Florida has become well-known as one of the worst states for anti-trans policies in recent years. After failing to pass a ban on gender affirming care for transgender youth, Governor Ron DeSantis used a handpicked Board of Medicine to enforce the same ban. Additionally, the state has cut Medicaid coverage for gender affirming care for transgender adults, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that schools can discriminate against transgender students regarding bathroom access. While the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed in Florida this year has been lower than expected during the start of this year, activists have been anticipating an increase. Now, the “Reverse Woke Act” has emerged as one of the first anti-trans bills in Florida of the 2023 legislative cycle. This bill would hold employers accountable for the detransition of any person who receives gender affirming care coverage for the rest of their life, potentially deterring coverage for many transgender adults in Florida.
The bill creates an impossible requirement for companies: if they provide health insurance coverage for gender affirming care, they are responsible for any procedures to reverse that care for the entirety of the individual’s life. As there is no set time limit for this liability and the mandate extends to “any benefits” that cover gender affirming care, companies may conclude that the risk of offering such coverage is unacceptably high.
[…]
The provisions are ridiculously broad and lack precedent in law. If an individual undergoes a surgical procedure, such as a knee operation, and later regrets it or desires to modify it, no employer is liable for it a decade later simply because the company’s health insurance covered the surgery. That liability is between the patient and the doctor, and often would carry some form of statute of limitations. This not only extends the statute of limitations to perpetuity, it targets the employers just for having health insurance that covers gender affirming care. This targeting of the company itself for the procedures covered under its health insurance is designed to get companies to drop that care.
[…]
Florida is not the only state that has targeted adult health insurance in recent months. We have seen somewhat similar bills pop up in Tennessee and Texas. Texas SB1029, introduced on February 17th, seeks to make health insurance plans strictly liable for all claimed “gender affirming care damages” for life if they offer that care without limitations. It also targets doctors offering that care by making them liable for malpractice. Taken together, they are designed to deter the provision of gender affirming care by both health insurers and doctors past the point of feasibility. Tennessee’s HB1215 would make any health insurance company that contracts with TennCare not offer coverage for gender affirming care. Both of these bills target transgender adults, not just trans youth.
Florida’s “Reverse Woke” bill SB952 is just another sneak attack on gender-affirming care that could force health insurance providers to drop gender-affirming care services on the basis of being “risky.”
The restaurant industry has long coordinated efforts to suppress labor costs through the NRA, a multimillion-dollar lobbying machine funded both by its restaurant members and by the fees workers pay for required food-safety classes, according to a recent New York Times report.
The group has spent its war chest on lobbying campaigns to preserve a subminimum wage for tipped workers — who are disproportionately young, women, and people of color, and far more likely to live in poverty than regular minimum wage workers — and to help block state and federal sick leave proposals and minimum wage increases.
But now, restaurant executives are on edge. Union campaigns are suddenly penetrating their industry, which employs about 10 percent of the American workforce and has one of the lowest unionization rates of any sector. Over the past few years, baristas have unionized nearly 280 Starbucks stores in the face of enormous odds, and dozens of other coffee shops and restaurants have followed suit.
[…]
“The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, every newspaper reports on every union win… when an unfair labor practice charge is filed, when there are challenges to elections,” said Felice Ekelman, a principal at Jackson Lewis, one of the oldest and most infamous union avoidance law firms in the country. “When did this become first page news?”
“And guess who’s reading it?” replied Laura Pierson-Scheinberg, one of Ekelman’s Jackson Lewis colleagues, as the two sat across from each other on the main stage of the summit. “My kids. Literally. I have an 18-year-old, my kids are into it.”
The two lawyers were discussing a new threat for the restaurant industry: the unexpected rise of union campaigns in workplaces that, for decades, have largely been immune from such organizing efforts.
[…]
“Before, I used to say… ‘[Unionization] isn’t a problem for you in the restaurant industry,’” said Pierson-Scheinberg. But now, she warned, “Kids do not care about paying union dues. Two percent of pay, are you kidding me? Their Netflix costs more. They think it’s a hell of a deal.”
The “kids,” she added, are organizing workplaces which would have previously seemed unreachable.
those lawyers quoted at the bottom of the post are literally worms
That’s unfair, I think.
A worm had no choice in becoming a worm. Those lawyers are something lower still.
Malcolm X’s assassination on Feb. 21, 1965, was a tragedy for all working and oppressed people. Like Che Guevara, who was also murdered, Malcolm X became an inspiration for everyone struggling against capitalism and racism.
Late last month a Florida teacher posted a video of a school library where almost every shelf was empty. The video went viral, getting millions of views. Now, the teacher who posted that video has been fired.
Republicans: We have to protect students from the most serious danger imaginable…BOOKS
That’s why teachers should be allowed to carry guns
In case some MANIAC tries to bring a book into a classroom
“It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak, from nothing by his own exertions; dissipating, by the light of reason, all the thick clouds in which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself; soaring in thought even to the celestial regions; like the sun, encompassing with giant strides the vast extent of the universe; and, what is still grander and more wonderful, going back into himself, there to study man and get to know his own nature, his duties and his end.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (via philosophybits)
