Return Of The Blue Wave, Con't

Perpetually DEEPLY CONCERNED ABOUT DONALD TRUMP Maine Sen. Susan Collins should now be deeply concerned about keeping her job, as Cook Political Report has shifted her 2020 reelection race to true toss-up status.

Collins won her last reelection bid in 2014 by more than 30 points but is expected to face a much tighter race this time around, with the leader of the state's House of Representatives, Sara Gideon (D), announcing she would challenge the four-term senator.

A press release Friday from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) claimed that the incumbent senator's support had cratered in the state following her confirmation vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year, a controversial vote that Democrats argue pushed her outside the label of "moderate."

"This is the latest in a string of bad news for the vulnerable incumbent, who has continued to lose support among Mainers and seen her net approval drop by a 'stunning' amount since President Trump took office," the DSCC said in a press release, quoting a Morning Consult analysis.

The senator defended her vote to confirm Kavanaugh last month in an interview with The New York Times, telling the newspaper she did not regret her vote "in the least."

Gideon, meanwhile, hammered Collins for the vote in her campaign announcement earlier this year.

“At one point, maybe Sen. Collins was different, but she doesn’t seem that way anymore: taking over a million dollars from drug companies and the insurance industry and voting to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court,” Gideon said.

No current Republican senator has paid more in the polls than Collins.  Like the article says, she won in 2014 by 30 points, running against her was unthinkably quixotic even a few years ago.

Now she's in serious trouble, along with Republican incumbents Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona.

If Democratic Sen. Doug Jones can keep his seat in Alabama, Democrats can pick up at least three seats.  They'll need to pick up more to send Mitch McConnell to the showers, but two open GOP seats, one in Tennessee and one in Kansas are in play, and support for North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis isn't very deep.

It'll take some lifting, but then again, I figure Trump wrecking the economy will have an effect.

Vacationless Nation

America, you're getting screwed out of your time off, and it's costing us tens of billions of dollars.

Workers in the United States left a record number of vacation days on the table last year, equating to billions in lost benefits, according to research from the U.S. Travel Association, Oxford Economics and Ipsos. 

A total of 768 million days went unused in 2018, a 9% increase from 2017. Of those, 236 million were completely forfeited, which comes out to $65.5 billion in lost benefits.

Fifty-five percent of workers reported that they did not use all of their vacation days. If American workers used their time off to travel, the study says, the economic opportunity amounts to $151.5 billion in additional travel spending and would create 2 million American jobs. 

One of the main culprits for the increase in unused vacation days is that the number of earned days off is increasing faster than workers are using them. Workers did not use an average of 27.7% of their earned days off in 2018, up from 25.9% in 2017. 

Although there was a large increase in unused vacation days, on average, American workers took more days off in 2018: 17.4, up from 17.2 off in 2017. However, that is a significant drop from the 20.3 average vacation days used from 1978 to 2000.

But of course in Trump's America, you do what you are told, worker.

The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County was to either spend Tuesday standing in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak, or to take the day off with no pay.
“Your attendance is not mandatory,” read the rules that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those that showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” the rules said.

Those that decided to sit out the event would have an excused absence, the company said, and would not qualify for overtime pay on Friday. The company has a 56-hour workweek with 16 hours of overtime. That means those workers who attended Mr. Trump’s speech and showed up for work on Friday meeting the overtime threshold are being paid at a rate of time and a half, while those that didn’t go to hear the president are being paid the regular rate, despite the fact that both groups did not do work on the site on Tuesday.

This is just what Shell wanted to do and we went along with it,” said Ken Broadbent, business manager for Steamfitters local 449.

The local has 2,400 workers on the site and Mr. Broadbent said he would not “bad rap about it one way or another.”

“We’re glad to have the jobs. We’re glad to have the project built,” he said. “The president is the president whether we like him or dislike him. We respect him for the title.”

We all serve at the pleasure of Dear Leader Trump now, and our corporate masters will see to it that we do.

Now get back to work.