Vox Sentences: Uber pays $100 million to keep its drivers from becoming employees

Virginia will reenfranchise 200,000 people with felonies; Uber settles suits brought by drivers; three CIA torture victims are finally getting the chance to sue two of the program's architects.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

If Terry McAuliffe only accomplished felon reenfranchisement, dayenu

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced Friday that he's taking executive action to restore the voting rights of all felons in his state who've completed their sentences.

  [Washington Post / Sari Horwitz and Jenna Portnoy]

• As of 2012, 5.8 million Americans were disenfranchised because of criminal records. And Virginia has one of the strictest laws on the books: Some felons were barred from voting for life.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• That restrictive law is still on the books even after McAuliffe's order; an attempt to change it in the legislature was voted down last year. (Instead, he'll be signing monthly executive orders using his clemency powers to restore voting rights to that month's released felons.)

  [NYT / Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Erik Eckholm]

• Republican state legislators are already making noise about what they can do to stop McAuliffe's plan — pointing out, totally accurately, that the practical impact of restoring felon voting rights will probably be to expand the size of the Democratic electorate in November.

  [Huffington Post / Samantha Lachman]

• They might not need to worry about it. Research shows that even when felons are notified that their voting rights have been restored, their turnout is generally still low.

  [Annals / Marc Meredith andf Michael Morse]

• McAuliffe's office turned up a 1906 quote from a state senator promising that felon disenfranchisement would "eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years." Over a hundred years later, undoing that damage won't be so easy.

  [NYT / Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Erik Eckholm]

If Uber only reconciled with its drivers, dayenu

David Ramos/Getty Images

• Uber is paying $100 million to settle class-action lawsuits in California and Massachusetts brought by its drivers. The settlement will allow the company to keep classifying the drivers as contractors, rather than workers, under labor law.

  [Uber ]

• The lawsuits threatened the core of Uber's business model, which is built on minimal support and benefits for drivers as a way of keeping prices low.

  [Vox / Timothy Lee]

• To liberals and labor lawyers — including the woman who represented Uber's drivers in these suits, profiled in January by Mother Jones — Uber was one of many companies that have prospered in the "gig economy" by keeping their employees in precarity.

  [Mother Jones / Hannah Levintova]

• To companies themselves (not just Uber, but many smaller startups), on the other hand, the prospect of labor litigation has had a chilling effect — so the settlement should make them breathe a sigh of relief.

  [WSJ / Douglas Macmillan, Lauren Weber, and Rachel Emma Silverman]

• Uber isn't totally in the clear yet. Similar suits are still outstanding in several other states.

  [Huffington Post / Ben Walsh and Alexander C. Kaufman]

• Meanwhile, another attempt to reconcile labor practices with the gig economy fell through this week, as the SEIU and Airbnb halted talks on a highly controversial deal that would have had SEIU workers cleaning Airbnb-listed properties between rentals.

  [The Guardian / Sam Levin]

If the CIA's torture victims only got their day in court, dayenu

ACLU

• For the first time, thanks to the ruling of a judge in Washington state on Friday, victims of the CIA's torture program are being allowed to proceed with a lawsuit against two of the program's architects.

  [The Guardian / Maria L La Ganga]

• The government has blocked all previous lawsuits under the "state secrets" privilege. But after the release of the Senate "torture report" in 2014, which put a lot of information about the program into the public record, the government is letting the case proceed.

  [ACLU / Dror Ladin]

• The plaintiffs — two survivors of torture and the family of Gul Rahman, who died in CIA custody — are suing James Mitchell and John Jessen, two psychologists contracted by the CIA to help design its "enhanced interrogation."

  [The Guardian / Spencer Ackerman]

• President Barack Obama has all but promised not to prosecute anyone for torture, which leaves private lawsuits as the way to go.

  [Slate / Eric Posner]

• Because the US law governing torture lawsuits doesn't have a provision for torture that happened while being legally condoned by the US government, the plaintiffs are instead suing under a 1789 law called the Alien Tort Statute. As a Lawfare post argues, the ATS can only be used when the plaintiffs are suing over "a violation of a clearly defined, widely accepted, obligatory international norm."

  [Lawfare / Robert Loeb and David Ryan]

• John Mitchell, one of the defendants, insisted to the Guardian in 2014 that he did nothing wrong — and that he'd be able to defend himself better if he hadn't signed a nondisclosure agreement with the CIA. Depending on how open the court proceedings in this case are allowed to be, he might just get his chance.

  [The Guardian / Jason Leopold]

MISCELLANEOUS

Yes, Hillary Clinton really is that hawkish. [NYT / Mark Landler]

• An oral history of Al Capone's vault, the star of one of the most disappointing television events in history.

  [Mental Floss / Jake Rossen]

• Sex sells. But death sells more.

  [Digiday / Mark Duffy]

• If Joe Biden's anti-cancer "moonshot" has anything close to a chance, it'll be because of immunotherapy. Here's how it works.

  [The Atlantic / Vann Newkirk]

• Amazon's same-day delivery service excludes predominantly black areas in a number of cities.

  [Bloomberg / David Ingold and Spencer Soper]

VERBATIM

"Of all the days of the week, Saturday is the day people are most likely to die." [NY Mag / Cari Romm]

• "Southern Baptists will talk with you about the End Times over coffee and donuts after a Sunday service; Episcopalians will talk about politics, sex, or money with you before they’ll wander into end-of-the-world territory."

  [Pacific Standard / Laura Ortberg Turner]

• "When I was in seventh grade at Bryant Junior High School, an old three-story brick public school in inner-city Minneapolis, we all knew that one kid was the best player in the band. He played the trumpet, and he handled many of the band’s arrangements. We all thought the Bryant band’s rendition of 'Shaft' was even better than the original. He was a small, wiry boy named Prince Nelson."

  [WSJ / Eben Shapiro]

• "It would be cool to go outside, and you’re like, 'All right, I’ve got to go,' and everybody’s calling their Ubers and then you just give out this eagle cry. Then you hear an eagle cry respond to it and then out of the sky comes this eagle. It eclipses the sun a little bit and then swoops up and gets you. That’s a dream of mine and I’m going to make that happen."

  [Sam Richardson to AV Club / Marah Eakin]

• "The erotics of the Sanders campaign are about nostalgia: a new generation of kids is falling in love with a promise held out by a past one. The problem with nostalgia and the melancholy crushes it begets is how quickly you forget that the snapshot you hold of the time before you were born can’t, by definition, include you."

  [n+1 / Marissa Brostoff]

WATCH THIS

Prince, remembered in 11 songs you might not know he wrote [YouTube / Joe Posner]

Vox / Joe Posner

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