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Images of Maxwell Azarello, engulfed in flames, spread worldwide recently after he set himself on fire outside the Manhattan court where Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial is being held. It came just months after Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old active duty airman, livestreamed his self-immolation at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, repeatedly yelling “free Palestine”.

Journalists have called these self-immolations “extreme” and “grotesque”, and have obsessed over the “haunting” or “chilling” final messages left by those who died. People have also commented on a decline in the mental health of those involved.

But seeing these protests as fierce demonstrations of self-harm undermines the political claims that motivate them. There is, in fact, a long and often forgotten history of protest self-immolations in the US.

My own research, published in 2018, reveals that hundreds of Americans have demonstrated their political dissent by burning themselves in public. Each had a distinct motive, meaning and critique underpinning their final acts.

Understanding American self-immolations requires a patient and challenging reflection on the role emotions and mental health play in political action.

American self-immolations

Self-immolation became a recognised protest tactic in 1963, after Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burned himself to death in Saigon, South Vietnam. American photojournalist Malcolm Browne captured the spectacle in a widely reproduced photograph.

The protest, which was directed against religious oppression by the South Vietnamese government, also demonstrated Vietnamese opposition to growing US military intervention in the region.

Thích Quảng Đức set fire to himself in Saigon in protest against the anti-Buddhist measures of the government.
GRANGER – Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

The first American political self-immolation occurred in March 1965. Alice Herz, an 82-year old peace activist and refugee from Nazism, burned herself to death in Detroit to protest the US military’s strategic bombing in Vietnam. A letter sent to her daughter said that she did this “not out of despair, but out of hope for mankind”. Herz wrote: “I have chosen the flaming death of the Buddhists.”

Herz’s life and death quickly faded from the headlines as public awareness of the war in Vietnam was limited at the time. Despite Herz’s lifelong commitment to peace and civil rights, people refused to acknowledge the politics behind her suicide and she was immediately dismissed as someone demonstrating senility and dementia.

Although mostly forgotten in the US, Herz’s decision to convey solidarity with Vietnamese monks resonated in exactly the way she hoped. Crowds of people in Hanoi stood for a moment of silent prayer upon hearing news of her death. Poets composed songs and recitations cherishing her lifelong commitment to pacifism, children learned of Herz in school, and a street in Hanoi was renamed after her.

Nine months later, 31-year-old Norman Morrison set fire to himself outside the Pentagon. By now the conflict in Vietnam was widely known, and Morrison’s protest was better understood by the American public. Journalists drew connections between the location of his protest and his critique of the US military, and reported his death on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country.

A wave of self-immolations followed. On November 9 1965, 22-year-old Roger LaPorte set fire to himself outside the UN building in New York. Two days later, a bereaved mother “despondent over casualty reports from Vietnam” self-immolated in Indiana. By scouring local news reports, I’ve found hundreds of cases of people burning by self-immolation throughout the 1960s and 1970s, often as a protest against the ongoing war in Vietnam.

In fact, such was the fear of self-immolations in protest at the war that police were equipped with special firefighting implements and asbestos gloves to fend off, what they feared, would be marauding masses of aflame anti-war hippies.

The politics of protest suicide

Many acts of self-immolation are provoked or triggered by personal crises. But in such protests, observers often only see the suicide, and seek emotional and mental health reasons to explain something outlandish, and avoid admitting that political dissent motivated these last acts. This leads to some self-immolations being seen as more legitimate than others.

In 1996, an American political activist and artistic performer called Kathy Change self-immolated on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania to protest “the present government and economic system”. The New York Times responded with an article depicting “the manic and messianic life of a troubled idealist”. Change’s death is still deemed a less authentic protest than, for example, the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, whose 2011 self-immolation inspired the Arab Spring.

Categorising self-immolation as “just a suicide” can obscure thoughtful politics. Anti-Vietnam war protesters deliberately self-immolated to show solidarity with the Vietnamese. And civil rights organiser and former military veteran Willie B. Phillips self-immolated in Atlanta in 1972 to highlight the spectre of violence towards African Americans.

Environmental protesters have also used self-immolation to forcefully portray the effects of climate change. In April 2018, David Buckel explained in their last testament that “my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves”.

Then, in 2022, Wynn Alan Bruce, a 50-year-old climate protester from Colorado, self-immolated outside the Supreme Court. A friend tweeted: “This act is not suicide … this is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to the climate crisis.”

A sign at the Supreme Court building in Washington DC for Wynn Alan Bruce, who self-immolated to bring attention to the climate change crisis.
NurPhoto SRL / Alamy Stock Photo

If nothing else, self-immolations raise challenging questions. Is suicide the appropriate word to apply to these instances when many would consider themselves to be martyrs performing a self-sacrifice? Similarly, at what point does the motive for protest suicide move from a legitimate political judgement into the realm of an emotional or mental health crisis?

Ultimately, self-immolation reveals the responsibility everyone has to comprehend the politics of protest suicide. More importantly, each of us must detach judgement of mental health from judgement of political protest – even when the protest seems strange. Läs mer…

Did you receive a mail-order package this week? Carriers in the U.S. shipped 64 packages for every American in 2022, so it’s quite possible.

That commerce reflects the expansion of large-scale retail in recent decades, especially big-box chains like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot that sell goods both in stores and online. This has led to the growth of distribution centers that fulfill these orders. While mail-order commerce is convenient, these centers also have harmful impacts, including traffic congestion and air and water pollution.

I study environmental history, and I am part of a group of scholars examining the environmental impacts of big-box stores like Walmart, Target, REI and Bass Pro Shops. Sustainability is a hot topic in the retail sector, but my research on the history of Target – the sixth-largest retailer in the U.S. – shows how retail companies have largely escaped the kinds of environmental regulations that affect other sectors such as manufacturing.

California is leading efforts to regulate harmful impacts of retail distribution centers.

Indirect pollution sources

Doing business on Target’s scale, with US$108 billion in sales in 2022, creates a big physical footprint. The company has nearly 2,000 stores in the U.S. that cover over 240 million square feet of retail space, not including parking lots. Its 55 supply chain facilities add an additional 60 million square feet. For perspective, 1 million square feet is slightly larger than 15 football fields.

Target, which originated as a dry goods company in 1902, has been a leading retail voice for over a century. The company played a prominent role in the 1970s as Congress expanded federal power to regulate air pollution nationwide under the Clean Air Act of 1970.

Target stores offer a diverse range of products, from clothing to home goods, groceries and electronics. About 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Target store.

This law gave the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to identify and regulate air pollutants and to set air quality standards that would protect public health. To meet those standards, in the mid-1970s lawmakers and regulators considered adopting transportation controls that could address indirect pollution sources – entities that did not generate air pollution themselves but attracted large numbers of sources, such as cars and trucks, that did. Examples included airports, highways, sports stadiums and shopping centers.

Target’s parent company, Dayton Hudson, operated numerous shopping centers and other retail chains. One of its executives, George Hite, was a leading spokesperson against regulating indirect pollution sources.

From 1974-1977, Hite testified on behalf of large retail trade groups during a series of congressional hearings, arguing that the proposed regulations were unfair and would undercut sound planning. Hite asserted that because shopping centers were one-stop destinations for consumers, they actually reduced air pollution from consumers’ trips.

Ultimately, indirect source regulations did not become part of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977. As a result, retail continued to expand, unconstrained by major federal environmental laws.

Fans enter Target Field in Minneapolis, Minn., before a game on Aug. 15, 2021. Target is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul and was the Twin Cities’ largest employer for many years.
Joe Robbins/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Big-box boom

Big-box discount stores like Kmart, Walmart and Target began outcompeting shopping centers in the 1980s because of their low prices and convenience. The biggest chains expanded nationally, driving many smaller local stores out of business.

These companies relied on a new type of warehouse: the distribution center, which used computer technology to make supply chains more efficient. Compared with earlier warehouses, distribution centers were larger and focused on efficient movement of goods rather than storage.

In the 1990s, communities across the country began organizing to slow the expansion of big-box stores. Most efforts focused on opposing individual stores and ignored the rising number of distribution centers. One exception was in the Wisconsin town of Oconomowoc.

Located along I-94 between Madison and Milwaukee and surrounded by glacial lakes, Oconomowoc was a former vacation destination for wealthy Midwesterners that evolved into a commuter town. When Target announced in 1993 that it had selected Oconomowoc as the site for a new, million-plus-square-foot regional distribution center, residents quickly organized to preserve the area’s pastoral setting.

State and local officials refused to reconsider the deal they had reached with Target, which included grants and other tax subsidies. In response, opponents filed multiple lawsuits.

Plaintiffs cited the planned center’s environmental impacts, including potential threats to groundwater and air emissions from long-haul, diesel-fueled trucks. However, state and federal courts ultimately dismissed their cases. Judges ruled that the Clean Air Act did not attribute delivery truck emissions to the distribution center, and the Clean Water Act did not cover a retention pond that was planned to collect runoff from the center’s parking lot.

Probing retail’s environmental costs

Today, retail supply chain infrastructure is moving into urban areas. Target and other retailers are meeting new opposition, including pushback from environmental justice groups, which argue that these companies’ operations increase traffic and degrade air quality.

In a 2024 report, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund and ElectrifyNY, a coalition working to electrify transportation in New York state, found that 1 in 4 people statewide lived within half a mile of a retail distribution center, and that these facilities generated over 170,000 truck trips per day. The report endorsed proposed state legislation that would classify storage and distribution centers over 50,000 square feet as indirect pollution sources and require them to reduce transportation-related air emissions.

In Southern California, the powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates regional air quality, has taken this step with Rule 2305. This regulation is the first in the U.S. to address emissions generated by trucks traveling to and from large warehouse facilities.

The rule focuses on reducing ozone, a major contributor to smog, and fine particulate matter. Both of these pollutants are formed from chemicals in diesel exhaust and are harmful to human health.

Rule 2305 was adopted in 2021 and survived a legal challenge from trucking companies in 2023. To avoid fines of up to $10,000 per day, hundreds of warehouse operators must earn points for taking steps from a list of actions to reduce local air pollution.

Options include using low-emission or electric vehicles and installing charging stations on-site, or placing air filters in local buildings. Point targets are based on each facility’s size, number of truck trips and other factors.

Shopping carts vs. smokestacks

Big-box retailers maintain that they can manage their facilities’ environmental impacts without government intervention or structural change. For example, Target touts investments to make its facilities more energy efficient and place solar panels on its stores and distribution centers. Yet, Target’s indirect emissions dwarf these gains.

For example, in 2022 the company generated nearly 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions in transporting goods from its distribution centers to consumers. Including emissions generated when suppliers shipped these goods to Target’s distribution network more than doubled this figure.

In comparison, the company estimated that the electricity it purchased to power its facilities in 2022 generated just over 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions. Using this number as a base, I estimate that Target’s claim the same year of using 60% of electricity from renewable resources offset emissions by some 2.25 million metric tons.

And Target is only one of numerous retailers. According to a 2022 report by the World Retail Congress and Boston Consulting Group, this sector as a whole “has some way to go before it can claim truly green credentials. … Most [large retailers] have yet to put in place comprehensive sustainability agendas.”

The goods that consumers buy, and the ways in which they buy them, drastically affect the environment. In my view, the retail sector’s impacts on air, water, waste generation and Earth’s climate call for national-level responses. Big-box stores may not look like smoke-belching factories, but their companies’ operations affect the environment in ways that have become too big to ignore. Läs mer…

Dora Juhl, a 15-year-old teenager, walked into Dr. Rosa Goodrich Boido’s obstetrical practice in Phoenix in January 1918. Juhl wanted to end her pregnancy.

But abortion was illegal in Arizona.

Boido, the city’s sole female physician, asked Juhl for US$100 – about $2,000 today – to perform the abortion.

Juhl said she could pay $27 – her entire savings – but Boido explained the legal risks, including the prison time she could face, and insisted on full payment. Juhl left the office, then tried to give herself an abortion and returned to Boido’s practice in physical distress.

Boido then admitted Juhl as a patient. It is unclear whether Boido performed an abortion, removed fetal tissue, or merely gave her pain medication. The next day, police arrived and arrested Boido. Arizona charged Boido under a 54-year-old law banning abortions. She lost her medical license and spent three months in jail with bail set at $15,000 – about $300,000 today – before her trial.

Those days may soon return to Arizona.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled on April 9, 2024, that this same 160-year-old territorial law that bans abortion – unless the pregnant person’s life is in danger – will go into effect.

Since that ruling, the Arizona Legislature has been grappling with how to handle the near-total ban. After several weeks of attempts, the state House of Representatives passed a repeal of the law on April 24, 2024, that now goes to the state Senate for debate and a vote. But even if the ban is fully repealed, it could still take temporary effect this summer.

Passed during the Civil War in 1864, this law mandated that anyone who used medicine or surgery “to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child, and shall be thereof duly convicted, shall be punished by imprisonment in the Territorial prison for a term not less than two years nor more than five years.”

The sole exception was a physician who “deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

In the late 1800s, women in Arizona, as in other places in the U.S., had no direct say in laws governing their bodies. As someone who teaches history in Arizona and researches slavery, I think it is useful to understand what life was like in Arizona when this abortion ban was in force.

Rosa Boido was one of the first female doctors in Arizona. She was arrested for performing an abortion in 1918.

A women’s rights desert

In 1864, Arizona – which was an official territory of the United States – was a vast desert.

In the 1870s, Arizona had less than 10,000 residents, excluding Native Americans, whom the Census refused to count and the U.S. refused to grant citizenship.

Most women living in territorial Arizona were Diné, meaning Navajo, or Chiricahua Apache. In 1864, the U.S. Army was fighting Indigenous people in an effort to take Native lands. U.S. forces crowded Apaches onto reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.

All women in Arizona could not vote, serve on juries or exercise full control over property in a marriage. Demographically, the territory had a pronounced gender imbalance in favor of men – women were just one-quarter of the non-Native population.

Most of the white men in Arizona moved there to work as miners and soldiers. People there also worked on cattle ranches and grew cotton. Mining and ranching interests controlled politics, and many Arizonans supported the Southern Confederacy, though Arizona was a free territory in 1863, meaning slavery was not legal.

Many politicians in Arizona, like House Speaker William Claude Jones, were transplants from the South.

Jones was responsible for shepherding the abortion ban through the Legislature. Around this time, Jones abandoned his first wife. Throughout his life, he would have three more wives, including a 12-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old at the time of their weddings.

Women’s rights in territorial Arizona

Women had few basic rights in Arizona before it became a state in 1912. And territorial law did not favor women.

Hispanic and African American women had even fewer rights than white women. Arizona punished anyone who kidnapped a Black person for the purpose of selling them into slavery. But, at the same time, it outlawed “all marriages of white persons with negroes or mulattoes.”

Until 1871, a wife who divorced a husband for adultery faced the prospect of a court-appointed trustee to oversee the property or alimony she received.

But if a wife was found to have committed adultery, she lost all her property to her husband, forever. The 1871 Married Woman’s Property Act granted women more autonomy, but marriage remained an unequal partnership.

By around 1870, women’s suffragists began advocating for Arizona to follow Wyoming, Colorado and Utah in giving women the right to vote. This was 50 years before the 19th Amendment gave the right to vote to all women in the U.S.

Led by female attorney Murat Masterson, suffragists introduced a bill to enfranchise women in 1883. It failed. White women were allowed to cast ballots in county school board elections, but it took determined activism by women’s rights activists to achieve even this vote.

Suffragists led by Pauline O’Neill, Frances Willard Munds and others continued to push for the right for women to vote through organized clubs and staged rallies – and worked to sway pubic opinion.

Women’s health doctor Boido was also active in the women’s suffrage fight in Arizona by promoting sex education, as well as anti-death penalty, anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco efforts.

In 1913, one year after Arizona became a state, women finally got the right to vote.

A man and woman pass through the Badlands of Arizona in the 1800s.
Underwood & Underwood/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Getting an abortion in territorial Arizona

Some women like Juhl did indeed violate Arizona’s abortion ban, based on historical evidence of physicians charging a high fee.

After Boido’s arrest and arraignment, she remained in jail for three months, including during her trial. The jury “found her guilty of performing an illegal operation,” according to the Arizona Republican newspaper.

Historian Mary S. Melcher has argued that Boido did not have a jury of her peers since women were not allowed on them.

Juhl returned to her family in Yavapai County and went back to high school.

After her conviction in 1918, Boido became prisoner 5159 at the women’s wing of the state penitentiary. She served two months, then was paroled because the women’s section of the prison was too hot and unlivable in the Arizona summer. With Boido’s medical license gone, she moved to California. She died in Hawaii in 1959 at age 89.

Arizona kept this 1864 abortion ban in place until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Roe v. Wade in 1973, that the right to get an abortion was constitutionally guaranteed. The court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, sparking a series of events that have led to the resurrection of the 1864 Arizona abortion ban. Läs mer…

Given the spate of news about international trade lately, Americans might be surprised to learn that the U.S. isn’t very dependent on it. Indeed, looking at trade as a percentage of gross domestic product – a metric economists sometimes call the “openness index” – the U.S. is one of the least trade-oriented nations in the world.

In 2022, the U.S. trade-to-GDP ratio was 27%, according to the World Bank. That means the total value of U.S. imports and exports of goods and services combined equaled 27% of the country’s GDP. That’s far below the global average of 63%.

In fact, of the 193 countries examined by the World Bank, only two were less involved in international trade than the U.S. Those were Nigeria, at 26%, and Sudan at 3%. Most world economic powers scored considerably higher, with Germany at 100%, France at 73%, the U.K. at 70%, India at 49%, and China at 38%. Who knew?

Making sense of trade-to-GDP ratios

What do all these numbers mean? It’s tricky because many factors can influence a trade-to-GDP ratio. For example, a country can have a low ratio in large part because it has high tariffs or other protectionist policies; Nigeria, Ethiopia and Pakistan come to mind in this regard. Others, such as Turkmenistan, have low ratios because they’re geographically remote.

A low trade-to-GDP ratio may also arise from the fact that a country is large, wealthy and developed, with a diversified economy that can provide most of the goods and services it needs domestically. We think this explains a lot about the U.S.’s extremely low ratio.

On the other hand, extremely high ratios of well over 300% are found in a few tiny countries due to necessity, location or both. Countries such as Luxembourg and the microstate of San Marino are both located in high-trade Europe and are too small to survive without extensive trade.

Meanwhile, well-positioned locations such as Singapore and Hong Kong have historically thrived as true trade entrepôts. And Djibouti, in East Africa, is increasingly performing a similar function.

It’s also important to look at the trajectory of trade-to-GDP ratios over time. As for the U.S., the ratio rose from 9% in 1960 to just under 11% in 1970 to 25% by 2000.

Since then, the ratio has ranged from 22% in 2002 to 31% in 2012 – remaining low compared to almost every other country. The U.S. has registered a relatively low trade-to-GDP ratio throughout its history.

How the US got here: A roller-coaster history of American trade policy

The liberal, open institutional architecture that shapes today’s global economy was largely erected by the U.S. during World War II and shortly afterward. From then until the steep rise of trade-to-GDP ratios from 1970 to 2000, it was easy for U.S. political leaders to support engagement in relatively free trade.

After World War II, a regime of open trade and fixed exchange rates – associated with the Bretton Woods Agreement establishing both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1944, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 – succeeded in promoting trade and growth. Those policies also stabilized currencies and balance-of-payments ledgers. Devastated war economies and newly industrializing nations entered and in time helped fashion a new world economic order underwritten and overseen by the U.S.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. inevitably lost some of its edge in agricultural and manufacturing markets as overseas economies rebounded. But its low trade-to-GDP ratio and ideological commitment to anti-communist allies mitigated domestic political unrest around trade issues. Capital controls and a series of legislative and diplomatic fixes limited international trade’s role in U.S. economic dislocations.

Things changed dramatically in the 1970s, as indicated by the sizable increases in trade-to-GDP ratios for the U.S. and the world as a whole during that period. One key factor was the collapse of state-centered financial regulation. That opened the world to increasingly fluid goods and capital transfers as encouraged under world trade agreements. This was also the period when cheaper goods from Japan and Taiwan began taking hold in the U.S..

Bigger challenges to the stability of postwar working-class livelihoods arose from productivity-enhancing innovations in production, transportation and communications. Two further far-reaching factors were the opening of China’s economy beginning in 1979, and the demise of the Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991.

Two key free-trade developments took place in the 1990s. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 opened U.S. borders on the north and south to unprecedented transfers of capital, trade and migration. Then, in 2001, China gained “permanent normal trade relations status” with the U.S., thus smoothing its entry into the World Trade Organization. In both cases, the economic dynamism unleashed by the moves was accompanied by major job losses in American manufacturing.

As the U.S. trade-to-GDP ratio climbed steadily from 20% in 1990 to nearly 30% by 2010, trade became an increasingly high-profile issue in U.S. politics. Critics were especially worried by the prospect of trade hurting American jobs and living standards.

After NAFTA’s passage and China’s entry into the WTO, many Americans and interest groups representing them soured on “globalization.” That globalization was embodied in the long-open trade regime put into place after World War II.

So it’s no wonder that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 while calling for stiff new tariffs on China and a border wall against Mexico. And President Joe Biden hasn’t backed off significantly from Trump’s protectionist trade policies.

U.S. policymakers are unlikely to move further toward trade dependence anytime soon, much less toward any new free-trade agreements. Rather, we’re likely to hear skepticism from both Biden and Trump when the subject of open trade comes up.

Ironically, the open-trade world the U.S. did so much to create seems to depend on Americans limiting their participation in it. Läs mer…

Most American workers are hired “at will”: Employers owe their employees nothing in the relationship except earned wages, and employees are at liberty to quit at their option. As the rule is generally stated, either party may terminate the arrangement at any time for a good or bad reason, or none at all.

In keeping with that no-strings-attached spirit, employees may move on as they see fit – unless, that is, they happen to be among the tens of millions of workers bound by a contract that explicitly forbids getting hired by a competitor. These noncompete clauses may make sense for CEOs and other top executives who possess trade secrets, but they can seem nonsensical when they’re applied to low-wage workers such as draftsmen in the construction industry.

President Joe Biden expressed concern about the oppressive nature of noncompete contracts in July 2021.

And the Federal Trade Commission – a federal agency responsible for policies that affect competition within the economy – has now decided to ban them. On April 23, 2024, in a 3-2 vote, the majority agreed to curb noncompete contracts.

Previous noncompetes for senior executives will remain in place, but all others, with few exceptions, will no longer be enforceable.

The rule is slated to go into effect in late August. However, legal actions could delay or block these changes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups sued the government to stop it soon after the FTC vote.

As a scholar of employment law and policy, I have many concerns about noncompete clauses – such as how they tend to aggravate the power imbalances in relationships between workers and bosses, suppress wages and discourage labor market mobility.

Labor rights and the law

Courts began to enshrine the at-will doctrine in the 19th century, making exceptions only for employees with fixed-term contracts.

With the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, all private-sector workers and unions gained the power to collectively bargain with employers. Subsequent labor agreements, such as the one negotiated by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee with Carnegie-Illinois Steel in 1937, made employers prove “just cause” before firing any person covered by the contract.

The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991 added employment protections prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, religion and national origin. And the Americans with Disabilities Act, which Congress passed in 1990, ensured that people with disabilities would have access to jobs with or without reasonable accommodation.

Those laws and other measures, including modern exceptions to the at-will rule, offer workers some job security.

But despite some restrictions by individual state governments, until now there has been no federal protection from noncompete clauses.

Fast food chain Jimmy John’s stopped making its low-wage workers sign noncompete clauses after Illinois sued the company.
Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images

Noncompetes and low-wage workers

FTC chair Lina Khan has estimated that nearly 1 in 5 workers, some 30 million Americans, are in this boat.

Noncompete clauses are more common among higher-paid Americans, but more than 1 in 10 workers who earn US$20 or less an hour are covered by noncompete agreements, according to a 2021 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Wages for U.S. workers will rise by $400 billion to $488 billion over the next decade once there are fewer noncompete clauses, the FTC estimates.

In announcing the ban, the FTC offered advice to employers that might fear losing high-performing workers due to the new rules.

“Instead of using noncompetes to lock in workers, employers that wish to retain employees can compete on the merits for the worker’s labor services by improving wages and working conditions.”

Put another way, when employers pay workers better, their employees are more satisfied and less likely to quit.

Portions of this article were included in an article originally published on July 13, 2021. Läs mer…

Violence and harassment on the job are all too common: More than 1 in 5 workers worldwide have experienced it, according to the International Labor Organization, with women slightly more likely to be affected than men. In the U.S., more than 2 million workers face violence on the job each year – and those are just the cases that get reported.

The effects of workplace violence are profound, including physical and emotional suffering, destroyed careers and harm to companies and society. And it comes at a remarkable economic price. Although estimates differ, researchers have put the cost of workplace violence at as much as US$56 billion annually – and that’s likely an undercount.

As a professor who researches tourism, a field in which workers are often mistreated, I’m all too aware of the dangers of violence and harassment. In this article, I’ll be following the International Labor Organization’s Convention No. 190, which defines “violence and harassment” together as acts that “result in, or are likely to result in, physical, psychological, sexual or economic harm.”

Service workers are at risk

No industry is free of violence, but the problem is prevalent in the service sector. For example, in 2021, 10,490 violent crimes were reported in U.S. restaurants. An analysis by the National Restaurant Association found that 37% of women and 14% of men in the industry had been sexually harassed.

Similarly, a survey by the AFL-CIO found that 53% of hotel workers had experienced harassment on the job. From 2018 to 2020, the number of assaults in grocery stores rose 63%, while assaults in convenience stores rose 75%. Meanwhile, 3 in 4 health care workers report exposure to workplace violence.

At the same time, men of color and women of all races, who are at elevated risk of having already experienced discrimination, are overrepresented among service industry employees. These are the people who stand to benefit the most from a cultural change around workplace violence.

Companies fail to prioritize safety

A 2001 poll of executives by the insurance company Liberty Mutual showed that, on average, for every dollar invested in improving workplace safety, approximately $3 or more is saved. The potential for cost savings was made clear in another Liberty Mutual report published about two decades later. It found that on-the-job violence cost the health and social services sector nearly half a billion dollars in 2022 alone.

Despite this fact, only about 30% of businesses have established safety and health programs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In other words, companies are willing to shell out billions of dollars to deal with the effects of violence – lawsuits, insurance claims, staff turnover and property damage – while failing to invest in prevention.

The good news is that violence is now recognized by OSHA and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as a significant public health issue in many workplaces in the U.S. In many instances, industry and government are taking the issue seriously. But what can be done?

A longtime employee of the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., wears a shirt honoring the victims of a 2021 mass shooting. Three King Soopers grocery workers were killed in the attack.
Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Opportunities and solutions exist

Several big studies have looked at the effectiveness of various interventions against workplace violence. By implementing preventive measures such as training programs, effective reporting systems and regular risk assessments, and by maintaining a healthy work environment, organizations can significantly reduce the threat of workplace violence.

Research shows that a diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging lens in the workplace helps create a feeling of safety and confidence that fosters security. Many employees will have experienced forms of discrimination in varying degrees of severity throughout their time in the workplace. By adopting a DEIB-informed approach and expressing cultural sensitivity, workplaces can become safer environments for everyone.

It’s also crucial to have good data about the issue. Unfortunately, statistics on workplace violence are often siloed by industry – or even at the company level – and lack detail about important factors such as gender, age and disability. Without better data collection, researchers will continue to have an incomplete understanding of the problem.

Finally, there’s a role for social enterprises in fighting workplace violence. Speaking personally, in 2022 I became aware of a Chicago-based company, PAVE Prevention, which, using a human development approach, has developed organizational assessment tools to deliver curated human safety training. Their evidence-based approach encompasses a variety of interventions against workplace violence and works toward creating meaningful change in industries across the country.

It will take robust cultural change to end harassment and violence in our societies, including in the workplace. But such change is possible. Using moral imagination, managers can lead businesses ethically and successfully. Profit doesn’t need to come at the cost of human well-being – or vice versa. Läs mer…

A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble. Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040.

The mission would be the first to try to return rock samples from Mars to Earth so scientists can analyze them for signs of past life.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on April 15, 2024, that the mission as currently conceived is too expensive and too slow. NASA gave private companies a month to submit proposals for bringing the samples back in a quicker and more affordable way.

As an astronomer who studies cosmology and has written a book about early missions to Mars, I’ve been watching the sample return saga play out. Mars is the nearest and best place to search for life beyond Earth, and if this ambitious NASA mission unraveled, scientists would lose their chance to learn much more about the red planet.

The habitability of Mars

The first NASA missions to reach the surface of Mars in 1976 revealed the planet as a frigid desert, uninhabitable without a thick atmosphere to shield life from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. But studies conducted over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.

The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have each shown that the planet’s early environment was suitable for microbial life.

They found the chemical building blocks of life and signs of surface water in the distant past. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.

The Mars Jezero Crater, which scientists are searching for signs of ancient bacteria.
ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA

Why astronomers want Mars samples

The first time NASA looked for life in a Mars rock was in 1996. Scientists claimed they had discovered microscopic fossils of bacteria in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Scientists disagreed over whether the meteorite really had ever harbored biology, and today most scientists agree that there’s not enough evidence to say that the rock contains fossils.

Several hundred Martian meteorites have been found on Earth in the past 40 years. They’re free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteorites originated. Also, they were blasted off the planet’s surface by impacts, and those violent events could have easily destroyed or altered subtle evidence of life in the rock.

There’s no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past. As a result, the agency is facing a price tag of $700 million per ounce, making these samples the most expensive material ever gathered.

A compelling and complex mission

Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first stage has already started.

Perseverance has collected over two dozen rock and soil samples, depositing them on the floor of the Jezero Crater, a region that was probably once flooded with water and could have harbored life. The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes. Once the rover fills all the sample tubes, it will gather them and bring them to the spot where NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander will land. The Sample Retrieval Lander includes a rocket to get the samples into orbit around Mars.

An animation showing the Mars Sample Return mission’s plan, as designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The European Space Agency has designed an Earth Return Orbiter, which will rendezvous with the rocket in orbit and capture the basketball-sized sample container. The samples will then be automatically sealed into a biocontainment system and transferred to an Earth entry capsule, which is part of the Earth Return Orbiter. After the long trip home, the entry capsule will parachute to the Earth’s surface.

The complex choreography of this mission, which involves a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented. It’s the culprit behind the ballooning budget and the lengthy timeline.

Sample return breaks the bank

Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.

The NASA center behind the mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just laid off over 500 employees. It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly caused the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and suffering budget cuts.

Within the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission. These reports described the mission’s design as overly complex and noted issues such as inflation, supply chain problems and unrealistic costs and schedule estimates.

NASA is also feeling the heat from Congress. For fiscal year 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut NASA’s planetary science budget by over half a billion dollars. If NASA can’t keep a lid on the costs, the mission might even get canceled.

Thinking out of the box

Faced with these challenges, NASA has put out a call for innovative designs from private industry, with a goal of shrinking the mission’s cost and complexity. Proposals are due by May 17, which is an extremely tight timeline for such a challenging design effort. And it’ll be hard for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to put together.

An important potential player in this situation is the commercial space company SpaceX. NASA is already partnering with SpaceX on America’s return to the Moon. For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

However, the massive Starship rocket that SpaceX will use for Artemis has had only three test flights and needs a lot more development before NASA will trust it with a human cargo.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful commercial rocket.
AP Photo/Eric Gay

In principle, a Starship rocket could bring back a large payload of Mars rocks in a single two-year mission and at far lower cost. But Starship comes with great risks and uncertainties. It’s not clear whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.

Starship uses a launchpad, and it would need to be refueled for a return journey. But there’s no launchpad or fueling station at the Jezero Crater. Starship is designed to carry people, but if astronauts go to Mars to collect the samples, SpaceX will need a Starship rocket that’s even bigger than the one it has tested so far.

Sending astronauts also carries extra risk and cost, and a strategy of using people might end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.

With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a winning solution. We’ll know the answer next month. Läs mer…

About a trillion tiny particles called neutrinos pass through you every second. Created during the Big Bang, these “relic” neutrinos exist throughout the entire universe, but they can’t harm you. In fact, only one of them is likely to lightly tap an atom in your body in your entire lifetime.

Most neutrinos produced by objects such as black holes have much more energy than the relic neutrinos floating through space. While much rarer, these energetic neutrinos are more likely to crash into something and create a signal that physicists like me can detect. But to detect them, neutrino physicists have had to build very large experiments.

IceCube, one such experiment, documented an especially rare type of particularly energetic astrophysical neutrino in a study published in April 2024. These energetic neutrinos often masquerade as other, more common types of neutrino. But for the first time, my colleagues and I managed to detect them, pulling out a few from almost 10 years of data.

Their presence puts researchers like me one step closer to unraveling the mystery of how highly energetic particles like astrophysical neutrinos are produced in the first place.

IceCube observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the 800-pound gorilla of large neutrino experiments. It has about 5,000 sensors that have peered intently at a gigaton of ice under the South Pole for over a decade. When a neutrino collides with an atom in the ice, it produces a ball of light that the sensors record.

When neutrinos move through IceCube, a tiny fraction of them will interact with atoms in the ice and produce light, which the sensors record. In the video, the spheres represent individual sensors, with the size of each sphere proportional to how much light it detects. The colors indicate the light’s relative arrival time, according to the colors of the rainbow, with red arriving earliest and violet latest.

IceCube has detected neutrinos created in several places, such as the Earth’s atmosphere, the center of the Milky Way galaxy and black holes in other galaxies many light-years away.

But the tau neutrino, one type of particularly energetic neutrino, has eluded IceCube – until now.

Neutrino flavors

Neutrinos come in three different types, which physicists call flavors. Each flavor leaves a distinct imprint on a detector like IceCube.

When a neutrino bangs into another particle, it usually produces a charged particle that corresponds with its flavor. A muon neutrino produces a muon, an electron neutrino produces an electron, and a tau neutrino produces a tau.

Neutrinos with a muon flavor have the most distinctive signature, so my colleagues and I in the IceCube collaboration naturally searched for those first. The muon emitted from a muon neutrino collision will travel through hundreds of meters of ice, making a long track of detectable light, before it decays. This track allows researchers to trace the neutrino’s origin.

The team next looked at electron neutrinos, whose interactions produce a roughly spherical ball of light. The electron produced by an electron neutrino collision never decays, and it bangs into every particle in the ice it comes near. This interaction leaves an expanding ball of light in its wake before the electron finally comes to rest.

Since the electron neutrino’s direction is very hard to discern by eye, IceCube physicists applied machine learning techniques to point back to where the electron neutrinos might have been created. These techniques employ sophisticated computational resources and tune millions of parameters to separate neutrino signals from all known backgrounds.

The third flavor of neutrino, the tau neutrino, is the chameleon of the trio. One tau neutrino can appear as a track of light, while the next can appear as a ball. The tau particle created in the collision travels for a tiny fraction of a second before it decays, and when it does decay it usually produces a ball of light.

Those tau neutrinos create two balls of light, one where they initially bang into something and create a tau, and one where the tau itself decays. Most of the time, the tau particle decays after traveling only a very short distance, making the two balls of light overlap so much that they are indistinguishable from a single ball.

But at higher energies, the emitted tau particle can travel tens of meters, resulting in two balls of light separate from one another. Physicists armed with those machine learning techniques can see through this to find the needle in the haystack.

Energetic tau neutrinos

With these computational tools, the team managed to extract seven strong candidate tau neutrinos from about 10 years of data. These taus had higher energies than even the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth, which means they must be from astrophysical sources, such as black holes.

This data confirms IceCube’s earlier discovery of astrophysical neutrinos, and they confirm a hint that IceCube previously picked up of astrophysical tau neutrinos.

These results also suggest that even at the highest energies and over vast distances, neutrinos behave in much the same way as they do at lower energies.

In particular, the detection of astrophysical tau neutrinos confirms that energetic neutrinos from distant sources change flavor, or oscillate. Neutrinos at much lower energies traveling much shorter distances also oscillate in the same way.

Black holes, like the one in this illustration, can emit energetic neutrinos.
NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M.Weiss via AP

As IceCube and other neutrino experiments gather more data, and scientists get better at distinguishing the three neutrino flavors, researchers will eventually be able to guess how neutrinos that come from black holes are produced. We also want to find out whether the space between Earth and these distant astrophysical neutrino accelerators treats particles differently depending on their mass.

There will always be fewer energetic tau neutrinos and their muon and electron cousins compared with the more common neutrinos that come from the Big Bang. But there are enough out there to help scientists like me search for the most powerful neutrino emitters in the universe and study the limitless space in between. Läs mer…

When President Joe Biden signed a US$95 billion foreign aid bill into law on April 24, 2024, it started the clock on a nine-month window for TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app. The president can extend the deadline by three months, and TikTok has indicated that it plans to challenge the law in court.

If the law stands and the company fails to sell the app, TikTok will be blocked from any U.S. app store or web-hosting service. This would affect TikTok’s over 170 million U.S. users, including 62% of Americans ages 18 to 29.

It would also alter the news and information landscape. Unlike its competitors, TikTok has been annually increasing its proportion of users who regularly seek news on the platform. Nearly one-third of Americans under 30 use TikTok as a news source.

The main arguments against TikTok under ByteDance’s ownership include that it enables foreign influence of U.S. public opinion, promotes harmful behaviors among minors, and undermines Americans’ data privacy. However, none of these concerns are new or unique to TikTok among social media platforms.

Foreign influence and propaganda

Lawmakers have expressed concern that the Chinese government could influence U.S. public opinion, and thereby politics, by exerting control over what content TikTok users see. Rep. Mike Gallager (R-WI), co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, warned that allowing TikTok to establish itself as the dominant news platform in America is placing control of information in the hands of ByteDance and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) referred to TikTok’s role in challenging ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil drilling project in Alaska as a possible Chinese influence operation meant to undermine U.S. energy dominance.

But U.S-based social media platforms have been and continue to be exploited by a range of foreign governments, including China, and their proxies who use them to attempt to influence U.S. public opinion. Beginning with its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, Russian intelligence has long used platforms like Facebook and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to these ends for nearly a decade.

These influence campaigns create and maintain coordinated cross-platform networks. Researchers assert that Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube refuse to provide the access to the data necessary to track or prevent such activities.

Hazardous to minors

Some lawmakers also caution that TikTok feeds children content linked to dangerous behaviors, like eating disorders and self-harm. However, all social media may pose these threats.

For example, leaked internal documents from a whistleblower revealed that Meta has known since 2019 that its platforms are likely hurting U.S. minors’ mental health and well-being. The company’s internal research found that the platform contributed to body image issues and eating disorders among teen girls and exposed teens to other harmful behaviors, such as bullying, drug abuse and self-harm.

Currently, 41 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits against Meta for the damage allegedly done to minors.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke before the U.S. Senate in 2021 about the dangers posed by Meta’s platforms.

At the same time, there has been little outcry about how time spent on social media increases young people’s exposure to hate-based content or that platforms such as YouTube funnel users into pipelines for radicalization.

Data security and privacy

Proponents of the TikTok sale-or-ban law also claim that the app constitutes an unacceptable threat to data privacy. Rep. Gallagher asserted that the Chinese government could use TikTok for espionage to “find Americans, exfiltrate data and track the location of journalists.”

Yet, there is little reason to believe Americans’ data is safer with U.S.-based companies. Meta has had a wide range of data privacy scandals. Last year, leaked documents showed that even Meta engineers themselves have minimal understanding or control over how people’s data is used.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), co-sponsor of the House bill on TikTok, invoked a case involving the dating app Grindr as a successful precedent for forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok. In 2020, the Chinese company that owned Grindr sold the app to a U.S. company following security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok. But, just last year, a fringe Catholic group in Denver purchased location and usage data from Grindr and other dating apps to track LGBTQ+ priests.

Additionally, the Chinese government hardly needs control of TikTok to access the troves of data that apps, devices and smart appliances collect from Americans. Much of this data can be purchased, completely legally, from commercial data brokers, regardless of who owns it.

Data freely available for purchase on the open market has been shown to include the location data for people visiting Planned Parenthood and mobile device location pings that can be deanonymized to reveal the whereabouts of the president of the United States.

The need for regulation

Concerns about TikTok are not unfounded, but they are also not unique. Each threat posed by TikTok has also been posed by U.S.-based social media for over a decade. I believe that lawmakers should take action to address harms caused by U.S. companies seeking profit as well as by foreign companies perpetrating espionage.

Protecting Americans cannot be accomplished by banning a single app. To truly protect their constituents, lawmakers would need to enact broad, far-reaching regulation. Läs mer…

Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

“The David Grutman Experience”

What prompted the idea for the course?

The first time David Grutman, a Miami businessman who runs a growing hospitality empire,
told me he wanted to teach a class, I thought he meant he wanted to do a single guest lecture.

He had already been guest-speaking in the nightclub management class for several semesters, so turning one session over to David didn’t seem like such a huge leap.

When David clarified that he wanted to teach an entire course on entrepreneurship – drawing from his own experiences – I thought it would be a great opportunity.

Naively, I started sharing tips on how to run the class, based on Florida International University’s academic framework. David did not follow a single thing I said. His unique approach ended up paying off.

The course he teaches – which features celebrities such as DJ Khaled, Pharrell, Drake, Bad Bunny, David Beckham, Jason Momoa, Rick Ross, Serena Williams, Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber – consistently gets the highest positive feedback among all of our courses. Students pay attention intently for almost three hours per class. Faculty members co-teach the course, as I did initially.

David’s guest speakers always bring a sense of practicality and realism to his classes. For instance, when he talked about being 100% committed to his business and taking risks, his guest speaker Rick Ross echoed that sentiment and said he makes strategic decisions when he invests in something he likes, such as his investment in Wing Stop.

Similarly, Bad Bunny told students he cannot work on a project without feeling the passion and identifying with it. Actor Jason Momoa said “hospitality is giving of my heart. I’m self-made, and I had to do it all on my own,” which is similar to David’s own journey as an entrepreneur who started as a bartender.

When David promoted the class on his Instagram, we got over 100 registrations within the first two hours. At that time, most of our in-person classes had no more than 50 students. His last class in spring of 2024 had 400-plus students – so many that we had to use a ballroom as his classroom.

What does the course explore?

David focuses on the cornerstones of success in hospitality: authenticity, relationships, taking it personally, the pros and cons of first-generation versus second-generation establishments, picking a niche, work-life balance and much more. He also goes in depth and shares his business successes as well as failures.

What’s a critical lesson from the course?

The strongest and most lasting lesson is probably about tenacity and not giving up.

For instance, David shared stories of his successes as much as he shared stories of his failures. He recounted how he was convinced that a trio of restaurants he opened in the iconic Firestone tire shop and garage on Miami Beach failed, and he had to make the tough decision to close them shortly after they opened. But it did not deter him from opening his next restaurant in Coconut Grove, The Key Club, followed by his successful venture with rapper Bad Bunny, Gekko.

In each of those cases, David shared what he learned from the failures and how he avoided the same mistakes going forward. He also talked about knowing when the right partner at the right time will lead to success, such as his longtime friend Noah Tepperberg, founder of Tao Group, when he opened their first joint venture, Casadonna.

Despite his own humble start as a bartender, he never allowed anyone to tell him he couldn’t make it. He has shared the story about how his first employer, Jeffrey Soffer, turned him down when he wanted to open his first restaurant, Komodo Miami, because Soffer said, “You are not a restaurant guy, you are a nightclub guy.” Today, Komodo is one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the nation, and both Komodo and Papi Steak are primary dining attractions at the new Fontainebleau Las Vegas.

What will the course prepare students to do?

David emphasizes the importance of humility and learning from others, showcasing the need to prioritize the organization’s well-being over personal ego, even at the cost of facing negative publicity, such as when he had to close the three restaurants at Firestone. This lesson underlined the importance of collaboration and constructive feedback in entrepreneurship.

Developing an ecosystem is another major point, with David stressing the value of building his businesses so that guests will want to party with him in his nightclubs, eat at his restaurants and sleep in his hotels. He emphasized aligning with personal values to establish credibility and attract partnerships, which fosters community engagement and ecosystem growth.

Finally, the course emphasizes the importance of embedding the brand’s purpose in every aspect of the operation, from hiring to partnerships and authentically embodying the mission and values of the business. Läs mer…