Tag: Labor

More Good News from Yesterday’s Elections

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Missouri voters repealed a so-called “right to work” law by a 2 to 1 margin:

After a succession of political setbacks in onetime strongholds and a landmark defeat in the Supreme Court, organized labor has notched a hard-won victory as Missouri voters overrode a legislative move to curb union power.

A measure on the ballot on Tuesday asked voters to pass judgment on a prospective law barring private-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from workers who choose not to become members. The law was rejected by a 2-to-1 margin.

Clueless, Rich, and Narcissistic

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I am referring to Elon Musk, who met with workers and said that he, “Would Allow” them to unionize if he did not personally resolve their issues.

Mr. Musk, you are not the person who makes that decision. Your workers make that decision, period, full stop.

That’s how the system works, no matter how much you want to “disrupt” it.

What’s more, you are not allowed to threaten loss of benefits to employees if they choose to unionize:

In a June 2017 meeting with Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk solicited their complaints about safety issues and promised to address their concerns, so long as they refrained from trying to organize a union, the National Labor Relations Board alleges.

 The new claims emerged last month as a trial got underway over a complaint filed against Tesla by the NLRB, a government agency tasked with enforcing U.S. labor laws.

 During the June 7, 2017, meeting, Musk allegedly solicited employees complaints about safety issues, and “impliedly promised to remedy their safety complaints if they refrained from their union organizational activity,” the NLRB said.


………

Musk has made his disdain toward the United Auto Workers’ two-year union campaign at Fremont well known, but publicly he’s even gone so far as to call for workers to hold a unionization vote. The NLRB’s latest allegation appears to be the first documented claim of the CEO directly appealing to workers to refrain from organizing activity.  

 ………

 In its filing, the agency said Musk’s statements violated sections 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act, which says “It shall be an unfair labor practice for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed” to organize a union.

“For example, employers may not respond to a union organizing drive by threatening, interrogating, or spying on pro-union employees, or by promising benefits if they forget about the union,” according to the NLRB’s website.

And, BTW, he also tweeted that if they voted to unionize, that the would lose their stock options, which is a violation of black letter labor law.

But he’s a Silicon Valley big wig, and laws are for little people.

Here is hoping that the judge will disabuse him of this notion.

The Law is for Little People

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Elon Musk just tweeted that if his workers vote to unionize, they will lose their stock options.

I’m really not sure how much value the stock options would be to the shop floor workers, they will be locked up well past when they are worthless, much as it happened in the Dot Com bust, but still his threat is a direct violation of the NLRA, which prohibits penalizing workers for exercising their labor organizing rights:

The United Auto Workers has been Elon Musk’s target for days of derision on Twitter, and his posts may open Tesla Inc. up to trouble with U.S. labor regulators.

………

The UAW, which is actively trying to organize Tesla’s California assembly plant, has fired back with tweets of its own. But the more consequential outcome from the spat on the social-networking service may come in the form of unfair labor practice allegations made to the National Labor Relations Board, according to Wilma Liebman, who led the agency during the early years of the Obama administration.

Musk posted earlier this week that nothing was stopping Tesla employees in Fremont, California, from voting to join a union. But, he wrote, “Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” Liebman read this as a warning that the company would take away workers’ stock options if they succeeded in organizing the factory.

Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2018



“If you threaten to take away benefits because people unionize, that’s an out-and-out violation of the labor law,” Liebman, who’s done legal work for the UAW in the past, said in an interview.

This, is, as the saying goes, black letter law, and, if the expected complaint is filed, I would expect the NLRB to take some sort of action.

Ironically enough Trump’s NLRB might be more likely to take action than the Obama’s, because the Trump administration is less enamored with Silicon Valley than was the Obama administration, though I would not expect much beyond a stern warning.

And Elon Musk is Overrated

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After years of production problems resulting from automation issues that have been documented by legacy automobile manufacturers, Elon Musk has finally admitted that over-reliance robots and automation was a mistake, and has noted that “Humans are underrated“.

This is what happens when someone thinks that they are smart enough to ignore lessons leaned over decades from auto manufacturing across the world:

In a rare mea culpa for the mercurial billionaire, Tesla CEO Elon Musk acknowledged that the company has been too reliant on robots for production.

Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018

“Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk wrote, responding to a Wall Street Journal reporter’s tweet. “Humans are underrated.” He also talked about this with CBS News’ Gayle King, adding “we had this crazy, complex network of conveyor belts….And it was not working, so we got rid of that whole thing.”

You know, if humans are underrated, and you admit to over-automating your assembly line.

If you have REALLY have learned your lesson, how ending your policy of treating your assembly line workers like complete sh%$?

Abour F%$#ing Time

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It looks like unions are finally gaining a toe hold in the computer game industry, which is arguably the most abusive workplace in IT:

A concern-trolling panel at the Game Developers Conference was the catalyst that led workers to start organizing in a way they never have before.

At this point, you already know the facts: Game workers crunch too much. They’re underpaid compared to comparable positions in other industries. They burn out fast and young. We’ve had, for years upon years, stories and statistics proving all of this, decades of anonymous interviews with artists and coders desperate for something to change, from EA Spouse to the Rockstar Spouses, from The Guardian to Kotaku to here at Waypoint.

We are all aware. Awareness alone has changed nothing.

A little over a week ago, a blip came over the feed of a small Facebook chat group dedicated to discussing games and their creation. It was a link to a roundtable announcement at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. On March 21st, Jen MacLean, executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), was heading up a talk on games industry unionization.

………

But in this case, the panel was clearly skewed toward blunting union sentiment. It was right there in the title. “Union Now? Pros, Cons, and Consequences of Unionization for Game Devs Roundtable.” (My emphasis). Perhaps it was the contradictions layered one on top of another which made the union roundtable too much for some to bear this time. Whatever the spark was, it tindered a flame. 

Read the whole article, but it appears that MacLean, was so snarky that it led to people realizing that the IGDA was a tool of management, and not a reasonable alternative to a labor union.

Here’s hoping that the moronic Ayn Rand sensibilities which permeate IT don’t sabotage this effort.

Live in Obedient Fear, Union Brothers

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Scotland Yard has admitted Special Branch officers passed information to a controversial network that blacklisted construction workers.

It follows a six-year battle to find out if the Metropolitan Police supplied the intelligence on trade unionists.

The force says its investigation had “proven” the allegation, which will be investigated by a public inquiry.

Workers who say they were unfairly barred from jobs have already received millions of pounds in compensation.

In 2016, the union Unite reached a settlement with construction firms that resulted in 256 workers sharing more than £10m in compensation.

At the heart of the claims, which were made by hundreds of workers, was evidence that firms accessed a “blacklist” that logged workers’ trade union activities.

The list was used by dozens of construction firms to vet those applying for work on building sites.

When the files were found to contain details of individual’s political activities, the workers demanded that Scotland Yard disclose whether undercover police had colluded in supplying intelligence.

………

In a letter to the workers’ lawyers, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Martin said the findings of the Metropolitan Police’s internal investigation, completed two years ago, were so sensitive that they were sent directly to the then commissioner.

The letter states: “Allegation: Police, including Special Branches, supplied information that appeared on the Blacklist, funded by the country’s major construction firms.

“The report concludes that, on the balance of probabilities, the allegation that the police or Special Branches supplied information is ‘proven’.

This scheme did not spring full grown from the forehead of  the Yard.

Politically connected builders leaned on elected officials, who in turn leaned on law enforcement.

Hopefully, this will be investigated more deeply.

Stopped Clock, H1B Edition

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It appears that any number of abusers of the H1B program, like Tata, Wipro, and Infosys, who make big bank on gaming the H1B visa program, are incensed that they will now have to provide evidence that they are actually bringing people in to fulfill an otherwise unavailable talent:

The United States Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services has released new and strict rules for H-1B visas, the permit used by many-a-tech-company to bring skilled workers to the USA from abroad.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to restrict use of the visas, which he claimed are used to import workers who are paid less than locals and therefore make it harder for US citizens to get a job. Trump was also uncomfortable with outsourcers’ use of the visa, saying they displaced American workers. Labour hire agencies also sought the visa, bringing in people and then finding them jobs after they arrived.

The USA’s recently cracked down on employers who use the visa, with more inspections to make sure they’re not being abused.

Now a new Policy Memorandum (PDF), released late last week, revealed the Trump Administration’s plans to make H-1B visas harder to obtain by requiring extensive documentation about exactly what workers will do, why they’re needed and where they will work.

Now, if you’re familiar with the H1-B program, but have not followed it closely, you are probably asking yourself, “Wait, this is supposed to be for workers who are unavailable inside the US, why weren’t they already required to provide, ‘Extensive documentation about exactly what workers will do, why they’re needed and where they will work,’?”

If you have followed it closely, you know that the program has NEVER really been about finding unique and special talents that cannot be found in America.  It has ALWAYS been about getting cheap labor to keep wages down, particularly in the tech industry.

Applicants will now need to demonstrate they are already an employee of a stateside organisation, while businesses who hire H-1B holders must provide signed “detailed statements of work or work orders” and a letter detailing “… the specialized duties the beneficiary will perform, the qualifications required to perform those duties, the duration of the job, salary or wages paid, hours worked, benefits, a detailed description of who will supervise the beneficiary and the beneficiary’s duties, and any other related evidence.”

Ummm ……… If you do not already know the duties required and the other details listed above, then your H1-B application is fraudulent.

I understand that this policy likely is more driven by a general hostility to immigration than it is a concern about fair wages for skilled workders, and I expect this to be walked back significantly under pressure from tech lobbyists and the cheap labor crowd, but it’s a good start.

Thirteenth Amendment, Schmirteenth Amendment………

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It appears that private prison operators are coercing “voluntary” labor out of immigration detainees, in violation of the 13th amendment, which reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.“

Apparently, the Constitution of the United States of America is not something that concerns the Department of Homeland Security:

Officials at a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in rural Georgia locked an immigrant detainee in solitary confinement last November as punishment for encouraging fellow detainees to stop working in a labor program that ICE says is strictly voluntary.

Shoaib Ahmed, a 24-year-old who immigrated to America to escape political persecution in Bangladesh, told The Intercept that the privately run detention center placed him in isolation for 10 days after an officer overheard him simply saying “no work tomorrow.” Ahmed said he was expressing frustration over the detention center — run by prison contractor CoreCivic — having delayed his weekly paycheck of $20 for work in the facility’s kitchen.

Those in ICE custody often work for as little as $1 per day and cannot legally be compelled to work.

Ahmed’s account adds to a growing chorus of ICE detainees who allege that they have been forced to work in for-profit ICE facilities or else risk punishment with solitary confinement — a harsh form of captivity that, if prolonged, can amount to torture. Late last month, ICE detainees at a CoreCivic-run facility in California sued the private prison contractor, alleging that they had been threatened with solitary confinement if they did not work. In October, The Intercept reported that officials had placed another detainee in solitary confinement for 30 days for “encouraging others to participate in a work stoppage” at the same privately run facility where Ahmed was disciplined, the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.

CoreCivic has said that its practices of segregating detainees in individual cells are humane and has disputed the term “solitary confinement,” arguing that its harsh connotation does not apply to the publicly traded firm’s practices. “Use of the term in your coverage with regard to Stewart would give readers a false impression of the reality of restricted housing at the facility,” CoreCivic spokesperson Jonathan Burns said in an email.

But over the course of two interviews with The Intercept over a fuzzy detention center phone line, Ahmed used rudimentary English to describe being subjected to the isolating conditions of solitary confinement as it is generally understood. “The room is at all times locked,” Ahmed said. “If you talk, the sound does not go outside. And nobody comes to talk with us.”

“Sometimes I think I will be mentally sick,” Ahmed said of his time in isolation. “I feel pain in my head.”

In addition to severe isolation, Ahmed spoke of being subjected to restrictive treatment in segregation that might be more expected for a violent and volatile criminal than for an immigration detainee under punishment for encouraging a work stoppage.

………

In recent years, current and former ICE detainees have filed class-action lawsuits alleging forced labor against private prison contractors in Washington state, California, and Colorado. Across the country, detainees and advocates have said that the ICE contractors used solitary confinement as a cudgel to force work, and allege that the for-profit facility operators are profiting off the bonded labor.

“These big corporations are circumventing the traditional labor market,” said Lydia Wright, an attorney at the Burns Charest law firm who represents current and former ICE detainees suing CoreCivic in California. “If they weren’t requiring detainees to work for $1 per day, they would have to hire cooks and janitors at minimum wage.”

In an October response to a suit from detainees in Colorado, major private prison contractor GEO Group appeared to echo this point. “Were a court to conclude that GEO must pay thousands of detainees a minimum wage, it would significantly affect the prices that GEO would have charge for its services,” stated a GEO Group court filing. The Colorado class-action suit, which demands that detainees be paid minimum wage for their labor, “poses a potentially catastrophic risk to GEO’s ability to honor its contracts with the federal government,” the firm stated in a separate filing.

One obstacle such suits against ICE’s private contractors may face: Many of the immigrant plaintiffs are only fleetingly in the country before often being deported, making it potentially difficult, for instance, to find former detainees who may be entitled to back wages.

How convenient.

Good Point

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Over at Beat the Press, Dean Baker uses issues with Mexican truck drivers to make a very good point on how free trade works generally:

………

It [The New York Times article] suggests that there is not much at stake in this battle since the Mexican drivers are not allowed to carry goods back from their destination. The prospect of returning with an empty truck would make it uneconomical for most trips even if the Mexican drivers were paid far less than their U.S. counterparts.

 This discussion misses the point. If the restrictions on Mexican drivers transporting goods in the United States were eased, then it is virtually inevitable that the NYT and other major news outlets would soon be running pieces on the fact that it is wasteful to prohibit them from picking up goods in the U.S. and instead come back with empty trucks. The likely result would be that this restriction would be removed as well.

Yep.

So long as pharma, finance, insurance, real-estate, and media get their vigorish, it’s f%$# the American working man.

A Shallow Analysis

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In Krugman’s latest New York Times OP/ED, he observes that, “Republicans Despise the Working Class“.

He’s right, but his view is too narrow. Republicans hate everyone who isn’t rich. They believe that wealth is synonymous with virtue, and they are acting accordingly.

The only reason that they achieve any degree of political traction on this is because the Democratic Party establishment also despises the working class, and it ain’t just the whole “deplorables” thing, when we look at the lackluster support for labor unions, the suggestions that the solutions to the hollowing out of US manufacturing capabilities are in training everyone to be office drones, etc.

The US really needs a Jeremy Corbynesque “Old Labour” party.

Canada is Trying to Save the American Labor Movement

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The Canadian government is meeting with some of the country’s biggest labor groups to discuss Nafta as talks on the deal are set to resume.

Labor Minister Patricia Hajdu will meet union leaders Friday in a round-table discussion near Toronto to get input on the North American Free Trade Agreement. It’s the latest sign that labor has the Trudeau government’s ear in talks that could hinge, in part, on Canada’s push to raise working standards in both the U.S. and Mexico.

“That’s an indication of how much we value our labor movement, and we want to make sure as we go into negotiations that the rights of Canadian workers are protected,” Hajdu said in an interview with Bloomberg. “We’ll do everything in our power to make sure of that.”

Nafta talks resume Monday with a partial round in Washington, without political leaders at the table. Canada wants the U.S. to undo so-called “right to work” provisions in some states, while also calling on Mexico to raise labor standards. One of Canada’s top union leaders, Jerry Dias, has met often with the Canadian negotiating team and regularly predicts Nafta talks will fail.

Trudeau has been pushing to add “progressive” elements like labor, gender and the environment into all trade negotiations — a move derided by political opponents as “virtue signaling” that could make it tougher to get a deal. That strategy was a driving factor in the surprise false start this week of trade talks with China, a country that typically shuns the bells and whistles Canada wants in any trade deal.

Those added elements are among Nafta’s sticking points. Canada wants its two North American partners to ratify eight core conventions, including the right to organize, laid out by the International Labour Organization to make Nafta work. “We did put forward a very ambitious proposal on labor,” chief negotiator Steve Verheul told lawmakers this week. While Canada has adopted all eight and Mexico has nearly done so, the U.S. has adopted only two, Verheul said. “The U.S. is resisting that proposal.”

Canada’s call to claw back U.S. “right-to-work” laws, which ban unions from requiring workers to pay dues, is another obstacle. “The U.S. is also resisting that,” Verheul said.

As Yves Smith pithily observes, “Sounds like the Canadians are doing better by labor than our own Democrats.”

The history of the modern Democratic Party does not show meaningful support for organized labor.

When Republicans pass so-called “right-to-work ” laws, Democrats never repeal them, and the Obama administration dropped its support for the Employee Free Choice Act (Card Check) before the last states were called in 2008.

The positions pushed by Trudeau benefit workers in all three of the signatories of NAFTA, so I expect Democrats, or at least the current Democratic Party establishment to vociferously oppose labor justice, because they have sold their souls to big donors.

Love Me, I’m A Liberal

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Roll Phil Ochs

Liberalism is all well and good for papered staff at elite educational institutions when it doesn’t actually cost them anything personally:

Georgetown University this week refused to support a movement by graduate students to unionize, arguing that teaching and research assistants are students, not employees.

The decision arrives a month after the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees asked university president John DeGioia to support their union campaign. The students said that embracing a union would align with the school’s Jesuit values affirming the dignity of labor. University leaders, however, maintain the work that graduate students contribute is fundamental to their studies and should be considered part of their education.

Georgetown’s decision echoes opposition to graduate student unions at other prestigious universities. Yale University, Boston College and Columbia University have railed against a 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that granted teaching and research assistants the legal protection to unionize. Yale, Columbia and Princeton posted information on their websites warning students that unionizing could alter their relationship with faculty and limit their individual rights once a union becomes their collective voice.

In a letter sent this week to the school’s graduate student alliance, Georgetown provost Robert M. Groves and Edward B. Healton, the school’s executive vice president for health sciences, said the university is “eager” to address issues that affect graduate students, but not through collective bargaining.

………

The union organizers want to join the American Federation of Teachers. To do that, they need to file a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for an election. Organizers say they wanted the university’s backing, but will forge ahead regardless.

“We were hoping to negotiate with Georgetown administrators about the terms of the election, but now we’ll have to proceed on our own, without their help and anticipating their active push-back,” said Hailey Huget, a doctoral candidate in philosophy and a member of the graduate student alliance. “We hoped that Georgetown would be better than this.”

University leaders say they have discussed the collective bargaining campaign with the faculty senate, academic departments and the executive committee of graduate studies, the principal policy-making body for graduate programs. That committee has since passed a resolution affirming the position that students enrolled in degree programs are students and should be treated as students, not employees.

Silly grad students, don’t you realize that respect for human dignity and labor rights is only for OTHER people, and that it cannot be allowed to INCONVENIENCE the august denizens of the ivory towers of academy.

You need to focus on the bad people, you know  ……… The “Deplorables”.

It’s Called Control Fraud. It Can Also Be Called Looting.

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The LA Times guild, who is trying to unionize the newspaper, details how much senior executives at TRONC (formerly Tribune Publishing) are overpaying themselves while starving the business:

It’s a question we hear often: How would Tronc pay for the raises and improved benefits we’ll pursue through our union?

Well, the answer is that a great deal of money continues to flow into The Times, because of the high-quality journalism our newsroom produces every day. At a recent all-hands meeting, Ross Levinsohn said Tronc still earns $1.5 billion in annual revenue and remains profitable.

The problem is that a disproportionate amount of those profits are lavished on the salaries and perks for Levinsohn and a handful of other richly compensated Tronc executives.

The Columbia Journalism Review noted Monday that executive compensation at Tronc shot up 80% last year — a nearly $9 million jump over 2015. That squares with the findings below from a NewsGuild analysis of Tronc’s SEC filings.

………

Michael Ferro’s private jet alone costs the company millions. From February 2016 through September of this year, Tronc spent $4.6 million to sublease and operate the sleek Bombardier aircraft, which costs $8,500 an hour to fly. The kicker? Tronc subleases the jet from Merrick Ventures, one of Ferro’s companies.

………

Last year, Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn made an eye-popping $8.1 million in total compensation. He made substantially more than his counterparts at The New York Times Co., Gannett Corp., Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal and McClatchy, among others. In fact, Dearborn’s compensation was $3 million more than that of New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, whose company has revenues similar to ours but a market value many multiples of Tronc’s. Plus, Thompson took a pay cut in 2016 because he did not meet his performance goals.

………

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If executives were paid more in line with their industry peers, the savings alone would finance thousands of dollars in annual raises, lower out-of pocket healthcare costs, accrued vacation (that was taken away unilaterally), and perhaps even lower parking fees. In fact, if Dearborn last year had made the same as his New York Times counterpart – a “mere” $5 million – the $3 million in savings could provide a raise of about $8,000 to everyone in our Guild bargaining unit.

Given the performance of the company, these guys may be the most overpaid senior executives in media, including Harvey Weinstein.

Oh, Crap!

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The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to public labor unions.

With Gorsuch on the board, I expect a 5-4 decision saying that unions cannot collect fees to cover the cost of representing non members, effectively gutting  public labor unions:

Its conservative majority restored, the Supreme Court said Thursday it will return to an issue with the potential to financially cripple Democratic-leaning labor unions that represent government workers.

After the justices deadlocked 4-4 in a similar case last year, the high court will consider a free-speech challenge from workers who object to paying money to unions they don’t support.

The court, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch on board, could decide to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling that allows public sector unions to collect fees from non-members to cover the costs of negotiating contracts for all employees.

The union fees case is among nine new cases the justices added to their docket for the term that begins on Monday. Others deal with a defendant’s right to direct his own defense, police searches of vehicles and overtime pay for service advisers at car dealerships.

Unions, and public employees, are going to get absolutely screwed.

Heart on the Left, and Wallet on the Right

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A new survey by political scientists at Stanford University suggests a mostly straightforward answer — with one glaring twist. The study is the first comprehensive look at the political attitudes of wealthy technologists, whose views have long been misunderstood to the point of caricature by many outside the industry. The findings of the study, which is currently under peer review, were presented last week to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

The survey suggests a novel but paradoxical vision of the future of American politics: Technologists could help push lawmakers, especially Democrats, further to the left on many social and economic issues. But they may also undermine the influence of some of the Democrats’ most stalwart supporters, including labor unions. And they may strive to push Democrats away from regulation on business — including the growing calls for greater rules around the tech industry.

Over all, the study showed that tech entrepreneurs are very liberal — among some of the most left-leaning Democrats you can find. They are overwhelmingly in favor of economic policies that redistribute wealth, including higher taxes on rich people and lots of social services for the poor, including universal health care. Their outlook is cosmopolitan and globalist — they support free trade and more open immigration, and they score low on measures of “racial resentment.”

On most culture-war issues, they are unrepentantly liberal. They oppose restrictions on abortion, favor gay rights, support gun control and oppose the death penalty.

Now for the twist. The study found one area where tech entrepreneurs strongly deviate from Democratic orthodoxy and are closer to most Republicans: They are deeply suspicious of the government’s efforts to regulate business, especially when it comes to labor. They said that it was too difficult for companies to fire people, and that the government should make it easier to do so. They also hope to see the influence of both private and public-sector unions decline.

“You would think that people with enough money to influence the political system would obviously use that influence to increase social and economic inequality in ways that benefit them,” said David Broockman, an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a co-author of the study.

“What’s surprising to us,” he continued, “is that you could find this group that says, ‘Actually, our taxes should go up and more money should go to things like universal health care, or that we should do more to protect the environment’ — but at the same time believes that regulations and labor unions are a problem.”

These people are not liberals.  These people are not progressives.  They are poseurs, and to the degree that the liberals and progressives allow them to exert influence over their agendas, they are working to sabotage themselves.

One only has to remember that Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay colluded to depress wages for ordinary workers.

We are living in a new gilded age, then Silicon Valley are some of the most significant “malefactors of great wealth” in the mix.

They in the same disrepute as their predecessors were held by Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago.

The Democratic Party Establishment in a Nut Shell

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The web publication Slate is fairly consistently center left.

Of course, that won’t stop them from an aggressive campaign of union busting against their own employees, including firing organizers.

This is the problem with Clinton/Obama liberalism:  they are all for progressive ideas, until those might slightly inconvenience them.

They support the working man, but they want their cheap sh%$ from China, and they want “Undocumented Americans” treated fairly, but they don’t want to pay more to get their landscaping done, and they are horrified by price gouging by big Pharma and excesses of Wall Street, but they want the campaign donations.

If you wonder why promises of economic justice by the mainstream Democratic party are not taken seriously by much of the electorate, this is it:

Slate has been a solidly liberal voice online for the past two decades. So when its staff decided to form a union earlier this year, they didn’t expect a drawn-out labor fight. Yet Slate management has put up stiff resistance to the effort for months, using rhetoric that anyone familiar with attempts to weaken organized labor will recognize.

The site’s management declined to voluntarily recognize a union in March, after more than 90 percent of editorial staff signed cards signaling their intent to join the Writers Guild of America-East. Higher-ups, including the site’s editor-in-chief and the company’s chairman, have since tried to dissuade them from unionizing at all, according to internal emails obtained by Splinter.

Current and former employees, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said it’s left Slate organizers grappling with how aggressively they should force the issue in a newsroom known for technocratic liberalism. The question has become even more complicated as the publication has fashioned itself as a standard-bearer of the anti-Donald Trump resistance.

………

Current and former staffers said that the top-down campaign against the union hasn’t been as cartoonish as what’s been seen at other media outlets, such as DNAinfo and Gothamist, where management essentially threatened to shutter the sites if they unionized. But the pushback has been consistent from the start.

Soon after the vote to unionize in March, Editor in Chief Julia Turner led a non-compulsory staff meeting at which management outlined its anti-union position in full, according to both interviews with staffers and internal emails. Jacob Weisberg—former editor of the site, and currently both the chairman of the Slate Group and primary host of its popular Trumpcast podcast—has largely spearheaded the efforts through memos to staff filled with familiar anti-union talking points.

………

Slate management has called for a second vote to be administered by the National Labor Relations Board, sowing trepidation among organizers who fear a time-intensive process in an agency increasingly stocked with Trump appointees. Union organizers counter-offered, calling for a second vote conducted by a private third party. So far, Slate brass haven’t budged.

“We can only conclude that this is their time-consuming and demoralizing way of discouraging us from unionizing,” the Slate Organizing Committee said in a statement to Splinter. “We still feel strongly that we deserve a seat at the table to negotiate a contract that offers us more security in this volatile and uncertain industry.”

………

Slate’s union drive began during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, when then-politics editor Tommy Craggs—a onetime executive editor of Gawker Media—began discussing the idea with colleagues in earnest. He told Splinter in an email that he approached Turner in October in order to avoid appearing overly hostile.

………

“I really don’t know if the union drive would’ve been better off if I’d never said a word to her,” Craggs continued. “I do know that I never expected to hear the Slate [editor in chief] talking like a Heritage Foundation white paper.”

………

Craggs was among five staffers, including another editor involved in the union drive, L.V. Anderson, let go from Slate in February. A company spokeswoman called all the job losses “layoffs” at the time, saying that they “were unrelated to any union activity.” But Craggs, pointing to the ongoing search for his replacement, disputes that characterization. “I don’t think I got fired for trying to unionize Slate,” he wrote. “I got fired because I’m the sort of person who would try to unionize Slate.”

There Has to Be a Line beyond Which the Democratic Party Tells a Public Figure to Go Pound Sand

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In North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper, ostensibly a Democrat, just signed a bill purposed designed to cripple the farmworkers union in the state.

The bill was promulgated by a Republican state senator who had been successfully sued by the union for wage theft:

Earlier today, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed the state’s Farm Act, which prohibits farmworkers’ unions from collecting union dues directly from workers’ paychecks.

Labor activists say that the provision in the bill, SB 615, was aimed at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which represents 10,000 farmworkers in North Carolina. Earlier this year, FLOC was able to force a major settlement from North Carolina State [Senator] Brent Jackson.

“This attack on farm workers’ rights is most likely in retaliation for a series of lawsuits brought by farm workers and their union (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) over wage theft and mistreatment on several farms in Eastern NC — including one owned by Sen. Brent Jackson, who sponsored this bill and chaired the Senate conference committee” said North Carolina AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer MaryBe McMillian. “It is a clear conflict of interest and blatant abuse of power for legislators who are also growers to push policies that allow them to gain more and more profit on the backs of their workers.”

Organized labor had hoped that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would veto the bill,meeting with him twice to lobby against it. Yesterday, however, they received word that the Governor intended to sign it.

Normally, I’d be supportive of someone like Governor Cooper, but he could have vetoed it, even though there was a veto proof supermajority, or he could have allowed it to become law without his signature, signifying his disapproval.

He did neither, and I will neither forgive nor forget.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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Over at Bloomberg, we have a bit of history which describes how US Chipmakers dealt with the toxicity of their manufacturing processes by moving overseas, where they could harm brown people and no one would care:

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

………

SIA, representing International Business Machines Corp., Intel Corp., and about a dozen other top technology companies, established a task force, and its experts flew to Windsor Locks, Conn., to meet Pastides at a hotel near Bradley International Airport. It was Super Bowl Sunday, January 1987. “That was a day I remember being at a tribunal,” Pastides says. The atmosphere “bordered on hostility. I remember being shellshocked.” Soon after the meeting the panel formally concluded that the study contained “significant deficiencies,” according to internal SIA records. Nevertheless, facing public pressure, SIA’s member companies agreed to fund more research.

………

Pastides felt vindicated. More than that, he considered the entire episode one of the greatest successes in public-health history, as do others. Despite industry skepticism, three scientific studies led to changes that helped generations of women. “That’s almost a fairy tale in public health,” Pastides says.

Two decades later, the ending to the story looks like a different kind of tale. As semiconductor production shifted to less expensive countries, the industry’s promised fixes do not appear to have made the same journey, at least not in full. Confidential data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that thousands of women and their unborn children continued to face potential exposure to the same toxins until at least 2015. Some are probably still being exposed today. Separate evidence shows the same reproductive-health effects also persisted across the decades.

The risks are exacerbated by secrecy—the industry may be using toxins that still haven’t been disclosed. This is the price paid by generations of women making the devices at the heart of the global economy.

………

Yet in virtually every study published since the 1990s, Kim read one form or other of the same phrase: The global semiconductor industry had phased out EGEs in the mid-1990s, signaling the end of reproductive-health concerns. The statements made sense. Not only had IBM and other companies publicly announced that the use of EGEs had been discontinued, but the chemicals also had become classified as Category 1 reproductive toxins under international standards, and European regulators had placed them on a list of the most highly toxic chemicals known to science, designating them Substances of Very High Concern.

Still, something nagged at Kim. In focus groups, young South Korean women working in chip plants told Kim’s colleagues it was not uncommon to go months, or even a year, without menstruating. (Some saw these potentially ominous changes to their reproductive systems as blessings, not warnings. It was just easier not to have periods.) As in the U.S., women dominated production jobs in South Korea’s microelectronics industry, which employs more than 120,000 of them, mostly of childbearing age; they’re often recruited right out of high school. Kim and a colleague decided they needed to conduct a new reproductive-health study. They faced a challenge, however, that Pastides and the other U.S. researchers hadn’t, at least on the front end: a lack of industry cooperation.

In 2013 they persuaded a member of South Korea’s parliament to pry loose national health-insurance data. They got five years of physician-reimbursement records through 2012 for women of childbearing age working at plants owned by the country’s three largest microelectronics companies: Samsung, SK Hynix, and LG. Samsung and SK Hynix accounted for the vast majority of women in the study, as the two have long been among the world’s largest chipmakers. The data covered an average of 38,000 women per year. From that number, the researchers looked at the records of those who had gone to doctors for miscarriages.

The results were both undeniable and shocking to Kim, just as they had been for Pastides almost three decades earlier. She found significantly elevated miscarriage rates and a rate for those in their 30s almost as high as in the U.S. factories. And the findings were conservative, because many women don’t go to the doctor for miscarriages, and because production workers couldn’t be separated in the study from those who worked in offices. “This was not the result I had expected,” Kim says.

As an aside here, this is another argument for single payer in some form, it creates a demographic database that is both available and universal that can be used to find problems like these.

………

After the outcry in the U.S. in the 1990s, chemical companies said they’d changed the formulations for the photoresists and other products they supplied to chipmakers, including those in Asia. But testing data obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that changes weren’t made quickly or, in some cases, completely.

………

Kim, the epidemiologist, says the secrecy of these settlements is a reason there was so little discussion for so long of the risks in chipmaking. “It was not published in academic papers,” she says. “Just some hidden settlements between the companies and some victims.”

Even today, the chipmakers themselves sometimes don’t know what they’re bringing into their facilities and exposing their workers to. That’s what SK Hynix discovered in 2015 after hiring a team of university scientists to assess the toxic risks in two of its plants.

Some of their results were made public in Korean, but many of the findings remain confidential. An extract of the research reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek shows scientists found that the plants used about 430 different chemical products each. These included more than 130 deemed to be dangerous enough that employees exposed to them must undergo special health checks; those chemicals are called CMR agents—shorthand for carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins. In addition to benzene and EGEs, they’ve historically included arsenic, hydrofluoric acid, and trichloroethylene.

The ability to directly or indirectly poison unsuspecting employees is one of the goals of globalization.  It’s all about labor and regulatory arbitrage, which is why promises of labor, safety, and environmental protections that we hear about whenever they want to push through a trade deal are empty.

Allowing the 1% to f%$# the rest of us is the goal of modern trade deals, so it’s no surprise that this is their actual effect.

Not Enough Bullets

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American Airlines tends to underpay its employees relative to industry norms, and it shows.

Now that some of its unions have won some benefits in contract negotiations, the malefactors of great wealth are whining:

American Airlines is giving pay raises to its pilots and flight attendants, who have complained they are paid less than peers at other airlines. Wall Street isn’t happy.

 The raises come about two years before contract negotiations. Assuming they approve the increases, pilots and flight attendants will receive additional pay totaling close to $1 billion over three years.

 At a time when American and other airlines are seeing higher costs for labor, fuel and maintenance while finding it difficult to raise airfares, this goodwill gesture didn’t sit well with investors.

 “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers,” Citi analyst Kevin Crissey wrote in a note to clients. Investors showed their displeasure by sending American Airlines Group Inc.’s stock down 5.2% to $43.98 on Thursday.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, Mr. Crissey needs to be sent to China and forced to work at Foxconn 14 hours a day and 7 days a week for $300 a month making iPhones.

Airlines suck like 1000 Hoovers all going at once, and much of this is because the endless downward pressure on wages, working conditions, by senior management.

If American does not want to become the passenger beating/bunny killing United, it needs to improve its product, and its product is produced by those icky labor sorts.

Please Kevin Crissey, while you are dining on that excrement, could you do us the favor of expiring.