Visual effects crews at Walt Disney Studios have taken a significant step to unionize after filing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for an election to unionize.

A supermajority (over 80%) of the 18 in-house VFX crew members at Walt Disney Pictures signed authorization cards signaling their desire to unionize.

The historical move is the second time in history that VFX professionals have joined together to demand the same protections and rights as their colleagues. Earlier this month, VFX crews at Marvel Studios voted to unionize beginning Aug. 21. Ballots are due on Sept. 11, and the vote count will take place on Sept. 12.

Unions Work, Unionize.

Source: Variety, August 28th 2023

United Auto Workers members overwhelmingly granted union leaders authorization to call strikes during ongoing contract negotiations with General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, if warranted.

The union on Friday said an average of 97% of combined members at the automakers approved the action, however final votes are still being tallied. That's in line with support during negotiations four years ago, when 96% of workers who voted supported authorization for a strike. The "strike authorization vote" is part of the union's constitution and viewed as a procedural step in the negotiations. The voting results are historically high in support of the authorization. The vote does not mean there will or will not be a strike.

"Our goal is not to strike. I want to make that very clear. Our goal is to bargain good agreements for our members," UAW President Shawn Fain said Friday during a Facebook Live. "But all we've tried to do with this is prepare everybody in the event that we have to take action to get a fair and just contract."

Unions work, unionize.

Source: CNBC, August 25th 2023

Brazil’s Supreme Court has ruled that homophobic slurs can now be punishable by prison.

The unanimous 9-1 ruling that took place on Tuesday (22 August) now puts homophobic slurs on par legally as racist hate speech. 

Justice Edson Fachin, who led the ruling, called the decision a “constitutional imperative” to ensure LGBTQ+ people have equal protection under Brazilian law. 

In 2019, most of Brazil’s Supreme Court voted to recognize homophobia and transphobia as crimes under Brazilian law. That ruling applied to violence and discrimination in areas such as employment, while this week’s order extends the law to cover homophobic attacks against individual people. [2]. This applied to hate speech targeting the queer community, not particular individuals.

Transgender lawmaker Erika Hilton was one of many to celebrate the ruling, writing on social media: “Victory against LGBT-phobia.”

Source: [1]. Attitude Magazine, August 24th 2023 [2]. Blavity via MSN

In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by promoting the use of fossil fuels.

The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said.

The win, experts say, could energize the environmental movement and reshape climate litigation across the country, ushering in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change.

(Source: Washington Post, August 2023)

In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by promoting the use of fossil fuels.

The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state’s environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said.

The win, experts say, could energize the environmental movement and reshape climate litigation across the country, ushering in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change.

(Source: Washington Post, August 2023)

On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping The Battleground of Class War, by Kim Moody

(via

berniesrevolution

)

IN THESE TIMES

You’ve been fired. According to your employer’s data, your facial expressions showed you were insubordinate and not trustworthy. You also move your hands at a rate that is considered substandard. Other companies you may want to work for could receive this data, making it difficult for you to find other work in this field.

That may sound like a scenario straight out of a George Orwell novel, but it’s the future many American workers could soon be facing.

In early February, media outlets reported that Amazon had received a patent for ultrasonic wristbands that could track the movement of warehouse workers’ hands during their shifts. If workers’ hands began moving in the wrong direction, the wristband would buzz, issuing an electronic corrective. If employed, this technology could easily be used to further surveil employees who already work under intense supervision.

Whole Foods, which is now owned by Amazon, recently instituted a complex and punitive inventory system where employees are graded based on everything from how quickly and effectively they stock shelves to how they report theft. The system is so harsh it reportedly causes employees enough stress to bring them to tears on a regular basis.

UPS drivers, who often operate individually on the road, are now becoming increasingly surveilled. Sensors in every UPS truck track when drivers’ seatbelts are put on, when doors open and close and when the engines start in order to monitor employee productivity at all times.

The technology company Steelcase has experimented with monitoring employees’ faces to judge their expressions. The company claims that this innovation, which monitors and analyzes workers’ facial movements throughout the work day, is being used for research and to inform best practices on the job. Other companies are also taking interest in this kind of mood-observing technology, from Bank of America to Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc.

These developments are part of a larger trend of workers being watched and judged—often at jobs that offer low pay and demand long hours. Beyond simply tracking worker performance, it is becoming more common for companies to monitor the emails and phone calls their employees make, analyzing personal traits along with output.

Some companies are now using monitoring techniques—referred to as “people analytics”—to learn as much as they can about you, from your communication patterns to what types of websites you visit to how often you use the bathroom. This type of privacy invasion can cause employees immense stress, as they work with the constant knowledge that their boss is aware of their every behavior—and able to use that against them as they see fit.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute at Cornell University, tells In These Times that the level of surveillance workers are facing is increasing exponentially.

“If you look at what some people call ‘people analytics,’ it’s positively frightening,” Maltby says. “People analytics devices get how often you talk, the tone of your voice, where you are every single second you’re at work, your body language, your facial expressions and something called ‘patterns of interaction.’” He explains that some of these devices even record what employees say at work.

(Continue Reading)

The Atlantic

in 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as “the place of a gaping mouth.” Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. “None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view,” he later wrote. “A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears.” Many of those who have followed in Bunnell’s footsteps over the past 170 years, walking alongside the Merced River or gazing upon the god-rock of El Capitan, have been similarly struck by the sense that they were in the presence of the divine.

The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite’s Miwok tribes, like many of California’s Native peoples, were obstructing a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. And whatever Bunnell’s fine sentiments about nature, he made his contempt for these “overgrown, vicious children” plain:

When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for battle. While the Miwok hid, the militiamen sought to starve them into submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley’s air with the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe’s own campfires to set the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia’s campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.

Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.) The parks were intended to be natural cathedrals: protected landscapes where people could worship the sublime. They offer Americans the thrill of looking back over their shoulder at a world without humans or technology. Many visit them to find something that exists outside or beyond us, to experience an awesome sense of scale, to contemplate our smallness and our ephemerality. It was for this reason that John Muir, the father of modern conservationism, advocated for the parks’ creation.

More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden “favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.” But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley’s sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness—an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin—is an illusion.

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CATALYST JOURNAL

While the uptick in strike activity in 2021 is heartening, its influence should not be exaggerated. The number and extent of job actions was noticeable but still very small by historical standards, and union density continued to decline. A significant labor upsurge might be in the works, but it is not in evidence yet.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis spoke movingly of the workers keeping the world turning in dark times:

People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone.1

These workers have done everything we’ve asked of them and more. They have been through hell, particularly those who have risked their health and well-being to care for the sick, educate the young, feed the hungry, and deliver the things the rest of us need to get through this period of grinding uncertainty. Employers, politicians, and talking heads have lauded them as essential workers, but the stark gap between the praise and the grim realities of working life in the United States — which was already miserable for millions before the pandemic — have pushed many to the breaking point. Indeed, record numbers of American workers have quit their jobs in what the media has dubbed the Great Resignation. According to the US Labor Department, 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021. The number of monthly quits has exceeded three million since August 2020, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.2 Job switchers span the employment ladder, but turnover has been largely concentrated in the low-wage service sector, where workers are taking advantage of the very tight labor market to get a better deal for themselves. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, workers with high school diplomas are currently enjoying a faster rate of wage growth than workers with bachelor’s degrees, a remarkable situation that has not occurred in decades.3

Worker discontent is not only finding expression in the form of quitting and job switching. In 2021, we witnessed a modest increase in the frequency and visibility of collective action in the workplace. Tens of thousands of workers, union and nonunion alike, challenged employers through protests and strikes across sectors and in many different geographical regions. Workers in health care and social assistance, education, and transportation and warehousing led the way, but they were joined by workers in hotels and food services, manufacturing, and other industries. Protests and strikes tended to be concentrated in states where labor is relatively stronger, namely California, New York, and Illinois, but some states with low union density, like North Carolina, saw an uptick in labor action, too. Pay increases were easily the most common demand, but health and safety, staffing, and COVID-19 protocols were high on the agenda as well.

The year 2021 was less a strike wave than a strike ripple, and it has not yet resulted in any appreciable increase in unionization. A few trends stand out. The first is that labor protest and strike action were heavily concentrated among unionized groups of workers. Unionized groups of workers accounted for nearly 95% of all estimated participants in labor protests and more than 98% of all estimated participants in strikes. The second is that protests and strikes were concentrated by industry — namely health care and education, which together accounted for roughly 60% of all labor actions. Finally, protests and strikes were heavily concentrated geographically. Just three states with relatively high levels of union density — California, New York, and Illinois — accounted for more than half the total estimated participants in protests and strikes. In short, collective workplace action is by and large taking place where organized labor still retains residual sources of strength. In this context, spreading protest and strike action beyond its current industrial and regional confines depends on unionization in new places.

Conditions conducive to labor action — rising inflation, pandemic-related pressures, and a tight labor market — are likely to persist into 2022, and the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been meaningfully supportive of worker organizing. US labor is probably not on the verge of a historic breakthrough, but in this context, workers may have an opportunity to make modest material and organizational gains.

Making new organizational gains is critical to the fortunes of the labor movement and the reviving US left. The vast majority of the workers involved in strikes and labor protests last year were already members of unions, not unorganized workers looking to unionize. This is why it is so concerning that last year’s uptick in labor action occurred amid a further decline in union density in 2021. The overall rate of union membership stands at 10.3% of the total labor force, while the total number of union members, just over fourteen million in 2021, continues its long decline.4 While some have argued that treating union density as the key measure of labor’s strength is a mistake, it seems clear that, at least in the US context, where union density and union coverage almost entirely overlap, it does provide an effective measurement of working-class power.5

Boosting the level of union density should therefore be among the leading priorities of progressives and socialists in the United States. As the power resources school of welfare state scholars has long argued, the relative strength of the labor movement and its affiliated political parties has been the single most important factor shaping welfare state development over time and across countries. Here in the United States, where we have never had a nationwide social democratic party aligned with a strong labor movement, the weakness of working-class organization is clearly reflected in the fragmentation and stinginess of our welfare state. The state-level wave of attacks on organized labor that began in 2010 have made it that much harder for unions to defend working-class interests and reduce inequality. But the fact that they were able to meaningfully mitigate the growth of inequality, even during the period of neoliberal retrenchment, shows that rebuilding the labor movement needs to be a chief priority of any progressive political agenda.6 The Biden administration’s pro-union stance suggests it understands this. But if it’s unable to act decisively to boost union membership, all the pro-union rhetoric it can muster will ultimately amount to little.

TRACKING LABOR ACTION

Researchers at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) began documenting strikes and labor protests in late 2020. Their ILR Labor Action Tracker provides a database of workplace conflict across the United States, based on information collected from government sources, news reports, organizational press releases, and social media. It counts both strikes and labor protests as “events” but distinguishes between the two. The major distinction between strikes and labor protests, according to this methodology, is whether the workers involved in the event stopped work. If they did, the event is defined as a strike; if they did not, it is defined as a labor protest. The Labor Action Tracker also collects data on a number of additional variables, including employer, labor organization (if applicable), local labor organization (if applicable), industry, approximate number of participants, worker demands, and more.7

ACTION TYPES

In 2021, there were 786 events with 257,086 estimated participants.8 Over 60% of the events were labor protests, while less than 40% were strikes (there was one recorded lockout). Roughly one-third of the estimated number of workers participated in labor protests, while roughly two-thirds participated in strikes. Further, the average number of estimated workers per labor protest (188) was significantly smaller than the average number of estimated workers per strike (553, see Table 1 for details).

DURATION

Neither labor protests nor strikes tended to last very long, which tracks with the generally sharp decline in strike duration in recent decades.9 Labor protests in particular were very short affairs. Of the labor protests with a start and end date, 96% lasted for just one day or less. Strikes also tended to have a short duration, but they typically did not end as quickly as protests. Of the strikes with a start and end date, one-third lasted for one day or less. Roughly two-thirds of strikes (68%) ended within a week, and over 90% ended within thirty days. One strike stands out for its unusually long duration: a 701-day strike by United Auto Workers (UAW) members against a metallurgical company in Pennsylvania, which began in September 2019 and ended in August 2021.

INDUSTRIES

An informed observer will not be surprised by which industries saw the largest number of labor action events (Table 2). The leading two industries by far were health care and social assistance and education, which are both highly unionized and have been subjected to enormous pressures during the pandemic. Together, they accounted for nearly 40% of the total labor protests and strikes. These industries also comprised over 60% of the overall number of estimated labor action participants — health care with 41.5% of the estimated participants, education with 18.8%. The overrepresentation of health care and education workers becomes even starker when we compare this to their employment shares in the overall labor force. In 2020, these two industries accounted for 16.3% of total nonfarm employment — health care with a 13.8% share and education with 2.3%.10 Put another way, the share of health care workers in 2021 labor actions was roughly three times larger than their share in the nonfarm labor force, while the share of education workers was more than eight times as large.

These two pace-setting industries were followed by a second tier of industries including transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing. It is not surprising to see these listed among the most turbulent industries, as they contain a mix of highly unionized employers and nonunion employers that have become a major focus of labor organizing activity, namely Amazon — the most frequently targeted employer, with twelve total labor actions — which was the target of twice as many labor actions as McDonald’s, the second-most targeted employer.

The industrial distribution of labor protests generally follows the overall distribution of labor action, with the notable exception of manufacturing, which saw far more strikes than protests. While the health care industry did not experience the largest number of strikes, it accounts for more than half of estimated strike participants (53%). Workers in education (12.4%) and manufacturing (16%) also accounted for outsize shares of the estimated number of participants.

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We need to do this everywhere. (x)

UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to avert a strike. These are the highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 agreement:

Unions work, unionize.

If you own it, you should be able to repair it, modify it, and make it better. It's yours.

Fight for your right to repair.

US: Electronic Freedom Foundation, Repair Association Europe: The Restart Project

A new congressional caucus is raising awareness among federal lawmakers about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. The Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Therapies (PATH) Caucus aims to accelerate clinical research into the use of psychedelics—specifically psilocybin and MDMA—through educating members of Congress and encouraging them to allocate federal funding for that purpose.

(source)

biden 2024 - making things work

This is why I honestly feel like Biden was the best possible choice in a shitty situation, even with his age and potential health issues. Because if nothing else, he is NOT REACTIONARY. He is methodical and dedicated. Do I wish he acted a little faster and with more of an eye towards progressive policies? Obviously yes. But given the choices, and given everything else that's happened, Biden has absolutely made the best of a bad situation. Sometimes you don't need a hero, you need a fucking repairman to come and just make it work until it can be fixed. And he's a damn good repairman.

Okay, I’ll give him the W for this one.

I remember at the time being like ‘the only thing that man likes more than unions is trains, so I’m surprised this didn’t get resolved better’ and I am delighted to hear that, in fact, it did.

Unions work, unionize.

4 paid sick days still isn't enough, but it's something, and now they have a better ground floor for a better fight in the future.

UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.

The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)

Unions work, unionize.