Word: minimum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they involve involuntary pay cuts. Several Taiwanese high-tech companies, for example, began a forced policy of unpaid leave at the end of last year, prompting hundreds of workers to protest in front of the government's Council of Labor Affairs. The council requires that employers pay at least minimum wages and sign agreements with their employees on the terms of the unpaid leave. Even so, workers often feel they have little choice but to accept the policy. Michael Kramer works at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world's largest semiconductor foundry. Since January, he and all the other...
...helping addicts get clean. After the program proved too costly and ineffective, New York launched the Methadone Maintenance Program, which similarly caused little reduction in drug use. But by 1973, calls for stricter penalties had grown too loud to ignore, prompting Albany to enact legislation that created mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life for possession of four ounces of narcotics - about the same as a sentence for second-degree murder. The statutes became known as the Rockefeller Drug Laws - a milestone in America's war on drugs and the subject of one of the most abrasive legal...
...1980s, the war on drugs was in full swing, as the crack epidemic threatened to overwhelm American cities' criminal justice systems. Drug crimes had become increasingly violent, prompting calls for even stricter mandatory minimum sentencing laws. In 1986, the Reagan Administration passed a law requiring federal judges to give fixed sentences to drug offenders based on variables including the amount seized and the presence of firearms...
...mogul Russell Simmons and actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon lobbied for the cause. In 2004, prompted by increasing pressure from activists and legislators, then-Gov. George Pataki signed the Drug Law Reform Act, a move that significantly changed the Rockefeller laws' sentencing guidelines. The harshest mandatory minimum was relaxed to 8 to 20 years and those convicted of serious offenses were allowed to apply for lighter sentences. (Read "The Wire's War on the Drug...
While the Obama Administration cannot reverse the charges against Lynch, St. Pierre says it has great latitude over his sentencing. (State prosecutors have recommended the minimum mandatory sentence of five years in federal prison.) "They could commute his sentence. They can pardon his sentence," says St. Pierre. "That will be very demonstrative as to what this new Administration will do about medical marijuana. They can influence it. They can dial back what had been overt federal opposition to medical marijuana and allow, as they should have from the beginning, local mores and values to dictate who is going...