#@moreperfectus

[arthropooda]

[auckie]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1765391777580912958?s=20

PLEASE GD IF YOU LOVE AND WANT TRAINS

[ahaura]

(Nov. 7)

@MorePerfectUS: Bangladesh is raising the minimum wage for garment workers by 56% after workers led mass protests. Weeks of strikes had shut down factories for brands like Gap, H&M, and Zara. Worker groups plan to keep protesting, saying the new $113/month wage falls far short of fair pay.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

[a2zillustration]

Hello! On the comic where Croissant is saying "Don't all men say marriage is like that?", the "next" link doesn't link to the next comic. It links to a railroad tweet from the "MorePerfectUS" Twitter page.

LMAOFJIADOSHFIHDFG NOW EVERYONE WILL KNOW THAT I'M TRAINPILLED-

Genuinely thank you, sometimes my copy/pastes get messed up, I thought I caught that the day it happened but I must have missed that instance. It might take a minute to update, but it should be fixed now!

[intersectionalpraxis]

NEW: Merck is charging $200,000 for the life-saving cancer drug Keytruda. They’re making a fortune off it. But it was developed using tax-payer dollars. That means the federal government has the little-known power to lower the price by taking Merck’s patent and giving it away. [source: @/ MorePerfectUS. 12/21/23.]

Are we surprised the capitalists in the medical industrial complex are exploiting citizens in order to benefit the rich and affluent the most?? I think of Fredrick Banting -one of the original creators of Insulin -who said he would never put a patent on this life-saving medicine because it would go against/violate his vow to honor the Hippocratic oath he took... wanting to profit off of people's pain and illnesses is VILE, inhumane, and should be ILLEGAL.

[planetarybound]

How The Supreme Court Could Soon Destroy The Right To Strike

More Perfect Union 140K subscribers 3,626 views Jan 9, 2023

This Supreme Court case could devastate workers’ right to strike. If wealthy corporations get their way, companies would be able to sue workers for the cost of a strike — like spoiled food, lost revenue, and more. It would be a massive setback for the working class. The Supreme Court is hearing Glacier Northwest Inc. vs. International Brotherhood of Teamsters in early January and will release a decision in June. ----- More Perfect Union is a new nonprofit media org with a mission to empower working people.

Learn more here: http://perfectunion.us/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/perfectunion/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MorePerfUnion

[nando161mando]

Breaking news: oil execs are horrible fucking people who deserve to have their entire net worth taken from them, more at 11

https://fxtwitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1795536424437158200

[jechristine]

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1684216192154624000

Tenant organizing is so important, not really talked about much in the media, but I've been seeing alot of rent strikes and thats great.

Thank you for sending, Anon! The housing market is so fucked right now, and increased affordable living options would improve so many lives.

[thoughtportal]

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1671179846876119040

[ausetkmt]

More Perfect Union

@MorePerfectUS

BREAKING: The Teamsters have authorized a strike at UPS. By a resounding 97%, the members of the union have authorized leadership to call a strike of 340,000 workers. It would be the largest single employer strike in U.S. history.

[imagionary]

Damn, got myself muted on Twitter for 12 hours for saying the scummy demons in charge of Union Pacific should go to Hell 😔

Oh well, I do not regret it. If a train can derail in the same exact spot three times in 6 months, than there is severe corporate negligence and lack of care for employees and others going on, and dying and going to Hell is where those greedy corporate assholes deserve to go.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1628073534122770432

[theyoungturks]

Costco announced that they are absorbing some of the inflated prices of groceries instead of listening to Wall Street and passing the cost on to consumers. Ana Kasparian and Cenk Uygur discuss on The Young Turks. Watch TYT LIVE on weekdays 6-8 pm ET. http://youtube.com/theyoungturks/live Read more HERE: https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1601328437112684544 *** The largest online progressive news show in the world. Hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. LIVE weekdays 6-8 pm ET. Help support our mission and get perks. Membership protects TYT's independence from corporate ownership and allows us to provide free live shows that speak truth to power for people around the world. See Perks: ▶ https://www.youtube.com/TheYoungTurks/join SUBSCRIBE on YOUTUBE: ☞ http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theyoungturks FACEBOOK: ☞ http://www.facebook.com/TheYoungTurks TWITTER: ☞ http://www.twitter.com/TheYoungTurks INSTAGRAM: ☞ http://www.instagram.com/TheYoungTurks TWITCH: ☞ http://www.twitch.com/tyt 👕 Merch: http://shoptyt.com ❤ Donate: http://www.tyt.com/go 🔗 Website: https://www.tyt.com 📱App: http://www.tyt.com/app 📬 Newsletters: https://www.tyt.com/newsletters/ If you want to watch more videos from TYT, consider subscribing to other channels in our network: The Watchlist https://www.youtube.com/watchlisttyt Indisputable with Dr. Rashad Richey https://www.youtube.com/indisputabletyt Unbossed with Nina Turner https://www.youtube.com/unbossedtyt The Damage Report ▶ https://www.youtube.com/thedamagereport TYT Sports ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytsports The Conversation ▶ https://www.youtube.com/tytconversation Rebel HQ ▶ https://www.youtube.com/rebelhq TYT Investigates ▶ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwNJt9PYyN1uyw2XhNIQMMA #TYT #TheYoungTurks #BreakingNews 221213__TA01 by The Young Turks

[endquire]

[fadingsunsjvj]

https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1808503166377562273

[brianbrianbrain]

I am so tired of people's weird ass leapfrogging rhetoric, and very specifically am very fired up about how dangerous overdoing "union pride" can be. Take these two recent union posts:

ID. Screenshot of an Instagram post by @perfectunion on December 14, 2023. The slide is styled like a Twitter post from golden checkmarked user More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS with added annotations for emphasis: Tesla is being forced to recall nearly begin underline every car end underline it's ever sold in the U.S.

The problem is the autopilot system, which has been involved in begin double underline numerous end double underline fatal crashes.

It's another sign that Tesla begin highlight needs a union end highlight. Musk must be stopped from putting profit before human life. End ID.

ID. Screenshot of an Instagram post by @teamsters on December 4, 2023: In the top half of the slide, a United Airlines plane in grey/blue scale is in the background. Bold white text is centered In the foreground: We don't think twice text gets slightly smaller when boarding an airplane because we entrust our safety to the finest American technicians. The bottom half of the slide has a sandy white background with bold blue text centered in the foreground: What would passengers think if they knew text gets larger their plane was last text gets larger, begin italics maintained text gets even larger in China? The slide is bordered by a yellow frame and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters logo (the necks and heads of two horses facing away from each other on top of a wheel) is centered at the bottom. End ID.

I'm not glued to social media whatsoever, and I think it's horrible to discover that two (pro-)union accounts have taken such tone deaf stances barely a week apart from each other. No doubt there have been more infractions in that time period even in just public statements alone. I was heartened to see that at least for the Teamsters post, almost all of the comments called out the sinophobia and how indefensible it is that the Teamsters spout such racist and nationalist rhetoric while they are supposed to be an "International Brotherhood" and while there are so many actually valid pro-union arguments they could be making. But for the Tesla post, most comments just added to the "haha, Elon Musk is/billionares are at it again!" vibe.

My first reaction to the Tesla post was: consider this, what if Tesla simply didn't exist at all? What if it wasn't there to contribute to the violence and coercion in the Congo and other places where the raw materials for electronics are mined? What if it wasn't there putting out tabloid quality news and playing stock games and diverting attention and resources from actually uplifting people? And most directly, what in the world does having a union or not have to do with a recall? This recall was because Elon Musk is a hubristic piece of shit who, yes, doesn't give a shit about people's lives – he just wants to sell lies. A union would not be able to change that; in fact, the union might serve to slightly legitimize Musk's lies. And sure, Musk must be stopped from putting profit before human life, but OP just really went for a series of false equivalencies or something with union -> people over profit -> lol no more fatal autopilot?

Both of these posts take some incredibly tangential "issue" or even fabricate a new one and claim that a union would solve it in order to further a pro-union agenda. And as much as I hope that the Teamsters do well as a union and that Tesla workers win their union, "union pride" being taken to this level is unacceptable and foolish. What a union will accomplish: making sure workers are paid fairly and that billionaires are not completely stealing people's livelihoods for their hoards. Incendiary racist rhetoric will only ever serve to detract from united power against billionaires. What a union will not accomplish: magically making billionaires stop putting profit before human lives. In fact, organizing into a union as the end all be all reinforces the power of billionaires, because what you say as a union is: yea, we'll still work for you, you just have to give us a little more of these silly little tokens so we don't totally riot. And then the union usually proceeds to care jackshit about literally anyone else than people who are paying union dues, thus remaining complicit in or implicitly endorsing any other exploitation the billionaire may be up to (for instance, during the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, the lack of platform given to non-US workers. Sure there's legal shit where the union bargains for the union, but the LEAST you could do is to give other causes consistent shoutouts).

I want to make it clear that I am pro-union, but I stress that it must be seen as but one of the first steps. "Union pride" that treats the union as a silver bullet solution is unacceptable. Union pride that bashes the skills of scabs instead of considering more complex dynamics or at least only hounding on their lack of worker solidarity completely misses the point, and like racist rhetoric, only serves to divide power against billionaires. Stop jumping through hoops to act like a union would solve everything. It's not the holy grail. It's a stepping stone; as the Black Panthers put it, "Survival pending revolution." Unions are for making sure you've at least got enough to survive while you transition to a better future where unions as they exist today are no longer necessary.

(Tangentially, I do wonder if this is a US/European specific thing, if people in other countries understand the larger dynamics and that unions are for bargaining as a unit, not for pretending that they are the pinnacle of society. I wouldn't be surprised, given the Cold War era efforts to distance US worker movements from international liberation and fit them into the capitalist-imperialist machine.)

And this leapfrogging rhetoric is in no way exclusive to unions. For instance, you don't need to be going after how someone looks or making generalizations about people's cultures and origins when you're calling for an end to genocide, for the very simple fact that the most important thing is that the genocide needs to fucking end. Stop adding to false divides and be clear with your rhetoric instead of firing off every single goddamned piece of random shrapnel filled ammunition that your subconscious mind can spit up from the dark webs.