A Roundup Supreme Court Victory

A 7-2 majority stops a mass tort attempt to evade federal law on regulating a Monsanto pesticide

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (Fifra) . . . establishes a regulatory scheme for the Environmental Protection Agency to review and approve pesticides. It also expressly bars states from imposing requirements “for labeling or packaging in addition to or different from those required” by the agency."

"“For the more than three decades since, EPA has repeatedly re-evaluated glyphosate and has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer,” Justice Kavanaugh writes. “As a matter of federal law, Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change.”"

"Only “if EPA determines that a given warning is necessary for a pesticide’s label and the manufacturer then proceeds to sell the pesticide without that warning, the manufacturer might face liability for misbranding,” Justice Kavanaugh explains." 

 Also see Bayer Wins Supreme Court Challenge Over Roundup Litigation: The 7-2 decision will help the company in its battle to resolve thousands of claims that the popular weedkiller caused cancer by Lydia Wheeler and Patrick Thomas of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"a federal regulator—the Environmental Protection Agency—didn’t require the product to carry a warning label"

"federal law requires it to use the EPA-approved label without a cancer warning, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court. The goal of the federal law—to create a uniform labeling system—“would otherwise be impossible to achieve,” he said."

"The EPA has repeatedly determined that it isn’t likely to be carcinogenic in humans and doesn’t need a label that includes a cancer warning."

Glyphosate isn’t likely to be carcinogenic

See Supreme Court Grills Bayer Over Failure to Warn Consumers About Roundup Risks by Patrick Thomas and Lydia Wheeler of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Bayer has maintained that Roundup is safe to use. Governments globally and the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. have repeatedly determined that glyphosate isn’t likely to be carcinogenic in humans and approved Roundup labels that didn’t include cancer warnings."

"plaintiffs argue the company should go further in how it warns farmers and landscapers of the risks the herbicide may pose. But Bayer argues that those claims supersede the EPA’s authority and would cause a patchwork of rules imposed by individual states.

The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) prohibits states from imposing different or additional warnings from those required under the federal law."

Also see MAHA Moms Are Protesting Against Pesticides by Sabrina Siddiqui and Sara Ashley O’Brien of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"“The fact is that no health regulator anywhere in the world has ever found glyphosate to pose a threat to human health,” the company said in a statement. Bayer said that the Environmental Protection Agency and the European Union have repeatedly found that glyphosate products can be used safely according to the product label directions."

"Pressure around the issue has mounted for months. When a review paper that concluded glyphosate wasn’t a risk to people’s health was retracted last year by the scientific journal that published it 25 years ago over concerns about Monsanto’s involvement, a firestorm went off among those concerned with the chemical’s safety. The Environmental Protection Agency has said the government did not rely solely on the paper when evaluating glyphosate.

“Monsanto’s involvement with the Williams et al paper did not rise to the level of authorship and was appropriately disclosed in the acknowledgments,” Bayer said in a statement."

Top Ten Most Dangerous US Jobs and Percent Male

Tweet from Mark Perry.

 

Minimum wage hikes hurt vulnerable workers

Latest economic research shows harm to Blacks, disabled

By Warren Anderson. He is an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He wrote this for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan.

"Michigan is raising its minimum wage gradually until it reaches $15 by 2027. What many people don’t know is how few workers earn the minimum wage. Nationally, roughly 55% of workers are paid hourly, and of those just 1.1% are paid at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Michigan’s minimum wage is $13.73 per hour. Increasing the minimum wage will disproportionately affect different groups, according to recent economic research.

A new study analyzes the impact of minimum wage hikes on different racial groups in America. The authors look at the effect on African Americans and non-Hispanic whites from 2005 to 2019. They find that black workers were impacted more than white ones, with larger effects for men.

One reason for this could be that most workers earning the minimum wage are younger, and blacks in America are younger than whites on average. However, the researchers control for age. Even when this is done, higher minimum wages lead to more unemployment among blacks. In their conclusion, the authors quote Milton Friedman, who said that minimum wage laws are “the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.” This new paper is consistent with what Friedman predicted back in the 1960s.

Another recent paper studied what happens to the disabled when the minimum wage increases. The authors analyzed this group, who comprise roughly one-eighth of the labor force, during the 2010s. This study found the typical effect that large minimum wage increases impact younger workers overall more than adults. For the disabled, the authors found that small changes to the mandated wage had no effect. But large increases led to about a 3% lower employment rate among the disabled.

A paper published this year looks at college students from a Washington state university. Many students find summer work, and higher minimum wages could hamper their ability to find jobs. The authors gather individual data from the university and the state of Washington. Combining these sources allowed the authors to analyze the work history of students individually. Looking at the years from 2013 to 2019, they find that jumps in the minimum wage lowered employment for students, especially those with little work experience or those from out of town.

A 2024 paper looked at accident rates and the minimum wage. If firms have a fixed amount of money to spend on production, labor cost increases might lead to lower spending on safety. The authors studied state-level minimum wage increases greater than $1 from 2002 to 2011. They found that such wage hikes led to about 4.5% more workplace accidents, with a larger effect for more cash-constrained firms. Findings like these raise the question of whether workers are automatically better off when the government forces businesses to pay them more.

The number of people impacted by the proposed minimum wage hike in Michigan will most likely be minuscule. However, based on research from the past couple of years, we can make some predictions. Black workers, the disabled and college students with little work experience will probably see the largest effects. They will have a harder time finding jobs.

Thomas Sowell has said, “There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.” In considering an increase to the minimum wage, it is important to look beyond the immediate impact of higher wages and to recognize the unintended consequences of forcing employers to pay more for hourly work."

Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries

By Michael Davies, R. Jisung Park, and Anna Stansbury. From NPR's Planet Money.

"These economists analyze data from California worker compensation claims between 2000 and 2019, and they look to see if there is any effect of increasing the minimum wage on workplace injuries. They find one. And a rather large one. "We find that a 10% increase in the minimum wage increases the injury rate by 11% in an occupation-metro area labor market which is fully exposed to the minimum wage increase." That's right, when the minimum wage goes up, so do workplace injuries. Yikes. But why? Davies, Park, and Stansbury find that these workplace injuries reflect "cumulative physical strain, suggesting that employers respond to minimum wage increases by intensifying the pace of work, which in turn increases injury risk." This paper's findings are pretty shocking, and we will be looking down the road to see if other economists can replicate them. Link to paper"

Globalization’s Race to the Top: A Case Study from Bangladesh

By Johan Norberg. 

"In my essay Globalization: A Race to the Bottom – or to the Top?, part of Cato’s Defending Globalization project, I show that the belief that an open world economy would hurt working conditions turned out to be false. On the contrary, trade and investment are associated with higher wages, less child labor, safer working conditions, and better environmental performance. Between 2000 and 2016, the global rate of deaths related to work declined by 14.2 percent.

One of my examples is the effect of Bangladesh’s garment export industry in reducing poverty and creating better jobs, especially for women.

 

An interesting new study by Laura Boudreau of Columbia Business School, recently featured on the excellent podcast Trade Talks, sheds light on one transmission link between globalization and progress: how businesses and consumers in the West put pressure on suppliers to improve working conditions.

After the collapse of the Rana Plaza building, which killed at least 1,260 textile workers in 2013, foreign multinational apparel buyers decided to oblige every factory they bought from to introduce an Occupational Safety and Health Committee. Boudreau conducted a year‐​long field experiment with 84 supplier factories, randomly enforcing the mandate on half. She found that the commitment was not just PR. Because factories did not want to miss out on business, they formed committees, and these also correlated with small improvements in workers’ health and safety in those factories.

The conclusion is the complete opposite of what critics of capitalism have warned about for decades, when claiming that Western multinational companies (MNCs) take advantage of countries with weak governance to put downward pressure on standards. On the contrary, they often step in when governments fail. Boudreau writes: “In weaker states … it may be MNCs or multi‐​stakeholder coalitions with MNCs’ participation that provide enforcement. This research suggests that in such contexts, MNCs can contribute to increasing compliance with labor standards.”

For more on globalization’s race to the top and related issues, be sure to check out my full essay and all the other content on Cato’s Defending Globalization project page."

A Union Railroad Job in Congress

The Railway Safety Act does more to boost union jobs than to promote safety

WSJ editorial. 

"It pays to be wary of politicians rushing out legislation after an accident or disaster, and the Railway Safety Act is a classic of the genre. It uses February’s train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to enact a Big Labor priority.

The bill is courtesy of Ohio’s Senate duo, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican J.D. Vance.

Norfolk Southern

railroad is covering the more than $800 million cost to clean up the hazardous chemicals, but the Senators say their bill is meant to head off future accidents.

Yet the bill’s main provisions are irrelevant to the Ohio rail accident and most others. Instead it maximizes work hours for union laborers and slaps mostly redundant rules on rail carriers.

The biggest union giveaway is a mandate requiring rail carriers with more than $1.032 billion in annual revenue to maintain two-person train crews. That would mean more jobs and longer hours for rail workers, and more dues for the union, but any safety benefit is speculative. The Federal Railroad Administration declined a crew-size mandate in 2019 after finding it would have no effect on safety, and the failed Ohio train had three men aboard. Yet the 12 rail labor unions have sought it for years.

The same goes for the bill’s handling of inspections. It mandates that railcars be inspected by a railroad-certified mechanic instead of a conductor, and it directs the Transportation Department to ban railroads from setting a maximum time limit for inspections. The result will be backed-up trains awaiting inspectors, but no visual check would have caught the heat failure that caused the Ohio derailment.

Sensors beat human eyeballs in detecting malfunctions, as shown in a pair of studies by consulting firm Oliver Wyman in 2015 and 2021. Rail carriers in recent years have focused on developing on-board technology for heat sensing and other common malfunctions, and the mandates will divert money that could finance future breakthroughs.

The biggest carriers already have two-man crews under their collective-bargaining agreements with the rail unions. Midsize carriers often don’t, however, and they would be hit hardest by new costs. Sens. Brown and Vance rushed their bill into draft after the Ohio crash, and they seem not have considered how its rules will burden rail shipping.

Mr. Vance has said he “privately” has enough Republican support to clear the 60-vote Senate filibuster rule. But let’s hope the months since the accident have given other Senators time to consider the merits rather than the easy politics. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer planned to schedule a full vote after the bill cleared the Commerce Committee in May, but only seven Republicans have said they would support it. It would also face a tough hurdle in the GOP-controlled House.

Lawmakers will always be tempted to follow a crisis with new laws they can take credit for, especially when the event is close to home. Yet there’s no excuse for passing an ill-considered law loaded with unnecessary priorities that cater to a political special interest."

The Rail Safety Act Is About Union Handouts, Not Safety

The legislation—which was introduced in response to the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—pushes pet projects and would worsen the status quo

By Veronique de Rugy

"After many years of working in the policy world, I have concluded that politics is at most 10 percent about making the world better and safer. The rest is at least 45 percent theater and 45 percent catering to special interest groups. Further evidence for my assessment comes from the recent grandstanding in the U.S. Senate on rail safety.

One reason why so much of what comes out of Congress is useless, if not straight up destructive, boils down to incentives. Politicians need something they can brag about when they seek reelection or election to higher office. Meanwhile, legislators are constantly surrounded by special interests who plead for government-granted privilege such as subsidies, loan guarantees, tariffs, or regulations cleverly designed to hamstring competitors. Politicians rarely hear from the victims of their policies. Few voters can trace the origin of the higher prices they pay and the lower living standards they suffer.

Enter the Rail Safety Act, a joint product of Sens. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio). This bill, introduced in early May, is touted as a legislative response to the February freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled toxic material, forcing people out of their homes and filling the air with toxic gas. Thankfully, no one was injured. But before anyone understood what truly caused the derailment—most likely a faulty wheel—politicians of all stripes were out promising new regulations to improve rail safety.

The result is legislation with little connection to the derailment, or to any other derailments for that matter. Indeed, it appears to push pet projects that legislators wanted all along without any reckoning of costs and benefits. In consequence, says University of Dayton professor Michael F. Gorman in a new paper, none of the bill's detailed prescriptions and rules "would reduce the risk of a serious accident involving the transport of hazardous material. Taken together, they will likely result in an inferior outcome to the status quo."

This is not surprising. What the bill does have is an awful lot in it for unions to like. For instance, it would freeze train crew sizes (the opposite of efficiency and something unions were demanding long before the derailment) and require more inspections that can only be performed by, you guessed it, union workers.

These regulations might appeal to some people, but let's not pretend they will make the railroad industry more effective. Instead, they would make freight more expensive, potentially pushing more of it toward trucking (a dirty and more dangerous mode of transport). More frustrating is that none of these measures would prevent what is the leading cause of derailment in the United States—namely, human error.

The solution to human error is more automation rather than more people. In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials earlier in May, the Reason Foundation's Marc Scribner explained how rail safety can be greatly enhanced through automated track inspection and automated train operations. He also noted that the search for improved safety above and beyond what regulators require of the rail industry—improvement chiefly through automation—is already well underway.

All of this casts quite a bit of doubt on the rhetoric surrounding the issue. After the bill cleared committee with just one other Republican vote, Vance suggested that without it, there would be another East Palestine incident. In reality, there will be other train derailments regardless of whether the legislation is enacted. The good news is that most of these incidents will likely be insignificant, as a vast majority of derailments are.

This explains why we didn't hear much about derailments before East Palestine. As for rarer, more serious derailments, there's plenty of hope on that front. Whatever one thinks of U.S. railroads, sober analysis of the available data shows the industry is already overwhelmingly safe. This is especially true when juxtaposed against other modes of transportation, particularly trucking.

My colleagues at the Mercatus Center have showed clearly that the number one input to improved rail safety is private investment, something railroads do pretty well. They do it to the tune of around $25 billion a year, and at about six times the level of the average U.S. manufacturer. Most of those manufacturers happen to be served by railroads, and many are darlings of the New Right and its policy agenda.

Certainly, Congress could pursue policies to further improve rail safety. Instead, the American public is being railroaded by 50 percent pandering and 50 percent favoritism to unions."

Marc Levinson reviews Karen Levy's book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance

See ‘Data Driven’ Review: Miles of Mandates: On the failures of a well-intentioned regulation of the trucking industry that has not made the roads any safer. Excerpts:

"Falling asleep at the wheel is deadly. “It is obvious that a man cannot work efficiently or be a safe driver if he does not have an opportunity for approximately 8 hours sleep in 24,” the Interstate Commerce Commission declared in 1937. Ever since, federal rules have limited the work hours of interstate truckers. Also ever since, truckers, their employers and their customers have circumvented the rules when they stand in the way of making money.

Congress tackled the problem in 2012 by requiring long-distance truckers to track their hours with an “electronic logging device” connected to the engine. The mandatory rest breaks and the limits on drivers’ daily and weekly hours didn’t change, but the Transportation Department estimated that monitoring compliance with an ELD would avoid 1,844 crashes and save 26 lives annually. The mandate took partial effect in 2017 and was fully implemented in 2019.

In “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance,” Karen Levy makes a provocative case against this approach. Ms. Levy, a sociologist and lawyer who teaches information science at Cornell University, combines extensive interviews with a thorough understanding of the trucking industry to assert that ELDs haven’t made the roads safer."

"The ELD mandate is also at odds with the way the U.S. trucking industry functions. Long-distance truckers are largely paid by the mile. The shippers the trucking industry serves, however, have no incentive to load or unload trucks quickly. Time spent “detained” at a shipper’s loading dock is often unpaid, but it can count against the number of hours a trucker may legally work during the day, effectively limiting the number of miles he or she can cover. As an aphorism has it: “If the wheel ain’t turnin’, you ain’t earnin.’ ” At a fixed rate per mile, truckers are tempted to drive more than they safely should to compensate for income sacrificed to detention time.

Moreover, Ms. Levy asserts, the devices have tilted the balance of power in the industry against drivers. While regulations require only that ELDs store data related to work time for retrieval by inspectors, trucking companies can add on software that can track a vehicle minute by minute, continuously monitor its speed, and chastise the driver for hitting the brakes too hard or accelerating too fast. As Ms. Levy observed in her research, a dispatcher sitting far away with ELD data on the screen and the Weather Channel on the television may override a trucker’s judgment that the weather is too rough to drive through and order him or her to get on the road.

“The ELD mandate viewed [drivers]—the least powerful members of the industry—as untrustworthy liars who needed to be better policed, rather than professionals doing their best to negotiate difficult logistics in the face of countervailing demands,” Ms. Levy writes.

And what of safety? In a fascinating chapter, the author explores how the ELD mandate has changed the work of the officers who enforce the hours-of-service rules, mainly at roadside weigh stations. Formerly, truckers handed their log book out the window to inspectors, who could peruse it, question the driver, consult databases on a computer, and check truck-stop receipts to judge whether the log was accurate. ELDs, though, force officers to work inside truck cabs, with the driver nearby. “When officers inspected electronic logs, the interaction between enforcer and enforcee could shift from being an adversarial one—aimed at uncovering inconsistencies in accounts and probing the trucker’s veracity—to being reluctantly collaborative,” Ms. Levy found. The result: fewer and less effective inspections."

"trucking may be the most highly subsidized form of transportation in the U.S. Most federal and state expenditures for highways are funded by taxes on motor fuels. The last major federal study, updated in 2000, found that the highway wear and tear caused by heavy trucks far exceeds what those trucks pay in fuel taxes, and studies in several states have found much the same."

"Such subsidies make shipping by truck artificially cheap, leading to more work behind the wheel than if the industry fully paid its own way."

"She reports on a 2021 study linking ELDs to greater compliance with regulations but no reduction in truck crashes. Fatalities in crashes involving large trucks actually increased, as drivers sped up to cover as many miles as they could during their permitted driving time. “ELDs—if integrated alongside other meaningful economic reforms—might well be one component of a healthy, reorganized trucking industry,” Ms. Levy writes. “The problem in trucking is that drivers are incentivized to work themselves well beyond healthy limits—sometimes to death. The ELD doesn’t solve this problem, or even attempt to do so.”"

The Year in Exaggeration

Correcting the record on democracy’s death, nasty railroads, killer hurricanes, etc.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.. Excerpts:

"Reverse hysteria helped to obscure another important story. Police killings of blacks, while gaining saturation coverage, actually are a smaller share of all black homicides than for other racial groups. That share likely got even smaller in 2022 for a horrifying reason: an increase in black homicides overall. One study found that while gun homicides of white males remained flat at roughly 3 per 100,000, they jumped an astonishing 60% for black males in the previous two years, to 56 per 100,000.

This phenomenon, apparently related to a crisis in black-police relations after the George Floyd murder, goes unmentioned by many for whom putatively “black lives matter.”

Joe Biden intervened in 2022 to prevent as disastrous rail strike not because railroads insist on denying their workers sick days. As USA Today almost alone pointed out, railroads actually were leaders in a national “trend toward giving employees a bank of paid days off, that can be used for any purpose,” so workers don’t have to “lie about or prove illness to take a sick day.”

Perhaps the most misleading moment was a front-page Washington Post story about a rail worker who cancelled a doctor’s appointment for an unspecified symptom and died of a heart attack an unspecified number of weeks later.

The Post didn’t explain whether the symptom was related to the heart attack, how many weeks had elapsed, whether the worker had a known condition, why he didn’t reschedule the appointment, why he didn’t use any of his contractual days off or replenishable “points” under a company system that allowed him to reject a work assignment on short notice for any reason."

"In a tweet thread, Patrick Brown, an atmospheric scientist at the climate-action-supporting Breakthrough Institute, wondered why, apart from increased rainfall, the news media “insist on a framing that misleads its audience into thinking we have experienced a dramatic change in hurricane frequency/intensity?”

Ollie Wing, a University of Bristol hydrologist, wondered in a tweet why the media publishes exaggerated flood maps to suggest centimeters of sea-level rise will result in meter-deep floods. The maps are based on so-called bare earth digital overlays that ignore natural and artificial flood barriers, including trees and other vegetation, which in any climate act to limit flooding.

Mr. Wing’s own recently published study indicates that expected increases in U.S. flooding losses in the next 30 years will be primarily due to increased development, not climate change.

The year that ended saw the expressions “existential” and “climate crisis” become conjoined twins in the press. Yet a reader searched in vain for any mention that a long-awaited report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reduced its estimated path of future emissions and also judged the climate to be less prone to worst-case warming than previously thought."