Next labor fight is over when you work
Commercial Appeal - 05.24.2015 - WASHINGTON — If there's one labor issue that has come to the forefront of political...
Commercial Appeal - 05.24.2015 - WASHINGTON — If there's one labor issue that has come to the forefront of political agendas over the past few years, it's the minimum wage: Cities and states around the country are taking action to boost worker pay, as federal efforts seem doomed to fail.
But a new wave of reform is already in the works. Instead of how much you earn, it addresses when you work — pushing back against the longstanding corporate trend toward timing shifts exactly when labor is needed, sometimes in tiny increments, or at the very last minute.
That practice, nicknamed "just-in-time" scheduling, can wreak havoc on the lives of workers who can't plan around work obligations that might pop up at any time.
Right now, community groups and unions in Washington, D.C., are formulating a bill that will address the problem of schedules that can be both shifting and inflexible. The labor-backed group Jobs With Justice says it likely will include a requirement that employers provide workers with notice of their schedules a few weeks ahead of time, and that additional hours go to existing employees, rather than spreading them across a large workforce.
"The one thing we're finding overwhelmingly is that people aren't getting enough hours to make ends meet," says Ari Schwartz, a campaign organizer at D.C. Jobs With Justice. "People aren't getting their schedules with enough time to plan child care and the rest of the things in their lives."
When a proposal gets to the D.C. Council, Washington won't be the first: After passage of landmark legislation in San Francisco, bills have been offered in Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Illinois, Connecticut, California, New York, Michigan and Oregon. Along with new proposals to expand paid sick day legislation, they are a bid to give workers more control over how they spend their time.
"These scheduling reforms are getting really popular, because it makes no sense that, for example, you're required to be available to work by your employer and you're not picked for that time," says Tsedeye Gebreselassie, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. "People who don't suffer these abuses already understand what it's like to juggle work and family, so people really identify with that as being a problem."
Carrots and sticks
Twenty years ago, schedules weren't as much of a problem. Working in retail, especially, tended to be a solid 9-to-5 job.
Then retail hours grew longer. And then came computerized scheduling, which allowed employers to best fit staffing to demand. Here's what that looks like in practice: Handing out schedules based on what times of day or the month you expect the most business, splitting up hours across a large workforce that is available on a moment's notice, and sometimes sending people home if traffic is slow.
That helps companies optimize their labor costs, but it wreaks havoc on the lives of low-wage workers, who don't know how much they're going to make from week to week, and often can't schedule anything else around work.
One worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she is still employed there, has worked in the hot food prep section of the Whole Foods in Washington, D.C., for 12 years. She liked it; the pay wasn't bad, and the people were friendly. She worked consistently from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and took a second job as a nanny in the afternoons, which added around $300 a week to her income — more money to send home to her father in El Salvador, and to support her daughter in college in Tennessee.
But then, a new manager cut back hours; some people left and weren't replaced. The schedule posted on the wall started to shift the worker's days off, or tell her to come in from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. instead. Usually she got a week's notice, but once in a while she'd come to work and the schedule had already changed, so she'd have to go back home. After that happened on too many days, she had to drop the afternoon job. So once again, she was just squeaking by.
"She would come and say, ‘I really need you to cover this shift,' and it is what it is," the worker says in Spanish, through a translator. "Lots of us have lost lots of jobs."
It's been better over the past few months, she says. And that's not by accident: As public complaints surfaced about Whole Foods' scheduling practices, the company rolled out a new system that allows employees to see their schedules for two weeks in advance and prevents managers from changing them at the last minute or scheduling "clopenings" — both closing the store and opening it in the morning — without an employee's consent. The policy has been in place nationwide since early April, spokesman Michael Silverman says.
Whole Foods isn't alone. Walmart has also introduced a system of "open shifts," which allows workers to pick their own hours. Starbucks curbed some of its practices in the wake of a New York Times article last year that described their effect on one barista.
The Gap is working with the Center for WorkLife Law at Hastings College of Law, University of California, in San Francisco to set up pilot projects around the country that would measure the impact of giving employees stable schedules and more hours. Many companies haven't considered how much their scheduling practices are actually costing them in the form of employee turnover, says Joan Williams, a UC law professor.
"If you don't count that cost, it disappears. The idea is to generate the kind of rigorous data that will be needed to persuade people to change their financial models," says Williams. "Our hypothesis is that if you provide people with more stable schedules, you'll see lower turnover [and] absenteeism and higher worker engagement."
In time, the business case may grow clear enough that more companies move toward stable schedules on their own. But Williams says legislative efforts are needed as well: A recent national survey found that 41 percent of early-career, hourly workers get their schedules less than a week in advance.
Legislative action
Last year, San Francisco became the first jurisdiction to pass comprehensive scheduling reform, with a set of companion bills that require "formula retailers" (i.e., large chains) to give workers two weeks' notice of their schedules, pay workers for the shifts when they're on call and give hours to current employees instead of hiring more, among other provisions. The law went into effect in January but won't be enforced until July.
Meanwhile, scheduling legislation is in the works around the country. National groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Womens Law Center are helping to build coalitions where scheduling reforms could prove politically palatable, in places such as New York — where the union-backed Retail Action Project has been advocating for "just hours" for years — and Minnesota, where the AFL-CIO-affiliated Working America has been building support among non-union members for measures that would benefit all workers.
But it hasn't been smooth sailing for the scheduling reform movement. A Maryland bill failed this year, in the face of employer opposition. And though there isn't even a bill yet in Washington, businesses are voicing skepticism.
"Any time you alter how employers hire, schedule or retain their workforce, if that flexibility makes D.C. less attractive to businesses, than I'm concerned about that," said Harry Wingo, president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. "The D.C. chamber is concerned about any restrictions on free enterprise."
It's perhaps more concerning to employers than even raising the minimum wage: That's just extra cost. Scheduling, by contrast, impacts the very core of how they've learned to do business.
I Love Working at Starbucks—But Conditions Have to Change
Caitlin O’Reilly-Green is a member of Rise Up Georgia, a partner of Center for Popular Democracy. Too many employees...
Caitlin O’Reilly-Green is a member of Rise Up Georgia, a partner of Center for Popular Democracy.
Too many employees have to deal with inconsistent work schedulesOver the past 18 months, I have been working as a barista at Starbucks–and I love it here. I love making coffee, and I love chatting with customers. Despite the love I have for my work, I have to speak up on behalf of my co-workers: Something has to change in the way Starbucks is treating us.
This became clear to me when I met other Starbucks workers through Rise Up Georgia, a racial and economic justice organization based in Atlanta that is a partner of Center for Popular Democracy, the union-supported group that released a report Wednesday criticizing Starbuck’s labor practices. Through talking with my co-workers, I realized that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time planning my life around my work.
I have seen many co-workers quit on short notice because they couldn’t earn enough to make ends meet or their work schedule was too erratic to plan important things like child care. Though I faced some of the same issues, the hardest part of the job for me was without a doubt the so-called “skeleton-shifts”–severely understaffed shifts that left me stressed, exhausted, and, as a result, sick.
Earlier this year, I worked four days in a row with only my shift supervisor in the back to support me. A co-worker called in sick each day, so I was alone serving the entire store. My store has a drive-through, two registers in the front and a coffee bar–and I was the only one tending all of them.
The work was so grueling that I eventually developed a muscle spasm in my back and was forced to stop working for three months in order to recover from my injury.
When I took my struggles to Starbucks, the company listened and showed me that it cared about my problems. I was offered the opportunity to transfer to a store closer to my home so that I could have a shorter commute, and I now know how to indicate my preferred availability for shifts, so that I have a better chance of planning my life outside of work.
I’m so happy that Starbucks heard me, but I’m just one person. Unfortunately many Starbucks workers don’t speak up and voice their struggles.
My co-workers silently work “clopen” shifts, where they shut down the store at night and come back the next morning to open it. They silently deal with inconsistent work schedules. They silently cope with not knowing how much work they’re going to get each week, making it impossible for them to budget—and budgeting is already hard on $8.25 an hour.
The solution should be obvious for Starbucks. Instead of relying on every worker to bravely speak up about their struggles, Starbucks should change a system that is fundamentally broken.
I’m grateful for the improvements in my schedule, but I strongly believe that all of us deserve hours we can count on. I am speaking up and writing this op-ed in the hope that Howard Schultz, the CEO, will listen to the workers of his company and see that store-level problems don’t happen because of individual managers. It’s the company-wide structure that is failing us.
I think Starbucks is a great company, and I still believe that it wants its employees to be happy. But to get there Starbucks workers need a seat at the table.
Source: Time
Es tiempo que reconsideremos lo que significa la seguridad en nuestras comunidades
Es tiempo que reconsideremos lo que significa la seguridad en nuestras comunidades
La extrema vigilancia policial y la criminalización masiva de nuestras comunidades de color es la crisis moral de...
La extrema vigilancia policial y la criminalización masiva de nuestras comunidades de color es la crisis moral de nuestros tiempos.
Estados Unidos tiene la población más grande de personas encarceladas con aproximadamente 2.2 millones personas en prisión (21 por ciento de los prisioneros del mundo). Mientras, varios departamentos de policía a través del país se encuentran bajo investigación por cargos de brutalidad policial, faltas graves y violaciones a los derechos civiles.
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CFPB says Education is obstructing access to Navient records
CFPB says Education is obstructing access to Navient records
YOUTH ‘LOBBY DAY’ LOOKS TO DISCIPLINE GUIDELINES: More than 100 young activists are expected to gather in front of the...
YOUTH ‘LOBBY DAY’ LOOKS TO DISCIPLINE GUIDELINES: More than 100 young activists are expected to gather in front of the Education Department today and call on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to maintain Obama-era guidelines aimed at addressing racial bias in school discipline policies. DeVos is chairing a White House school safety commission that’s considering whether to rescind the guidelines over concerns that they burden school districts and potentially keep violent students in the classroom. The activists are also expected to visit the offices of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), urging them to sign a pledge and “prohibit federal funding for any school policing or criminalization of schools and invest in restorative justice, and mental health supports and resources for schools, students, and families,” according to a release. The “youth-led lobby day” is being organized by left-leaning groups including the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York and the Urban Youth Collaborative.
Read the full article here.
Developing Progress: Ensuring that public resources contribute to New York’s equity, resilience, and dynamic democracy
Progressive development policies that ensure consideration of economic, social, and environmental impacts will grow a...
Progressive development policies that ensure consideration of economic, social, and environmental impacts will grow a city that is equitable, resilient, and democratic. While stimulating new revenues for the city, progressive development policies will also promote the economic and environmental sustainability of our communities and provide good jobs to both construction and permanent employees.
Download the report.
Each year New York City invests $2 billion to encourage private development, but it does not require progressive development practices, transparency about job creation or other contributions to community well-being, or accountability to benchmarks that could demonstrate the return on this investment.
Starwood Capital Group’s track record for development in New York City provides a good example of the problems with the current approach to the public’s investment. While some Starwood developments meet responsible development standards, others endanger workers and other community members. Notably, on its publicly subsidized project at Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Starwood has partnered with a general contractor with a history of safety violations and alleged illegal behavior.
Examples like the Pier 1 project highlight the need for higher standards with stronger enforcement on projects the public invests in. Brooklyn Bridge Park – particularly, the development of Pier 6 there – offers the city an opportunity to develop principles, institute policies, and enforce standards to ensure that public resources contribute to New York’s equity, resilience, and dynamic democracy.
We recommend that immediate steps be taken as a broader set of progressive development policies takes shape:
The request for proposals for development of Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6 should include strong, clear criteria to promote the economic and environmental sustainability. Starwood Capital should use only responsible contractors and subcontractors on the Pier 1 project. Pension funds should withhold future investments with Starwood Capital until the group meets the pension funds’ Responsible Contractor standards. Developers should be legally accountable and culpable for the safety, health, and environmental conditions on their worksites. Penalties for violations of safety, health, building, and environmental standards, as well as for violations of community benefits and other agreements in public contracts should be raised.Download the full report here.
Protest Planned at St. Louis Fed
St Louis Business Journal - March 4, 2015, by Angela Mueller - A group of activists is planning a series of...
St Louis Business Journal - March 4, 2015, by Angela Mueller - A group of activists is planning a series of demonstrations Thursday outside several Federal Reserve district banks, including in St. Louis.
The demonstrations are intended to highlight the rising unemployment rates among minorities and to urge officials not to raise interest rates, the Wall Street Journal reports.
"The Federal Reserve has the power - and responsibility - to foster stronger economic conditions that create opportunity for all communities," the Economic Policy Institute, the Washington, D.C.-based liberal think tank that is backing the demonstrations, said in a statement.
Demonstrations are planned for outside the regional Fed banks in New York, San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Charlotte, N.C., Dallas and St. Louis.
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Behind the Business Attire, Many Bank Workers Earn Poverty Wages
The Committee for Better Banks (CBB), a Communications Workers of America (CWA)-affiliated community and labor...
The Committee for Better Banks (CBB), a Communications Workers of America (CWA)-affiliated community and labor coalition, was created in 2013 to put an end to that. Cassaundra Plummer, a Maryland-based CBB member currently employed as a bank teller at TD Bank, told In These Times, “A lot of the issues within the banks are not discussed, they’re kept really quiet. As a young woman, I always thought that working at a bank was more of a prestigious job than retail. Once I actually got into banking, I realized that it’s not a whole lot different.”
The CBB, which has grown from eight lead members in April to approximately 60 in six different states today, with thousands more either engaged through petition signing or attending rallies. CBB is hoping to expand and create a critical mass of organized workers by bringing these issues out in the open.
A study released by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) early this month shored up CBB claims, finding that 30.4% of the 1.7 million retail banking employees across the country—more than 500,000 workers—are paid less than $15 an hour. Nearly three-quarters of low-wage bank workers are bank tellers, 84.3% of which are women.
Another report, published by the UC Berkeley Labor Center last year, found that these low-wages led 31% of bank teller families toward enrolling in public assistance programs (compared to 25 percent of the entire workforce). “The cost of public benefits to families of bank tellers is nearly $900 million per year,” says the report.
Though it was labeled an “occupational winner” by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for its 84% throughout its growth in the 1970s, the introduction and proliferation of automated teller machines helped put the brakes on that, leading to a projected 1% growth over the next decade. As Timothy Noah noted for Slate in 2010, banks tellers earn “slightly less than [they] did in 1970,” putting the job at the center of wage stagnation that has become common-place throughout the middle class, especially within the context of expectations of higher productivity.
CEO compensation and executive pay indeed remain at worrying heights. The NELP report found that CEOs of Wells Fargo and Bank of America made amounts equal to more than 500 times the annual earnings of an average bank teller. Stephen Lerner, the architect of SEIU’s famed Justice for Janitors campaign, summed up the wealth disparity among bankers at the top and bottom of the pay brackets in a 2010 New Labor Forum article, writing, “We could increase pay by $2.00 per hour and provide employer-paid health insurance for over 550,000 tellers with just 3.6 percent of the bonuses paid out to executives.”
“The constant focus on making more forces the people working in the bank to take on more work, but we’re being paid the same amount,” says Plummer. “We’re not expecting to become wealthy off of entry-level positions. But the corporations make a lot of money off of the things that we do—the sales goals, and all that we have to do to create wealth for the bank. It should be reciprocated back to the employees.”
By shifting traditional banking services toward automation, low-wage bank workers such as bank tellers and personal bankers have also become the frontline for pushing financial products on to customers in an effort to increase profits. The pressure of sales quotas imposed by management and executives at the top keeps low-wage bank workers under more scrutiny than ever before. Customer service employees in retail banks must not only attempt to hook patrons onto core retail banking services like checking and savings accounts, but must also resort to hawking mortgages and credit cards in ways CBB organizers say can be predatory. Tellers risk termination if they fail to meet quotas for such products.
“Wells Fargo creates an environment of hostility and humiliation. Multiple times I witnessed management behaving in a condescending fashion to those who did not meet ‘goals’ even though their customer service was excellent. Wells no longer cares about customer service or the best interest of their customers; they are only looking to push products and most of the time they are unnecessary products,” one bank employee told the Committee of Better Banks when they surveyed 5,000 workers for the aforementioned study at the group’s conception.
According an April 2015 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, since 2011, 17 different lawsuits across the top five banks in the country (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and US Bank) have been settled for nearly $46 billion, “highlighting a range of alleged illegal and unethical business practices.”
A 2013 Los Angeles Times investigation reported that the pressure of sales goals, which increase U.S retail banks’ profits, has led some bank workers to commit fraud, forging signatures, opening secret checking accounts with fees attached, or even credit lines for customers in order to keep up with their sales goals. This has led to lawsuits from customers and even cities decrying the rigid and unfair sales culture fostered by the banking industry. When these practices become public, banks fire employees and managers in alleged attempts to uphold ethical finance.
But as Khalid Taha, one of the first Committee members in California, currently employed at Wells Fargo in San Diego, describes it, the “impossible” sales goals come from the top and workers ultimately have no other option. “They fire the entry level employees which is us, but if you think about it, yes we are responsible for it, but we are also victims,” says Taha. “We have to keep our jobs, pay our rent. We have no way but to go a little bit shady when we deal with our customers because the company wants to meet their quota. They don’t care how.”
Beyond low pay, CBB has been working to connect these pressurized work environments to their detrimental effects on the economy caused by the bank’s business practices.
The top four retail banks in the country (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo), part of the too-big-to-fail banking institutions that some, like presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, have called to be broken up, now collectively possess assets equivalent to 45% of the U.S economy, a slight increase than what it was in 2008 before that year’s financial crisis.
Lerner, who is currently advising CBB as a fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, told In These Times, “This campaign is different from many union campaigns that say ‘our sole goal is winning better conditions for workers.’ Those campaigns are important, [but] in this case we’re saying that you can’t win better conditions for workers unless you reform the industry—and you can’t reform the industry unless workers are helping reform it.”
At an April 2015 rally in Minnesota where they delivered 11,000 signatures on a petition calling for an end to sales goals, the Committee for Better Banks released a proposed bill of rights for bank workers. One of the planks of the bill addresses what they say is community suffering at the hands of banks: “We must eliminate unreasonable sales goals or performance metrics that force us to push unnecessary products on our customers. We are here for our neighbors—for the child who opens his first savings account, for the newlywed couple planning ahead to retirement, for the senior citizen opening a credit card. We want to be honest brokers of your financial security, and that means an end to pressure tactics that only serve to line shareholders’ pockets.”
“We’re at the very beginning of a baby-steps campaign to build working support for the idea that we need to do two things, and that come simultaneously: We need to address how bank workers unfairly—low pay, etc., but we need to connect with how the finance industry behaves is bad for the overall economy,” Lerner says.
In 2010, Lerner was launching SEIU’s new plan to organize bank workers. Mike Elk described that effort as emanating from his realization that banks influenced the rest of labor organizing through its close connections to the pensions and investment banks that intertwined with financial decisions made not only by workers but their communities, as well.
At the time, fellow journalist Steve Early told Elk, “[Successful organizing] require[s] a long-term commitment that few unions are willing to make, even when dealing with a strategic multinational target that’s not going away.” Lerner left SEIU later that year under disputed circumstances, and his work organizing bank employees was abandoned by the union.
CEO and President of union-owned Amalgamated Bank, Keith Mestrich announced in early August that the bank’s employees would be making at least $15 an hour under their new collective bargaining agreement. He told Buzzfeed, “We think it’s the right thing for our bank to do, and frankly we think it’s the right thing for all banks to do. … If any industry in this country can afford to set a new minimum for its workers, it’s the banking industry.”
But in the rest of the nonunionized retail banking industry, CBB, like the Fight for 15 and OUR Walmart, will be agitating for improvements.
“It was a little bit scary at the beginning, but we have to do it. If we don’t talk then the banks will do whatever they want to do,” says Taha.
Source: In These Times
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a...
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a blanket pardon of immigrants with green cards who have committed minor crimes.
San Diego Councilman David Alvarez and San Diego Unified School District Board President Richard Barrera, along with 57 others, signed a letter organized by Local Progress, a network of progressive municipal elected officials, that was sent to Obama this week.
The group wants to undercut President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to deport individuals who, without their minor criminal histories, would not be deportable. Between 100,000 and 200,000 families could be affected by such a pardon, according to the letter.
“From literally the day after the election, we started hearing concerns from teachers that students were worried and were afraid that they were going to be deported, that their parents were going to be deported, just based on the rhetoric from the campaign,” Barrera said by telephone. “What we’re trying to do is look for every avenue that’s available to us as elected officials to protect our young people and their families.”
The letter suggests that it would be within Obama’s power to make such a blanket pardon because of former President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of draft evaders in 1977 on his first day in office.
“We must protect the legal permanent residents of our city,” Alvarez said via email. “President-elect Trump proposed a deportation plan modeled after Operation Wetback from the 1950s. Dividing families by recklessly deporting hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents would be morally wrong and economically destructive.”
Since 2014, the Obama administration has not prioritized minor convictions for immigration enforcement, as a matter of policy not any change in law. By law, green card holders can be deported for committing offenses that would not incur jail time in today’s criminal court system, like low-level drug offenses.
Trump campaigned on the idea of deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants, particularly criminals. His transition team has yet to set forth details about which immigrants and which criminals.
By Kate Morrissey
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Man with ALS who confronted Flake over tax law launches ‘Be a Hero’ campaign to beat Republicans
Man with ALS who confronted Flake over tax law launches ‘Be a Hero’ campaign to beat Republicans
The minute-long ad, which will run on television and online ahead of the April 24 election for Arizona’s 8th...
The minute-long ad, which will run on television and online ahead of the April 24 election for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, is the first product of Barkan’s new Be a Hero Fund — an outgrowth of the Center for Popular Democracy’s CPD Action, the organization that Barkan has worked with as he’s protested Republican-backed tax and health-care bills.
Read the full article here.
Congressional Briefing Coming on the ‘Walmart Economy’
24/7 Wall ST - November 27, 2014, by Paul Ausick - U.S....
24/7 Wall ST - November 27, 2014, by Paul Ausick - U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Congressman George Miller (D-CA) are scheduled to appear as speakers at a congressional briefing on Tuesday, November 18, to discuss a business model that some are calling the “Walmart Economy.”
The term refers to a business model “where a few profit significantly on the backs of the working poor and a diminishing middle class.”
Also appearing at the hearing are employees of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) who are members of the OUR Walmart group, as well as Carol Joyner, Director of the Labor Project for Working Families; Amy Traub of research firm Demos; and Carrie Gleason, an organizer at The Center for Popular Democracy.
According to a press release from OUR Walmart, “The briefing will highlight Walmart’s low pay, manipulation of scheduling and illegal threats to workers who are standing up for Walmart to publicly commit to $15 an hour and full-time, consistent hours.”
Senator Warren was recently named to the Democratic leadership team that will be put in place next January. She becomes the strategic policy adviser to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a newly created position that the Democratic leadership probably thinks will serve as a bridge to the more liberal elements of the party. She was the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau following the financial crisis and has been a thorn in the side of the big banks ever since.
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