#every worker has a right to form a union and strike

[thatcollateraldamage]

this blog supports workers rights to unionize, unions right demand fair wages adjusted with inflation, fair benefits that allow decent quality of life and all labour movements!

[robertreich]

The Silent Revolution in American Economics

I don't think you're expecting what I'm about to say, because I have never seen anything like this in fifty years in politics.

For decades I've been sounding an alarm about how our economy has become increasingly rigged for the rich. I've watched it get worse under both Republicans and Democrats, but what President Biden has done in his first term gives me hope I haven't felt in years. It’s a complete sea change.

Here are three key areas where Biden is fundamentally reshaping our economy to make it better for working people.

#1 Trade and industrial policy

Biden is breaking with decades of reliance on free-trade deals and free-market philosophies. He’s instead focusing on domestic policies designed to revive American manufacturing and fortify our own supply chains.

Take three of his signature pieces of legislation so far — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and his infrastructure package. This flood of government investment has brought about a new wave in American manufacturing.

Unlike Trump, who just levied tariffs on Chinese imports and used it as a campaign slogan, Biden is actually investing in America’s manufacturing capacity so we don’t have to rely on China in the first place.

He’s turning the tide against deals made by previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that helped Wall Street but ended up costing American jobs and lowering American wages.

#2 Monopoly power

Biden is the first president in living memory to take on big monopolies.

Giant firms have come to dominate almost every industry. Four beef packers now control over 80 percent of the market, domestic air travel is dominated by four airlines, and most Americans have no real choice of internet providers.

In a monopolized economy, corporate profits rise, consumers pay higher prices, and workers’ wages shrink.

But under the Biden, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department have become the most aggressive monopoly fighters in more than a half century. They’re going after Amazon and Google, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, JetBlue and Spirit, and a wide range of other giant corporations.  

#3 Labor

Biden is also the most pro-union president I’ve ever seen.

A big reason for the surge in workers organizing and striking for higher wages is the pro-labor course Biden is charting.

The Reagan years blew in a typhoon of union busting across America. Corporations routinely sunk unions and fired workers who attempted to form them. They offshored production or moved to so-called “right-to-work” states that enacted laws making it hard to form unions.

Even though Democratic presidents promised labor law reforms that would strengthen unions, they didn’t follow through. But under Joe Biden, organized labor has received a vital lifeboat. Unionizing has been protected and encouraged. Biden is even the first sitting president to walk a picket line.

Biden’s National Labor Relations Board is stemming the tide of unfair labor practices, requiring companies to bargain with their employees, speeding the period between union petitions and elections, and making it harder to fire workers for organizing.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at how decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people have thrown our economy off-keel.

But these three waves of change — a worker-centered trade and industrial policy, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, and moves to strengthen labor unions — are navigating towards a more equitable economy.

It’s a sea change that’s long overdue.

[elbiotipo]

My grandpa was one of the last to work for La Forestal. They came to the Argentine Chaco to extract tannin from the quebracho tree. He tells me that every time a huge quebracho was cut down, it fell on the new little trees, not giving the forest time to grow back. A job from sun to sun, on lands stolen from the native peoples of the Chaco, who, along with criollos and immigrants, were also forced into gangs to cut down trees so hard that broke down axes, with trunks meters in diameter, to be pulverized in sweatshop factories and sent as tanin podwer to European industries. La Forestal did not pay you in pesos; you had a coin (my grandpa still has his, it says "Obrero N° 14"), which you presented at the company store, and they gave you whatever (food, booze) they cared to give you, or what they said they had; after all, as my grandfather says, if you didn't know how to read or write, how would you know you were getting less than they said?

And if you went on strike? And if you formed a union? And if you wanted to resist, like the indigenous peoples did? Some boys with a blood-red cap, the Cardenales, criminals taken from prison, would come and kill you, in broad daylight if you were striking, in the middle of the forest if you were alone. Many books tell about hacheros yelling one last long sapucai before killing themselves, because they couldn't stand it anymore.

Who were the owners of this terrible company? English. In the La Forestal HQ in the north of Santa Fe, a beautiful mansion (I understand that it is now a ruin) while the workers lived in mud huts with roofs of palm leaves, every day, the Union Jack was hoisted over Argentine soil, and of course, at five o'clock it was tea time, while all the tannin, loaded on barges and on railways worked by Argentines but owned by the British, went to Europe, and the wealth, of course, to London.

My grandfather lived through the last of this. Perón already came by that time, with worker's rights, unions, rural schools and clinics, the nationalization of railways... Nevertheless, he still had to hunt to eat and work from a young age at the machines of the company, as the company was leaving the country and couldn't even bother to pay a pittance to its workers. It eventually closed most of its operations and came into Argentine hands. But don't think it was because the English had a change of heart. They just found a better source of tannin, the acacias in their African colonies. God knows what crimes they committed there, if this is what they did in the territory of a 'sovereign' country.

And this is the side of the story I know. I cannot yet speak for all the territories the British owned in the Patagonia, some of which are still owned by English millionaries today. Don't come to tell me that the poor innocent English had nothing to do with the genocide that was done to the indigenous peoples in this country.

[bfpnola]

about the ongoing hunger strike to ensure that the historic anti-casteism bill passes in california ^^ wanna support?

if you’re on mobile, go to: https://tinyurl.com/Signsb403

other devices, like laptops: https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/

—

sample email below from the mobile link, not my own writing:

Subject: Please Sign SB403 (Wahab) to End Caste Discrimination

I am writing to request the governor to sign the historic bill SB403 introduced by State Senator Aisha Wahab, which would end discrimination on the basis of caste. This bill aims to clarify existing California state law and make explicit that discrimination based on caste is illegal by adding caste to ancestry and defining caste in the Civil Rights Act, Fair Employment and Housing Act, and Education Code.

Caste systems are social stratification where each position is characterized by hereditary status, endogamy, and social exclusion. Caste discrimination manifests as workplace discrimination, housing discrimination, gender-based violence, and other physical and psychological forms of violence.

Caste discrimination occurs across industries, including technology, construction, restaurants, and domestic work. In these sectors, caste discrimination has included harassment, bias, wage theft, and even trafficking. Caste is today inextricably intertwined with existing legal protections in state and federal civil rights laws such that discrimination based on one’s caste is effectively discrimination based on the intersection of other protected identities. However, because of the grave discrimination caste-oppressed Californians face, these existing protections must be made explicit.

Caste is a workers rights issues, a women's rights issues, and racial justice issue. It is also a bill that has bipartisan support. That is why we are joined by Asian Law Caucus, Stop AAPI Hate, AAPI Equity Alliance, Tech Equity, Equality Labs, Alphabet Workers Union, Ambedkar Association of North America, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, Californians for Caste Equity, Hindus for Caste Equity, Jakara Movement, South Asian Network, Sikh Coalition, and Sikh American Legal Defense Fund. Every major legal association is in support of caste equity and the lawfulness to make caste equity explicit. This includes the American Bar Association, South Asian Bar Association, National Asian American Pacific Bar Association, and Asian Law Caucus.

That is why we urge you to make history and sign his bill without hesitation. Justice delayed is justice denied. Let's ensure California opportunity for all by ensuring that ancestry and caste discrimination is explicitly prohibited and make history across the country.

Thank You,

[Name]

—

and if you don’t know what caste is? send in an ask @bfpnola or join our Discord server, link in bio, so we can answer you in real-time!

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Under capitalism, where part of the value of every product goes to the employer as profit, the workers in any single enterprise, or in a whole industry, can force the employers to raise their wages or otherwise to improve their conditions by direct action. If strikes are successful, wages rise at the expense of profits, which is satisfactory to the workers though unsatisfactory to the employers. When, however, as in the U.S.S.R. today, the whole of the means of production are owned and controlled by public bodies in the public interest, a strike by the workers in any factory or industry for higher wages can only react to the disadvantage of the working population itself. For, by a strike, production is restricted. And this is contrary to the public interest in a community in which every extra product is required and is utilized. A strike, therefore, is to the disadvantage of the workers of the Soviet community as a whole. The method of fixing wages by means of strikes in a Socialist country is highly undesirable, for it is no longer possible for any workers to raise their wages at the expense of employers’ profits. If, as a result of a strike, higher wages are won, then they are won at the expense of the general fund which goes to paying the wages of all citizens. If the coalminers of the U.S.S.R. strike today for more wages, they are in fact fighting to force the Government to give to them what otherwise it would be dividing up among other workers. Strikes, then, in such conditions, can only represent sectional demands against the whole community, and in themselves are contrary to the general interest because they restrict production. In a diary of a visit of a few weeks’ duration to the U.S.S.R., Sir Walter Citrine has said that “it was too much to assume a complete identity of interest between the director and the workers. The director was concerned with efficiency and output, and the worker with the amount he could earn, and the conditions under which it was earned” (Search for Truth in Russia, p. 129). And, in a later passage, he says that “liberty of association and the right to strike are the essential features of legitimate trade unionism” (p. 361). It is clear, from what has been said here, that Sir Walter’s estimation of the relations between director and worker in the Soviet factory is based on a lack of understanding of the situation. Sir Walter ignores the unique fact that the Soviet director, as part of his job, is responsible for increasing the welfare of the workers. He ignores the fact that the workers, no longer working for an employer who takes part of their product in the form of profit, know that everything they produce is distributed to the community — that is, to themselves. Finally, he ignores the also important fact that, under such conditions as these, a strike is an attack by a small minority on the economic resources of the whole community; and at the same time, by holding up production, reacts to the disadvantage of all citizens. As to the other matter — freedom of association — no other State in the world has ever given the encouragement to trade unionism which has been given in the U.S.S.R. We have already seen how the young Soviet State, in its first months of existence, made the trade union committees the official representative bodies of the workers in all industrial enterprises, with powers of control over the management. This was a tremendous stimulus to trade union development, as is shown by the figures of trade union membership. In October 1917, at the time when the Soviets seized power, there were 2 million trade unionists. By 1928 this figure had increased to 11 million, and was 18 million in 1934. No other country can show such figures, and it is absurd to suggest that the U.S.S.R. has ever done anything but encourage, to the greatest possible extent, the organization of the workers in trade unions.

Pat Sloan, Soviet Democracy, 1937

[organizeworkers]

Labor Law as a Shield

by Will Altera

The law is impossible to separate from labor organizing, just as it is difficult to extract from any aspect of modern American life. Laws govern so much of what we do every day, particularly in the labor and employment context. But notwithstanding the centrality of the law to workers and organizers, it can be a mistake to treat organizing as a fundamentally legal struggle.

While the law can offer aid and protection in specific instances, it is not the primary or even a secondary lever by which workers can best apply their power. Economic and political power, wielded through collective action built and maintained from common bonds, continue to be the strongest and sharpest tools for creating transformative change.

Accumulating and deploying economic and political power can be a dangerous business, and the law can offer narrow but crucial protections to workers and organizers as they undertake that work.

“The best way to think of the law is as a shield, not a sword. The law is not an especially good way to change things. But it can give you some real protection as you try to change things in other ways.”

Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross, “Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law”

Organized labor could not exist without labor laws

The steel spine of labor protections is a millennia-old legal device that also undergirds nearly every other economic interaction: the contract. The goal of labor organizing — a collective bargaining agreement — is, after all, just a contract: a promise to act in certain ways with the threat of enforcement ensuring those promises are kept. Without contacts, employers would be able to make concessions under pressure only to withdraw them when they think no one else is watching.

Contracts had been available to some (white, male) workers since before the Industrial Revolution, and, by the 1930s, were available to most. Yet Congress enacted the Wagner Act in 1935 to protect labor organizing and encourage the development of organized labor. Why? The status quo before the Wagner Act allowed employers to do everything in their power to prevent workers from demanding and receiving enforceable contracts. This included coopting local law enforcement and flooding state laws and legislatures with anti-union statutes. Employers would even petition federal courts to keep members of the largest economic class in America from accessing the legal tools that the rest of the country took for granted.

Your rights as an organizer

That is why federal law now establishes and protects the rights of workers to engage in concerted activity to improve their workplaces. It’s why we have the right to form, join, or assist a union to negotiate with our employers over the terms and conditions of our employment. It’s why we also have the right to picket, to protest, and — in many cases — to strike: so we can force employers to the bargaining table or to hear our concerns about our work and workplaces.

Without these legal protections, employers would be free to use whatever financial, social, or physical force they can muster to alienate and exploit their workers. They would also be allowed to return to the days of wielding the law — whether a federal judge’s injunction or a local sheriff’s billy club — as a weapon against workers.

Labor laws and other legal mechanisms are a poor mechanism for change

For all the good the law has done to empower workers and organizers to pursue collective action and economic self-defense, it makes for a poor means of enacting affirmative change, for at least three reasons.

Fighting the Gatekeepers

First, legal solutions tend to be top-down affairs. The two primary ways of changing the law, and thus of changing society through the law, are by lawmaking and litigation. Lawmaking is the process of drafting, debating, and enacting legislation. Litigation is the process of enforcing the terms of that litigation through the court system.

Lawmaking

Lawmaking is accomplished by lawmakers, and laws are written either by or with the assistance of experts, academics, advocates, lobbyists, and others whose professions are the very definition of “insider.” The emails, phone calls, texts, and direct messages of those insiders occupy the overwhelming share of lawmakers’ attention That is why broadly popular laws are so uncommon and are so often undercut by follow-on legislation that reeks of capitalist interference (as occurred with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act following the 1935 Wagner Act).

Litigation

Litigation must end in some kind of decision: either from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal judge or panel of judges, or the Supreme Court. The composition of the NLRB changes with every presidential election, and conservative presidents appoint reliably anti-worker members to the NLRB, where they serve for up to five years. Seven in ten federal judges were either prosecutors or corporate lawyers before taking the bench. Empirical studies of those judges’ rulings also show that judges who spent their careers siding with corporate interests and protecting private property — even those appointed by Democratic presidents — are significantly more likely to rule against workers.

Thus, making change through the law means convincing the gatekeepers at the top to understand and then take a stand for working people in the middle and at the bottom. Though it is possible, it is difficult, and it is unlikely.

High Financial Costs

Second, changing the law is expensive. Lawmakers have grown accustomed to the way those career insiders interact with them: the way their legislation is drafted and presented and the kinds of political advantages, including campaign and super PAC contributions, that cooperating with those insiders can provide. All but a handful of lawmakers tend to expect similar treatment from any group that wants their attention or their vote, regardless of the issue in question. Being heard and being listened to costs money — money that could be better deployed elsewhere, particularly because any return on money spent to change the law is speculative at best.

Litigation is hardly better. The kind of litigation that could result in genuinely meaningful change across industrial sectors and across society often requires large numbers of lawyers, even multiple law firms, as well as costs for investigators, experts, and dealing with large volumes of documents and witnesses. Well-heeled litigants with deep pockets tend to bury smaller parties in what they call “paper”: frivolous filings and other motions that run up the cost and run out the clock until someone can’t afford to litigate any longer. And that is just at the trial level — parties can and often do appeal, which can result in major costs stretching out over as much as a decade.

The Waiting Game

Third, the law is a poor mechanism for change because is so time-consuming. Lawmaking is a waiting game. Individuals elected to Congress sometimes spend their entire tenure trying to enact a single piece of legislation — and failing. It is not uncommon for bills that do become law to have done so only on the fourth, fifth, or sixth attempt. That is why bills are frequently titled, “the such-and-such Act of 2023” — because there was a such-and-such Act of 2021, 2019, 2017, etc.

Litigation is also tremendously time-consuming. Lawyers often see the NLRB still adjudicating unfair labor practice determinations by the time the worker in question has found a new workplace. It is not uncommon for complex civil cases to take two to three years just at the trial court level, not including appeals, which can stretch the life of a case to close to a decade.

Labor laws can offer meaningful protection to workers and organizers

Notwithstanding all of the above, the law can be an effective shield for workers and organizers. Knowledge of what the law permits and prohibits for employers, unions, and workers can also be an armor all its own.

So much compliance with the law is voluntary. Think about things like traffic laws or paying taxes: we comply with the law in part because it’s the law. It’s something we’ve agreed to abide by as members of our community, and it’s an expectation of other members of the community who we don’t want to disappoint. While we may also be motivated by the risk that the law might be actively enforced against us, often just avoiding having to engage in that enforcement process is enough to balance out any potential inconvenience of complying with the law.

Know the laws in advance

What many don’t realize is that this same calculus happens in courtrooms and boardrooms across the country in much more complicated circumstances than driving the speed limit or filing an income tax return. Much of the work of lawyers is trying to enforce voluntary compliance by persuading the other side of one’s view of the law and trying to avoid the expensive and time-consuming hassle of litigation. Workers and organizers can do this, too.

Knowing what the law permits you to do and being confident in explaining it to your employer or anyone else who asks is a way of using the law as a shield to protect you from intimidation and allow you to go about your organizing. You don’t have to file an unfair labor practice or hire a lawyer or do any of the other expensive and time-consuming tasks that come with using the law affirmatively when you know that the law has your back regardless.

Labor law is your best defense

And remember that the law is expensive and time-consuming for employers to enforce, too. They are often as reticent to pay their lawyers as they are their workers. A worker who knows their rights and knows how the law protects them can shift the burden of enforcing the law onto their employer, who may decide that the fight is not worth it.

Of course, some employers would rather pay millions to lawyers to fight their workers than pay those same workers those same millions. And in that case, the shield that labor law provides is truly your best defense. For now, we have the right to concerted activity. We have the right to build a union and to bargain through that union for better working conditions. We have the right to picket and protest, and many of us have the right to strike. Working within those rights, we are protected from the kinds of legal harm employers may try to inflict.

[go-to-two]

If the strike goes on for too long, what is to stop a studio from hiring their own writers and actors that are not in unions?

I'll put a warning here that this got long, but I'm very excited to get to overshare my useless film history knowledge!

To start, the major studios have existing contracts with multiple unions including DGA, IATSE, and Teamsters. This means that productions under the jurisdiction of the studio must hire workers from those unions. Each union has already come out in solidarity with the strikes, so even if they tried to make productions without WGA and SAG-AFTRA (legalities aside), other unions would not cross the picket lines. The studios need the unions for their large, experienced hiring pools. In in terms of SAG and WGA members specifically, they need them for the high-profile roles. For better or for worse, it is a simple fact that the bigger names in entertainment bring in more money, and those big names belong to unions. For good reason...

...so lets get into the history! The scenario of your question is actually was how film studios used to operate. There were parallel systems called the Studio System and the Star System, and they were a huge industry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the Studio System, five major studios had their own writers, directors, and actors contracted to work for them and only them, full time and without union representation. Studios used to release hundreds of movies per year with this assembly line system, and they owned the movie theaters they released the films into. Pretty sweet for studios, right? Unfortunately, not so sweet for everyone else. If you look at when most of the major unions were formed, it is in this 1930s-1940s time period to combat highly exploitative multi-year studio contracts. The Star System specifically refers to actors who were subject to rigorously manufactured public personas under these contracts (I'll let you look up "morality clauses" if you choose, but it's not good). The Studio System and the Star System met resistance for a while, but they began to really break down in 1948 after a ruling in the United States vs. Paramount Pictures, Inc supreme court case prohibited studios from owning movie theaters, and suddenly the studios could not afford to keep high-profile talent on their payroll full time. It became increasingly common for talent to go freelance with protection from growing unions that ensured them more freedom and rights in the workplace. This was a lot of history to say that once creatives transitioned into a union-backed force, they won't want to go back.

There will always be independent, non-union projects out there, and that is a good thing! We don't want every production to come through the creative funnel of a handful of major entities. But in terms of those major entities and the big name shows and movies they release, the presence of unions is crucial for the people that make them.

[newstfionline]

Sunday, September 17, 2023

13,000 workers go on strike at major US auto makers (AP) About 13,000 auto workers have walked off the job at three targeted factories after their union leaders couldn’t reach a deal with Detroit’s automakers. The United Auto Workers union is seeking big raises and better benefits from General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. They want to get back concessions that the workers made years ago, when the companies were in financial trouble. A small percentage of the union’s 146,000 members walked off the job at a GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Ford factory in Wayne, Michigan, near Detroit; and a Stellantis Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio. Both sides began exchanging wage and benefit proposals last week. Though some incremental progress appears to have been made, it was not enough to avoid walkouts. The strike could cause significant disruptions to auto production in the United States.

Muslim Students’ Robes Are Latest Fault Line for French Identity (NYT) The mass French return to work, known as the “rentrée,” is often marked by renewed social conflict. This year has been no exception as the summer lull has given way to yet another battle over a recurrent national obsession: How Muslim women should dress. Late last month, with France still in vacation mode, Gabriel Attal, 34, the newly appointed education minister and a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron, declared that “the abaya can no longer be worn in schools.” His abrupt order, which applies to public middle and high schools, banished the loosefitting full-length robe worn by some Muslim students and ignited another storm over French identity. The government believes the role of education is to dissolve ethnic or religious identity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship and so, as Mr. Attal put it, “you should not be able to distinguish or identify the students’ religion by looking at them.” Since then, organizations representing the country’s large Muslim minority of about five million people have protested; some girls have taken to wearing kimonos or other long garments to school to illustrate their view that the ban is arbitrary; and a fierce debate has erupted over whether Mr. Attal’s August surprise, just before students went back to their classrooms, was a vote-seeking provocation or a necessary defense of the secularism that is France’s ideological foundation. Where some see laïcité as the core of a supposedly colorblind nation of equal opportunity, others see a form of hypocrisy that masks how far from unprejudiced France has become.

Crowds descend on Munich for the official start of Oktoberfest (AP) The beer is flowing and millions of people are descending on the Bavarian capital to celebrate the official opening of Oktoberfest. Revelers decked out in traditional lederhosen and dirndl dresses trooped to Munich’s festival grounds Saturday morning, filling the dozens of traditional tents in anticipation of getting their first 1-liter (2-pint) mug of beer. The Oktoberfest has typically drawn about 6 million visitors every year. The event was skipped in 2020 and 2021 as authorities grappled with COVID-19, but returned in 2022.

If 3.3 Million Ukrainian Refugees Never Come Home? The Economics Of Post-War Life Choices (Ukrainska Pravda) Approximately 6.7 million Ukrainians have left their country since the Russian invasion. The longer the war lasts, the more these refugees will consolidate their new lives in their host countries, resulting in a heavy population drain for Ukraine. Earlier this month, the Kyiv-based Center for Economic Strategy (CES) presented a study on the attitudes of Ukrainian refugees that shows a large number of them will likely not return to their homeland even after the end of the war. According to their calculations, Ukraine may lose 3.3 million citizens. There is also a strong likelihood that a large number of men currently fighting in the war will move abroad in order to reunite with their families that have settled there. Even in peacetime, counting Ukrainians is not an easy task. A full-fledged census was conducted in the country only once: in 2001. It concluded that Ukraine had a population of 48.5 million.

Erdogan says Turkey may part ways with the EU (AP) President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that Turkey may part ways with the European Union, implying that the country is thinking about ending its bid to join the 27-nation bloc. “The EU is making efforts to sever ties with Turkey,” he told reporters before departing for the 78th U.N. General Assembly in New York. “We will evaluate the situation, and if needed we will part ways with the EU.” He was responding to a question about a recent report adopted by the European Parliament, which stated “the accession process cannot resume under the current circumstances, and calls on EU to explore ‘a parallel and realistic framework’ for EU-Türkiye relations.”

China Is Investigating Its Defense Minister, U.S. Officials Say (NYT) China’s defense minister, Gen. Li Shangfu, has been placed under investigation, according to two U.S. officials, fueling speculation about further upheaval in the military after the abrupt removal of two top commanders in charge of the country’s nuclear force. General Li has not been seen in public in more than two weeks. He had been expected to take part in a meeting last week in Vietnam, but there was no word of his attendance. The investigation points to questions about the Communist Party’s leader Xi Jinping’s confidence in his own military, a pillar of his ambitions abroad and dominance at home. Just six weeks ago, Mr. Xi replaced the two most senior commanders of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, which oversees China’s nuclear missiles. The abrupt dismissals suggested that Mr. Xi was seeking to reassert his control over the military and purge perceived corruption, disloyalty and dysfunction from its ranks, analysts have said. Mr. Xi still appears politically unassailable, with the Communist Party leadership, military top brass and security services packed with his loyalists. Even so, the sudden downfall of such high-ranking officials has exposed the pitfalls in a system so dominated by a single leader and has raised questions about Mr. Xi’s judgment because the officials under scrutiny been promoted by him.

History Turns Upside Down in a War Where the Koreas Are Suppliers (NYT) Washington and Moscow flooded the Korean Peninsula with arms and aid as they fueled the war between South and North seven decades ago. Now, in a fateful moment of history turning back on itself, Russia and the United States are reaching out to those same allies to supply badly needed munitions as the powers face each other down again, this time on the other side of the globe, in Ukraine. “In the post-Cold War era, South and North Korea have been virtually the only countries that have remained on a constant war footing, with large artillery and other weapons stockpiles ready to use,” said Yang Uk, a military expert at the Asian Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “The fact that South and North Korea remain stuck in a Cold War armed confrontation explains why Washington and Moscow come to them seeking weapons.” Artillery ammunition has been in particular demand as both sides in the Ukraine conflict tear through their stores faster than production can catch up. South Korean and American officials have been tight-lipped about how many shells South Korea has provided to the United States. But recent news reports indicated that South Korea has sold or lent at least hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to the U.S. military. Moscow has repeatedly warned Seoul against supplying weapons to Ukraine. But South Korea has been pressed by the United States, its most important ally, to help the war effort.

A year after Mahsa Amini’s death: Repression and defiance in Iran (Washington Post) A year ago, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police sparked a popular uprising, led by women and young people, that rattled the pillars of the Islamic Republic: clerical rule, gender segregation and the security state. In the end, the leaderless movement, clustered in pockets across the country, was no match for the keepers of Iran’s authoritarian system. Its clerical leaders are still standing, having brutally crushed the demonstrations. More recently, they have strengthened the kind of strict social controls that gave rise to the protest movement. The last year allowed the world to glimpse the seething anger just below the surface of a repressive society, and to document government abuses. But it also highlighted the resilience of the regime. But Tehran has not emerged from the uprising unscathed, according to analysts, human rights advocates and ordinary Iranians—many of whom say they are just waiting for the next spark.

There’s a glimmer of hope on Yemen’s war front. Yet children are still dying of hunger (NPR) Malia Qassim Mahmoud found herself at Al-Thawra hospital in Taiz, seeking help for the third time for the acute malnutrition affecting her family. Two years ago, her older son was severely malnourished. He recovered but his growth has been stunted; she says the 6-year-old is much smaller than other kids his age. A year later, she herself had to be hospitalized for malnutrition. Then it was her 1-year-old baby, lying limp in her arms, his skin a sickly yellow color, unable to even open his mouth as his mother tried to feed him protein paste. “Most days we can only get water and flour and I make a doughy paste and that’s what we eat,” Mahmoud said. “We can’t afford more, and we haven’t received any aid through the war.” This family is among at least 20 million people in Yemen who need food assistance in the midst of what the United Nations calls one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. In 2014 Houthi rebels overthrew the Saudi-backed government. They took control of parts of Yemen, sparking a civil war. The U.N. estimates that the conflict in Yemen has caused over 377,000 deaths, most of which were due to hunger and lack of health care. A slowdown in fighting has raised hopes that the war could end, but the number of people needing medical attention or hospitalization due to malnutrition has not decreased.

In the midst of Morocco earthquake chaos, surprising heroes: Donkeys (NPR) When the villagers of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains were stricken by a powerful earthquake on Friday, they found themselves facing a situation they had never known before. They dug desperately in the rubble to rescue loved ones or find their bodies so they could bury them, rescue crews having been held up by mountain roads choked with rocks that fell in the magnitude 6.8 quake. Heavy machinery was dispatched to clear the roads, and rescue teams worked to open access points to the mountain. But it took time—time the villagers did not have. The villagers, used to the mountainous terrain, found a foolproof method to move themselves and materials around: their donkeys. Photos have emerged of villagers using donkeys to move rubble out of the way, to get relief supplies to more difficult-to-reach spots, and to move people to where they need to go. The nimble-footed creatures have been able to pick their way along tracks that are barely visible, loaded with bulging saddlebags and sometimes hauling a person on their backs to boot.

Amazing science: The Ig Nobels (AP) Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders and explaining why scientists lick rocks are among the winning achievements in this year's Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday. Jan Zalasiewicz of Poland earned the chemistry and geology prize for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.” Other winning teams were lauded for studying the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom; the affect of anchovies' sexual activity on ocean water mixing; and how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change how food tastes.

[msclaritea]

The Hollywood Strike Forces A Reckoning For The Trades | Defector

If you were on the website-formally-known-as-Twitter last week, first of all, my condolences, we are in hell together, and second, you might have seen a flurry of furious tweets from TV and film writers. Specifically, that anger took the form of retweeting a Variety article that focused on a key demand from the Writers Guild of America that drove them to strike, along with a simple message: “I asked for this.”

The Variety article in question quoted “one prominent showrunner” as saying that “every” showrunner they know is against key proposals the WGA brought to the table when talks started earlier this year with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), a proposal that would set a minimum number of writers that must be hired at each stage and size of television production. The WGA’s proposal has the number ranging from six up to 12, depending on those factors. “Nobody asked for this,” was the quote from an anonymous showrunner. 

Here’s the short form of the argument: For decades, best practices for television were to have a large staff of writers to help outline a season of television, write scripts, and then be on set to produce their scripts, helping to make the changes as needed. This not only allowed the show to benefit from having writers around, it helped the staffers advance to running their own writers' rooms and eventually, the hope goes, their own shows. The cases where a single person wrote every single script of a show were few and far between. 

The problem is that this standard was just oral tradition among good showrunners. And since execs wanted shows to be good and long-lasting, they approved budgets for that setup. Streaming undermined these norms, with CEOs who want a show that lasts two seasons, not 10 years, making it near impossible for showrunners to run things in a way that made sense. And so those few outliers—the cases where one writer did everything—became an excuse for studios to say, “You don’t really need writers.” When it came time for a new contract, the WGA determined that the best thing for the majority of writers was to force the studios to codify a system of bigger writers' rooms. 

It’s been clear since before the strike that showrunners are not only supportive of a minimum writing staff but desperate for it. It was also evident early on in the strike that this was the case, as showrunners on Twitter pointed out how difficult their job had become without having at least six writers on staff. As a publication whose sole focus is the entertainment industry, there was no way for Variety to not know that those disagreeing are in the extreme minority. 

And yet, the article isn’t framed as a small minority speaking up. It’s framed as the union forcing people who disagree to keep silent. While some attention is paid to why the WGA feels the need to mandate room size, it also presents a requirement as an undue burden on the few that don’t want a writers' room. What it neglects to mention–while stating that the WGA has given awards to shows written by one person–is that a union by its very nature has to do what is best for a broad collection of workers across the whole industry, not the handful of (often very loud) people who work differently.

It did not take long for the striking writers, extremely online and with a surplus of righteous anger on their hands right now, to seize on the story. This is because it was flagrantly wrong and also because they’ve had a lot of practice. You can have a great time on Twitter just plugging the link of any trade story on the strike into the search bar and watch striking actors and writers debunk it in real-time. There’s been a constant drip of suspiciously pro-studio strike stories in the trades since the strike began in May, and those on strike have been very quick to rebut them.

While it has always a bit of an open secret that the Hollywood trade publications can be little more than studio public relations, the strike has absolutely shattered their credibility. This tension has always existed in an industry town where the idea of “getting good publicity” serves all sides, creating a symbiotic relationship that has made the trades entirely dependent on studio sources. As the biggest entertainment story in decades unfolds, the trades’ practices are being exposed, with reporting that alternates between being useless to outwardly harmful. 

Under normal circumstances the work that Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline—and at this point in our late-stage capitalism hell, it is worth noting all three are owned by the same company, Penske Media Corporation—does is a form of access journalism that can seem harmless. Think fluffy profiles, actors interviewing actors, breathless awards speculation or hyping casting announcements and release dates. 

The problem for the trades is all of that depends on being in the good books of the studios. Because they are industry papers, the assumption is that everyone in the industry reads them. That’s why the trades make so much money off of “for your consideration” ads, designed to get fellow insiders to vote for certain movies and actors in awards season. Not only is it de rigueur for studios to pay for those ads, actors placing their own is seen as declasse. So the most direct route to the trades has always been through the studios, and the studios likewise saw the trades as the best route to the rest of the industry.

For an example of how jealously the trades guard their access, you don’t have to look further than two weeks ago with Scott Feinberg and “the email heard around Hollywood.” Feinberg, the “executive editor of awards” for The Hollywood Reporter, got word that writers from other outlets were getting to see films before him. This was unacceptable to Feinberg. As Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein reported, he treated studios to a truly magical email stating, in part, “As you plan the rollout of your film(s), I would like to respectfully ask that you not show films to any of my fellow awards pundits before you show them to me, even if that person represents himself or herself to you as (a) a potential reviewer of it, (b) needing to see the film in order to be part of decisions about covers, or (c) really anything else.”

So the trades depend on the studios. But why are the studios sending things to the trades when, in theory, the writers and studios are under a media blackout? Since the WGA and the AMPTP are back at the bargaining table, neither side is supposed to be trying to manipulate the other through the media. 

One answer is that the AMPTP fumbled the PR game real bad when the strike began. Ridiculously bad. There was not a rake they did not step on happily.

The studios made a bet that the public opinion would be against privileged writer elites keeping regular Americans from their entertainment. But the writers were not alone, they were joined by the 160,000 actors of SAG-AFTRA. Add to that recent polls showing public opinion in favor of striking writers and actors at a time when union support has experienced a resurgence in the country. It’s easy to see why the public is behind the unions, as studio executives cannot seem to keep their expensive shoes out of their definitely-worth-$40-million-per-year mouths. The PR problem is so severe that the AMPTP has reportedly begun bringing in multiple PR firms to help them with messaging. 

It’s because things are going poorly for the studios that they once again are looking to the trades for help. For example, in June, The Hollywood Reporter published a profile of Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan—billed as “THR’s Producer of the Year”!—that probably didn’t go as anyone involved expected. While the article asks us to “appreciate what Sheridan has accomplished,” that’s not what happened. The AMPTP probably hoped the interview with Sheridan, who has happily put himself up as one of those one-in-a-million writers who does not need any help with his shows, would undermine the WGA’s demand for a minimum writers' room size.

Instead, Sheridan showed an intense lack of knowledge about how TV is made, proving he was not a solitary genius but someone who didn’t care about all the people who work on his shows. Sheridan claimed he receives no studio notes on his scripts and that “they tell me there’s a story coordinator, but I don’t know who that is.” First of all, it’s impossible not to have studio notes. If nothing else, lawyers have to make sure nothing in a script will get a studio sued. Also, as many writers, producers, and others in Hollywood pointed out, the job is script coordinator and they were probably making below a living wage to make sure those non-existent notes Sheridan claims are not in the script are actually incorporated. 

It was a masterclass in discrediting yourself, which Sheridan capped off by threatening to leave the WGA over writers' room minimums. There was a rush to Twitter to point out that Sheridan’s view was, at best, wrong and, at worst, outright dangerous. 

Not to leave out one of the other trades, Deadline—already with a reputation for publishing rumors its staid sisters wouldn’t—put out an article that said, “We heard that WGA strike captains and negotiating committee met yesterday to parse through the AMPTP’s offer. By the end of today, sources tell us we’re bound to have further clarity on talks.”

Now, had every fact in that sentence been correct, you could still suspect that the source was the AMPTP or an individual studio, since it frames the success of the talks as contingent on a meeting by the writers. Unfortunately for Deadline, not only were the facts wrong, writers were quick to point out that it was an absurd statement.

Some quick math: The negotiating committee is 26 people. There are over 200 strike captains. The negotiating committee and the WGA board make decisions to get an agreement that can be presented to the entire membership for a vote. Strike captains, as the name suggests, run the day-to-day organizing of the actual strike, and are too busy and too large as a group to do the job of a whole separate group of writers.

The line is gone from the article now, relegated to an editor’s note at the bottom stating, “The original story has been corrected to reflect the fact that the WGA-AMPTP meeting was in person, and that a rumor about WGA strike captains participating in the review of the AMPTP’s counterproposal was not confirmed.” I can only wonder if they got contacted by the WGA or if the roasting on Twitter was enough for Deadline’s editors. 

If the studios had hoped to use the new round of talks between the WGA and AMPTP as a chance to rebrand their efforts, they may need to hire several more PR firms to clean up the mess. If they wanted to claw back the perception of their CEOs as reasonable business people, and the WGA as out-of-touch elites with ludicrous demands, it’s not working. Each of these stories shows the same old, ineffective strategy at work. It’s the same reason those FYC ads appear: they want to sow chaos among those further down the call sheet who read the trades. This might have worked during previous strikes, in an era where union leadership couldn’t communicate with the rank and file via cell phone. 

I want to stress again that all three of these publications are owned by the same company (Penske Media Corporation) And they’re making the same mistakes over and over, burning credibility with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. At the end of the day, without outright stating it, by printing these stories they are effectively taking the side of management in a labor dispute. That’s a bad look for anyone, it’s frankly a weird look when one of the groups striking is the writers. Because you’d think if anyone would fully understand the situation of the WGA, it would be other writers suffering from the same squeeze as the ones who work for TV and film. The way media has consolidated, fallen victim to vulture capital and Silicon Valley, and finally been replaced by AI, is everything the WGA is fighting. So while giant companies siding with giant companies wouldn’t really be a surprise, it is a problem when the company at issue is a media one.

It’s hard to tell what combination of malice and laziness is at fault here. Corporate overloads being what they are, they clearly want to keep studio connections comfortable and ad money flowing. That leaves the writers and editors at the trades, who chose the path of least resistance. It’s easy to do this in culture writing because so many people truly want access to famous people, glamorous red-carpet premieres–all the stuff fans use to populate their Instagram feed. Being confrontational is clearly not what the trades hired for, and sadly that’s contributing to the broader trend in media of devaluing of real reporting.

The trades need access to writers and actors for their stories, and, more importantly, to sell FYC ads–because, again, the value of those ads is that the trades are read by those in Hollywood—with actors being the largest bloc in the industry—who vote in the awards. What are they going to do with the Emmys postponed due to strike and FYC campaigns at a pause? What purpose do the trades serve if, at the end of all of this, actors and writers don’t trust them? And if they aren’t useful propaganda for the studios, what’s left for them? 

When actors and writers can go directly to their peers and fans via social media, it seems that “access” isn’t what it once was. And if you can’t credibly cover the biggest entertainment story and there is no access, what’s left? Demanding to be the first in a screening, I guess.

Share on Facebook

I SHALL!

[argyrocratie]

“The railroads, Albert Jay Nock observed, were — “with few exceptions” — not a “response to any economic demand. They were speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention, by allotment of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies….”

Those federal land grants, according to Matthew Josephson, in effect transformed the railroad companies into land companies. In the decade before 1861, “the railroads, especially in the West, were ‘land companies’ which acquired their principal raw material through pure grants in return for their promise to build, and whose directors… did a rushing land business in farm lands and town sites at rising prices.” For example, under the terms of the Pacific Railroad bill, the Union Pacific (which built from the Mississippi westward) was granted twelve million acres of land and $27 million worth of thirty‐year government bonds. The Central Pacific (built from the West Coast eastward) received nine million acres and $24 million worth of bonds.

No less a right-libertarian eminence than Murray Rothbard confirms that the land grants included not only the rights-of-way for the actual track, “but fifteen-mile tracts on either side of the line.” This was so that, as the lines were completed, the railroads could cash in by selling off the now-prime real estate at its new, astronomically increased value. Every home and business in the new towns that sprang up along the railroad routes was bought from the railroad companies. In addition, the land grants also included valuable timber land.

Let’s look a little closer at those railroad bonds Josephson mentioned above, while we’re at it. Theodore Judah, chief engineer for what would be the Central Pacific railroad, stated that the project “could be done — if government aid were obtained.” One of the railroad’s leading promoters, Collis Huntington, obtained financing by bribing local governments (including Stockton, Sacramento, and San Francisco) into issuing bonds (“ranging from $150,000 to $1,000,000”), and/or extorted them with the threat of being bypassed in favor of other towns.

Michael Piore and Charles Sabel argue that it is quite unlikely the railroads would have been built anywhere near as quickly, or on as large a scale, had they not been funded by massive subsidies. The initial capital outlays required to secure rights-of-way, prepare road beds, and lay track were too costly.[34] The federal government also overcame transaction costs by revising tort and contract law, among other things exempting common carriers from liability for many kinds of physical damage caused by their operation.

Absent all these subsidies, Lewis Mumford speculates, the railroad system that emerged would likely have been much lower in capacity and less centralized — a large number of regional railroad systems geared primarily to supporting local and regional industrial district economies, and loosely linked together (if at all) by fewer and smaller national trunk lines.

In addition to the subsidies mentioned so far, the federal government has also intervened constantly to enforce labor discipline in the railroad industry and guarantee its smooth functioning. Consider, for example, President Grover Cleveland’s use of federal troops to break the Pullman Strike in 1896. The Railway Labor Act of 1926 gave the federal government power to impose mediation and binding arbitration on unions, forcing workers to accept terms defined by the government in the interest of avoiding strikes.

The history of state subsidies and protections to the railroad industry is a prime example of the state’s role in subsidizing transportation, artificially reducing the cost of shipping freight and thereby making larger firms serving larger market areas artificially profitable. As Noam Chomsky writes:

One well-known fact about trade is that it’s highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors…. The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized…. Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation sorts of market distortion function.

Also included in the pencil’s ancestry, Read writes, “are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill’s power!”

Since Read fails to specify the particular dam from which the San Leandro mill gets its power, there’s no way of knowing the details of its history. But it’s odd, to say the least, for an article touting the voluntary decisions of “free men and women” to discuss the ordinary workers pouring concrete for a dam without once mentioning eminent domain or the Army Corps of Engineers.

Railroads and hydroelectric dams both occupy prominent places in the long history of state-funded “internal improvements” in the development of the American economy. Transportation and utility infrastructure, in turn is just part of the larger phenomenon by which the capitalist state has socialized all the major input costs of “private” industry. James O’Connor, in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, referred to such expenditures as “social investment”; they referred to “expenditures required for profitable private accumulation,” and more specifically “projects and services that increase the productivity of a given amount of laborpower and, other factors being equal, increase the rate of profit.”Because taxpayers assume a major portion of the cost side of the ledger, the rate of profit on capital is artificially inflated. But over time, an increasing share of total corporate costs must be socialized in order for capital to remain profitable.

Unquestionably, monopoly sector growth depends on the continuous expansion of social investment and social consumption projects that in part or in whole indirectly increase productivity from the standpoint of monopoly capital. In short, monopoly capital socializes more and more costs of production.

...

-Kevin Carson “I, Pencil Revisited”  (2023)

[actualbird]

//cn spoilers

hey zak!

the new pv had my friends & i looking at everything to try and figure out what the au might be about. we've pegged it down to a 1920s Mafia AU (and i hope it's true). But if it's really set in 1920s China err... Stellis, this AU is going to be chaotic. For the sake of my sanity I'm only gonna cover the shit that happens in Shanghai because it involves a gang so I can insert Marius in there xD.

First, 1920s was at the turning point that marks the end of 青帮 (green gang) rule over Shanghai (and yes, they were like the unofficial rulers in place of a real government).

Second, there was the two political parties, Nationalists vs Communists, fighting for control over the country. (temporarily forming an alliance against the other factions)

Third, a bunch of foreigners essentially split Shanghai after China lost the Opium Wars, so the French, the British, Japanese, and Americans all had a mini colony within the area (French Concessions, International Settlement), and they were basically colonizing the area, though it wasn't ever "official".

Finally, as the rotten cherry on top of this long-melted sundae nobody wants, due to the awful working conditions and shit wages that didn't even let you feed yourself, labor unions were standing up against foreigners and gangsters. there were hundreds of strikes with hundreds of thousands of workers alone in Shanghai in one year, demanding fair treatment.

No matter what year of the 1920s it's set in, shit is going down fast due to the aforementioned issues. Of course, if they get closer to 1930s, even more shit happens cause Communists and Nationalists stop being allies and turn against each other, and they'll recruit whoever they can to dispose of the other party.

With all that history said (HELP I DIDN'T REALIZE IT WAS THAT LONG), I'd be really interested in seeing one of the boys represent each of the factions.

Luke as a political spy

Marius as head of the Pax Gang

Vyn as a foreigner

Artem as someone related to the workers (factory worker artem is a weird concept)

Rosa as someone close to the four, being different in every card ofc xD

irt the new cn server teaser

oh mANNNNN, pls first off i really appreciate the long rundown of history because aside from vaguely being familiar 1920s shanghai Look (from old movies and the like), i did not know anything about the legitimate history behind it. so, tot aside, this was a really interesting read :DDD

but taking it into consideration WITH tot, you are SO RIGHT THAT THE FACTIONS OF EACH BOY WILL BE INTERESTING!!

given that this will be adapted to stellis (maybe? idk, i didnt spoil myself on the actual plots of the bakerlon event, which also was a regional-historical au, did they just say it was london? or did they make a tot world version like uh.....lobdon..HVKSDJHFVSJDH), thatd be really cool cuz since im an insane person who constantly reads Big Data Lab entries, im aware that stellis city has a pretty interesting history.

orchidshine district was the city's birthplace, but it's not mentioned just how far back it had Begun. but by the 1930s, stellis city went through a Lot of development and was participating in international trade via stellis harbor (now called the airport district, because theres an airport there now. thanks for the creativity, stellis city govt jhvjhVKJH), which ended up turning into the hub for all commerce. by the 1970s, the fancier districts like hemingway heights and long beach are getting spruced up further

BUT WHILE ALL THAT IS HAPPENING. THERES A PLAGUE. in the 1930s, the trading via stellis harbor brought in the NXX gene which cause "a pandemic of an unprecedented scale" and all the consequences that come with a shitshow widescale pandemic

haha........

ANYWAY i bring that all up just cuz the 1930s seems like a perilous time in stellis' canon history, with many opportunities but also a lot of danger too. it'd be cool if they delved into that while incorporating some of the actual history of 1920s shanghai

also, your assignments for the boys are SO SPOT ON and im excited to see how this event's au plays out and how it will look like in the full card cgs and full event pv :DDD

(.....tho i most probably wont be spoiling myself for the actual stories HAHA, i quite like the experience of playing it on my own firsthand without knowing any spoilers beforehand. though ive broken this rule many times cuz a card just looked SO DAMN COMPELLING JHVKJVKJH)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Unemployed Plan May Day Parade Here," North Bay Nugget. April 13, 1934. Page 3. ---- Stir Up Sentiment Urge of Organizer ---- Meeting Last Night Wholly Behind Idea --- MAKE PLANS ---- J. Davis, Sudbury, Sees General Strike ---- May Day demonstrations will be staged in North Bay by members of the North Bay Unemployed Association.

This was the unanimous decision, reached at a meeting in the City Hall last night following an address by James Davis, Sudbury, organizer for the National Council of Unemployed and the Workers' Unity League.

With the council chambers crowded to the doors, Mr. Davis proclaimed that May Day this year would be the most powerful in history and was convinced that in many places in Canada there would be one-day strikes. May Day will be celebrated in the face of any opposition, he said, The association will ask city council that relief recipients be excused from working May 1 and that their vouchers remain unaltered.

"Stir up sentiment, make plans, and talk May Day," Mr. Davis advised. "I understand you have a city council friendly to labor. I suggest you ask for the day off; they refuse then they will condemned themselves in the eyes of their own class"

Name Committee Immediately following the meeting a special committee of seven members met with the executive to start forming plans for the demonstrations.

In his address, Mr. Davis referred to unemployment organization, unemployment insurance, the May Day celebrations, and relief matters.

Claiming that Nova Scotians receive more relief because the unemployed there are united, Mr. Davis urged further organization here.

"There are many railroaders among you who should be able to raise relief levels by Union efforts, but there are too many of you who are doing nothing," the speaker began. Referring to unemployment insurance, Mr. Davis said that the Federal Government should take action on it immediately.

"Mr. Bennett supports contributory insurance which means that the worker who receives it has to contribute towards it. But the joker is that the man who has not worked or contributed to it would not draw from it. All who are unemployed at the present time would receive nothing.

"But there is the non-contributory unemployment insurance which is being supported by the National Council of Unemployed," Mr. Davis went on. "This should be put into effect as soon as possible, and the funds for it could be raised by placing a tax on high incomes and taking monies not being used for war purposes."

Militant Movement May Day originated in the United States in 1886 by labor demonstrations for an eight-hour day, Mr. Davis explained. He termed the affair "one of the militant movements in history."

Unemployed associations in many places last year carried their demands forward on May Day, he declared while belittling Labor Day in Canada.

"You are essentially entitled to relief," the speaker continued. "If it was not given you there would be a tremendous demand on every street in every city, and a state of things would be created that the powers could not handle."

"We can get more than we are getting if we have the strength to get it. As citizens we have a right to live decently and should assort that right.

"May Day this year from coast to coast will be the mightiest blow ever struck against the Bennett ideals. We must demand non-contributory unemployment insurance, abolishment of the sweat-shops and no more wage cuts.

"Mr. Bennett will not permit the trade in peace-time commodities between Russia and Canada and yet he allows war-time trade with other countries.

"On May Day you should parade through the streets to show you have an organization and prove to city council you have strength. Throw your weight behind your demands on May Day.

"Great masses of workers will gather on that day and I hope North Bay will be on the agenda. The only way our demands will be considered will be by these demonstrations," Mr. Davis concluded,

[eeo-1]

"Empowering the Workforce: Leveraging the National Labor Relations Act of 1935"

Federal state has served their citizens with various suggestive regulatory bodies and laws to maintain a pact of harmony in their territory. The federal government has covered every possible domain of concern, and a systematic working structure has been paved for the convenience of the public. Also, this massive system of functioning sets a clear path for the employees to cherish a systematic and structured routine. This wholesome system determines whether the target audience has been managed efficiently or not. This blog navigates through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, how it has shaped workplace cultures, and where it critically stands today.

After the dismissal of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1934, the National Labor Relations Act was introduced on 5 July 1935 by then-President Franklin Roosevelt. Under the rule of Congress, this act was enacted. The following act is also identified as the Wagner Act of 1935, named after Senator Robert R. Wagner of New York. The act guarantees employees ‘the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor union organizations, to collectively bargain through a representative medium they’ve chosen, and to engage in concerted activities like collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection priorities. The National Labor Relations Act Board ensures the act’s enforcement and maintenance status. The NLRA applies to every employer from interstate commerce except airlines, railroads, agriculture, and government. The NLRA attained constitutional status after being upheld by the United States Supreme Court during NLRB versus Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. in 1937.  The act’s primary purpose is to protect the rights of employees and employers, encourage the phenomenon of collective bargaining, and curtail certain private-sector labor and management practices that could generally affect the general welfare of the workers, businesses, and the US economy.

What is the “Right to Strike”?

Right to strike reflects on holding or organizing concerted activities to highlight their perspective, notifications, or demands in a group or from a group to a rigid body. Concerted activities could be defined as mass meetings, strikes, or protests by employers emphasizing certain collective bargaining or mutual interests or protection purposes. The lawfulness and unlawfulness of a strike depend on factors like the objective behind the strike, timing, and the method of conduct of the strikers. These factors are quite tricky to determine; NLRB could handle the task of deciphering the motive behind such strikes.

Unlawful strikes could lead to severe consequences like reinstatement and back pay. The lawfulness of strikes could be categorized into two distinctive categories, economic strikes, and unfair labor practice strikes. Economic strikes could be an upheaval after the delayed or partial payroll practices from the employer’s end. Unfair labor practices could be defined as certain discriminatory events identified by employees, and the medium of address chosen is strike here. Suppose the NLRB finds that strikers who have participated in economic issues or unfair labor practices strikes are recognized putting unconditional requests for reinstatement have been unlawfully denied reinstatement by their employer. In that case, the Board may reward such strikers backpay starting when they’re expected to be reinstated. 

Right of employees under the act

Section 7 of this act determines that employees shall have the right to self-organization, to join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through a representative of their choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, or shall have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized.

How does this law affect an organization?

The organization gets affected to the core when employees decide to strike against their representative employers or organizations. Employers are the identifiable face of the organizations. Employees seek to get their questions answered through employers for such means. Employers act as a medium of communication between the employers and the organization. The position of an organization becomes quite fragile in such situations. The valid classification of strike purpose decides the stand of organizations. The approach of an organization depends on the requests primarily.  According to NLRB, the legitimate bargaining unit is a group of two or more employees who share a community of interest and may reasonably be grouped for collective bargaining

What do exempt employees mean by the law?

Exempted employees could be defined as employees who aren’t categorized as a striker for any economic strike or unfair labor practices strike. Exempted employees under the law are:

Public sector employees such as employees of state, federal, and local governments and their sub-division. 

Agricultural and domestic workers, 

Independent contractors,

Workers employed by parents or spouses, 

Employees of air and rail carriers categorized under Railway Labor Act,

and lastly, supervisors that have been discriminated against for refusing to comply with NLRB regulations. 

Conclusion

The National Labor Relations Act also known as is a fundamental right safeguarding the rights of employers working in organizations located in federal territory. This Labor Fundamental Act allows employees to address their concern or request in a collective manner. The pact of relationship between the organization and employees becomes quite sensitive when employees strikes collectively. NLRB acts as a regulatory body who looks into the proper functioning of NLRA. NLRB has set a prominent bargaining unit, that is, a group of two or more

[truck-fump]

The Silent Revolution in American EconomicsI don’t think...

New Post has been published on https://robertreich.org/post/740326857674735616

The Silent Revolution in American EconomicsI don’t think...

The Silent Revolution in American Economics

I don’t think you’re expecting what I’m about to say, because I have never seen anything like this in fifty years in politics.

For decades I’ve been sounding an alarm about how our economy has become increasingly rigged for the rich. I’ve watched it get worse under both Republicans and Democrats, but what President Biden has done in his first term gives me hope I haven’t felt in years. It’s a complete sea change.

Here are three key areas where Biden is fundamentally reshaping our economy to make it better for working people.

#1 Trade and industrial policy

Biden is breaking with decades of reliance on free-trade deals and free-market philosophies. He’s instead focusing on domestic policies designed to revive American manufacturing and fortify our own supply chains.

Take three of his signature pieces of legislation so far — the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and his infrastructure package. This flood of government investment has brought about a new wave in American manufacturing.

Unlike Trump, who just levied tariffs on Chinese imports and used it as a campaign slogan, Biden is actually investing in America’s manufacturing capacity so we don’t have to rely on China in the first place.

He’s turning the tide against deals made by previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that helped Wall Street but ended up costing American jobs and lowering American wages.

#2 Monopoly power

Biden is the first president in living memory to take on big monopolies.

Giant firms have come to dominate almost every industry. Four beef packers now control over 80 percent of the market, domestic air travel is dominated by four airlines, and most Americans have no real choice of internet providers.

In a monopolized economy, corporate profits rise, consumers pay higher prices, and workers’ wages shrink.

But under the Biden, the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department have become the most aggressive monopoly fighters in more than a half century. They’re going after Amazon and Google, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, JetBlue and Spirit, and a wide range of other giant corporations.  

#3 Labor

Biden is also the most pro-union president I’ve ever seen.

A big reason for the surge in workers organizing and striking for higher wages is the pro-labor course Biden is charting.

The Reagan years blew in a typhoon of union busting across America. Corporations routinely sunk unions and fired workers who attempted to form them. They offshored production or moved to so-called “right-to-work” states that enacted laws making it hard to form unions.

Even though Democratic presidents promised labor law reforms that would strengthen unions, they didn’t follow through. But under Joe Biden, organized labor has received a vital lifeboat. Unionizing has been protected and encouraged. Biden is even the first sitting president to walk a picket line.

Biden’s National Labor Relations Board is stemming the tide of unfair labor practices, requiring companies to bargain with their employees, speeding the period between union petitions and elections, and making it harder to fire workers for organizing.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at how decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people have thrown our economy off-keel.

But these three waves of change — a worker-centered trade and industrial policy, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, and moves to strengthen labor unions — are navigating towards a more equitable economy.

It’s a sea change that’s long overdue.

[recentlyheardcom]

By Daina Beth SolomonMEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Labor said on Tuesday it is disappointed by the closure of VU Manufacturing's facility in the northern Mexican city of Piedras Negras, which it said failed to adhere to a labor rights remediation plan under a regional trade pact.VU Manufacturing, a small car upholstery factory, came under scrutiny for alleged violations twice under the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which has tougher rules than its predecessor, NAFTA, regarding protecting the right of workers to form unions.The case marks the first time the U.S. has rebuked a company for failing to meet its commitments following a USMCA labor probe, in contrast to 13 other workplaces that have also come under review in Mexico.In March, the U.S. and Mexico pledged to oversee VU Manufacturing carry out a series of commitments to remain neutral in union affairs and allow workers to freely organize."Unfortunately, the company undermined the majority union's ability to represent workers in collective bargaining negotiations and their right to strike," said Thea Lee, U.S. deputy undersecretary of labor for international affairs, in a statement."We note with disappointment VU's decision to close its facility without adhering to the agreed course of remediation."VU Manufacturing, an unlisted company based in Michigan, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Lee said U.S. officials had anticipated that "employers would not choose compliance in every instance," but that other USMCA complaints have largely benefited workers.The Department of Labor urged Mexico to prevent retaliation against former VU workers as they seek new jobs, and to ensure VU makes timely payments to dismissed workers.(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon in Mexico City; Editing by Kylie Madry and Matthew Lewis)