Latest news with #workers
New York Times
a day ago
- Business
- New York Times
Trump Administration Live Updates: ICE Limits Congressional Visits as Democrats Pressure Agency
Social Security benefits could be reduced by about 23 percent in less than a decade if Congress does not shore up the program, its trustees said on Wednesday. The Social Security program faces a longstanding financing shortfall that, if left unaddressed, would slash millions of retirees' crucial monthly benefit payments in just eight years. The deteriorating financial outlook for the retirement program, which supports roughly 61 million Americans, was released in its annual trustees report on Wednesday. It is now expected to run out of money nine months earlier than previously projected, which means benefits could be reduced by 23 percent if Congress does not act to bolster the program. That puts the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, which pays retiree and survivor benefits, on schedule to be depleted in 2033, or when today's 59-year-olds turn 67. At that time, the program will have enough revenue coming in to pay only 77 percent of total scheduled benefits. The most recent setback was driven largely by a policy change, known as the Social Security Fairness Act, which took effect in January and increased benefits for about 2.8 million government and public sector workers. But there were other factors: Government actuaries now assume that the birthrate will remain lower for longer, while projecting that workers' compensation would weaken over time as they capture a lower share of the nation's economic output. A separate trust fund, which finances Social Security disability benefits for an additional 8.2 million people, is on more stable ground. It will be able to pay all of its bills through 2099, the report said. The trustees also reported a slightly weaker financial outlook for the trust fund that finances hospital care for Medicare beneficiaries. They expect that that trust fund will be unable to pay all its bills in 2033, three years sooner than it had estimated last year. That change was driven mostly by increased spending on hospital care in 2024, a shift the trustees believe will continue into the next few years. In their report, the trustees urged lawmakers to address the shortfalls in a timely way so that any changes could be phased in gradually, giving workers and beneficiaries time to adjust. 'Implementing changes sooner rather than later would allow more generations to share in the needed revenue increases or reductions in scheduled benefits,' the trustees said in the report. Some policy experts say it's hard to fully project Social Security's outlook because the latest report doesn't reflect many of President Trump's policies, including his tariff and mass deportation plans, which are expected to worsen the program's deficits. Image Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said the new report on Social Security relied on assumptions from December. 'The world has changed dramatically since then,' she said. Credit... Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press 'The most important story is not in the report,' said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who noted that the report's economic assumptions were locked in at the end of last year. 'The world has changed dramatically since then.' If the administration's tariffs cause the economy to contract and lead to job losses, that would dampen trust fund revenues because fewer payroll taxes would be flowing to the fund. If tariffs caused price increases, that could lead to a higher cost of living adjustment for Social Security recipients and therefore a bump in benefits. Immigrants, both lawful and otherwise, are generally a net positive to the trust fund. One analysis, from October, projected that Mr. Trump's proposals would accelerate the trust fund's insolvency by three years. Social Security and Medicare have long faced a financing shortfall, partly because of demographic changes. Dwindling birthrates mean fewer workers are paying taxes into the programs, all while thousands of baby boomers are retiring daily and collecting their benefits for longer periods. In addition, a larger share of the country's wage base is not subject to payroll taxes, Social Security's lifeblood, compared with years past. The taxes are applied only up to $176,100 in income, and rising income inequality means a greater share of Americans' earnings exceeds that cap and is not taxed. Mr. Trump has vowed to protect Social Security benefits, but he hasn't introduced any proposals to shore up its financing. He empowered Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, to embed at the agency, where it enacted aggressive federal job cuts and policy changes at a time when beneficiary claims were at a record high and staffing was already thin. The changes threw the agency into chaos, left retirees nervous and confused, and overshadowed its true challenges. Mr. Musk, who recently left Washington amid a blowup with Mr. Trump, had cast his efforts to root out waste and fraud as a way to preserve Social Security. 'As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money,' he said on Fox News in March. But those kinds of efforts would have a minimal effect on a program that is already efficiently run, policy experts said, with overhead costs of half a percent of its total spending, and an improper-payment rate of 0.3 percent. 'To even suggest that it is possible to solve the fiscal challenges faced by Social Security focusing only on fraud, waste and abuse is misleading at best and dishonest at worst,' said Jason Fichtner, who held several senior positions at the Social Security Administration after being appointed by former President George W. Bush. To put the magnitude of the financing shortfall in perspective, the trustees noted that revenue would need to rise by an amount that would raise the payroll tax by 3.65 percentage points. That would keep the combined retirement and disability trust funds solvent for the next 75 years, and bring the total tax to 16.05 percent. In many cases, workers split the payroll tax burden with their employers; each currently pays 6.2 percent on earnings up to $176,100, for a total of 12.4 percent. By law, Social Security (unlike parts of Medicare) cannot use money from the federal budget's general revenues to pay benefits. Reducing all beneficiaries' payments by 22.4 percent would also close the financing gap, but proposals to shore up Social Security often combine different approaches to varying degrees. 'There are many variations on these options, including those that vary the timing, magnitude, and other specifics of the changes under consideration,' the trustees said in the report. Republican-led proposals have historically suggested cutting benefits by raising the retirement age, among other changes. Democrat-led proposals typically support raising taxes. Government actuaries have estimated that fixing Medicare's trust fund over the long term would also require significant changes. To make sure Medicare had enough money to pay all its bills over the long term, Medicare would need to either reduce its overall spending on hospital care by 9 percent or lawmakers would have to raise the payroll tax that funds it to 3.32 percent from 2.9 percent, according to the report. Neither option is under discussion by Congress, and Mr. Trump has vowed not to touch the program. A major bill working its way through Congress would cut Medicaid and other social safety net programs, but make almost no adjustments to Medicare. Unlike Social Security, not all of Medicare's bills are financed through a dedicated trust fund. Payments for the parts of Medicare that cover doctors visits and prescription drugs are funded through the government's general fund and with premiums paid by beneficiaries. But the trustees did note that those costs are also expected to rise substantially, putting pressure on the federal budget. Many baby boomers will reach old age over the next decade, meaning they are likely to need more medical care. Myechia Minter-Jordan, the chief executive of AARP, called on Congress to stabilize the social insurance programs, given their widespread support. She added: 'Older Americans nationwide consistently say that the future of Social Security and Medicare are the issues they care about most, and they stand ready to hold politicians across party lines accountable to strengthen these programs for the long term.' Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Unite opposes DS Smith's Derbyshire packaging factory closure
UK's trade union Unite is opposing the proposed closure of DS Smith's packaging factory in Derbyshire as consultations commence. The factory in question is the Clay Cross site, which has nearly 140 jobs at risk. DS Smith, a supplier of retail packaging in the UK, was recently subject to a £5.8bn takeover by Memphis-based International Paper. The new management is reportedly planning to restructure UK operations, potentially closing five sites by the end of 2025. The planned closures could affect around 300 roles, raising concerns among workers and their families. Unite represents the engineers at the Clay Cross site, which has been a significant employer in the local community for generations. Despite International Paper's assurances during the acquisition process that they would not close UK plants, these proposed closures have emerged. Earlier in 2025, the company reported increased sales and earnings, largely attributed to the DS Smith acquisition. The Clay Cross site has been recognised for its operational success and health and safety, making it one of DS Smith's highest performing locations in the UK. The decision to consider this site for closure is reportedly linked to required infrastructure investments, particularly a new roof. This recommendation for a roof replacement stemmed from a visual inspection conducted in 2021. However, the site team has been managing the roof for several years and is not currently requesting its replacement. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: "Workers who were given assurances that their jobs would be safe now face paying the price for a profitable company's greed. It is an utter disgrace that International Paper is playing fast and loose with workers' livelihoods. "Unite is prepared to fight every step of the way to protect our hardworking members' jobs at Clay Cross." "Unite opposes DS Smith's Derbyshire packaging factory closure" was originally created and published by Packaging Gateway, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Malay Mail
a day ago
- General
- Malay Mail
Toxic toll of shipbreaking: New rules may not change dirty and deadly ship recycling business
CHITTAGONG (Bangladesh), June 19 — Mizan Hossain fell 10 metres from the top of a ship he was cutting up on Chittagong beach in Bangladesh — where the majority of the world's maritime giants meet their end — when the vibrations shook him from the upper deck. He survived, but his back was crushed. 'I can't get up in the morning,' said the 31-year-old who has a wife, three children and his parents to support. 'We eat one meal in two, and I see no way out of my situation,' said Hossain, his hands swollen below a deep scar on his right arm. The shipbreaking site where Hossain worked without a harness did not comply with international safety and environmental standards. Hossain has been cutting up ships on the sand without proper protection or insurance since he was a child, like many men in his village a few kilometres inland from the giant beached ships. One of his neighbours had his toes crushed in another yard shortly before AFP visited Chittagong in February. Shipbreaking yards employ 20,000 to 30,000 people directly or indirectly in the sprawling port on the Bay of Bengal. But the human and environmental cost of the industry is also immense, experts say. The Hong Kong Convention on the Recycling of Ships, which is meant to regulate one of the world's most dangerous industries, is set to come into effect on June 26. But many question whether its rules on handling toxic waste and protecting workers are sufficient or if they will ever be properly implemented. Only seven out of Chittagong's 30 yards meet the new rules about equipping workers with helmets, harnesses and other protection as well as protocols for decontaminating ships of asbestos and other pollutants and storing hazardous waste. This photograph taken on February 19, 2025 shows Mizan Hossain, a former employee at a shipbreaking yard who sustained injuries in an accident, posing with his son for photos at his residence on the outskirts of Bangladesh's southern port city of Chittagong. — AFP pic No official death tolls Chittagong was the final destination of nearly a third of the 409 ships dismantled globally last year, according to the NGO coalition Shipbreaking Platform. Most of the others ended up in India, Pakistan, or Turkiye. But Bangladesh — close to the Asian nerve centre of global maritime commerce — offers the best price for buying end-of-life ships due to its extremely low labour costs, with a minimum monthly wage of around US$133 (RM566). Chittagong's 25-kilometre stretch of beach is the world's biggest ship graveyard. Giant hulks of oil tankers or gas carriers lie in the mud under the scorching sun, an army of workers slowly dismembering them with oxyacetylene torches. 'When I started (in the 2000s) it was extremely dangerous,' said Mohammad Ali, a thickset union leader who long worked without protection dismantling ships on the sand. 'Accidents were frequent, and there were regular deaths and injuries.' He was left incapacitated for months after being hit on the head by a piece of metal. 'When there's an accident, you're either dead or disabled,' the 48-year-old said. At least 470 workers have been killed and 512 seriously injured in the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan since 2009, according to the Shipbreaking Platform NGO. No official death toll is kept in Chittagong. But between 10 and 22 workers a year died in its yards between 2018 and 2022, according to a count kept by Mohamed Ali Sahin, founder of a workers' support centre. There have been improvements in recent years, he said, especially after Dhaka ratified the Hong Kong Convention in 2023, Sahin said. But seven workers still died last year and major progress is needed, he said. The industry is further accused of causing major environmental damage, particularly to mangroves, with oil and heavy metals escaping into the sea from the beach. Asbestos — which is not illegal in Bangladesh — is also dumped in open-air landfills. Shipbreaking is also to blame for abnormally high levels of arsenic and other metalloids in the region's soil, rice and vegetables, according to a 2024 study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. This photograph taken on February 18, 2025 shows workers cutting down metal parts at a shipbreaking yard of the PHP Ship Breaking and Recycling facility in Bangladesh's southern port city of Chittagong. — AFP pic 'Responsibility should be shared' PHP, the most modern yard in the region, is one of few in Chittagong that meets the new standards. Criticism of pollution and working conditions in Bangladesh yards annoys its managing director Mohammed Zahirul Islam. 'Just because we're South Asian, with dark skin, are we not capable of excelling in a field?' he told AFP. 'Ships are built in developed countries... then used by Europeans and Westerners for 20 or 30 years, and we get them (at the end) for four months. 'But everything is our fault,' he said as workers in helmets, their faces shielded by plastic visors to protect them from metal shards, dismantled a Japanese gas carrier on a concrete platform near the shore. 'There should be a shared responsibility for everyone involved in this whole cycle,' he added. His yard has modern cranes and even flower beds, but workers are not masked as they are in Europe to protect them from inhaling metal dust and fumes. But modernising yards to meet the new standards is costly, with PHP spending US$10 million to up its game. With the sector in crisis, with half as many ships sent for scrap since the pandemic — and Bangladesh hit by instability after the tumultuous ousting of premier Sheikh Hasina in August — investors are reluctant, said John Alonso of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). Chittagong still has no facility to treat or store hazardous materials taken from ships. PHP encases the asbestos it extracts in cement and stores it on-site in a dedicated room. 'I think we have about six to seven years of storage capacity,' said its expert Liton Mamudzer. But NGOs like Shipbreaking Platform and Robin des Bois are sceptical about how feasible this is, with some ships containing scores of tonnes of asbestos. And Walton Pantland, of the global union federation IndustriALL, questioned whether the Hong Kong standards will be maintained once yards get their certification, with inspections left to local officials. Indeed, six workers were killed in September in an explosion at SN Corporation's Chittagong yard, which was compliant with the convention. Shipbreaking Platform said it was symptomatic of a lack of adequate 'regulation, supervision and worker protections' in Bangladesh, even with the Hong Kong rules. This aerial photograph taken on February 18, 2025 shows a general view of a shipbreaking yard at the PHP Ship Breaking and Recycling facility in Bangladesh's southern port city of Chittagong. — AFP pic 'Toxic' Trojan horse The NGO's director Ingvild Jenssen said shipowners were using the Hong Kong Convention to bypass the Basel Convention, which bans OECD countries from exporting toxic waste to developing nations. She accused them of using it to offload toxic ships cheaply at South Asian yards without fear of prosecution, using a flag of convenience or intermediaries. In contrast, European shipowners are required to dismantle ships based on the continent, or flying a European flag, under the much stricter Ship Recycling Regulation (SRR). At the Belgian shipbreaking yard Galloo near the Ghent-Terneuzen canal, demolition chief Peter Wyntin told AFP how ships are broken down into '50 different kinds of materials' to be recycled. Everything is mechanised, with only five or six workers wearing helmets, visors and masks to filter the air, doing the actual breaking amid mountains of scrap metal. A wind turbine supplies electricity, and a net collects anything that falls in the canal. Galloo also sank 10 million euros into water treatment, using activated carbon and bacterial filters. But Wyntin said it is a struggle to survive with several European yards forced to shut as Turkish ones with EU certification take much of the business. While shipbreakers in the EU have '25,000 pages of legislation to comply with', he argued, those in Aliaga on the western coast of Turkiye have only 25 pages of rules to respect to be 'third-country compliant under SRR'. Wyntin is deeply worried the Hong Kong Convention will further undermine standards and European yards with them. 'You can certify yards in Turkiye or Asia, but it still involves beaching,' where ships are dismantled directly on the shore. 'And beaching is a process we would never accept in Europe,' he insisted. Illegal dumps Turkish health and safety officials reported eight deaths since 2020 at shipbreaking yards in Aliaga, near Izmir, which specialises in dismantling cruise ships. 'If we have a fatality, work inspectors arrive immediately and we risk being shut down,' Wyntin told AFP. In April, Galloo lost a bid to recycle a 13,000-tonne Italian ferry, with 400 tonnes of asbestos, to a Turkish yard, Wyntin said. Yet in May, the local council in Aliaga said 'hazardous waste was stored in an environmentally harmful manner, sometimes just covered with soil.' 'It's estimated that 15,000 tons of hazardous waste are scattered in the region, endangering human and environmental health due to illegal storage methods,' it said on X, posting photos of illegal dumps. In Bangladesh, Human Rights Watch and the Shipbreaking Platform have reported that 'toxic materials from ships, including asbestos' are sometimes 'resold on the second-hand market'. In Chittagong, everything gets recycled. On the road along the beach, shops overflow with furniture, toilets, generators and staircases taken straight from the hulks pulled up on the beach a few metres away. Not far away, Rekha Akter mourned her husband, one of those who died in the explosion at SN Corporation's yard in September. A safety supervisor, his lungs were burned in the blast. Without his salary, she fears that she and their two young children are 'condemned to live in poverty. It's our fate,' said the young widow. — AFP
Fast Company
a day ago
- Fast Company
Will AI replace humans at work? 4 ways it already has the edge
If you've worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see that the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you're safe for another day. But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don't—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce. AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won't always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won't always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement. Speed First, speed. There are tasks that humans are perfectly good at but are not nearly as fast as AI. One example is restoring or upscaling images: taking pixelated, noisy or blurry images and making a crisper and higher-resolution version. Humans are good at this; given the right digital tools and enough time, they can fill in fine details. But they are too slow to efficiently process large images or videos. AI models can do the job blazingly fast, a capability with important industrial applications. AI-based software is used to enhance satellite and remote sensing data, to compress video files, to make video games run better with cheaper hardware and less energy, to help robots make the right movements, and to model turbulence to help build better internal combustion engines. Real-time performance matters in these cases, and the speed of AI is necessary to enable them. Scale The second dimension of AI's advantage over humans is scale. AI will increasingly be used in tasks that humans can do well in one place at a time, but that AI can do in millions of places simultaneously. A familiar example is ad targeting and personalization. Human marketers can collect data and predict what types of people will respond to certain advertisements. This capability is important commercially; advertising is a trillion-dollar market globally. AI models can do this for every single product, TV show, website, and internet user. This is how the modern ad-tech industry works. Real-time bidding markets price the display ads that appear alongside the websites you visit, and advertisers use AI models to decide when they want to pay that price—thousands of times per second. Scope Next, scope. AI can be advantageous when it does more things than any one person could, even when a human might do better at any one of those tasks. Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT can engage in conversation on any topic, write an essay espousing any position, create poetry in any style and language, write computer code in any programming language, and more. These models may not be superior to skilled humans at any one of these things, but no single human could outperform top-tier generative models across them all. It's the combination of these competencies that generates value. Employers often struggle to find people with talents in disciplines such as software development and data science who also have strong prior knowledge of the employer's domain. Organizations are likely to continue to rely on human specialists to write the best code and the best persuasive text, but they will increasingly be satisfied with AI when they just need a passable version of either. Sophistication Finally, sophistication. AIs can consider more factors in their decisions than humans can, and this can endow them with superhuman performance on specialized tasks. Computers have long been used to keep track of a multiplicity of factors that compound and interact in ways more complex than a human could trace. The 1990s chess-playing computer systems such as Deep Blue succeeded by thinking a dozen or more moves ahead. Modern AI systems use a radically different approach: Deep learning systems built from many-layered neural networks take account of complex interactions—often many billions—among many factors. Neural networks now power the best chess-playing models and most other AI systems. Chess is not the only domain where eschewing conventional rules and formal logic in favor of highly sophisticated and inscrutable systems has generated progress. The stunning advance of AlphaFold2, the AI model of structural biology whose creators Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were recognized with the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024, is another example. This breakthrough replaced traditional physics-based systems for predicting how sequences of amino acids would fold into three-dimensional shapes with a 93 million-parameter model, even though it doesn't account for physical laws. That lack of real-world grounding is not desirable: No one likes the enigmatic nature of these AI systems, and scientists are eager to understand better how they work. But the sophistication of AI is providing value to scientists, and its use across scientific fields has grown exponentially in recent years. Context matters Those are the four dimensions where AI can excel over humans. Accuracy still matters. You wouldn't want to use an AI that makes graphics look glitchy or targets ads randomly—yet accuracy isn't the differentiator. The AI doesn't need superhuman accuracy. It's enough for AI to be merely good and fast, or adequate and scalable. Increasing scope often comes with an accuracy penalty, because AI can generalize poorly to truly novel tasks. The 4 S's are sometimes at odds. With a given amount of computing power, you generally have to trade off scale for sophistication. Even more interestingly, when an AI takes over a human task, the task can change. Sometimes the AI is just doing things differently. Other times, AI starts doing different things. These changes bring new opportunities and new risks. For example, high-frequency trading isn't just computers trading stocks faster; it's a fundamentally different kind of trading that enables entirely new strategies, tactics, and associated risks. Likewise, AI has developed more sophisticated strategies for the games of chess and Go. And the scale of AI chatbots has changed the nature of propaganda by allowing artificial voices to overwhelm human speech. It is this 'phase shift,' when changes in degree may transform into changes in kind, where AI's impacts to society are likely to be most keenly felt. All of this points to the places that AI can have a positive impact. When a system has a bottleneck related to speed, scale, scope, or sophistication, or when one of these factors poses a real barrier to being able to accomplish a goal, it makes sense to think about how AI could help. Equally, when speed, scale, scope, and sophistication are not primary barriers, it makes less sense to use AI. This is why AI auto-suggest features for short communications such as text messages can feel so annoying. They offer little speed advantage and no benefit from sophistication, while sacrificing the sincerity of human communication. Many deployments of customer service chatbots also fail this test, which may explain their unpopularity. Companies invest in them because of their scalability, and yet the bots often become a barrier to support rather than a speedy or sophisticated problem-solver. Where the advantage lies Keep this in mind when you encounter a new application for AI or consider AI as a replacement for, or an augmentation to, a human process. Looking for bottlenecks in speed, scale, scope, and sophistication provides a framework for understanding where AI provides value, and equally where the unique capabilities of the human species give us an enduring advantage.
Bloomberg
a day ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Japan Ruling Party Makes Election Pledge of 50% Pay Rise by 2040
Japan's ruling party said it aims to ensure workers secure a cumulative 50% pay increase by 2040 with the economy expanding to a value of ¥1 quadrillion ($6.9 trillion) as it unveiled its platform ahead of a national election next month. The Liberal Democratic Party will try to ensure real wages and nominal wages rise annually by 1% and 3%, respectively, so that annual pay will increase by ¥1 million by fiscal 2030, according to its campaign manifest released on Thursday.
