Readit NewsThis is why the US dropped tea into Boston to have it's own Freedom.
(But primarily done to protect colonial smugglers' and merchants' businesses which were being undercut by the English tea that was still cheaper than theirs, even with the small tax.)
It's reasonable to be upset about the fact that this is arguably a tax dodge! But all of the other criticism of buybacks apply equally to dividends which no one seems to get upset about. Fundamentally this is the corporation saying it doesn't have a market-beating way to reinvest this capital, and it's giving the money back to its owners to more productively invest.
They temporarily raise the stock price for the people who are the counterparties to the stock purchase, but isn't that also creating a taxable event for them?
Once the buyback is done, what's keeping that share price from sliding right back down to earth? The shareholders who support the company and hold watch a group who bet against the company by selling shares reap a profit, in a tax advantaged way, while their own dividends are effectively stolen. The buybacks are actually a crap deal for anyone who is a responsible buy and hold investor.
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There are at least two sides to every contract, that's how contracts work. There are a lot of people lining up to defend the business owner, and I'm not finding a single word from any of the H-2A workers, who are uniquely powerless and in a class who has a well-documented history of being exploited.
Those workers 'quitting' was found to be constructive dismissal. They were coerced into quitting, that's the 'other side.' That meant they surrendered their transportation costs back home (which they would've been entitled to if they were fired), and arguably lost out on other work they could've done.
I didn’t say the article was lying, I said it uncritically reported only one side of the story.
This is an agribusiness news site. Do you think that they’re out here looking for an honest to god scoop about labor abuses? Do you think that if they found them, they’d make a front page story about it?
In the other issue, their representative mistakenly clicked the 'kitchen provided' food option in the paperwork instead of 'meals provided', with the government claiming there was some conspiracy to defraud the employees into taking meals instead of receiving a food stipend, when they'd been providing home cooked meals to the employees for decades, as the DOL had observed countless times.
In both cases, there was no harm to the employees whatsoever.
The article uncritically printed this claim, however we have no reporting from the workers. For all we know they got off easy with the level of fines they received. The article is a press release.
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By contrast the workers themselves signed up for some of the most brutal/specialized farm work (which they may not have understood had they lied and never actually done it before - it's one of the highest paid crops for laborers), zero witnesses to their claims (and in fact they could only get 3 of the 17 workers to even claim that they were fired), and were able to carry out a freeroll for a crop year of salary by saying 'Yeah uh we were fired.' Anonymously. Through a translator. Provided by some NGO. Online. While in Mexico. At home.
In the end if one has to make a probability judgement, this is not even remotely close. And indeed this is why the farmers are cheering having their constitutional right to a fair trial granted - they're going to win this literally 100% of the time to the point that this is practically fit for summary judgement. Again the only thing particularly weird here are the government's actions.
> (When contacted by Agweb regarding the Sun Valley case, DOL referred all questions to DOJ. When contacted by Agweb, DOJ did not respond.)
So we're basically hearing the side of the story from the business' lawyers, since the regime's DOJ is vehemently not on the side of laborers and certainly not willing to vouch for the prior administration.
At the end of the day this is just a debate about whether they're due a jury trial, and this is all a matter of political philosophy. I'm personally of the opinion that jury trials are inappropriate in civil cases, and should only be used for criminal trials, so I don't really get worked up about the right of this business to get one.