Mark my words: that stuff will continue to happen with more and more frequency, and instead of conceding that it has anything to do with climate change, they will blame liberals and the left.
And their base (that they've manufactured over a couple of generations now to be stupid, racist, bigoted, and extremely opinionated) will eat it up.
Which is just so insane because the Greenhouse Effect is a very simple, very well-understood phenomenon that anyone who actually wants to understand it (and even conduct experiments to directly test it) very easily can.
The runaway greenhouse effect leading to climate change is slightly more complex (but is it really?), but simply growing trees to counter the greenhouse effect is like such a basic, simple, scientific concept that even children understand.
Like... It's literally the reason greenhouses exist and work. I just... I don't know what to say anymore to peoples' ignorance.
And they'll still blame the left. These people will never admit they were wrong about this. They will go to their graves claiming climate change is a hoax, even as the world that they were meant to leave for their children and grandchildren literally burns around them.
They are established locally, but the federal government calculates their own (as required by the Davis-Bacon Act). Some states may or may not have similar laws of their own, and calculate their state prevailing wage differently than the federal government (in labor-friendly states, it'll be much higher in general).
At least with respect to the contracts I'm familiar with, the higher of the two (between federal and state wage rates) must be paid. In the case of my state, they're higher than federal rates 100% of the time. And they're very fair, it's great to see folks that work that hard get paid like that.
So basically it's like federal/state minimum wage, but for government contracts.
Many states have their own prevailing wages for state-funded contracts, and if you live somewhere that actually gives a shit about its citizens, it's very high.
It makes for great investment in things like infrastructure when the government provides grants and low-interest loans, essentially free money, to local municipalities. They get the infrastructure, as well as all the local, well-paying jobs that the work brings. And that money stays local because it's usually local contractors and engineering firms doing the work.
There is one of those three groups with the power to end all of this. They also have the most money and power (and US-backing). But it's just so disingenuous to put them all in the same sentence like that as if they're all on an even playing field.
When the government tells an employer that they can't fire a person for x reason, the first amendment gets involved. Because that's the government limiting the speech of a private citizen (or in the case of a company/corporation, a group of private citizens that apparently gets all the rights of a person).
Which is when employment law does swerve into first amendment territory
The First Amendment protects the right to organize in addition to free speech. The NLRB (and the Wagner Act, the law that gives us the right to discuss wages, as well as unionize, without retaliation) have a storied history of being challenged on first amendment grounds.
People have tried arguing that an employer's first amendment rights are violated by a law that prevents them from firing someone for any reason they want. The government codifying what an employer can and can't fire an employee for is directly related to the first amendment.
Any time you're talking about protected speech, or the right to organizing, its directly related to the first amendment. If you can't see that, then I don't know what to tell you.
Non-disparagement clauses (are intended to) effect people after they've already left the place of employment, usually. That's why they're bullshit and largely unenforceable.
Why they fired you isn't really relevant when they're suing you years later for saying something bad about them on Twitter.
Right, but their point was kind of about side-effects we're not aware of at the time. So that's kind of the entire point, that we think there are no negative side effects only to later find out we were wrong.
So that doesn't really address what they said at all.
Oh ok... So I guess that means the National Labor Relations Act is unconstitutional (it's not, it was upheld by SCOTUS in the 30s), because it explicitly prevents employers from firing or otherwise retaliating against employees for discussing salary.
We make our employees sign a form when they're hired stating that they will not mention our company or any of its employees on social media in a negative way. It's standard practice
The NLRB ruled that non-disparagement clauses are not enforceable
It's a clear violation of the first amendment...
Also, referring to the company you work for as "we" while talking about firing another employee is cringe as fuck.
Well, actually, they were living in Florida in the 70s, and now they live in Michigan, so for them, it was hotter in the 70s.
Logic.