Case Claiming Sean Penn Illegally Threatened His Non-Profit's Staff Dropped by Trump Labor Board
US labor board prosecutors are ditching a Biden-era complaint that alleged Sean Penn illegally threatened his non-profit's workers, the latest sign of a more management-friendly enforcement approach under President Donald Trump.
In a Friday filing, a regional official at the US National Labor Relations Board ordered the withdrawal of a complaint against Community Organized Relief Effort, Penn's disaster relief organization. While the agency's investigation had concluded that an email Penn sent staff contained illegal implied threats, 'the conduct is isolated in nature,' with no 'ongoing unlawful effect' on working conditions, regional director Danielle Pierce wrote in her order. Pierce said she could revive the case if there were new allegations brought against CORE within the next six months, according to the order viewed by Bloomberg News.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
33 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump repeats threats to California over transgender track state champion
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump targeted California's education funding again after a transgender student won two high school track and field events at the state meet Sunday. AB Hernandez, 16, became the center of political controversy overnight because she is transgender and running in girls track and field in California. Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state of California in a May 27 Truth Social post prior to the meet because of her presence and issued a similar threat for 'large scale fines' Tuesday after she was crowned a California state champion in girls triple jump and high jump. The California Interscholastic Federation adopted regulations in 2013 allowing students to engage in high school sports 'in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student's records.' The same year, California lawmakers codified into state law that students could participate in school programs consistent with their gender identity. After Trump's May 27 threat, the CIF changed its rules to allow the athlete with the next-best qualifying mark in three events to participate and to issue a duplicate medal to the next-best finisher behind Hernandez in those events. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon threatened legal action Monday against California public schools if they continue allowing transgender athletes to compete in accordance with their gender identity. The attack on California's education funding over transgender girls' participation in girls' sports teams came as little surprise after the Justice Department filed suit against Maine in April for a similar policy. The White House argues policies like those in California and Maine are discriminatory, and therefore allow it to terminate federal K-12 funding to those states. Trump ordered investigations into all three, but has moved more swiftly in its dispute with Maine, whose governor publicly challenged Trump over the policy. Several education policy researchers and attorneys previously told the Chronicle that Maine is a test case, intended to see whether the Trump administration can subvert the normal process for cutting funds — as well as terminate all education funding to a state, rather than a more targeted cut. The Education Department is investigating California, Minnesota and Oregon's high school athletic associations, individual school districts in Oregon and Washington, the University of Pennsylvania and San Jose State University for allowing transgender athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identities. The Education Department confirmed Tuesday that it has opened an investigation into a Connecticut school system for allowing transgender athletes to compete on sports teams consistent with their gender identity. California received about $8 billion in federal funding for K-12 education in the 2024-25 school year, about 6% of its total budget, according to the state Department of Education. Of that, $2.5 billion was for low-income students under Title I, $1.5 billion for special education and students with disabilities, $157 million for English as a second language programs, and $5.7 million for nutritional services. To terminate funding, the Trump administration will need to argue that allowing athletics participation based on gender identity rather than sex assigned at birth violates Title IX. Several federal courts have found the opposite: that if a school tells a transgender athlete they can't participate in certain sports or use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity, it is discriminating against that student on the basis of sex.
Miami Herald
40 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Walmart sends a hard-nosed message to employees
Walmart (WMT) , the largest retail chain in the U.S., has sent a harsh message to employees after a controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling. For years, President Donald Trump has promoted his plan to secure the U.S. borders and conduct mass deportations of immigrants who are in the country illegally. Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter "Illegal immigration costs our country billions and billions of dollars each year…And I will therefore take every lawful action at my disposal to address this crisis," said Trump during a briefing in the White House in 2018. Related: IRS sends stern warning to employees after layoffs Shortly after Trump was sworn in for a second term as president in January, he signed several executive orders focused on cracking down on illegal immigration. Some are targeted at increasing border security, reinstating "enhanced vetting" of visa applicants, and adding limits on birthright citizenship. Last week, the Trump administration gained major ground in its immigration agenda when the Supreme Court gave it the green light to cut a humanitarian program that granted temporary U.S. residency to over 500,000 immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The decision comes after the court ruled in another case that the administration could also remove temporary legal status from roughly 350,000 Venezuelan migrants. Shortly after the Supreme Court's latest ruling, Walmart reportedly informed its stores nationwide to identify workers who will lose their work authorization due to the ruling, according to a recent report from Bloomberg. Related: Walmart suffers another major boycott from customers The retailer also fired an unknown number of workers in Florida and Texas who will soon lose temporary legal residency in the U.S. Walmart even warned employees in at least two Florida stores that they will be let go if they don't get new work authorizations. Walmart's move follows in the footsteps of Disney, which reportedly warned its Venezuelan employees in Florida that their jobs are at risk after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to cut protections for thousands of Venezuelans last month. On May 20, Disney placed those employees (45 cast members) on a 30-day unpaid leave and told them they would be fired if they did not obtain new work authorization by the end of the 30-day period. So far, since Trump took office on Jan. 20, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested over 100,000 immigrants. ICE is reportedly arresting up to 2,000 immigrants a day. Last year, under the Biden administration, ICE was making 300 daily arrests. The dramatic increase in arrests comes after the Trump administration's "Border Czar" Tom Homan warned in an interview last year that the U.S. will soon see a "historic deportation operation." More Labor: Amazon CEO gives hard-nosed message to employeesIRS has an alarming solution to a growing problem after layoffsJPMorgan Chase CFO issues stern warning to employees These efforts have so far sparked controversy on social media and massive protests in a few cities across the nation. The Trump administration's deportation plan can also have a major domino effect in workplaces across the country, as immigrants make up a significant portion of the U.S. workforce. Out of the roughly 169 million workers in the U.S., over 32 million are immigrants, which is about 19% of the workforce. Many industries in the U.S. have also relied on the employment of undocumented immigrant workers. According to a report from the American Immigration Council last year, the U.S. is estimated to have over 7.5 million undocumented workers in various industries. Construction is the top industry with the most undocumented workers, who make up about 14% of its workforce. Following construction is the agriculture industry, where almost 13% of its workforce is made up of undocumented workers. The hospitality industry comes in as No. 3, as undocumented workers make up about 7% of its workforce. Related: Dollar General suffers major boycott from customers The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Fast Company
42 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Trump's favorite expression: ‘I don't know'
On Monday, the head of U.S. disaster agency FEMA stunned staffers when he mentioned in a briefing that he'd not been aware of any such thing as 'hurricane season.' Not exactly an ideal grasp of weather phenomena for the person in charge of America's emergency management. Although a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security later claimed the comment was intended as a joke, it didn't exactly rouse more confidence in his abilities. 'I don't know,' after all, has lately become a go-to line among leaders all throughout the federal government—especially the president himself. The most egregious 'I don't know' in recent memory was almost certainly Trump's response when a reporter asked him if the president needs to uphold the U.S. Constitution, something he swore an oath to do, but that's just the tip of the uninformed iceberg. Ignorance may be bliss but in President Donald Trump's second term, it's just standard operating procedure. Nearly five months in, it's starting to look like the I Don't Know administration. Every shade in the 'I don't know' rainbow For leaders in every field, 'I don't know' can be a get-out-of-jail-free card for difficult questions, be they from board members, reporters, or staff at an all-hands meeting. 'I don't know' can be the meat in a sandwich where the bread slices are, 'that's a great question,' and 'I'll look into that.' It only tends to work as an acceptable deflection, however, if used sparingly. That's certainly not the case with the current president. Some of Trump's 'I don't know's'—which will be labeled IDKs going forward, for brevity—seem utterly genuine. It stands to reason that the president might have merely been candid, rather than obtuse, in an Oval Office meeting back in April when he said he did not know what 'the Congo' is. More often than not, however, those IDKs smack of tactics. Looking closely at the president's recent speeches, press conferences, and interviews, he appears to have three main modes for using IDK as a strategic evasion: the Ostrich, the Complicator, and the Minimizer. As the title suggests, the Ostrich is Trump's way of metaphorically burying his head in the sand. He employs it seemingly to avoid admitting an inconvenient fact, either to maintain plausible deniability or deflect blame. The Ostrich is perfect for neither confirming nor denying the details of Signalgate right as that explosive story first broke, explaining why the new surgeon general is a wellness influencer and not a practicing physician, or why Trump pardoned a violent January 6 rioter who assaulted a police officer. The Complicator is the IDK Trump trots out in an apparent effort to inject ambiguity into settled issues, or at least those with an obvious correct answer. Is the separation of church and state a good thing or a bad thing? Trump does not know. Do DOGE's massive cuts or the elimination of the US Agency of International Development require a vote in Congress? Who's to say. (Certainly not Trump.) Did Trump benefit at all from sky-high sales of the memecoin that literally bears his name? Consider asking someone else who may know of such things. Finally, The Minimizer is the IDK Trump seems to reach for when casting a moment or person as so insignificant as to not be worth talking about. It can't be a big deal if Trump doesn't even know about it—perhaps it never even happened! This one is reserved for not acknowledging things like Mitch McConnell's battle with polio or a Kennedy Center audience booing JD Vance. It can be hard to tell sometimes whether Trump is using strategic evasion or if he truly doesn't know something. Either way, when it comes to issues as important as the arrest and detention of a Tufts University student, seemingly over her writing of a pro-Palestine op-ed in a student newspaper, the leader of the free world not knowing about it is a problem. The evolution of Trump's IDKs Trump's history with IDK runs all the way back to the early days of his political career. In a February 2016 interview, Jake Tapper asked the then-candidate if he wanted to disavow a recent endorsement from former KKK leader David Duke, who told listeners on his radio show that week that voting for anyone besides Trump 'is really a treason to your heritage.' What should have been a no-brainer disavowal, however, ended up becoming an Ostrich moment. 'I don't know anything about David Duke,' Trump claimed. The non-disavowal quickly became a persistent news item, helped in no small part by unearthed footage of Trump previously denouncing Duke in the year 2000. (Trump went on to disavow Duke again, and blame a supposedly shoddy earpiece during the Tapper interview for his not doing so sooner.) During his first term as president, Trump seemed to use IDK's as a folksy performance of not being the average ivory tower egghead politician. He wouldn't simply admit when he didn't know something, he would cast it as groundbreaking information for Real Americans. The telltale term in such instances wasn't IDK, but rather 'nobody knew.' When Trump proved unable to quickly replace Obamacare, he famously lamented, 'nobody knew health care could be so complicated.' He used this construction so often, Now This made a supercut about it. As for those in Trump's cabinet and in Congress during his first term, the IDK's mostly came in response to reporters asking for reactions to Trump's provocative tweets. The 'I don't know' administration The difference between Trump's first term and his current one is that both Trump and his colleagues seem to be a lot more comfortable dropping IDK's, considering how often they do it. Another change, though, is the brazenness with which they offer them. The Secretary of Health didn't know whether the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives or not. The Secretary of Education didn't know about a new policy of vetting social media accounts for foreign students. The Secretary of Labor didn't know her department had eliminated a whole agency, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, one that happened to be investigating self-styled DOGEfather Elon Musk. And neither the Secretary of State nor the Speaker of the House apparently knew about the president's private dinner for investors in his cryptocurrency during the week of the dinner. Members of Team Trump even cling to their supposed lack of information as they are offered enlightenment in real time. Anyone paying close attention to politics in 2025 will have likely seen by now the surreal spectacle of a grown adult denying the necessary knowledge to determine whether, say, January 6 rioters behaved violently, while being shown a video about it. The worst offender of the bunch is probably Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Questioned about a doctored image Trump shared in an effort to link mistakenly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia with the violent gang MS-13, Noem vehemently refused to admit the image had obviously been photoshopped. 'I don't have any knowledge as to that photo you're pointing to,' she claimed, refusing to look at the blown-up image in question. When the congressman interrogating her asked an assistant to bring the poster image within five feet of Noem's face, she declined to look at it, and thus continued to know nothing about it. It's getting easier to believe, though, that Trump and his administration may not know a lot of things. Who knows what they won't know tomorrow.
