#University Unions

[utcampuslifeupdate]

Hogg Memorial Auditorium Makes a Comeback

Student performers on stage at the Hogg Showcase on Nov. 29, 2023

We’re giving you a front row seat to listen to the live music, performances and fun events that marked Hogg Memorial Auditorium’s comeback as a vibrant student life space.

Let the sounds take you there for all the action – a concert headlined by a well-known, hometown musician, movie screenings, a showcase of student, faculty and staff talent, and more. Throughout October and November, the grand re-opening festivities showcased how the auditorium is now a premier destination for performing arts, live music and student events. It’s a major turning point for the intentionally-designed space in the heart of campus.

The auditorium’s rich history spans decades and its transformation is 10 years in the making. Student leaders partnered with the Division of Student Affairs – the hub of student life and well-being – to make it happen.

Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Soncia Reagins-Lilly, President Jay Hartzell and Ashley Baker Hayes (2011-2012 Student Government vice president) at the grand re-opening celebration on Nov. 3, 2023

“If there's something you're advocating for, keep working on it, you might not see the benefits while you're on campus, but you're helping to make the Forty Acres a place for future students to be able to utilize and be excited about. Who knows what will happen in 10 years from the little seed you helped plant?” said Ashley Baker Hayes, BA ’12 and 2011-2012 Student Government vice president.

Click play on this three-minute story to envision the possibilities of how future generations of students will live the Longhorn life there, or find the Living the Longhorn Life Podcast on Spotify, Apple or Google.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

Actual footage of the Universal Studios* CEO "trimming" all of the shade trees at one of the L.A. WGA/SAG-AFTRA picket locations, so strikers have no protection from the intense heat of the sun

(*production company behind 2012's tumblr hit film The Lorax)

[toogalaxyflower]

NLC Tackles Ngige, Rejects Registration Of New Academic Unions

NLC Tackles Ngige, Rejects Registration Of New Academic Unions

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has tackled the Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige over the registration of two new academic unions in the Nigerian public university system. Ngige wrote to the NLC on Tuesday, urging the labour leaders to rescind its opposition to the registration of two new academic unions in the Nigerian public university system. But in a letter to the…

[decolonize-the-left]

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain lambasted the mass arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses across the country, while emphasizing the union’s call for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. “The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice,” Fain wrote Wednesday on the social platform X. “Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong.”

Hundreds of students and faculty members have been arrested over the past two weeks as pro-Palestinian protests roil college campuses nationwide. Demonstrators have taken to university yards and streets and started encampments to protest Israel’s wartime campaign in Gaza and call for a halt in U.S. aid to Israel. Tensions spiked in New York and California on Tuesday night, resulting in the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators. The New York Police Department on Tuesday went through a second-story window of a building at Columbia that was seized by demonstrators. Police cleared out the protesters, and videos quickly circulated on social media showing the arrests at Columbia, which has served as ground zero for the mass college protests that have quickly spread across the country.

New York Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday confirmed around 300 people were arrested. At the University of California, Los Angeles, counter-protesters clashed with pro-Palestinian demonstrators when they attempted to dismantle the encampment on that campus. Los Angeles Police Department officers responded, but it was not immediately clear how many arrests were made and whether there were any injuries. The leadership at UAW 4811, the union chapter representing postdoctoral scholars and researchers of the University of California campuses, voted on Wednesday to hold a strike authorization vote as early as next week should the “circumstances justify.”

“Should the university decide to curtail the right to participate in protected, concerted activity; discriminate against union members or political viewpoints; and create or allow threats to members’ health and safety, among others, UAW 4811 members will take any and all actions necessary to enforce our rights,” UAW 4811 wrote in a statement. Fain on Wednesday said the UAW is calling for the release of students and employees. “And If you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting this war,” Fain added. The UAW backed a long-term cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in December. The war has lasted nearly seven months since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against southern Israel, during which the militant group killed about 1,200 people and took 250 others hostage. Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When the app tries to make you robo-scab

When we talk about the abusive nature of gig work, there’s some obvious targets, like algorithmic wage discrimination, where two workers are paid different rates for the same job, in order to trick occasional gig-workers to give up their other sources of income and become entirely dependent on the app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Then there’s the opacity — imagine if your boss refused to tell you how much you’ll get paid for a job until after you’ve completed it, claimed that this was done in order to “protect privacy” — and then threatened anyone who helped you figure out the true wage on offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

Opacity is wage theft’s handmaiden: every gig worker producing content for a social media algorithm is subject to having their reach — and hence their pay — cut based on the unaccountable, inscrutable decisions of a content moderation system:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Making content for an algorithm is like having a boss that docks every paycheck because you broke rules that you are not allowed to know, because if you knew the rules, you’d figure out how to cheat without your boss catching you. Content moderation is the last place where security through obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

When workers seize the means of computation, amazing things happen. In Indonesia, gig workers create and trade tuyul apps that let them unilaterally modify the way that their bosses’ systems see them — everything from GPS spoofing to accessibility mods:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

So the tech and labor story isn’t wholly grim: there are lots of ways that tech can enhance labor struggles, letting workers collaborate and coordinate. Without digital systems, we wouldn’t have the Hot Strike Summer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

As the historic writer/actor strike shows us, the resurgent labor movement and the senescent forces of crapulent capitalism are locked in a death-struggle over not just what digital tools do, but who they do it for and who they do it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

When it comes to the epic fight over who technology acts for and against, we need a diversity of tactics, backstopped by tech operated by and for its users — and by laws that protect workers and the public. That dynamic is in sharp focus in UNITE Here Local 11’s strike against Orange County’s Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa.

The UNITE Here strike turns on the usual issues like a living wage (hotel staff are paid so little they have to rent rooming-house beds by the shift, paying for the right to sleep in a room for a few hours at a time, without any permanent accommodation). They’re also seeking health-care and pensions, so they can be healthy at work and retire after long service. Finally, they’re seeking their employer’s support for LA’s Responsible Hotels Ordinance, which would levy a tax on hotel rooms to help pay for hotel workers’ housing costs (a hotel worker who can’t afford a bed is the equivalent of a fast food worker who has to apply for food stamps):

https://www.unitehere11.org/responsible-hotels-ordinance/

But the Marriott — which is owned by the University of California and managed by Aimbridge Hospitality — has refused to bargain, walking out negotiations.

But the employer didn’t walk out over wages, benefits or support for a housing subsidy. They walked out when workers demanded that the scabs that the company was trying to hire to break the strike be given full time, union jobs.

These aren’t just any scabs, either. They’re predominantly Black workers who rely on the $700m Instawork app for gigs. These workers are being dispatched to cross the picket line without any warning that they’re being contracted as strikebreakers. When workers refuse the cross the picket and join the strike, Instawork cancels all their shifts and permanently blocks them from new jobs.

This is a new, technologically supercharged form of illegal strikebreaking. It’s one thing for a single boss to punish a worker who refuses to scab, but Instawork acts as a plausible-deniability filter for all the major employers in the region. Like the landlord apps that allow landlords to illegally fix rents by coordinating hikes, Instawork lets bosses illegally collude to rig wages by coordinating a blocklist of workers who refuse to scab:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-makes-rent-setting-software-for-landlords-sued-for-collusion/?comments=1

The racial dimension is really important here: the Marriott has a longstanding de facto policy of refusing to hire Black workers, and whenever they are confronted with this, they insist that there are no qualified Black workers in the labor pool. But as soon as the predominantly Latino workforce struck, Marriott discovered a vast Black workforce that it could coerce into scabbing, in collusion with Instawork.

Now, all of this isn’t just sleazy, it’s illegal, a violation of Section 7 of the NLRB Act. Historically, that wouldn’t have mattered, because a string of presidents, R and D, have appointed useless do-nothing ghouls to run the NLRB. But the Biden admin, pushed by the party’s left wing, made a string of historic, excellent appointments, including NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has set her sights on punishing gig work companies for flouting labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/10/see-you-in-the-funny-papers/#bidens-legacy

UNITE HERE 11 has brought a case to the NLRB, charging the Instawork, the UC system, Marriott, and Aimbridge with violating labor law by blackmailing gig workers into crossing the picket line. The union is also asking the NLRB to punish the companies for failing to protect workers from violent retaliation from the wealthy hotel guests who have punched them and screamed epithets at them. The hotel has refused to identify these thug guests so that the workers they assaulted can swear out complaints against them.

Writing about the strike for Jacobin, Alex N Press tells the story of Thomas Bradley, a Black worker who was struck off all Instawork shifts for refusing to cross the picket line and joining it instead:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/southern-california-hotel-workers-strike-automated-management-unite-here

Bradley’s case is exhibit A in the UNITE HERE 11 case before the NLRB. He has a degree in culinary arts, but racial discrimination in the industry has kept him stuck in gig and temp jobs ever since he graduated, nearly a quarter century ago. Bradley lived out of his car, but that was repossessed while he slept in a hotel room that UNITE HERE 11 fundraised for him, leaving him homeless and bereft of all his worldly possessions.

With UNITE HERE 11’s help, Bradley’s secured a job at the downtown LA Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites, a hotel that has bargained with the workers. Bradley is using his newfound secure position to campaign among other Instawork workers to convince them not to cross picket lines. In these group chats, Jacobin saw workers worrying “that joining the strike would jeopardize their standing on the app.”

Today (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

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

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

[Image ID: An old photo of strikers before a struck factory, with tear-gas plumes rising above them. The image has been modified to add a Marriott sign to the factory, and the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' to the sky over the factory. The workers have been colorized to a yellow-green shade and the factory has been colorized to a sepia tone.]

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[historyforfuture]

The country of freedom and ridiculous democracy.

The moment of the violent arrest of the economics professor of Emory University Caroline Fohlinin in the state of Georgia

After these scenes, there must be a position for all universities around the world to stand with the people of Palestine in Gaza. All hypocritical authorities and rulers who support the Nazi terrorist Israelis must be confronted.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took aim at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again on Sunday, saying that Israel’s actions in Gaza are “ethnic cleansing.”

Sanders reiterated his familiar call on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday to hold Netanyahu responsible for Israel’s actions in Gaza, pointing to the staggering death toll and the displacement of Palestinians in the region. He was asked to respond to the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests that have broken out on college campuses across the country and to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) remarks last week when visiting Columbia University.

“What I think the essential point that Ilhan made is that we do not want to see antisemitism in this country. And I think the word ‘genocide’ is something that is being determined by the International Court of Justice,” he said.

“But just as what I will say: I don’t think there’s any doubt that what Netanyahu is doing now — displacing 80% of the population in Gaza — is ethnic cleansing. That’s what it is. Pushing out huge numbers of people,” he added.

Omar visited Columbia’s campus last week, where the national spotlight has focused on the hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered there. CNN played a clip of her comments Sunday on the ongoing protests on “State of the Union.”

“I think it is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe and that we should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide,” she said.

Sanders has repeatedly criticized Netanyahu for the ongoing war in Gaza and has opposed more U.S. funding to Israel. He also reiterated his calls for an end to U.S. funding to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“And now we’re looking at the possibility of an attack on Rafah, where people have gone to as a so-called safety zone. So, what’s going on there, again, to my mind, is outrageous. And as you’ve indicated, I strongly oppose U.S. funding for Netanyahu’s war machine,” he added.

[phoenixyfriend]

We knew it was coming but goddamn, we had hope.

LA, YOU NEED BETTER TREE LAW. I know it's probably a matter of the law being built more to protect private property than that which belongs to the public, but it's still disappointing to see such a NOTHING slap on the wrist.

(Source, I went for the most recent news posting)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The most terrifying creature of all

[First] Prev <--> Next

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The University of British Columbia has argued against allowing graduate research assistants to unionize, claiming they are students and not employees.

CUPE 2278, which also represents teaching assistants at UBC, filed to expand its bargaining unit by including graduate research assistants. UBC graduate assistants are set to cast ballots in a union representation vote on Monday.

Both the union and university attended a certification hearing before the B.C. Labour Relations Board this week, where the university argued against graduate research assistants' right to unionize.

"The monies they receive are scholarship awards and are treated as such and do not constitute wages received for work performed," said Matthew Ramsey, director of university affairs, in a statement. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[utcampuslifeupdate]

Food Trucks Spice Up Campus Dining

Tacos from the University Housing and Dining-operated food truck

With a rotation of more than a dozen food trucks at locations across campus, we’re making it easier for students, faculty, staff and campus visitors to spice up their next meal on-the-go. Food trucks have become a staple in the Austin dining scene – and now there’s a bustling clientele on the Forty Acres too. It’s a campus vibe embracing and enriching the spirit of growth in Austin ... and giving students more ways to live the Longhorn life. Meet some of the campus customers and truck owners — and hear how University Union has grown the program since it started in 2017.

Listen to the latest episode of our Living the Longhorn Life podcast featuring sophomores Rotem Cohen, a business and economics major from Dallas and Carlos Gonzalez, a neuroscience and public health major from Laredo; University Unions’ David Anthony, who manages the contracts; and food truck owners Lee Rowland, It’s a Rap, and Romel Viray, Wetzel’s Pretzels.

Students at the Four Brothers Venezuelan Kitchen food truck

You can also listen to our stories anytime, anywhere on Spotify, Apple and Google podcasts.

[internetskiff]

Breen's unfortunately pretty underrated amongst the Valve antagonists, which I suppose is understandable compared to the likes of GLaDOS or The Administrator, but just like those two I feel like there's plenty of things to talk about when it comes to him. He seems like a very conflicted character, especially if you take into account the BreenGrub account and Laidlaw's Epistle 3. First of all is, of course, the leadup to the Black Mesa incident, with the G-Man seemingly making an offer to Breen which seemingly involved overloading the Anti-Mass Spectrometer while processing an extremely pure sample of Xen Crystal - and yes, while it's pretty obvious that the order to overload the systems was very intentional and motivated by whatever deal they struck, I believe that when it comes to the aftermath he may have been sold on a lie. Considering his actions as Administrator of Earth being entirely in the interests of keeping Humanity from feeling the full force of the Combine, I don't think "Becoming the de facto leader of all of Earth" was on his agenda. Perhaps G-Man promised that whatever their deal would entail would bring about a prosperous future for humanity, perhaps all he promised was the possibility of establishing contact with another sentient species (which is something he technically did provide), or perhaps it was something else - there's simply way too much room for speculation there, I think.

A little detail from a HL:A newspaper implies that his position as Earth's administrator wasn't exactly handed to him on a silver platter, instead he had to go out of his way to reach out to the governments with information on how to communicate with the invaders, at which point, already beaten down by Combine forces, they simply gave him the all-clear to speak for all of mankind. This still begs the question of who, or what, gave him the knowledge of how to speak with them - however, it's safe to say if they didn't, Earth would've been left a smoldering pile of rocks and withered carcasses. Once again, he acts with Humanity's best interests in mind, having to choose between the lesser of two evils - it's either enslavement or extinction. He simply chose the option in which Humanity would survive, even if just for a little while longer.

And ever since, we're watching the aftermath. He's trying to talk the last generation of Humanity down, so they may either pass of old age or be absorbed into the Combine - at least if that happens, something gets preserved. Once again, the alternative? They'll just wipe the slate once they get the local teleportation technology they desire. Breen sees no other way than to go along with their demands. He's eventually proven wrong, of course, but he refuses to see the Rebellion as anything but a suicidal march towards the extinction of the human race, and he sticks to that belief up until he is killed by Gordon at the tip of the Citadel. Of course, this doesn't make him a good person. Not at all. This belief has lead him to seek out and destroy anyone who tries to resist. He shows no sympathy to them. He paints them as fools. He himself believes it so. This intense hatred for anyone who resists is seen perfectly in how he treats the Vance family. He views them as fools. As narrow-minded rabble in the streets, senselessly struggling against a tide beyond their comprehension. He's willing to send off a father and his daughter into a world far beyond simply to use them as a bargaining chip. Listening to the two comfort eachother as they're almost raised up to a fate surely worse than death, the only expression on his face is that of pure contempt and annoyance. He's a very fascinating character that I wish Valve would explore again if they ever do another Half Life set during a time period in which he was still alive. He's a coward that easily bends to the oppressor, yet in the end he only does it to make sure something survives. He's cruel to those who resist because he's completely convinced they're going to get everyone killed. He is the Combine's perfect puppet.

haha anyhoo so why was he straight up serving on the magazine covers in HL:A like what was up with all that

[transmutationisms]

(If you're alrght with another poorly articulated question from an obnoxious high schooler) Do you have thoughts on academics and their position in a labor framework? I know some grad students and have never been quite sure where they fit because they don't always work with "capital" in a traditional sense. Professors are odd to me because they are under university contract, but rather than get paid by the university they often get their own funding from the government. Or graduate sudents, who are often unionized, but I know a paleontology student who studies shark fossils who says he doesnt really consider what he does "making surplus value."

ok well that last person is simply confused lol. graduate students exist because the university profits from having us; it is a capitalist institution. most directly we usually work as teaching assistants or research assistants (or else pay tuition) and more indirectly, graduate programs get funding and university support because their existence contributes to a university's rankings, prestige factor, &c, which is to say its (perceived) profitability. plenty of us study things that don't produce much directly lucrative research, but this does not mean the university keeps us around for shits and giggles or some kind of laudatory interest in knowledge for its own sake. it is a capitalist institution and acts in the financial interest of its owners / beneficiaries.

anyway wrt faculty members, they are also employed by the university because it profits from them (or hopes to, anyway). i think many people get confused by tenureship; tenure is indeed fairly cushy as far as employment contracts go, but it is is still an employment contract, and most faculty are not actually tenured anyway. academics are a classic example of the 'professional-managerial class', which is not a marxian term but is a useful one for identifying those 'upper-middle class' members differentiated by their professional qualifications and status; the prestige and perceived utility of academic knowledge production is partially what makes academics an attractive target for a lot of government and NGO funding. state funding of academic research ofc has numerous functions but, and not to put too fine a point on it, a capitalist state also invests money in things because it is hoping for some kind of return on investment, eg in the form of directly profitable inventions, soft power, &c.

there are distinctions here between different academic employment statuses. an adjunct or contingent hire is paid by the university solely to teach, making their labourer status fairly straightforward. with tenured or tenure-track positions, yes there may also be money coming from outside; however, this doesn't negate the fact that the university is trying to profit from its faculty (else it wouldn't hire them). the professional-managerial class has certain characteristics of both proletariat and bourgeoisie, and there is some variation between academics as a very select few do attain the kind of household name status that can turn them into basically a personal brand. again though: the university wants to extract value from the work (both teaching and research) of academics it hires, and so do outside sources of funding for research projects. knowledge production should not be mystified or abstracted in ways that obfuscate the financial interests of involved parties; though it attains a prestige that few other commodities do, this is still a process that is embedded within the overall operating logics of capitalism.

an additional consideration wrt internal academic class politics is that many faculty use graduate students, postdocs, and even undergrads to perform or assist with their research. these arrangements vary in structure (and between disciplines) but in general, this does mean that many academics produce papers, books, &c that depend upon the labour of many people and rarely compensate these people equally to themselves. this can take the form of a more overtly employer-employee relationship between a professor and their underlings (for example, some labs are run this way) or it can be the case that it's another party (a publisher, say) who is reaping most of the surplus value squeezed from grad / undergrad / postdoc labour. in any case it is important to keep in mind that professors can and often do take on employer (ie, small capitalist) roles in relation to other employees of the university, even though the professors themselves are there because the university and other institutions pay them and profit from their labour.

i hope this is a useful start; obviously there is lots else to be said about the economics of the university and knowledge production as a capitalist process. in general when you are trying to think through this my advice would be not to let the presentation of the university as some kind of cerebral place of enlightenment confuse a materialist analysis of the flows of capital. plenty of workers and capitalists deal with commodities that are immaterial in the sense that 'knowledge' is, or are imbued with similar social meaning and value; the university deals with knowledge production but this does not make it any less an employer (ie, a capitalist institution) than any other institution operating in a capitalist context.

[damnesdelamer]

On the picket line the other day, I saw a former lecturer of mine, and we got talking. Part of the whole dispute we in UCU are involved in is around the fact that Higher Education as a sector has over £40 billion in reserves nationwide, and many universities have chosen to dump that into vanity projects like shiny new buildings (many of which are both exorbitantly expensive and also not fit-for-purpose), rather than invest in staff during the biggest cost of living crisis in living memory.

My former lecturer, a staunch liberal, intimated that £40 billion seems like a lot, so who knows if that money even exists. So I told him, here’s what I do know: three years ago, my managers, who were responsible for allocating a £5 million bid of government funding, ignored the advice of me and another expert on practical teaching equipment, and chose instead to spend more on products from existing contracts. This could be seen as corruption, but technically I think it’s just laziness. But it also amounts to a mutual agreement among university management and external contractors and suppliers to continue to profit off government funds, rather than invest in staff.

Over the last ten years, workers across Higher Education are being paid 25% less in real terms, due to stagnating wages, due to inflation, due to increased cost of living. This is to say nothing of the fallout from covid, or the arguably substantial decline in education standards new students receive (in spite of all the money dumped into new buildings and equipment).

Meanwhile, my institution’s student intake has nearly doubled in the past five years, which both means greater workload and, in theory, greater revenue. But who sees that money? Not me, nor even the lecturers who make twice as much as me, but you can bet that money is going somewhere.

Initially we had no offer of increased pay, then we went on strike and got an offer of 3% (again, in the face of a loss of 25% over the last decade in real terms), and then 5%. These ‘offers’ have been overwhelmingly rejected by UCU members, in part because they prove that that money does exist, and is available for our employers to give us our due. But more importantly, this is not just about pay, and the problems of workloads, pensions, mismanagement, and discrimination, which sparked the current strikes, won’t be solved by throwing money at them.

Nevertheless, slowly but surely, we are making advances. Industrial action works. Support the Unions and support the strikes!

Solidarity forever.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Actually, the President of the United States is powerful

US Presidents have lots of things they can do beyond signing or vetoing legislation. Their administrative agencies have broad powers that allow them to act without dragging Congress behind them.

For example, Jennifer Abruzzo, the ass-kicking superhero that Biden appointed as National Labor Relations Board General Counsel, has used her powers to establish a rule that companies that break labor law during union drives automatically lose, with the affected union gaining instant recognition.

For a followup, Abruzzo is using a case called Thrive Pet Care to impose a “duty to bargain” on companies. If a company won’t bargain in good faith for a union contract, Abruzzo’s NLRB will simply force them to adhere to the contractual terms established by rival companies that did bargain with their unions, until such time as a contract is signed.

But wait, what about the dastardly Supreme Court? What if those six dotards in robes use their stolen seats on the country’s highest court to block Biden’s administrators?

Well, Biden could do what his predecessors have done. Like Lincoln, Biden could simply ignore the court, embracing popular policies he was elected to enact, revealing the Supremes to be toothless, out-of-touch, undemocratic and illegitimate.

(Andrew Jackson was a monster, but when he ignored his own Supreme Court, he proved that the Supremes’ only leverage came from their legitimacy; recall the (likely apocryphal) quote, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”)

Like FDR, Biden could threaten to pack the court, creating a national debate about the court’s illegitimacy, which would add fuel to the court’s plummeting reputation amidst a string of bribery scandals.

-Joe Biden is headed to a UAW picket-line in Detroit: “I want to do it, now make me do it.”

Image: Fabio Basagni https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Sahara_desert_sunrise.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[millionmovieproject]