Author: TSA Press

PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEES SERIES 47/2019

There will be three committee meetings open to the public on Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th December.

The meetings will be held in Parliament Building, Harare, on the dates and at the times and venues indicated below.

Members of the public may attend these meetings – but as observers only, not as participants, i.e. they may observe and listen but not speak. If attending, please use the entrance to Parliament on Kwame Nkrumah Ave between 2nd and 3rd Streets. Please note that IDs must be produced.

The details given in this bulletin are based on the latest information from Parliament. But, as there are sometimes last-minute changes to the meetings schedule, persons wishing to attend should avoid disappointment by checking with the committee clerk that the meeting concerned is still on and open to the public. Parliament’s telephone numbers are Harare 2700181 and 2252940/1.

Reminder: Members of the public, including Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, can at any time send written submissions to Parliamentary committees by email addressed to [email protected] or by letter posted to the Clerk of Parliament, P.O. Box 298, Causeway, Harare or delivered at Parliament’s Kwame Nkrumah Avenue entrance in Harare.

PLEASE NOTE THAT ALL PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE MEETINGS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Monday 16th December at 2.00 pm

Portfolio Committee: Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare

Oral evidence from the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare on Government policy regarding enrolment of children into residential care facilities, and the care and discharge of the children from homes.

Venue: Committee Room No.  1

Portfolio Committee: Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services 

Receiving oral evidence from the Zimbabwe Academic and Research Network (ZARNet) on its operations.

Note: ZARNet provides Internet and ICT services to the academic and research sector which include kindergarten schools, primary schools, secondary schools, vocational training colleges, university, tertiary colleges, research Institutions, government institutions, and affiliate institutions.

Venue: Committee Room No.  413.

Tuesday 17th December at 10.00 am

Thematic Committee: Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs]

Oral evidence from the  Permanent Secretary for Minister of Health and Child Care on the quality of the health care system and mechanisms that have been put in place to combat chronic illnesses in Zimbabwe.

Venue: Committee Room No.  413

Veritas makes every effort to ensure reliable information, but cannot take legal responsibility for information supplied.

Post published in: Featured

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

BLICKSTEIN GROUP & ABOVE THE LAW

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

Findings from the 12th Annual Law Department Operations Survey – Webinar

BLICKSTEIN GROUP & ABOVE THE LAW

When this is over, somebody is going to need to write a book about all the crimes Donald Trump committed that nobody cared about in real time.

Imagine, if you will, a law professor with less teaching experience, fewer publications, fewer professional honors but somehow making…. more money? If that set-up left you scratching your head, what if you learned the person making more money was a man, and the one with more CV notches was a woman. Does that help the picture come into focus?

That’s the crux of a shocking new lawsuit filed by Linda Mullenix, who has taught law at the University of Texas School of Law since 1991. Her lawsuit, filed in federal court yesterday, uses a specific comparison to the compensation of another law prof, Robert Bone to illustrate her point about pay equality:

Over the past three years, Professor Linda Mullenix, one of UT Law’s most distinguished professors, has been paid $134,449 less than male professor Robert Bone. Professor Bone has the same above-average teacher evaluation rating as Professor Mullenix, but almost a decade less overall teaching experience, fewer than a third of Professor Mullenix’s overall publications, and fewer professional honors. This pay gap is sex discrimination.

As reported by the Austin Statesman, the lawsuit alleges that by the University’s own standards the two professors should have pay equity:

“Under UT Law’s own stated standards, Professor Mullenix and Professor Bone are equal form 2017 until 2019” the lawsuit says. “Yet Professor Bone received $134,449 more than Professor Mullenix. The reason Professor Mullenix is paid less for equal work is because of her sex and prior reports of equal pay violations.”

The lawsuit alleges that there was more than just garden variety pay inequality at work here. Mullenix says the administration retaliated against her after first complaining about the pay gap in 2010:

Mullenix first became aware of the pay gap in 2010, the lawsuit says. At the time, she brought her concerns before then-Dean Lawrence Sager who refused to negotiate any adjustments to her salary, the suit alleges.

“On at least one occasion, Dean Sager threatened her, stating that if she brought a lawsuit, ‘you will never be able to work anywhere again,’ and ‘nobody will like you,’” the lawsuit says.

Those claims were settled in 2011, though she also claims the settlement was structured to artificially inflate her salary. But according to the complaint the practice of unequal pay has continued.

The lawsuit also alleges her stance on equal pay has ostracized her from colleagues, “Most disturbingly, because of Professor Mullenix’s opposition to UT Law’s unequal pay practices, she has been made a pariah by the administration. New professors are told to stay away from her and that she is ‘poison.’”

The University has not commented on the instant litigation, but did point to the University’s faculty and gender equity council’s finding that, between 2008 and 2018, female faculty at the school made slightly more on average than male faculty.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Bonus season is exciting, but no matter how nice it is to get a little extra it’s always better to get your money guaranteed. So for these associates, Friday the 13th is turning out to be pretty lucky after all.

As the legal industry continues to flatten salaries across locations, Alston & Bird associates in the Charlotte office got the good news that they will now be paid per the prevailing NY Cravath scale for all classes. The bonuses remain discretionary, but at the end of the day there’s not much to complain about when you’re taking home $190K in Charlotte because the cost of living there is, shall we say, cheaper.

The news was reportedly delivered via town hall so we don’t yet know if this is localized to the Charlotte office or if other non-NY markets are receiving identical news right now. If you’re an Alston & Bird associate in another office, drop us a line to let us know by email (tips@abovethelaw.com), by text message (646-820-8477), or by tweet (@ATLblog)

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

This year’s Biglaw bonus schedule is nice, though perhaps not overly exciting. But we are always on the lookout for firms that are topping that bonus scale, and that’s exactly what we got at Hueston Hennigan.

Sources at the firm told us that some junior associates received bonuses at 2x or even 3x (or more) the market rate. And every associate that is in good standing received a bonus in excess of the market rate. These are indeed generous bonuses, but expected for Hueston Hennigan associates. And this is in addition to the firm’s “generous” contributions to associate 401(k) accounts (staff get in on that action as well)!

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Rarely do you see a piece of legislation that does all the things. But a bill proposed by South Carolina State Senator Mia McLeaod is such a law. SB 928 looks at the pro-life movement, last seen righteously treating women as little more than incubators with mouthparts, and challenges them to put some money behind their repeated attempts to burden women with unwanted pregnancies.

Imani Gandy on Rewire has the details:

The bill, SB 928, demands that anti-choice lawmakers in South Carolina who have proposed banning abortion at six weeks into pregnancy put their money where their mouth is: If lawmakers are going to force people to carry their pregnancies to term, and if they are going to deem the development of an unborn embryo as more important than the life and rights of pregnant people, then South Carolina should compensate them for acting as a gestational surrogate for the state of South Carolina.

The law points out that given the surrogacy market, a pregnant person’s uterus is not unlike a rental property: People who commission surrogates pay that surrogate to carry a fetus to term and to give birth to a child. So why should South Carolina be permitted to force its citizens to act as surrogates for the state without compensating them?

I LOVE the legal argument here: IF Republicans are determined to treat a live woman like she’s merely a halfway house for Jesus, THEN we should pay the damn rent. We have a well established legal and market structure around surrogacy, and applying those rules to a situation where the state is forcing a woman to carry a baby against her will seems like the perfectly “market-based solution” to the economic problem of literal forced labor, while we still debate the moral problem of the pro-life position.

Of course, since this bill is proposed by a Democrat, it does not stop — as Republicans often do — with being “pro-life” right up until the point that the baby is alive.

If the pregnant person becomes disabled as the result of carrying the fetus to term, then the state must cover all medical expenses associated with the disability. Similarly, if the child is born with a congenital abnormality or disability, the state must cover all medical expenses associated with that disability for the rest of the child’s life.

Also, South Carolina would be required to cover all costs associated with health, dental, and vision insurance until the child turns 18. And if the biological father of the child is unknown or unable to provide support, then the state must provide child support in the biological father’s stead.

I don’t believe that the state should force a woman to carry a baby against her will. But if it does, the state has to pay for it. It has to pay for ALL of it. This bill is the most intellectually consistent “pro-life” proposal I’ve ever seen.

I’m sure that this bill will pass the South Carolina legislature with near unanimous support… unless of course it turns out that the people pushing anti-abortion laws are drooling hypocrites who don’t give one damn about the life and health of the baby, but instead only care about sexual domination of women and the denial of equal human rights. This bill right here is the ultimate hypocrisy check on the entire pro-life movement.

Groundbreaking South Carolina Bill: Compensate People for Forcing Them to Give Birth [Rewire]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Two years ago, JPMorgan Chase’s money-laundering operations received the most fulsome compliment imaginable, a slap on the wrist from the Swiss authorities. Now, however, that proud and august banking legacy has been reined in.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday lifted consent orders against JPMorgan Chase & Co. and U.S Bancorp stemming from what the central bank identified as weak anti-money laundering controls…. JPMorgan had a similar order in place with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. That order was lifted in May.

Federal Reserve Lifts Consent Orders Against JPMorgan, U.S. Bancorp [WSJ]

Milbank set off the bonus season a little early this year and firms have taken their sweet time in matching. But now that we’re less than two weeks from Christmas, firms are finally comfortable letting the bonuses fly and they are flying today.

Morgan Lewis joins the ranks of the Biglaw bonus crowd with a full Milbank match for all U.S. associates in good standing and sitting at over 1900 hours (billable plus pro bono). Well, maybe not a full match because the Morgan Lewis fiscal year starts on October 1, meaning there are no pro-rated bonuses for the folks that just showed up. So that means we’re looking at something like this:

Class of 2018 – $15,000
Class of 2017 – $25,000
Class of 2016 – $50,000
Class of 2015 – $65,000
Class of 2014 – $80,000
Class of 2013 – $90,000
Class of 2012 – $100,000
Class of 2011 – $100,000

Bonuses will be paid on January 31. All associates have to do is correctly spell “Bockius” without looking.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.