Michael Caputo — said contained faulty science. For instance, defining teenagers aged 18 and older as "pediatric" patients was "misleading," Alexander wrote to Charlotte Kent, the editor-in-chief of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. Alexander also said that the document wrongly conflated the risks of the coronavirus to young children and older adolescents, urging Kent to make multiple changes to the document.
Alexander's requests — the latest in a series of demands — set off new concerns inside CDC, which was already reeling from Alexander's efforts to retroactively alter several reports or halt the MMWR process altogether. The reports are sent to researchers, physicians and hospitals to update them on the latest medical guidance and findings. The study in question addressed the death rates of Covid-19 among the pediatric population; CDC has frequently used the term "pediatric" to refer to the population under age 21, in line with how the American Academy of Pediatrics defines the term.
Alexander's requests also complicated Kent's own efforts to change the report after she said career civil servants made similar suggestions, according to an email exchange that CDC shared with POLITICO.
"[I]f we change the title and how the cases are described, there could be an erroneous perception that we are being influenced," Kent wrote on Sept. 14 to Anne Schuchat, the CDC's no. 2 official and the agency's top civil servant.
The final version of the CDC's report, published on Sept. 15, contained revisions approved by career officials like Schuchat but also in line with those sought by Alexander. For instance, the report's title was changed to remove the words "Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults" and replace them with "Persons." Meanwhile, the word "pediatric," which had appeared three times in the draft summary, did not appear in the published version of the equivalent paragraph, among other changes in the final version.
“Careful monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 infections, deaths, and other severe outcomes among persons aged <21 years remains particularly important as schools reopen in the United States,” according to the published report. The draft version of that sentence, reviewed by POLITICO, used the words “children, adolescents, and young adults” instead of “persons.”
The report went on to break down health and demographic data about young people who died of Covid-19.
The episode is the latest example of how Trump appointees' interference has rippled across the health department — and how even when career experts can find common ground with political officials, they have been tainted by the unprecedented efforts to shape their findings.
One current and two former CDC officials who reviewed the email exchange between Alexander and Kent said they were troubled by the intervention to alter scientific reports viewed as untouchable prior to the Trump administration. The resulting changes also appeared to minimize the risks of the coronavirus to children by making the report’s focus on children less clear, two individuals said.
Alexander’s emails on the CDC’s bulletins are also a further indication of how administration officials have mounted a concerted effort to play down language about the risks of the coronavirus to children. White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx separately pressed the CDC to adjust its guidance to reopen schools, The New York Times reported last week.
Alexander, who left HHS on Sept. 16, did not respond to a request for comment. An HHS spokesperson distanced the department from Alexander, saying that his role had been "temporary" and pointing to his recent departure. HHS Secretary Alex Azar told a congressional committee on Friday that he did not support Alexander's harshly worded demands to edit the reports.
POLITICO first reported that Alexander and other Trump appointees were seeking to alter and even halt the CDC's reports, alleging that the MMWR bulletins were deliberating undermining Trump’s claims about the virus' risks. Alexander also spent months pushing government scientists to minimize the risks of the coronavirus in children, including attempting to muzzle infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci from speaking publicly about those risks.
CDC defended the revisions to the MMWR as science-based. Kent said in a statement that the changes were made based on an "internal clearance process, not based on any comments from outside CDC."
"This wording issue was flagged by CDC scientific reviewers as part of the routine internal clearance process for MMWR reports," she said in a statement. "They noted, and MMWR editorial staff agreed, that the change should be made for clarity and to make the wording consistent with other scientific characterizations of age."
One current and two former CDC officials said they did not agree with the decision to remove words like "children" and "adolescents" from the title in favor of the vaguer "persons." For instance, the new title would make it harder to find the report when scientists searched for data on the risks of the coronavirus to children — and that some scientists might skip by it altogether, said two of the individuals.
They also unanimously raised concerns about why Alexander — who had served as Caputo’s hand-picked science adviser before Caputo went on medical leave Sept. 16 — was requesting changes in the scientific bulletin.
"The unusual thing is that he's having a discussion directly with the MMWR editor-in-chief," said a former CDC official with knowledge of the MMWR process, adding that the journal editor was historically protected from directly interfacing with political appointees outside of CDC.
The CDC has spent decades maintaining a firewall around the MMWR reports, which officials said is intended to protect its scientists from political pressures. Three former editors-in-chief of the MMWR reports warned last month that even the implication of political pressure could tarnish the famed journals' influence and scientists' trust in the findings. The reports are influential in shaping global public health strategies. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert, has credited a 1981 MMWR that broke the news of HIV with changing the shape of his career.
But before he left the health department, Alexander had sent emails haranguing Kent and CDC Director Robert Redfield, attacking the MMWR process and demanding that he be allowed to edit the reports prior to publication.
The bulletins are "constantly reporting incompletely and writing in a manner to make the nation run and dig a hole and climb inside with their children for 10 years," Alexander wrote to Kent, Redfield and other officials on Aug. 8, in an email obtained by POLITICO. "It makes no sense. It is meant to [deceive]."
After POLITICO first reported Alexander's interventions last month, sparking widespread concern from scientists and others in the public health community, Redfield insisted that political appointees’ demands had not shaped the reports.
"At no time has the scientific integrity of the MMWR been compromised," Redfield testified in a Senate hearing on Sept. 16. "And I can say that under my watch it will not be compromised."
But current and former CDC officials have said the agency is already facing regular pressure that threatens to compromise its operations.
“CDC science should not be undermined nor the voices of its experts muted, or our nation will suffer a crisis of confidence and trust that will continue to hamper our recovery from this pandemic,” Richard Besser, the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the former acting CDC director, wrote in the Scientific American last month. “We cannot let this happen.”
Kenneth and Bryan Woodington kiss on arrival back in Florida. (photo: US Navy)
The "Proud Boys" Hashtag Has Been Taken Over by Gay Love
Emma Powys Maurice, Pink News
Maurice writes: "The Proud Boys hashtag has been reclaimed by the LGBT+ community to drown out the racism and flood the internet with images of beautiful, queer love."
Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky. (photo: Inc42)
Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You
Ken Armstrong, Justin Elliott and Ariana Tobin, ProPublica
Excerpt: "These American workers - cheap, disposable and isolated - worked through a company called Arise Virtual Solutions, a little-known business that has helped some of America's best-known businesses shed labor costs."
Arise Virtual Solutions, part of the secretive world of work-at-home customer service, helps large corporations shed costs at the expense of workers. Now the pandemic is creating a boom in the industry.
irbnb, battered by the pandemic recession, announced in May that it would be laying off a quarter of its workforce. In a post hailed for its empathy and transparency, CEO Brian Chesky wrote, “We will have to part with teammates that we love and value.” He outlined a generous severance package. Departing employees would receive 14 weeks of pay plus an extra week for each year at the company; help from professional recruiters to land new jobs; and 12 months of continued health insurance.
Around the time Chesky made this announcement, another group of people working with Airbnb also lost their jobs. But these weren’t called layoffs and weren’t accompanied by a compassionate note from the CEO. And the workers, who handle the day-to-day tasks of bookings, cancellations and keeping the peace between guests and hosts, got no severance. There was no health insurance plan to be extended.
You may not have heard of Arise, but chances are, you’ve talked to an Arise agent — perhaps when you thought you were talking to a Comcast employee about a bill or a Disney employee about a reservation. Arise lines up customer service agents who work from home. It then sells this network of agents to blue-chip corporations.
Arise and most of its corporate clients consider preserving the secrecy of this arrangement to be vital. An Arise company manual says, “The confidentiality of information related to Arise and its clients must be maintained forever.” Arise’s agents are forbidden from publicly identifying the brand-name companies whose customers’ calls they answer. Even commiserating in a private Facebook group, they avoid typing out Airbnb, opting instead for rather flimsy code. The “bed and breakfast client,” some write. One used “sky bnb.”
Arise’s workers not only don’t work for its clients, they also don’t officially work for Arise. Like Uber drivers or TaskRabbit gofers, they are independent contractors. To get gigs, they first absorb substantial expense, paying for their own equipment and training, and then have fees deducted from every paycheck for the “use” of Arise’s “platform.”
Arise has faced, and lost, legal challenges alleging that its arrangements with agents violate federal labor law and cheat workers of what they are rightfully owed. One judge called the arrangement an “elaborate construct” created by Arise to get around labor law. Nevertheless Arise has been able to avoid altering its model in any significant way, aided in part by a 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court, written by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch.
Arise not only creates separation between its corporate clients and individual agents, it also allows those companies to quickly add or subtract workers. In March, Instacart needed all kinds of agents. By May, those jobs had largely disappeared. “I was there for a week. We’re disposable,” one Florida agent dropped from Instacart assignments told ProPublica.
The “biggest benefit” Arise provides is to help companies “squeeze wastage out of a typical workday,” as John Meyer, a former Arise CEO once explained to a trade publication. Meyer, who has remarked that “business is sports for adults,” said that “a typical employee has a utilization rate of 65 percent because you’re paying for their lunch, breaks, and training.” Without that “low utilization” and other overhead, Arise costs up to 30% less than a traditional call center, Meyer said.
With American roots going back to the 1990s, Arise’s list of corporate clients, past and present, includes not only Airbnb, Comcast, Instacart and Disney, but also Amazon, Apple and AT&T. There’s also Barnes & Noble, eBay, Intuit, Home Depot, Staples, Princess Cruises, Peloton, Signet Jewelers, Virgin Atlantic and Walgreens. It is now owned by Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm where former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is president.
Arise has been a pioneer in driving two currents roiling the American labor market. Ever more people are working from home, and workers are increasingly treated as independent contractors, stripped of the right to minimum wage, overtime and other legal protections provided to employees.
The pandemic has accelerated these forces. Many physical call centers have closed but companies still need someone to answer their customers’ calls, chats and emails, a need answered by Arise and its peer companies like Liveops, NexRep and Working Solutions. The work-from-home customer service business, in which an estimated 500,000 Americans worked even before the pandemic, is booming.
For this story, ProPublica obtained transcripts of arbitration hearings, financial slides, corporate contracts and other records that provide an unusually close look at Arise, a major player in this underground industry. Arise requires agents to sign nondisclosure agreements as a condition of working, but ProPublica was able to interview dozens of former or current agents and employees at Arise’s corporate headquarters.
Arise executives declined to be interviewed for this story, as did Meyer, the former CEO. In legal proceedings, Arise has consistently said that it follows the law and that its practices are “transparent every step of the way.” The company provided ProPublica a written statement that said Arise’s system was a boon for those who work through it, people it calls “Service Partners.”
“The Arise® Platform is not necessarily a guarantee of success — the work can present challenges like any other, and it can be dependent on demand like many independent contractor arrangements — but it offers significant flexibility” for its customer service agents, the statement said. “In our 25-year history, our platform and the opportunities it provides have overwhelmingly shown positive outcomes for Service Partners who use the Arise® Platform to do the meaningful work they love and choose to do.”
ProPublica reached out to 38 corporations that have contracted with Arise over the years. After being contacted by ProPublica and asked about Arise’s labor practices, Signet, the corporation that owns Zales, Kay and Jared jewelers, “paused” its relationship with Arise “pending further due diligence,” according to a company statement that noted almost all of Signet’s customer service agents are in-house.
The vast majority of the corporations either didn’t respond or declined to answer our questions. From Home Depot: “We ... don’t have anything to add here.” From Airbnb: “We do not have additional comment here.”
Arise isn’t so reticent when talking itself up to potential clients. In a webinar this spring, CEO Scott Etheridge talked about Arise’s explosive growth during the pandemic. In April the company saw a surge of new agents, bringing its network up to 70,000. Arise, Etheridge said, is “changing the way the world works.”
Between 400 and 740 Seconds
After paying about $1,500 for home office equipment: a computer, two headsets and a phone line dedicated to Arise; after paying Arise to run a check on her background; after passing Arise’s voice-assessment test and signing Arise’s nondisclosure form; after paying for and passing Arise’s introductory training, to which she devoted three days, unpaid; after paying for and passing a certification course to provide customer service for Arise client AT&T, to which she devoted 44 unpaid days; after then being informed she had to get more training yet — an additional 10 days, for which she was told she would be paid, but wasn’t; and then, after finally getting a chance to sign up for hours and do work for which she would be paid (except for her time spent waiting for technical support, or researching customer issues, or huddling with supervisors), Tami Pendergraft spent three weeks fielding telephone calls from AT&T customers, after which she received a single paycheck.
For $96.12.
To understand what happened to Pendergraft, picture a hanging chain. The first link, at the top, is a big company with many customers who have questions about their bill or some product or service. This big company contracts with Arise, the second link. Arise contracts with smaller businesses, the third link. These small businesses are often a lone person who incorporated because Arise’s business model demanded yet another corporate layer. They contract with an agent — such as Pendergraft — who is the fourth and bottom link. So the agent assisting the big company’s customers doesn’t work for the big company: she is three links removed.
For playing the middle link, Arise charges both sides: the corporate clients, who often pay millions, and the network of workers, composed overwhelmingly of women and people of color.
To prospective agents, Arise touts that you can “be your own boss,” as its website says. “Set your own schedule.” “No commute, no suit!” Arise targets its pitch to those who might have limited mobility or options: stay-at-home mothers, caretakers, military spouses or people with physical disabilities. Some agents do find freedom and a reliable source of income. Arise has produced several videos of business owners praising the platform. The president of Girlicity, which, according to its blog, is Arise’s largest business partner, praised the company in a video as “a perfect fit.”
But often people discover that despite the layers of legal paperwork between them, the brand-name company at the top can still retain strict control over agents at the bottom. Rigid workplace formulas often govern everything from length of calls to frequency of refunds. Deviate from these standards and an agent can lose her job.
Control over the agents in Arise’s network can extend beyond work-performance measures. Some contracts require agents to work a set number of weekends and holidays. In multiple contracts reviewed by ProPublica, Arise reserved the right to make agents submit to drug testing “at any time.” And one former agent, testifying in an arbitration hearing, said: “Arise sent two instructors to my home, to audit my home. I’m not sure exactly what they were looking for, but they checked my ID. They looked around, too. They took a look at my internet connection.”
And the work often isn’t as lucrative as people hope. Many agents find that the pay, after the cost of training and fees to Arise, dips well below minimum wage.
When Tami Pendergraft first heard of Arise, it was 2012. She was in her 40s and unemployed. She had attended college in Missouri and gone on to live in Houston. For 20-plus years, she had worked in information technology sales. Then she hurt her back and sought work from home. Arise offered her that chance. It was her first job in customer service.
Pendergraft, citing her nondisclosure form with Arise, declined to be interviewed for this story. But her account can be found in arbitration hearing transcripts.
Pendergraft testified that she put in “50, 55” unpaid hours a week during the AT&T training, which cost her $199. “Practice, practice, practice, practice,” instructors told trainees, who had to pass a succession of tests to keep moving on. Her class — or “wave,” as each was called — had about 60 people at the start. All paid to take the course. Only half finished. They did not get their money back.
Once Pendergraft was certified, she was obligated to work at least 20 hours a week. But come her turn to sign up for shifts, “there would be nothing left,” she said. Any slots available to her were chopped up, “30 minutes here, 30 minutes there. It was all broken up.” She realized she couldn’t have a life and meet her contractual requirements. When she did get hours, she was paid for time talking, not waiting, even though she was tethered to her computer and headset: “Sometimes I wouldn’t get a call for 30, 40 minutes, sometimes an hour, and I’d just have to sit there.”
Disgusted, Pendergraft quit.
“I felt like I did my part in good faith,” she testified, but “nobody really cared.”
Then she sued.
Around the country, other agents did, too, joining federal class-action lawsuits filed against Arise in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2016.
A woman from Douglasville, Georgia, filed a declaration saying her initial Arise training had cost her approximately one week and $99. She then worked with six companies that contracted with Arise. To be eligible for each gig, she paid an upfront training fee, and for each, her training time was unpaid. She approximated the training commitments and fees:
- Jewelry TV: one week; $50
- Sears: 30 days; $200
- Walgreens: 30 days; $159
- TurboTax: 30 days; $59
- Rogers (a Canadian telecom): six weeks; $279
- AT&T: 90 days; $179
Added up, she had spent about $1,000 for about eight months of training, unpaid.
A woman in Orange County, Florida, reported working 117.5 hours in one two-week period. That would have entitled her to 37.5 hours of time-and-a-half overtime — if she were an employee. But since she was labeled an independent contractor, there was no OT.
This same agent had signed with Arise in 2015 to help AT&T customers with questions about bills, rate plans and other matters. Her contract listed 25 performance measures that she had to meet:
Her Average Handle Time, the industry term for average length of call, had to fall between 6 minutes, 40 seconds and 12 minutes, 20 seconds. Commitments to get back to a customer to resolve a particularly complicated issue had to be kept at or below 0.5% of the calls. If she put a customer on hold, the average hold time had to remain below 30 seconds. She could offer a credit on a customer’s bill no more than once per 15 calls, and if she determined a customer was indeed owed money, any refunds or deductions had to average less than $2.50 per call.
Failure to meet any one of these 25 requirements “shall be deemed a breach,” the contract said, allowing Arise to terminate her job.
An agent who worked in Florida testified that he answered calls from customers for Barnes & Noble. Someone hired by Arise would listen to some of the agent’s calls and then send him a scorecard — with 40 items.
Did the agent express genuine interest in helping? If so, he received 3.75 points. If he provided “complete information,” he received 7.1429 points. If he “kept control of the call,” he got 2.857143 points. He received one bonus point for addressing the caller by name and two bonus points if he used an “empathetic statement.”
While Arise declined to comment on specific cases, the company said in its statement that it doesn’t mislead any prospective agents: “The Arise® Platform is built on the basis of transparency and freedom of choice. How the platform works and the specific requirements and needs of each opportunity are clearly laid out every step of the way.”
For corporate clients, the arrangement offers contractual distance without loss of control. Arise also provides assurance that American consumers will hear American voices on the line’s other end, helping to reverse the exportation of call center jobs to places like the Philippines.
At an industry conference in February, Intuit’s top customer service executive noted that the company had had trouble achieving its “cost goals” in the pre-pandemic context of low unemployment and rising wages.
The solution was an army of workers — not employees — provided by Arise and several peer firms. Internal documents obtained by ProPublica show the level of control Intuit has over call agents, even when they’re three contract hops away. Intuit provides the training materials that Arise and other contractors distribute to agents. Intuit staffers receive, in return, detailed performance data showing, for example, the percentage of “non-talk time,” or NTT, on each agent’s calls. The higher the NTT, the worse the agent’s performance, in the view of Intuit. Much of the data is generated automatically by analytics software, and Intuit staffers can also listen to audio of any call. Some agents, according to a former Intuit employee, figured out a clever way to fool the software: They would turn up their TV so there wasn’t much NTT.
If a particular agent isn’t doing well, the agent can be, in Intuit’s parlance, “deskilled,” according to the former Intuit staffer. That means fired. Intuit documents lay out “Deskillable Behaviors” that include “patterns of excessively short calls” and incorrectly categorizing calls. “1st Violation = Warning,” an Intuit document says. “2nd Violation = Deskilling/Removal.”
Intuit ultimately built an outsourced customer service workforce of more than 20,000. That’s more than double Intuit’s employee workforce. The company shifted from under 10% to over 65% work-at-home labor for its customer service, said Balakarthik Venkataramanan, Intuit’s director of global partner management. Most of the agents who work from home are contractors. Intuit was able to cut its customer service costs by more than 15% in just a few years, even as its needs increased, he said.
An Intuit spokesman did not respond to questions about Arise’s labor practices. The company said in a statement its vendors are responsible for their workers.
Arise can’t assign regular schedules to individual agents because they’re not officially employees. So to guarantee it can deliver the labor force that corporate clients are paying for, the company over-recruits agents for each client, a former Arise executive told ProPublica. That way, the former executive said, “when the need comes, you have people with extra capacity lying around.” For the agents, that means spending hundreds of dollars on training equipment and fees and potentially never getting enough hours to make the investment worth it.
Arise began in the late 1980s in Toronto as Willow Corp., founded by serial entrepreneur Richard Cherry, who has authored several books including “Money NOW Safely: Ka-Ching!” and “The Silver Bullet Obesity Terminator.” He believed he could unlock a workforce of people with disabilities to answer customer service calls from home.
By the mid 1990s, Willow went belly up and Cherry and his wife relaunched in Florida. An early client was the Home Shopping Network. Early investors included media mogul Barry Diller and the Hunt family of Texas.
Over time, Willow, which eventually changed its name to Arise, gained traction. Virgin Atlantic, JetBlue and Staples became customers. In 2006, “Good Morning America” featured the company in a segment on moms working from home. In 2009, the CEO was invited to a jobs summit at the White House where she received a personal shoutout from President Barack Obama.
Arise is privately held, so its finances are not public. But a 2017 confidential slide deck obtained by ProPublica shows quarterly revenue of $40 million and a gross profit margin of nearly 30%. Intuit, Carnival, Disney and Comcast were among the largest revenue generators.
Arise was acquired last year by Warburg Pincus, the New York private equity firm. A report the firm published this year said it seeks, in its investments, to “support the payment of competitive wages and benefits to employees.” A spokeswoman for Warburg Pincus declined to comment.
“Mouse Client”
If a customer with a question about Intuit’s TurboTax software had reached out for help in the fall of 2018, the agent who answered might have been Krystin Davenport. The customer, seeing Davenport on video chat, would not have known she was working from home. She wore a white polo shirt and sat in front of a TurboTax-blue screen that she attached to the back of her chair. Nor would the customer have known she wasn’t an employee of Intuit. By design she was far removed, working at the end of a chain that went from Intuit Inc., in Mountain View, California, to Arise Virtual Solutions Inc., in Miramar, Florida, to Client Virtual Solutions LLC, incorporated in Nevada, to Davenport, who lived in Las Vegas.
The job paid $12 an hour and allowed Davenport to stay home with her two kids, who took classes online. The trainers at Arise had made the job sound fun. “They were saying as long as you’re wearing your polo shirt, you can rock out in pajamas if you wanted to,” Davenport told ProPublica. “That was basically how they were advertising it, making it sound, like, so cool.”
Part of Arise’s value to its corporate clients is in making itself invisible. Arise training materials say that most Arise clients — that is, the big companies — “do not want their customers to know that the handling of the call has been outsourced or that it is being answered in someone’s home.” To the caller, it must appear the agent is working “from a professional office environment,” with no dog barking, no baby crying, no mower mowing. The training materials advise agents to consider investing in carpet and a solid-core door to muffle sound.
Arise agents take this seriously. In private online forums they discuss their preferred lies for why their pretend call center seems so silent. One agent tells callers she works in the back, where it’s quiet. Some agents use manufactured sound to drown out the sounds of home: a whirring fan, a space heater’s hum or white noise, courtesy of Google Home or Alexa. Some learn the weather each day wherever it is they’re pretending to be, in case it comes up with a caller. Some even turn to YouTube and play a long recording of a call center’s background noise.
The most important secret that agents must keep is the identity of the companies that use Arise. Beyond “skybnb,” agents adopt code names such as “Diva Cruise” for Princess Cruises and “The Fruit” for Apple. Some code names create confusion among agents when autocorrect does its thing, turning “Funship” (Carnival Cruise Line) into “Gunship.”
Yvonne Corder worked as an agent with Arise for seven years, through 2016. She helped Disney (code name: “Mickey” or “Mouse Client”) customers wanting restaurant reservations at Disney parks. Corder lived just outside Hot Springs, Arkansas. But if a caller asked where she was, she’d say Orlando, Florida. Picking up, she had to say, How can I make your trip more magical? Hanging up, she’d say, Have a magical day. The words became so wired she’d be on the phone with friends or family, saying, Goodbye, I love you, have a magical day. She would have to say that even to the mom who had waited too long to reserve Cinderella’s royal table for her daughter’s second birthday. The mom screamed and cried and threatened Corder with a bad review, which could jeopardize her job.
Corder worried constantly about losing the $9-an-hour job, which she needed to support her family of four. She kept watch on her metrics and tried never to take so much as an unauthorized bathroom break. One night, sick with food poisoning, she remembers putting callers on hold to throw up. “I prayed there were no extra monitors listening that day.”
Some callers were creepy, Corder said. “Want to come do something?” she would hear. Agents across the industry interviewed by ProPublica said sexual harassment was a constant problem. Some corporations don’t allow agents to hang up without permission, no matter what the caller is saying. One young woman in Florida said the same man would call on Saturday nights to say: “I can hear your typing. I really like the way you type.” Another longtime agent said she couldn’t believe how many “perverted calls” she had to field on Sunday mornings. “They’d say: ‘What are you wearing? Are you naked? Can I do things to you?’ I figured they got a thrill from skipping church.”
Customers sometimes assume, reasonably enough, that agents are plugged into the system of the company they appear to work for. A former Arise agent who assisted eBay callers (she asked not to be named because of a nondisclosure agreement) told ProPublica she received calls from eBay sellers fuming about a site-wide glitch. But having no access to eBay software or personnel, the agent had no way of restoring auction items taken down by accident. “I was screamed at and cussed at,” she said. A few weeks later, she lost her job because her customer-satisfaction scores had tanked.
In its business model, Arise refers to the third link — the corporate layer between Arise and the agents — as Independent Businesses. Arise markets them at every turn as an entrepreneurial opportunity. “We are fostering the growth of American small businesses run by women and minorities,” a former Arise CEO said in a 2016 press release. Arise reported that 64% of the owners were people of color and about 89% were women.
That same year, however, another Arise executive, testifying in a legal proceeding, disclosed that most of these businesses are hardly businesses at all. He estimated that 60% have only one agent — the very agent who created the business, as a condition of working with Arise.
Those who opt instead to work under someone else’s Independent Business typically have to give up another slice of their paychecks. Say you sign up with Girlicity, the Independent Business that bills itself as Arise’s largest partner and claims to have 9,000 Arise agents. Arise charges $19.75 for each agent, twice a month, for the use of its platform. On top of that, Girlicity will charge you $25, twice a month.
For Arise, these corporate go-betweens offer a second advantage in addition to being a legal defense. Arise has its Independent Businesses help recruit agents. Arise advises people to post flyers at intersections, print up school banners, and contact churches, temples, universities and associations “for the handicapped or disabled.” Some Independent Businesses, in turn, offer referral fees to agents who recruit other agents.
Those who have run Independent Businesses include a minister in Georgia, who talked up Arise at her church; others who pitch potential agents on YouTube; and even Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former “Apprentice” contestant who later worked in the Trump White House.
ProPublica worked on this story with the NPR show “Planet Money.” Though Arise did not offer the show an interview with any executives, it did give “Planet Money” the names of three Independent Business owners who would talk about their experiences with Arise. In interviews, two said that while Arise’s system has its flaws, it can be a good opportunity for people working from home. (The third agreed to be interviewed, then canceled.) But Arise’s selection raises questions about its vetting. Federal court records show that one of the three owners had previously been convicted of felony wire fraud while working in a similar job. As an administrator for a company that books cruises online, she manipulated the payment system so that commissions for travel agents were double paid, with the second sent to her mother’s bank account, court records show.
Some Independent Businesses have been accused of shortchanging their agents. In 2014, Work at Home Solutions, which works with Arise, was cited for 44 violations by the U.S. Department of Labor, all but one for failure to pay minimum wage or overtime. Work at Home Solutions, just like Arise, had argued that its agents were independent contractors, not employees. But the Labor Department, after analyzing the relationship, found otherwise, and the owner agreed to pay back wages. (The owner declined to comment for this story.)
Agents have little ability to take complaints to Arise itself. Arise typically tells agents who have concerns about the Independent Business they work under that it has no responsibility for adjudicating any disputes.
Arise carefully monitors the language agents use to reinforce that it does not have an employment relationship with them. Stung by lawsuits that claimed Arise had actually employed agents but didn’t pay them fairly, Arise’s legal department has become a kind of word police, one former staffer told ProPublica.
“You don’t schedule ‘hours,’ you schedule ‘intervals,’” the former staffer said. Agents were not to be addressed as “you,” but “your business.” They were not “working,” they were “servicing.” There were no “supervisors,” only “performance facilitators.” Agents were not “coached.” Rather, their services were “enhanced.”
Once, an Arise manager, testifying in an arbitration hearing, was asked about meetings that performance facilitators have with agents. “They’re not meetings,” he said. “They’re informational sessions, or hosts.”
In an internal announcement in 2012, Arise listed “new terminology” for eight terms to avoid “the misconception” that agents are Arise employees. The corporate link between Arise and the agents went from being called Virtual Services Corporations to Independent Businesses. Service Fees became Service Revenue. Central Operations became Support Operations.
Arise seems particularly unable to settle on a term for the agents. Early on, the company called each a CyberAgent. Later came Arise Certified Professional. In 2012, that was changed to Client Support Professional. Nowadays, Arise’s website calls agents “onshore brand advocates or Service Partners.”
“Arise-speak,” as one opposing attorney called it in legal proceedings, could be a wonder to behold. Client Support Professionals (CSPs) would work with Quality Assurance Performance Facilitators (QAPFs) in a Performance Enhancement Session (PES), or they might reach out to Chat Performance Facilitators or Escalation Performance Facilitators, and none would be an Arise employee, all would be independent contractors.
This was the world in which Krystin Davenport, the agent in Las Vegas, found herself while assisting customers for Intuit.
The owner of Client Virtual Solutions, the Independent Business under which Davenport worked, emailed her to say: “It is an Arise and Client Virtual Solutions policy to NEVER discuss pay with other CSP’s from other Independent Businesses.” If Davenport was caught comparing pay, she could be terminated.
Davenport quit in November 2018 after working for about a month. She then received a final invoice from Client Virtual Solutions. In her last two weeks Davenport had worked 23.2 hours, earning $278.40. From that amount, $69.95 was taken out as a charge for Arise’s and Client Virtual Solutions’ services. On top of that, Client Virtual Solutions added another charge. The invoice deducted $150 as a “Contract Termination Fee.”
Davenport’s total pay came to $58.45. Per hour, that’s about $2.52.
“Elaborate Construct”
Agents have pursued claims against Arise and won. Yet the company has been able to stay the course, even as its business model has been found in violation of federal law.
Tami Pendergraft, the Houston woman who worked for Arise after hurting her back, joined a federal class-action lawsuit filed against Arise. But a judge kicked the class action out of court. The plaintiffs were bound by waivers, required by Arise, mandating that any legal claims be handled through arbitration, he ruled. In arbitration, the proceedings are private.
Arise knew firsthand the risks of being sued by a collection of agents. In 2013 it had settled a class-action lawsuit brought by California residents who claimed they had been misclassified as independent contractors rather than as employees of Arise or its client companies. Arise agreed to pay $1.245 million while admitting no wrongdoing, according to court records.
Pendergraft’s arbitration hearing lasted two days in September 2014. She had two lawyers. Arise had three. That was a lot of lawyers for an individual case that did not involve “an awful lot of money,” as Pendergraft’s attorney put it. Pendergraft was represented by Shannon Liss-Riordan, a Boston attorney who has litigated similar worker misclassification claims against Uber, FedEx, Amazon and other companies. Liss-Riordan argued that for Arise, the inefficiency of individual arbitration was the point. Arise, she asserted, probably didn’t think anyone would go to all this trouble for so little return.
At the hearing, Pendergraft testified to the various ways Arise dictated her work. But an Arise attorney argued that Pendergraft had signed legal agreements stating, explicitly, she was not an employee of Arise. Pendergraft, the lawyer said, never submitted a job application to Arise. Never had an Arise business card. Never had an Arise email address. Never went to Arise’s offices in Miramar. Never met anyone in person who works at Arise. Never received a paycheck from Arise. Any pay she received came from the independent business in between her and Arise.
To determine if a worker, no matter how labeled, is actually an independent contractor or an employee, courts have fashioned an “economic realities test.”
In Pendergraft’s case, the arbitrator, Deborah Hankinson, a former justice on the Supreme Court of Texas, weighed the test’s six factors, checking off those that suggested Pendergraft had been an Arise employee. Did Arise exercise significant control over Pendergraft? Check. “Arise closely monitored all aspects of her work,” Hankinson wrote. Were agents like Pendergraft vital to Arise’s business? Check. “Without CSPs, Arise would have no service to sell,” the arbitrator wrote. Was Pendergraft’s work the kind that required no specialized skill? Check. In the end, Hankinson checked five of the six factors — and the sixth, she determined, could go either way. “Ms. Pendergraft was an employee of Arise,” the arbitrator concluded.
In her ruling issued in February 2015, Hankinson found that Arise, as Pendergraft’s employer, had been required by federal law to pay her the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. The company also had to pay for her training time and equipment expenses.
Added up, that came to $5,841.82.
But that wasn’t all. Employers who violate the Fair Labor Standards Act face lower damages if they can show they had reason to believe they were in the right. An employer, for example, could present evidence that it had consulted labor law experts and followed their advice. Since Arise made no such showing, Hankinson doubled the damages, ordering Arise to pay Pendergraft $11,683.64.
In another case Liss-Riordan brought against Arise, a different arbitrator came to the same conclusion, ruling in 2015 that Arise owed an agent $6,526, and then doubling it for damages.
For Arise, these individual arbitration awards were dribs and drabs compared with the potentially large payouts that could come from a class-action lawsuit. So as Arise continued to classify agents as independent contractors, Liss-Riordan tried a different legal tactic, turning to the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that enforces labor law.
The NLRB had previously concluded that employers cannot make employees waive their rights to class action. But that did not cover independent contractors. So the issue again became: Were agents independent contractors or Arise employees?
A two-day hearing was held in May 2016, before an administrative law judge in Miami. The NLRB’s general counsel took and argued the side of Liss-Riordan’s client, Matthew Rice.
Rice said he worked out of his bedroom, in his mother’s home, helping customers for Arise’s clients, including Barnes & Noble, Disney and Sears. While testifying, Rice referred to performance facilitators in the Arise network as supervisors. This elicited a challenge from a lawyer for Arise.
“Where’d you get that term from, supervisor?” the lawyer asked.
“Growing up in America,” Rice said. “That’s the term people use for people that are above you.”
“… You never referred to them as supervisors while you were providing services, did you?”
“Well, yeah,” Rice said.
“You did? To who?”
“Well, obviously I’m on the phone with a customer, I’m not going to say, ‘OK, let me go check my chat performance facilitator.’ Usually I just said, you know, ‘Let me just talk to my supervisor.’”
Rice didn’t incorporate in order to work for Arise. Instead, he worked as an agent through a company his mother had formed. Under questioning by an Arise lawyer, Rice’s mom, Patricia, said her corporation had probably signed up “at least 50” agents over 10 or 11 years.
If that sounded impressive, it sounded less so when the lawyer for the NLRB followed up.
“Did you perceive yourself as a big business owner?” the lawyer asked Patricia Rice.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“To me, big business means you’re making money and you’re — and you have stuff. And I don’t have all of that. I’ve just — I work from home. Like still today, I live in a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate and my son. And now my daughter’s there, so I’m still on a couch, with no car. So no, I don’t consider myself big business.”
Arise’s lone witness was Robert Padron, whose title at the time was senior vice president and general manager. He described Arise’s platform as “connective tissue” that linked Arise’s corporate clients with its network of small businesses and their agents.
In August 2016, an administrative law judge, Charles Muhl, issued his ruling. He called Arise’s business structure an “elaborate construct” designed to portray the agent as an independent contractor. “However, that construct cannot hide the reality of the relationship,” Muhl wrote. Like the two arbitrators before him, Muhl concluded that Arise was in fact an employer and the agent an employee.
Finding that Arise’s mandatory class-action waiver violated federal law, he ordered Arise to stop requiring agents to sign it. What’s more, he ordered Arise to rescind all waivers already signed and to notify all of its current and former employees that the waivers were no longer in effect.
Muhl’s order could have had a dramatic impact, allowing Arise’s agents to join in litigation rather than being forced to go it alone, in private.
But three months later, the United States elected Donald Trump president. Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, that federal law allows corporations to use arbitration clauses that bar employees from class-action lawsuits. The vote was 5-4, with Gorsuch writing the majority opinion.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote the dissent. In an oral statement from the bench, she said the effect of the court’s ruling “will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of vulnerable workers.”
In August 2018, Muhl’s ruling in the Arise case was overturned. A three-member panel wrote that in light of the Supreme Court’s Epic Systems ruling, Rice’s claim now had to be dismissed. The panel’s decision didn’t address whether Arise had misclassified Rice as an independent contractor, because now, for the purpose of determining the proper forum, that no longer mattered. Even if he were an employee, he would have to pursue his claims in arbitration, alone.
Arise has continued to require class-action waivers. It has also continued to categorize agents as independent contractors. But the company does not enlist agents who live in certain states. Currently on that list: California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon and Wisconsin, nearly all of which have tighter rules protecting workers.
This spring, Arise announced that it would honor Juneteenth as an official company holiday, a day off for all employees to commemorate the end of slavery. The company said it would donate a portion of its revenue “for every hour serviced through [its] platform” that day to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Of course, the customer service agents, many Black, didn’t get the day off. Employees get holidays. Independent contractors do not.
The aftermath of recent shelling during the ongoing fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region, in the disputed region's main city of Stepanakert. (photo: Karo Sahakyan/AFP/Armenian Government)
Nagorno-Karabakh: Civilian Areas Targeted in Armenian, Azeri Shelling
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "As Armenia and Azerbaijan continue their clash over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region for a second week, both countries have blamed each other for targeting important cities and endangering the lives of civilians."
READ MORE
Governor Vladimir Solodov speaks on the Avacha Bay coast, in Russia's Kamchatka Region, on Sunday. (photo: Alexandr Piragis/Sputnik/AP)
Investigators Probe 'Possible Ecological Catastrophe' in Russia's Far East
Yuliya Talmazan, NBC News
Talmazan writes: "Russian investigators said Saturday they were looking into 'a possible ecological catastrophe' in the eastern Kamchatka region, after scores of dead sea creatures washed up in one of it bays and surfers reported burns to their eyes and throats."
Images of dead seals, octopi, starfish and urchins on the Khalaktyrsky Beach in the Avacha Bay have been shared on social media for several days.
Surfers in the area have also complained that the sea had an unnatural smell and color.
Local government in the region, which is known for its pristine beaches and volcanic black sand, shared a video of one surfer, Anton Morozov, on Sunday.
He said a number of surfers have suffered chemical burns to their eyes, adding that he had not seen anything like it in 15 years.
“We need to understand what will happen to our health, to the health of animals,” Morozov said.
His fellow surfer, Natalia Danilova, said in an Instagram post Friday that she was diagnosed with a chemical burn to her cornea after spending time in the water in the bay.
Danilova said she had been surfing in the area since August, but three weeks ago she started to struggle with her vision. Others in her surfing group had similar symptoms, while some were also throwing up and complained of breathing problems, she added.
Authorities had not posted any warnings in the area and there had been no official explanation as to what might have caused it, she said.
NBC News has not been able to verify her claims.
Russia’s investigative committee said in a statement Saturday that it had sent a team to look into the mass death of marine mammals in the area and "a possible ecological catastrophe."
The committee said there had been reports of increased concentrations of oil products and phenols "from an unidentified source in the sea coastal waters."
“Experts have taken samples of sea water, air and sand, as well as carried out other verification activities aimed at establishing all the circumstances of the incident,” the statement said.
Kamchatka Gov. Vladimir Solodov said the ecological situation on the Khalaktyrsky Beach was a “source of serious concern,” in a series of videos posted to his Instagram page Friday.
The following day, he posted another video to the social media site calling on all surfers to seek medical help if they had been exposed. Additional water, sand and animal samples from the area were sent to Moscow for analysis, he said. The regional government said preliminary results are expected on Monday.
Thanking local bloggers and surfers for alerting authorities about the situation in an Instagram video Sunday, Solodov said the color of the seawater had evened out in the area and there were no stains on the water that would be indicative of an oil spill.
However, the Russian branch of environmental group Greenpeace tweeted Saturday night that an "environmental disaster" had taken place in Kamchatka and called for an immediate investigation.
“The unique nature of Kamchatka, the UNESCO World Natural Heritage is under threat,” head of the climate project with Greenpeace Russia, Vasily Yablokov, said in a statement on the organization’s website.
“One of the best surfing beaches in Russia, one of the main tourist attractions of the region is life-threatening and calls into question the development of the region's tourism potential," he added.
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