California and Texas ranked highest on the United States Postal Service’s annual list of states with the most dog bites against its employees, the USPS announced.
The report calls attention to the aggressive dog behavior mail carriers often face as the USPS kicks off National Dog Bite Awareness Week.
In 2022, California had the highest number of dog bites with 675. Texas and New York were not far behind with 404 and 321 bites, respectively, the Postal Service reported.
“When our mail carriers are bitten, it is usually a ‘good dog’ that had not previously behaved in a menacing way,” USPS Occupational Safety and Health Senior Director Linda DeCarlo said in a news release.
Houston, Los Angeles and Dallas ranked highest among US cities with the most dog attacks against USPS workers last year, according to the USPS.
More than 5,300 USPS employees were attacked by dogs during mail deliveries last year, according to the Postal Service.
The annual public service awareness campaign, accompanied by the hashtag #dogbiteawareness, runs through next week.
“When letter carriers deliver mail in our communities, dogs that are not secured or leashed can become a nemesis and unpredictable and attack,” Leeann Theriault, USPS employee safety and health awareness manager, said in the release.
The USPS trains its mail carriers not to startle dogs, to avoid petting or feeding them and to place something between themselves and the animal – like their mail satchel – if a dog does attack, the postal said in a news release.
Since most people know the general time their mail arrives each day, the USPS advised keeping dogs secure before Postal Service employees stop by.
Other advice for dog owners, according to the USPS: Place pets on a leash, keep them in the house or behind a fence and make sure they’re away from the door.
The Postal Service also advises parents to not allow children to take mail directly from mail carriers, as the dog may view it as a threat to the child’s safety.
A massive fire broke out at the historic Manila Central Post Office in the Philippine capital late Sunday, with teams of fire fighters battling for more than seven hours through the night before it was finally brought under control.
The fire started around 11:45 p.m. local time and the situation was raised to the highest fire alarm level just before 6 a.m on Monday morning, according to the Bureau of Fire Protection.
The blaze was brought under control around 7 a.m., leaving behind a charred roof and upper levels of the structure.
Pictures and footage showed flames and thick smoke billowing from the windows of the neoclassical building, known for its grand entry lined with ornate columns.
The building sits within the historic old Manila town near other tourist landmarks along the Pasig River that flows through the capital.
The post office was first built in 1926 and designed by Filipino architects Juan M. Arellano and Tomás Mapúa. It was severely damaged during World War II but rebuilt in 1946, preserving most of its original edifice.
It was declared an “important cultural property” in 2018, meaning the country’s oldest post office was of “exceptional cultural, artistic, and historical significance to the Philippines,” according to CNN affiliate CNN Philippines.
The building currently houses the Philippine Postal Corporation, the government-run postal service that handles everything from regular mail, parcels and special stamp collections.
Mark Laurente, chief of staff of the postmaster general, said that national identification cards were spared from the fire as those were stored in another city, CNN Philippines reported Monday morning.
The Supreme Court seemed to side with a former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, who says the US Postal Service failed to accommodate his request to not work on Sundays.
A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an “undue burden” on the USPS and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts.
But during oral arguments on Tuesday, there appeared to be consensus, after almost two hours of oral arguments, that the appeals court had been too quick to rule against Groff.
There seemed to be, as Justice Elena Kagan put it, some level of “kumbaya-ing” between the justices on the bench at times.
But as justices sought to land on a test that lower courts could use to clarify how far employers must go to accommodate their employees’ religious beliefs, differences arose when a lawyer for Groff suggested that the court overturn decades-old precedent. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed open to the prospect.
Critically, however, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were sympathetic to arguments made by the Postal Service that granting Groff’s request might cause morale to plummet among the other employees. Kavanaugh noted that “morale” among employers is critical to the success of any business. And several justices nodded to the financial difficulties the USPS has faced over the years.
Groff, who lives in Pennsylvania, served in 2012 as a rural carrier associate at the United States Postal Service, a position that provides coverage for absent career employees who have earned the ability to take off weekends. Rural carrier associates are told they need flexibility.
In 2013, Groff’s life changed when the USPS contracted with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. Groff’s Christian religious beliefs bar him from working on Sundays.
The post office contemplated some accommodations to Groff such as offering to adjust his schedule so he could come to work after religious services, or telling him he should see if other workers could pick up his shifts. At some point, the postmaster himself did the deliveries because it was difficult to find employees willing to work on Sunday. Finally, the USPS suggested Groff choose a different day to observe the Sabbath.
The atmosphere with his co-workers was tense and Groff said he faced progressive discipline. In response, he filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is charged with enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against an employee because of religion.
Groff ultimately left in 2019. In a resignation letter, he said he had been unable to find an “accommodating employment atmosphere with the USPS that would honor his religious beliefs.”
Groff sued arguing that the USPS violated Title VII – a federal law that makes it unlawful to discriminate against an employee based on his religion. To make a claim under the law, an employee must show that he holds a sincere religious belief that conflicts with a job requirement, he must inform his employer and has to have been disciplined for failing to comply.
Under the law, the burden then shifts to the employer. The employer must show that they made a good faith effort to “reasonably accommodate” the employee’s belief or demonstrate that such an accommodation would cause an “undue hardship” upon the employer.
District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled against Groff, holding that that his request to not work on Sundays would cause an “undue hardship” for the USPS.
“Exempting Groff from working on Sundays caused more than a de minimis cost on USPS because it actually imposed on his coworkers, disrupted the workplace and workflow, and diminished employee morale,” the 3rd Circuit wrote in its opinion last year.
“The accommodation Groff sought (exemption from Sunday work)” the court added, “would cause an undue hardship on USPS.”
A dissenting judge, Thomas Hardiman, offered a road map for justices seeking to rule in favor of Groff. The main thrust of his dissent was that the law requires the USPS to show how the proposed accommodation would harm “business” – not Groff’s coworkers.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stayed Gerald Groff from the completion of his appointed rounds,” wrote Hardiman, a George W. Bush nominee who was on a shortlist for the Supreme Court nomination that went to Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017. “But his sincerely held religious belief precluded him from working on Sundays.”
Groff’s lawyer, Aaron Streett, told the high court that the USPS could have done more and was wrong to claim that “respecting Groff’s belief was too onerous.” He urged the justices to cut back or invalidate precedent and allow an accommodation that would allow the worker to “serve both his employer and his God.”
“Sunday’s a day where we get together and almost taste heaven,” Groff told The New York Times recently. “We come together as believers. We celebrate who we are, together. We worship God. And so to be asked to deliver Amazon parcels and give all that up, it’s just really kind of sad.”
The Biden administration has urged the high court to simply clarify the law to make clear that an employer is not required to accommodate an employee’s Sabbath observance by “operating shorthanded or regularly paying overtime to secure replacement workers.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar acknowledged, however, that employer could still be required to bear other costs such as administrative expenses associated with rearranging schedules.
This story has been updated with additional details.
A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
CNN
—
The Wild West of the post-Roe v. Wade legal landscape is focused on a lone federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, who could use a 19th century law to limit access to abortion medication for every American woman.
The judge, 45-year-old Matthew Kacsmaryk, held a hearing Wednesday about whether he should impose a preliminary injunction that would require the US Food and Drug Administration to withdraw or suspend its approval of the drug, mifepristone, while a larger case progresses.
Mifepristone is taken along with another drug, misoprostol, as part of the two-step medication abortion process. Misoprostol can be prescribed on its own, but it is consideredless effective.
Kacsmaryk, who sounded open to the idea of restricting access to mifepristone, will have to agree with some or all of these general points raised if he decides to issue an injunction:
That doctors who don’t perform abortions and live in Texas, where abortions are already banned, are harmed by abortions conducted elsewhere.
That an FDA approval conducted over the course of four years and finalized 23 years ago was so flawed that it should be rescinded.
That a single federal judge in Amarillo should do what no federal judge has ever done and unilaterally rescind an FDA approval.
That a drug, which studies suggest is on par with ibuprofen in terms of safety, is actually so harmful it should be reconsidered by the FDA.
CNN’s Tierney Sneedwrote a longer list of takeaways from the hearing, where anti-abortion rights doctors and activist groups teed up their lawsuit in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom to further limit access to abortion care in the US.
It’s important to note that no matter what Kacsmaryk does, it will be appealed up through the 5th USCircuit Court of Appeals and potentially to the Supreme Court.
But perhaps the most incredible question Kacsmaryk faces is whether an 1870s chastity law named for an anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, should be resuscitated and applied to the medicine that now accounts for a majority of US abortions.
Comstock operated the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and was a special agent of the US Postal Service. He was known for seizing contraband like contraceptives and condoms in the name of rooting out obscenity, according to the New York Historical Society.
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who has written about the Comstock Act for CNN Opinion, described Comstock as being “obsessed by what he saw as the decaying morals of a country preoccupied with sex.”
Ziegler writes:
The law he inspired barred not just the mailing of “obscene books” but also birth control and abortion drugs and devices. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Comstock Act was used to prohibit the mailing of many literary classics, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” to works by James Joyce and Walt Whitman.
Comstock himself proudly carried a gun and scoured the mail for cases involving information about abortion or contraception, even if a doctor provided it. By Comstock’s standard, the law was a great success: he claimed to have destroyed 15 tons of books, arrested more than 4,000 people and driven at least 15 people to suicide.
While Congress has acted to relax elements of the Comstock Act, including to allow the mailing of contraceptives, it is still technically on the books with regard to the mailing of anything that could be used for an abortion.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the FDA dropped its requirement that a person obtain mifepristone in person. A prescription is still required.
In December, the Department of Justice notified the US Postal Service that the Comstock Act did not apply as long as “the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.”
The group that brought the Texas lawsuit, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, wants to reapply the Comstock Actand restrict the mailing of abortion medication.
The FDA’s already exhaustive and detailed drug approval process was especially scrutinized for mifepristone, which was more commonly known as part of the RU-486 regimen when it became available to American women at the turn of the century.
It had been available in Europe for a dozen years before that. Here’s CNN’s report from September 2000.
That the drug works safely as a means of abortion is not really up for dispute as a medical matter after all that time, according to CNN’s Jen Christensen, who explains more about the medication in this article about mifepristone.
Another CNN data analysis suggests mifepristone is safer than penicillin and Viagra.
Mifepristone has a death rate of 0.0005% – five deaths for every 1 million people in the US who used it. Penicillin’s death rate is four times greater. Viagra’s is 10 times greater, according to the analysis by CNN’s Annette Choi and Will Mullery.
Kacsmaryk had a long history of challenging laws providing greater access to reproductive rights before he became a federal judge. While he has promised to be an impartial judge, every Democrat and one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, opposed his nomination in 2019.
Now Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge at the courthouse in Amarillo, which almost guarantees he hears cases filed there.
So it may be no coincidence that the group challenging use of mifepristone set up an outpost months before filing its lawsuit. The group is based in Tennessee, but one of the doctors named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit practices near Amarillo.
However one feels about judicial shopping and whether that happened in this case, the word appears to be out that a conservative judge is alone in Amarillo and open for business.
According to a CNN profile, Kacsmaryk has also put on hold Biden administration policies related to immigration and overseen cases related to vaccine requirements and gender identity. Last December, he halted a federal program in Texas that allowed minors to get birth control without their parents’ consent.
That suit regarding the birth control program established in 1970 was brought by a Texas father “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality,” which he said forbids premarital sex.
Kacsmaryk agreed, even citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church in his decision to say “contraception (just like abortion) violates traditional tenets of many faiths, including the Christian faith Plaintiff practices.”
His sister described him to The Washington Post as an anti-abortion rights activist and detailed her own decision to give a child up for adoption rather than seek an abortion.
“He’s very passionate about the fact that you can’t preach pro-life and do nothing,” Jennifer Griffith told the Post. “We both hold the stance of you have to do something. You can’t not.”
Many of us will close out 2022 with celebrations that stretch well into the wee hours of New Year’s Day.
But when Jan. 1, 2023 gets underway, we’ll just as likely return to familiar routines and habits – caffeine? – and even add in some new resolutions, like a morning walk or healthier eating.
If that’s the case, there are several grocery chains, drug stores and restaurant chains nationwide open for business on Jan 1, 2023.
But check hours of operation at your local store. Several will have modified hours and are either opening later or closing earlier on New Year’s Day.
Also, with January 1, 2023 falling on a Sunday, for most federal employees, Monday, January 2, will be treated as a paid holiday. This means post offices, government offices and banks will be closed on Monday.
Grocery stores:
Whole Foods
Safeway
Albertsons
Wegmans
Kroger
Stop & Shop
Drug stores:
CVS (pharmacy hours will vary based on location)
Walgreens (pharmacies closed on Jan.1)
Rite Aid
Discounters:
Walmart
Target
BJ’s
Dollar General
Five Below (check for modified store hours)
Department stores:
Nordstrom
JC Penney
Kohl’s
Macy’s
Marshalls
TJ Maxx (check for modified store hours)
Home improvement and home goods stores:
Lowe’s
Bed, Bath & Beyond
IKEA
USPS: Local post offices will be open on New Year’s Eve. Post offices will be closed on Jan. 1 and Jan. 2. Mail will not be picked up and will not be delivered.
FedEx: Ground and Express services are closed on Jan. 1. On Jan. 2, ground service is open but express service is closed.
Britain’s cost-of-living crisis is already taking the shine off Black Friday. Now, the annual shopping bonanza faces an additional threat from strikes that could disrupt deliveries, subdue online sales and deliver another blow to the slumping economy.
Some 235,000 workers have gone on strike across the United Kingdom this week, encompassing schools, universities and the postal service. Workers are demanding better pay and working conditions as they struggle with soaring food and energy bills.
Strike action by as many as 115,000 Royal Mail staff on Thursday and Friday threatens to disrupt Black Friday sales and deliveries at a crucial time of the year for retailers.
Small businesses in particular are suffering “enormous damage” as a result of the postal strikes, as they “rely on an efficient mail service for so much of their trade,” according to a statement posted to LinkedIn and signed by Murray Lambell, eBay
(EBAY) UK general manager, Martin McTague, chair of the Federation of Small Businesses, and Michelle Ovens, founder of campaign group Small Business Britain.
Postal workers are planning further strike action for November 30 and December 1, following walkouts in August and September.
“Customers should expect delays to items posted just before, during or just after strike action,” Royal Mail said in a statement.
Strikes have swept the United Kingdom this year, as workers grapple with a worsening cost-of-living crisis and an economy that is sliding into a recession. Wages have stagnated and failed to keep pace with inflation, now at a 41-year high, setting the stage for clashes between employers and employees.
Those clashes have already caused widespread disruption, including to train travel, and are now spreading to even more sectors, such as education and healthcare.
More than 70,000 university workers went on strike over pay, working conditions and pensions on Thursday and Friday at 150 universities across the United Kingdom.
The strike is the biggest in the history of British higher education, affecting over 2.5 million students, according to the University and College Union, which organized the strike. Another strike is planned for November 30.
In Scotland, every school on the mainland was shut Thursday after walkouts by as many as 50,000 teachers in the first day of national strike action over pay in almost 40 years, according to the Educational Institute of Scotland, a trade union.
Meanwhile, the Royal College of Nursing, which has more than 300,000 members, said Friday that nurses would hold a strike on two days in December — the first in the union’s 106-year history — in support of its call for higher pay.Unison, a labor union representing nearly half a million health service workers, will complete its own strike ballot on Friday.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 356,000 days were lost to strike action in August, not far off the previous high recorded in July 2014, when 386,000 days were lost. That number dipped to 205,000 in September.
But the picture could get worse again before it gets better, with disruption stretching beyond Black Friday and well into the holiday season. Strike action will also add to losses facing companies and could prompt further job cuts.
RMT, Britain’s largest transport union, on Tuesday announced four 48-hour strikes in December and January after talks with Network Rail collapsed. Network Rail’s chief negotiator, Tim Shoveller said that striking makes the “precarious financial hole” in which the company finds itself bigger and “the task of finding a resolution ever more difficult.”
Drivers for Best Food Logistics, who deliver fresh food to restaurants including KFC, Burger King and Pizza Hut, have also voted to strike, according to a statement fromtheGMB Union on Thursday. No dates have yet been announced and a company spokesperson told CNN Business it is committed to “reach a way forward.”
The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents striking postal workers, has announced additional walkouts on December 9, 11, 14, 15, 23 and 24, which could jeopardize Christmas deliveries. Royal Mail says it has not yet been formally notified of these dates.
Relations between the company and the union have deteriorated after they failed to reach an agreement on pay and changes to working terms and conditions during talks lasting seven months.
According to Royal Mail CEO Simon Thompson, the strikes have added £100 million ($121.3 million) to Royal Mail’s losses so far this year and could lead to further job cuts on top of 10,000 already announced.
“The CWU’s planned strike action is holding Christmas to ransom for our customers, businesses and families across the country, and is putting their own members’ jobs at risk,” Thompson said in a statement.
Also on Friday, thousands of Amazon
(AMZN) warehouse workers plan to take part in protests and strikes in around 30 countries, including the United States, Britain, Japan, India, Australia, France, Germany and South Africa, according to UNI Global Union.
This is the third year that the Make Amazon Pay campaign has organized a global day of action on Black Friday. Protests due to take place between shifts at an Amazon warehouse in Coventry, England on Friday evening are not expected to affect Black Friday deliveries.
New batches of votes were reported late Thursday evening in Arizona and Nevada – states with key races that will determine control of the Senate – but it’s still not clear when enough of the outstanding hundreds of thousands of ballots will be counted to call the Senate and gubernatorial contests in those states.
Control of the House is also still in the balance as ballots are counted in states such as California. Republicans appear to be inching toward a majority, though they have not yet secured enough wins to take control as more than two dozen congressional races remain uncalled. The closer-than-expected contest for the House has added serious complications to GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be the next speaker.
Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, is expected to begin reporting votes from the critical batch of roughly 290,000 early ballots turned in on Election Day – and the partisan composition of those votes could determine who wins the state’s Senate and governor’s races.
More votes are expected to be reported on Friday as counting continues. Here’s what to know about where things stand:
The biggest reason the vote counting is taking so long is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.
When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. Of course, the lag was anticipated – it took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner in the presidential race, following a massive increase in mail-in voting amid the pandemic.
In Arizona, CNN and other news networks have yet to call the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters, or the governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake.
The CNN Decision Desk estimated there are roughly 540,000 ballots still to be counted, as of late Thursday evening. The majority of those, about 350,000 ballots, are in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.
The biggest chunk of uncounted ballots, about 290,000, are votes that were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day. A top official told CNN late Thursday that Maricopa County expects to start releasing the first results from those outstanding ballots Friday evening.
“We should start to see those tomorrow, I believe – we’ll start seeing those come in,” said Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.
Those ballots could be key in determining who will win the statewide races for governor and Senate. The mail-in ballots reported so far in Arizona lean heavily Democratic while Election Day ballots strongly favor Republicans – but it’s still too early to know which way the mail-in ballots turned in on Election Day will fall.
In addition, Maricopa County has about 17,000 ballots that were not read by the tabulator on Election Day because of a printer error, and those ballots still need to be counted, too.
Maricopa County updated an additional tranche of just over 78,000 ballots on Thursday night.
In Pima County, Arizona’s second-most populous and home to Tucson, a new batch of 20,000 ballots was reported Thursday evening. Elections Director Constance Hargrove told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and John King that the county has been able to report batches of approximately 20,000 ballots per day, and anticipated another ballot drop of 20,000 on Friday.
“We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.
The delay in calling the races in Arizona have prompted criticisms and conspiracies – some of which are reminiscent of the wild and baseless allegations that were made in the state after the 2020 election, such as false claims about felt-tipped Sharpies.
Elections officials in Maricopa County debunked false claims circulating on right-wing social media suggesting that a woman wearing glasses in the county’s counting facility livestream was Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee and current secretary of state.
“Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” the official Twitter account of Maricopa County tweeted in response Thursday evening. “We can confirm this was a party Observer. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers who happen to wear glasses.”
Lake, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who has embraced former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen, said on Charlie Kirk’s right-wing talk show Thursday, “I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won.” There is no evidence that the election officials were deliberately delaying the reporting of results.
At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”
Gates explained why it takes longer for Arizona to count ballots than states such as Florida, which reported most of its results on election night. He pointed out that Florida does not allow for mail-in ballots to be dropped off on Election Day, while Arizona does. This slows down the process because the hundreds of thousands of ballots need to be processed and go through signature verification before they can be counted.
Florida also closes early voting the Sunday before Election Day, while ballots can be dropped off through Election Day in Arizona.
“We have so many close races that everyone is still paying attention to Maricopa County. Those other states like Florida, those races were blowouts. Nobody is paying attention anymore,” Gates said.
In Nevada, the CNN Decision Desk estimated there were about 95,000 votes outstanding as of Thursday evening.
In Clark County, the state’s largest, which includes Las Vegas, there are more than 50,000 ballots still to be counted, Clark County registrar Joe Gloria said Thursday.
Nevada state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots to be counted. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.
Jamie Rodriguez, interim registrar of votes for Washoe County, said the county disqualified 400 mail-in ballots on Thursday – about two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received – because they were postmarked late.
Washoe County, which includes Reno, still has about 22,000 ballots left to count, Rodriguez said, and the county expects to get through most of them on Friday.
Clark County added around 12,000 votes on Thursday night. The county says it will provide an update Friday on its remaining ballots to count.
Key races in the Silver State, including the Senate contest between Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican challenger Adam Laxalt and the governor’s race between Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Republican Joe Lombardo, have not been called as of Friday morning.
Control of the Senate – which will come down to Nevada, Arizona and possibly the December runoff in Georgia – was expected to be a toss-up going into Election Day. Republicans, however, anticipated winning the House, though the closer-than-expected contest for control of the chamber has made McCarthy’s quest for the speakership more difficult, even if Republicans do end up winning the majority.
Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.
McCarthy and his team are confident he will get the votes to be speaker. But conservative hard-liners are emboldened by the likelihood of a narrow House GOP majority and are threatening to force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, which he has long resisted.
The ultimate makeup of the House is important for McCarthy because of the way the chamber elects a speaker: It requires a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, not just a majority of the party in control. If Republicans take power with a double-digit majority, McCarthy could afford to lose a few defectors. But a slim majority gives single members – and the Freedom Caucus – more power to make demands and threaten to withhold support.
Many key House races have yet to be called, and some remain razor-thin and could head into recounts. One such race is in Colorado, where GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was ahead by just 1,122 votes as of 9 a.m. ET Friday. Votes are still being counted in the district.
LIVERPOOL, England — On the long picket line outside the gates of Liverpool’s Peel Port, rain-soaked dock workers warm themselves with cups of tea as they listen to 1980s pop.
Dozens of buses, cars and trucks honk in solidarity as they pass.
Dockers’ strikes are not new to Liverpool, nor is depravation. But this latest walk-out at Britain’s fourth-largest port is part of something much bigger, a great wave of public and private sector strikes taking place across the U.K. Railways, postal services, law courts and garbage collections are among the many public services grinding to a halt.
The immediate cause of the discontent, as elsewhere, is the rising cost of living. Inflation in the United Kingdom breached the 10 percent mark this year, with wages failing to keep pace.
But the U.K.’s economic woes long predate the current crisis. For more than a decade, Britain has been beset by weak economic growth, anaemic productivity, and stagnant private and public sector investment. Since 2016, its political leadership has been in a state of Brexit-induced flux.
Half a century after U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger looked at the U.K.’s 1970s economic malaise and declared that “Britain is a tragedy,” the United Kingdom is heading to be the sick man of Europe once again.
The immediate cause of Liverpool dockers’ discontent that brought them to strike is the rising cost of living. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Here in Liverpool, the “scars run very deep,” said Paul Turking, a dock worker in his late 30s. British voters, he added, have “been misled” by politicians’ promises to “level up” the country by investing heavily in regional economies. Conservatives “will promise you the world and then pull the carpet out from under your feet,” he complained.
“There’s no middle class no more,” said John Delij, a Peel Port veteran of 15 years. He sees the cost-of-living crisis and economic stagnation whittling away the middle rung of the economic ladder.
“How many billionaires do we have?” Delij asked, wondering how Britain could be the sixth-largest economy in the world with a record number of billionaires when food bank use is 35 percent above its pre-pandemic level. “The workers put money back into the economy,” he said.
What would they do if they were in charge? “Invest in affordable housing,” said Turking. “Housing and jobs.”
Falling behind
The British economy has been struck by particular turbulence over recent weeks. The cost of government borrowing soared in the wake of former PM Liz Truss’ disastrous mini-budget on September 23, with the U.K.’s central bank forced to step in and steady the bond markets.
But while the swift installation of Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, as prime minister seems to have restored a modicum of calm, the economic backdrop remains bleak. Spending and welfare cuts are coming. Taxes are certain to rise. And the underlying problems cut deep.
U.K. productivity growth since the financial crisis has trailed that of comparator nations such as the U.S., France and Germany. As such, people’s median incomes also lag behind neighboring countries over the same period. Only Russia is forecast to have worse economic growth among the G20 nations in 2023.
In 1976, the U.K. — facing stagflation, a global energy crisis, a current account deficit and labor unrest — had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. It feels far-fetched, but today some are warning it could happen again.
The U.K. is spluttering its way through an illness brought about in part through a series of self-inflicted wounds that have undermined the basic pillars of any economy: confidence and stability.
The political and economic malaise is such that it has prompted unwanted comparisons with countries whose misfortunes Britain once watched amusedly from afar.
“The existential risk to the U.K. … is not that we’re suddenly going to go off an economic cliff, or that the country’s going to descend into civil war or whatever,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London. “It’s that we will become like Italy.”
Portes, of course, does not mean a country blessed with good weather and fine food — but an economy hobbled by persistently low growth, caught in a dysfunctional political loop that lurches between “corrupt and incompetent right-wing populists” and “well-intentioned technocrats who can’t actually seem to turn the ship around.”
“That’s not the future that we want in the U.K,” he said.
Reviving the U.K.’s flatlining economy will not happen overnight. As Italy’s experience demonstrates, it’s one thing to diagnose an illness — another to cure it.
Experts speak of an unbalanced model heavily reliant upon Britain’s services sector and beset with low productivity, a result of years of underinvestment and a flexible labor market which delivers low unemployment but often insecure and low-paid work.
“We’re not investing in skills; businesses aren’t investing,” said Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “It’s not that surprising that we’re not getting productivity growth.”
But any attempt to address the country’s ailments will require its economic stewards to understand their underlying causes — and those stretch back at least to the first truly global crisis of the 21st century.
Crash and burn
The 2008 financial crisis hammered economies around the world, and the U.K. was no exception. Its economy shrunk by more than 6 percent between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009. Five years passed before it returned to its pre-recession size.
For Britain, the crisis in fact began in September 2007, a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when wobbles in the U.S. subprime mortgage market sparked a run on the British bank Northern Rock.
The U.K. discovered it was particularly vulnerable to such a shock. Over the second half of the 20th century, its manufacturing base had largely eroded as its services sector expanded, with financial and professional services and real estate among the key drivers. As the Bank of England put it: “The interconnectedness of global finance meant that the U.K. financial system had become dangerously exposed to the fall-out from the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market.”
The crisis was a “big shock to the U.K.’s broad economic model,” said John Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. Productivity took an immediate hit as exports of financial services plunged. It never fully recovered.
“Productivity before the crash was basically, ‘Can we create lots and lots of debt and generate lots and lots of income on the back of this? Can we invent collateralized debt obligations and trade them in vast volumes?’” said James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum and a former adviser to Labour’s left-wing former shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.
A post-crash clampdown on City practises had an obvious impact.
“This is a major part of the British economy, so if it’s suddenly not performing the way it used to — for good reasons — things overall are going to look a bit shaky,” Meadway added.
The shock did not contain itself to the economy. In a pattern that would be repeated, and accentuated, in the coming years, it sent shuddering waves through the country’s political system, too.
The 2010 election was fought on how to best repair Britain’s broken economy. In 2009, the U.K. had the second-highest budget deficit in the G7, trailing only the U.S., according to the U.K. government’s own fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
The Conservative manifesto declared “our economy is overwhelmed by debt,” and promised to close the U.K.’s mounting budget deficit in five years with sharp public sector cuts. The incumbent Labour government responded by pledging to halve the deficit by 2014 with “deeper and tougher” cuts in public spending than the significant reductions overseen by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
The election returned a hung parliament, with the Conservatives entering into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The age of austerity was ushered in.
Austerity nation
Defenders of then-Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity program insist it saved Britain from the sort of market-led calamity witnessed this fall, and put the U.K. economy in a condition to weather subsequent global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from the war in Ukraine.
“That hard work made policies like furlough and the energy price cap possible,” said Rupert Harrison, one of Osborne’s closest Treasury advisers.
Pointing to the brutal market response to Truss’ freewheeling economic plans, Harrison praised the “wisdom” of the coalition in prioritizing tackling the U.K.’s debt-GDP ratio. “You never know when you will be vulnerable to a loss of credibility,” he noted.
But Osborne’s detractors argue austerity — which saw deep cuts to community services such as libraries and adult social care; courts and prisons services; road maintenance; the police and so much more — also stripped away much of the U.K.’s social fabric, causing lasting and profound economic damage. A recent study claimed austerity was responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
Under Osborne’s plan, three-quarters of the fiscal consolidation was to be delivered by spending cuts. With the exception of the National Health Service, schools and aid spending, all government budgets were slashed; public sector pay was frozen; taxes (mainly VAT) rose.
But while the government came close to delivering its fiscal tightening target for 2014-15, “the persistent underperformance of productivity and real GDP over that period meant the deficit remained higher than initially expected,” the OBR said. By his own measure, Osborne had failed, and was forced to push back his deficit-elimination target further. Austerity would have to continue into the second half of the 2010s.
Many economists contend that the fiscal belt-tightening sucked demand out of the economy and worsened Britain’s productivity crisis by stifling investment. “That certainly did hit U.K. growth and did some permanent damage,” said King’s College London’s Portes.
“If that investment isn’t there, other people start to find it less attractive to open businesses,” former Labour aide Meadway added. “If your railways aren’t actually very good … it does add up to a problem for businesses.”
A 2015 study found U.K. productivity, as measured by GDP per hour worked, was now lower than in the rest of the G7 by a whopping 18 percentage points.
“Frankly, nobody knows the whole answer,” Osborne said of Britain’s productivity conundrum in May 2015. “But what I do know is that I’d much rather have the productivity challenge than the challenge of mass unemployment.”
‘Jobs miracle’
Rising employment was indeed a signature achievement of the coalition years. Unemployment dropped below 6 percent across the U.K. by the end of the parliament in 2015, with just Germany and Austria achieving a lower rate of joblessness among the then-28 EU states. Real-term wages, however, took nearly a decade to recover to pre-crisis levels.
Economists like Meadway contend that the rise in employment came with a price, courtesy of Britain’s famously flexible labor market. He points to a Sports Direct warehouse in the East Midlands, where a 2015 Guardian investigation revealed the predominantly immigrant workforce was paid illegally low wages, while the working conditions were such that the facility was nicknamed “the gulag.”
The warehouse, it emerged, was built on a former coal mine, and for Meadway the symbolism neatly charts the U.K.’s move away from traditional heavy industry toward more precarious service sector employment. “It’s not a secure job anymore,” he said. “Once you have a very flexible labor market, the pressure on employers to pay more and the capacity for workers to bargain for more is very much reduced.”
Throughout the period, the Bank of England — the U.K.’s central bank — kept interest rates low and pursued a policy of quantitative easing. “That tends to distort what happens in the economy,” argued Meadway. QE, he said, is a “good [way of] getting money into the hands of people who already have quite a lot” and “doesn’t do much for people who depend on wage income.”
Meanwhile — whether necessary or not — the U.K.’s austerity policies undoubtedly worsened a decades-long trend of underinvestment in skills and research and development (Britain lags only Italy in the G7 on R&D spending). At British schools, there was a 9 percent real terms fall in per-pupil spending between 2009 and 2019, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Xu. “As countries get richer, usually you start spending more on education,” Xu noted.
Two senior ministers in the coalition government — David Gauke, who served in the Treasury throughout Osborne’s tenure, and ex-Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable — have both accepted that the government might have focused more on higher taxation and less on cuts to public spending. But both also insisted the U.K had ultimately been correct to prioritize putting its public finances on a sounder footing.
It was February 2018 before Britain finally achieved Osborne’s goal of eliminating the deficit on its day-to-day budget.
Austerity was coming to an end, at last. But Osborne had already left the Treasury, 18 months earlier — swept away along with Cameron in the wake of a seismic national uprising.
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David Cameron had won the 2015 election outright, despite — or perhaps because of — the stringent spending cuts his coalition government had overseen, more of which had been pledged in his 2015 manifesto. Also promised, of course, was a public vote on Britain’s EU membership.
The reasons for the leave vote that followed were many and complex — but few doubt that years of underinvestment in poorer parts of the U.K. were among them.
Regardless, the 2016 EU referendum triggered a period of political acrimony and turbulence not seen in Westminster for generations. With no pre-agreed model of what Brexit should actually entail, the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU became the subject of heated and protracted debate. After years of wrangling, Britain finally left the bloc at the end of January 2020, severing ties in a more profound way than many had envisaged.
While the twin crises of COVID and Ukraine have muddled the picture, most economists agree Brexit has already had a significant impact on the U.K. economy. The size of Britain’s trade flows relative to GDP has fallen further than other G7 countries, business investment growth trails the likes of Japan, South Korea and Italy, and the OBR has stuck by its March 2020 prediction that Brexit would reduce productivity and U.K. GDP by 4 percent.
Perhaps more significantly, Brexit has ushered in a period of political instability. As prime ministers come and go (the U.K. is now on its fifth since 2016), economic programs get neglected, or overturned. Overseas investors look on with trepidation.
“The evidence that the referendum outcome, and the kind of uncertainty and change in policy that it created, have led to low investment and low growth in the U.K. is fairly compelling,” said professor Stephen Millard, deputy director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
Beyond the instability, the broader impact of the vote to leave remains contentious.
Portes argued — as many Remain supporters also do — that much harm was done by the decision to leave the EU’s single market. “It’s the facts, not the uncertainty that in my view is responsible for most of the damage,” he said.
Brexit supporters dismiss such claims.
“It’s difficult statistically to find much significant effect of Brexit on anything,” said professor Patrick Minford, founder member of Economists for Brexit. “There’s so much else going on, so much volatility.”
Minford, an economist favored by ex-PM Truss, acknowledged that “Brexit is disruptive in the short run, so it’s perfectly possible that you would get some short-run disruption.” But he added: “It was a long-term policy decision.”
Where next?
Plenty of economists can rattle off possible solutions, although actually delivering them has thus far evaded Britain’s political class. “It’s increasing investment, having more of a focus on the long-term, it’s having economic strategies that you set out and actually commit to over time,” says the IFS’ Xu. “As far as possible, it’s creating more certainty over economic policy.”
But in seeking to bring stability after the brief but chaotic Truss era, new U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has signaled a fresh period of austerity is on the way to plug the latest hole in the nation’s finances. Leveling Up Secretary Michael Gove told Times Radio that while, ideally, you wouldn’t want to reduce long-term capital investments, he was sure some spending on big projects “will be cut.”
This could be bad news for many of the U.K.’s long-awaited infrastructure schemes such as the HS2 high-speed rail line, which has been in the works for almost 15 years and already faces a familiar mix of local resistance, vested interests, and a sclerotic planning system.
“We have a real problem in the sense that the only way to really durably raise productivity growth for this country is for investments to pick up,” said Springford, from the Centre for European Reform. “And the headwinds to that are quite significant.”
For dock workers at Liverpool’s Peel Port, the prospect of a fresh round of austerity amid a cost-of-living crisis is too much to bear. “Workers all over this country need to stand up for themselves and join a union,” insisted Delij.
For him, it’s all about priorities — and the arguments still echo back to the great crash of 15 years ago. “They bailed the bankers out in 2007,” he said, “and can’t bail hungry people out now.”
The US Postal Service on Friday proposed increased prices “to offset the rise in inflation,” according to a statement from the agency.
The price hikes, which have been approved by the Governors of the U.S. Postal Service, include a three-cent increase to purchase a stamp and a four-cent increase to mail a postcard. The changes amount to a 4.2% price increase for first class mail, according to USPS.
The proposal must now be reviewed by the Postal Regulatory Commission.
The announcement from the US Postal Service comes as consumers around the nation continue to grapple with rising prices for groceries, gas and other necessities. The US Postal Service has publicly struggled financially in recent years, and President Joe Biden signed a law earlier this year to overhaul the USPS’ finances and allow the agency to modernize its service.
“As operating expenses continue to rise, these price adjustments provide the Postal Service with much needed revenue to achieve the financial stability sought by its Delivering for America 10-year plan,” US Postal Service said on Friday. “The prices of the U.S. Postal Service remain among the most affordable in the world.”
Unlike other government agencies, the USPS generally does not receive taxpayer funding, and instead must rely on revenue from stamps and package deliveries to support itself.
The Postal Service is also looking to increase fees for P.O. Box rentals, money orders and the cost to purchase insurance when mailing an item.
If approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission the changes would take effect January 22, 2023, after midnight.
