Tag: Union

Seeing as How I Mentioned the PRO Act………

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Here is a brief rundown of The PRO Act, which passed the House the last session, and died in the Senate.

The cynic in me believes that if it were not headed to certain death at the hands of Mitch McConnell, it would not have passed the house, because it is an amazingly good bill.

The high points:

  • Expands the definition of employer, to make it more difficult for employers to classify their employees as “Independent Contractors.”
  • Narrows the definition of supervisor who cannot unionize.
  • Increases data reporting requirements for the NLRB.
  • Makes it illegal to threaten to shut down if unionized or to lock out workers.
  • Repeals ban on secondary strikes, secondary boycotts, and jurisdictional strikes.
  • Makes mandatory anti-union meetings illegal.
  • Requires employers to maintain existing working conditions in the event of an impasse. 
  • Sets a strict timeline for employers to negotiate with a union.
  • Allows union members to refuse to handle cargo from other business which are on strike.
  • Makes it illegal to have mandatory arbitration or forbid employees from entering class-action suits.
  • Requires employers to supply names of potential union membership voters.
  • Reduce the restrictions on what constitutes a bargaining unit.
  • Allows the union to specify the type (in person, by mail, etc) and location of a union recognition ballot.
  • Speeds up unionization elections.
  • Increases damages for unfair labor practices.
  • Expands coverage of illegal immigrant workers.
  • Makes NLRB orders self enforcing.  (Don’t have to have a court ruling in addition to the NLRB decision)
  • Creates personal liability for managers and officers who engage in unfair labor practices.
  • Repeals right-to-work laws.

Given that there is actually a chance of this passing with a Democratic Senate this time around, I’m dubious that we will anything as expansive in scope hitting the floor of the house.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is fine with pro-labor legislation as performative legislation, but as actual law, the Blue Dogs and the New Dems have no interest in offending their corporate masters.

And In Gender Equity News

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A study has shown that weakening unions increases gender inequality:

Barbara Biasi, assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, recently published a study that concluded that eliminating unions increases the gender gap in wages.

She looked at data from Wisconsin, before and after Scott Walker eliminated collective bargaining rights in 2011, in his Koch-funded effort to destroy unions. 

………

Barbara Biasi, an assistant professor of economics at Yale SOM, had an opportunity to examine this question when Wisconsin passed Act 10, legislation that essentially weakened the power of teachers’ unions. Afterward, schools had much more latitude in deciding how much to pay teachers.

Five years after union agreements expired, male teachers earned about 1% more per year than female colleagues with similar experience and skills, reported Biasi and her co-author, Heather Sarsons at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The gender gap was even higher among younger teachers.

The anti-union wing of the Democratic Party (the identity politic folks) has always dismissed unions as bastions of racism and sexism, and the history clearly shows that, but dismissing unions hurts the people that they claim to want to help.

Pass the damn Pro Act, and strengthen the rights of workers to organize.

If You Thought that Amazon Was Bad

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Just watch what they are going to do to kill the unionization drive in Alabama.

This is going to make WalMart look like John L. Lewis:

Amazon.com Inc. workers at an Alabama warehouse received approval to hold a unionization vote, the first such election since 2014 at the nation’s second-largest employer, testing the potential for additional labor organizing at the retailing giant.

The National Labor Relations Board Tuesday ruled that employees at Amazon’s Bessemer, Ala., warehouse can decide whether to create a bargaining unit within the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, according to an NLRB official. The date of the election and other terms have yet to be determined. A hearing about the vote is scheduled for Friday.

A majority of the workers would have to choose unionization for the employees to gain representation. The Alabama warehouse has about 1,500 full- and part-time employees, according to the union, although Amazon has said the total is higher.

Though many hurdles remain, labor experts say a successful campaign by workers could inspire similar efforts at other Amazon warehouses. The company has more than 800,000 U.S. employees, second only to Walmart Inc. in the country, as well as more than 760 facilities in its fulfillment network, according to logistics consultant MWPVL International.

………

Hourly Amazon workers have never previously formed or joined a union in the U.S. The same is true at Walmart Inc., which has about 1.5 million U.S. employees.

This is untrue.  Wal-Mart had its butchers in one store unionize, and Wal-Mart fired all of its butchers in all of its stores in response, so for about a week, Wal-Mart was unionized.

The retailer has seen its toughest labor battles in Europe, where union participation is common in some countries and government authorities have been quicker to confront the company. A French court in the spring ordered Amazon to stop selling nonessential items while the company addressed coronavirus- safety measures, prompting Amazon to temporarily close its French warehouses.

While Alabama typically hasn’t been known for unionizing efforts, RWDSU represents workers across the poultry and healthcare industries in the state.

I’d say expect every dirty trick in the book to be deployed by Amazon, but the reality is that Amazon is going to go way past the book here.

Expect to see a level of evil heretofore unseen.

Amazon Again

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We don’t care, we don’t have to ……… we’re Amazon.

The Monster from Seattle is engaging in a systematic program of spying on its workers and activists, because they don’t care, they don’t have to, they’re Amazon.

Seriously, this company is ineluctably evil:

A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company’s obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon’s “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company’s security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world.

The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.

Internal emails sent to Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center obtained by Motherboard reveal that all the division’s team members around the world receive updates on labor organizing activities at warehouses that include the exact date, time, location, the source who reported the action, the number of participants at an event (and in some cases a turnout rate of those expected to participate in a labor action), and a description of what happened, such as a “strike” or “the distribution of leaflets.” Other documents reveal that Amazon intelligence analysts keep close tabs on how many warehouse workers attend union meetings; specific worker dissatisfactions with warehouse conditions, such as excessive workloads; and cases of warehouse-worker theft, from a bottle of tequila to $15,000 worth of smart watches.

The documents offer an unprecedented look inside the internal security and surveillance apparatus of a company that has vigorously attempted to tamp down employee dissent and has previously been caught smearing employees who attempted to organize their colleagues. Amazon’s approach of dealing with its own workforce, labor unions, and social and environmental movements as a threat has grave implications for its workers’ privacy and ability to join labor unions and collectively bargain—and not only in Europe. It should also be concerning to both customers and workers in the United States and Canada, and around the world as the company expands into Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and India.

Amazon intelligence analysts appear to gather information on labor organizing and social movements to prevent any disruptions to order fulfillment operations. The new intelligence reports obtained by Motherboard reveal in detail how Amazon uses social media to track environmental activism and social movements in Europe—including Greenpeace and Fridays For Future, environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s global climate strike movement—and perceives such groups as a threat to its operations. In 2019, Amazon monitored the Yellow Vests movement, also known as the gilet jaunes, a grassroots uprising for economic justice that spread across France—and solidarity movements in Vienna and protests against state repression in Iran.

………

“Like any other responsible business, we maintain a level of security within our operations to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe,” Lisa Levandowski, a spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard. “That includes having an internal investigations team who work with law enforcement agencies as appropriate, and everything we do is in line with local laws and conducted with the full knowledge and support of local authorities. Any attempt to sensationalize these activities or suggest we’re doing something unusual or wrong is irresponsible and incorrect.”

Levandowski denied that Amazon hired on-the-ground operatives, and said that any claim that Amazon performs the described activities across its operations worldwide was “N/A.”

In a report from November 2019, however, an analyst wrote that Amazon hired Pinkerton spies who were “inserted” into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, to investigate an allegation that management coached job candidates on how to complete job interviews and possibly even conducted the process for them.

………

The report refers to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States supplied detectives to infiltrate unions and hired violent goon squads to intimidate workers from engaging in union activity in steel mills. Today, Pinkerton is a subsidiary of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, and has supplied operatives to monitor strikes in West Virginia as recently as 2018.

………

“It’s not enough for Amazon to abuse its dominant market power and face antitrust charges by the EU; now they are exporting 19th century American union-busting tactics to Europe,” Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, a global federation of trade unions that represents more than 20 million workers, told Motherboard. “This is a company that is ignoring the law, spying on workers, and using every page of the U.S. union-busting playbook to silence workers’ voices.”

………

Since Amazon posted job listings for two intelligence agents who could track “labor organizing threats,” journalists have obtained more documents that reveal some of the sophisticated technology and strategies the company has used to surveil its workforce and gain intelligence on worker organizing. In September, Motherboard obtained evidence that Amazon had been using a social media monitoring tool to spy on dozens of private Facebook groups for Amazon Flex drivers in the United States and Europe. Last month, a report in Recode revealed that Amazon has made significant investments in a new geospatial tool that tracks threats to the company. Out of 40 or so data points Amazon that tracks at least half are labor or employee-related, including “Whole Foods Market Activism/Unionization Efforts,” “union grant money flow patterns,” “and “Presence of Local Union Chapters and Alt Labor Groups.”

You know, it would be a good idea to put someone’s head on a pike at the beginning of the Biden administration, and Jeff Bezos would be a particularly good guy to make an example of.

If the Feds could take down Capone, they can take down Bezos.

Remember that Strike Busting Vegan Meat Company?

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Well, the NLRB has filed a complaint against them for firing union organizers.

Considering the fact that this is the Trump National Labor Relations Board, the ironically named No Evil Foods (I wrote about them previously here) had to be pretty egregiously over the line:

Earlier this year, the vegan meat company No Evil Foods—which sells socialist-branded products at 5,500 grocery stores nationwide, including Whole Foods—fired two production workers at its Weaverville, North Carolina production plant who led a union drive at the company and circulated a petition asking for hazard pay during the COVID-19 pandemic.

………

This week, the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) found merit that the company illegally terminated the two workers, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard. According to a federal complaint issued Wednesday and obtained by Motherboard, the company violated the law by firing workers because they “assisted a union” and “circulat[ed] a petition seeking hazard pay…for the purposes of mutual aid and protection.”

Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for employers to discriminate or retaliate against workers for organizing coworkers to improve their working conditions or for attempting to form unions.

………

On Wednesday, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against No Evil Foods, alleging the company violated the NLRA by “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed.” According to the complaint, on April 1, 2020, a No Evil Foods HR manager interrogated employees about their union organizing and the petition for hazard pay, creating the impression management was “surveilling employees” by telling them they knew who had circulated the petition in the parking lot outside the production plant.

………

The firing of the two union organizers fits within an ongoing trend of ostensibly progressive companies like Kickstarter and Whole Foods taking anti-union stances when employees seek to improve their working conditions.

Jon Reynolds, the other fired No Evil Foods production worker, told Motherboard, “part of what helped us is that we kept notes, and documented and recorded everything. Throughout the unionization process, we amassed as much evidence as possible [that No Evil Foods was against our union].”

Note to would be labor organizers: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.

………

Following a series of compulsory anti-union meetings led by management, workers voted against joining the United Food and Commercial Workers union in a landslide 43-15 vote in February.

………

A spokesperson for the National Labor Review Board says that a trial for No Evil Foods has been scheduled for December 7.

“The finding that our case had merit is a cause for any worker anywhere to see that there is an actual law that allows people to organize without fear of retaliation,” said Roche, the fired No Evil Foods worker. “Companies that fire people who organize aren’t on the right side of history. “

I really hope that the hypocrites at No Evil Foods get what’s coming to them.

Justice for Me, but Not for Thee, Vegan Meat Edition

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The rather ironically named No Evil Foods has embarked on a policy of targeting and firing pro-union employees:

No Evil Foods describes its mission as to “put more good into the world.” The North Carolina company started in 2014 when its owners and founders Mike Woliansky and Sadrah Schadel sold plant-based meat products out of a cooler at Asheville farmers markets. Since then, the company sells products with left-wing names like Comrade Cluck (a mock chicken product), the Pardon (a Thanksgiving-season turkey substitute), and El Zapatista, a vegan chorizo whose name is a nod to the revolutionary indigenous movement in southern Mexico.

………

But earlier this year, the company fought back a drive by employees to unionize its production facility in Weaverville under the United Food and Commercial Workers International union (UFCW).

The union lost handily in a February vote. Over a half dozen current and former employees who spoke with The Appeal described a hostile union-busting campaign, complete with frequent “captive audience” meetings—required meetings billed as “educational” sessions in which management effectively tries to kill organizing drives. Workers who spoke with The Appeal requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from their bosses.

………

But a month after production worker Cortne Roche posted the petition online, several pro-union workers and others who had signed it were fired in rapid succession, workers say. Roche, who had been pro-union and helped organize the petition, was fired on April 30, the day after she was suspended for a dress code violation.

Roche and two other workers who’ve been fired in recent weeks told the Appeal that they believe their terminations were retaliatory. “I was told I was terminated immediately and there was no conversation about that,” Roche said. “I’m not stupid.” Roche said she’s filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board; the company currently has two open charges against it for alleged violations of the National Labor Relations Act, both of which were filed earlier this month.

No Evil refused to answer specific questions about the firings, including the alleged use of “shadow write-ups”—writing employees up for violations without telling them, and then citing the violations in their firings.

………

But although No Evil Foods is a much smaller company than some of the meat-producing behemoths it hopes to turn people away from, workers and former workers whom The Appeal spoke with say it has betrayed its progressive branding in the times where it mattered most.

“It’s not in the interest of a company that exploits workers to give those workers any say in the company,” Roche said. “Even a vegan company called No Evil.”

What’s more, when the mandatory anti-union talks were leaked online, the company used bogus copyright challenges to suppress news reporting:

Earlier this year, the vegan-meat company No Evil Foods, which sells socialist-themed products at 5,500 grocery stores across the United States, including Whole Foods, fought a union drive at its Weaverville, North Carolina-plant.

The anti-union campaign led by No Evil Foods management featured a series of compulsory meetings, some of which were recorded by workers on their personal phones, portions of which were published in May by Motherboard and several other outlets, including In These Times, Industrial Worker, and the podcast Dixieland of the Proletariat.

Someone claiming to represent the company now appears to be trying to scrub the internet of these recordings by filing takedown requests on copyright and privacy grounds with the sites on which they’re hosted. Audio of the meeting has been deleted from YouTube, SoundCloud, and the podcast hosting platform LibSyn in recent days. A freelance journalist, Andrew Miller, who published the audio, had his personal website shut down by his web host HostGator on August 27. The takedown requests, several of which were viewed by Motherboard, claim that the speeches the company wrote are copyrighted. One video and four audio recordings—including two full-length podcast episodes that incorporate recordings of the meeting—have been flagged and removed from the internet.

No Evil Foods did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment, and the company blocked me on their official Twitter account. Emailed requests for comment sent to “rachel@noevilfoods.com,” the address that filed the complaints, were not returned. On Friday, LibSyn determined that one of the takedown requests was “fraudulent,” meaning that the person who filed it did not have a legitimate copyright claim, according to an email obtained by Motherboard. The episode of Dixieland of the Proletariat was restored because No Evil Foods did not respond to an inquiry about fraud from the podcast platform.

Motherboard spoke to copyright experts who said that under fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, news outlets likely did not violate No Evil Foods’ copyright by publishing the audio recordings. In the United States, fair use allows the limited use of copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder specifically for the uses of news reporting and criticism.

………

In meetings recorded by workers and published by Motherboard and other outlets, which have since been taken off the internet, the company’s founders Mike Woliansky and Sadrah Schadel utilize standard anti-union talking points, warning their employees that a union would scare away investors, take away their rights, and drain their wages like a “sh%$ty gym membership that you just want to get out of.”

………

In early August, Motherboard received a notification from YouTube that a video of one of the speeches had received a privacy complaint. The video was subsequently removed; YouTube denied an appeal to leave it up. In recent weeks, SoundCloud has also removed audio of the speeches published by Motherboard and Industrial Worker, citing supposed copyright violations.

Each of the recordings was taken on workers’ personal devices in North Carolina, which requires the consent of only one present person in order to record audio.

In an email complaint to the podcast platform Libsyn about a version of the audio that appeared on In These Times’s Working People podcast on August 24, someone using the email address “rachel@noevilfoods.com” claimed that the recording was “Unauthorized” because it included contents “authored” by the two No Evil Foods founders and a hired consultant. The name on the email account is “Rachel Woliansky,” and Soundcloud told Industrial Worker that the inquiry came from “Rachel Woliansky.” (No Evil Foods’ CEO Mike Woliansky has a relative with the same name, according to a public database.) The email address Rachel@noevilfoods.com did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

“Each clip was authored by Mark McPeak, Sadrah Schadel, & Michael Woliansky of No Evil Foods, respectively,” the person in control of rachel@noevilfoods.com wrote. “I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.”

………

Cory Doctorow, a prominent internet rights expert, activist, and science fiction author, said that companies and other actors have a strong interest in presenting unfavorable coverage as a copyright infringement.

“What if Harvey Weinstein had taken copious notes on his crimes, and then said he had a copyright right on them, and that you couldn’t publish them? This is news reportage and it’s in the public interest to know about it,” Doctorow said. “But there’s a strong interest in presenting this as copyright infringement.”

Indeed.

If you fancy yourself progressive, but that only applies when it does not cost you anything, you are not a progressive.  You are a hypocrite.

A Microcosm of What is Wrong with the Narcissistic Left

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Brooklyn friends school in New York is a Quaker institution which posits as its central value, its “brand” if you will, is creating students who will fight for social justice.

However, it appears that when it is their ox that is gored, they will go above and beyond to screw their own workers.

They are trying to decertify their union because it is “Incompatible” with their Quaker faith.

Just in case you are wondering, Quakers have a long history of pro organized labor activism.

It’s just that this this school rat-f%$# administrator does a not want to be inconvenienced:

Everyone knew there would be layoffs at Brooklyn Friends School. Not even a school where tuition is the cost of a new car is safe from a major recession. The letters, though, were a shock. A couple weeks into severance negotiations with the staff union, head of school Crissy Cáceres made an announcement. The school had filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking it to decertify, or disband, its union. The presence of a union violated the school’s Quaker character, she wrote in two August 14 notes to teachers and families. “If we are to fully practice our Quaker values of respecting others and celebrating every individual’s inner light while compassionately responding to existing needs,” she said, “we must be legally free to do so.”

 In this intimate school community, the news was an earthquake. It “came out of the blue,” remembers Sarah Gordon, who teaches third grade at Brooklyn Friends and belongs to the union’s negotiation committee. Nobody knew the school was even considering such an extreme decision. “It was like ‘wait, this is what you were doing?’ We had no idea,” echoes Laura Hulbert, a learning specialist.

 At a different institution, that sense of surprise might be less profound. Employers usually don’t welcome unions, and they can adopt ugly tactics to prevent workers from organizing. But Brooklyn Friends isn’t the average workplace. The school is famously progressive. Parents hear of its commitment to social justice on orientation tours. Second-graders study the lives of labor leaders Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez as part of a curriculum on “change-makers.” The school’s union — which includes about 200 teachers, maintenance staff, and office workers, and is represented by United Auto Workers Local 2110 — seemed like a natural extension of its left-wing ethos. At least to staff.………

………

But look deeper, and a question presents itself: Is this spiritual warfare, or something more profane?

Spolier, Cáceres isn’t a member of the Quaker meeting, and she is making sweeping generalization that unionization runs counter to the religion.

This corrupt, profane, narcissistic, and sociopathic.

This is not William Penn, this is William Edward Hickman,* “What is good for me is right.”

………

Conservative Christians and right-to-work groups hailed the Bethany decision, [Which said that a religious school was not covered by the NLRB] which means that liberal Brooklyn Friends could soon have some uncomfortable company. It may also find itself at odds with other Quaker institutions. The Friends Council on Education told Intelligencer in an email that it has no formal position on unionization at its member schools, including Brooklyn Friends. But other Quaker organizations have unionized without incident. Teachers at Friends Seminary in Manhattan have a union. So do the employees of the American Friends Service Committee, which a source described as being “like the Peace Corps for Quakers.” A 2016 statement on the Committee’s website praises Walter Reuther — a storied leader of the United Auto Workers — in effusive terms. Brooklyn Friends itself has acknowledged Quakerism’s links to labor in the past. A blog post on its website celebrates Bayard Rustin, who in addition to being a Quaker and a civil-rights activist also co-founded the A. Philip Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO.

………

“This school is incredibly diverse on so many levels, and I think that they care a lot about diversity and social justice. They can talk about that quite a bit,” McMackin said. “But the one thing that’s really lacking is economic diversity, and that contributes to the culture of the school.” She and Roddick receive financial aid to send their son to Brooklyn Friends, as do many other families. But overall, she added, “there is a very affluent culture there,” populated by “art dealers and finance bros” and other pillars of Brooklyn high culture. That influences the school’s rhetoric, she concluded: “When they talk about diversity, when they talk about social justice, they’re really talking about every other type besides economics.”

There is no social justice without economics.

Everything else is just virtue signaling.

It is also amazingly self-destructive and stupid:

………

“Brooklyn Friends is never going to have the tradition and gravitas of Packer. It’s never going to have the toniness of St. Ann’s, or the campus and athletic spirit of Poly Prep. But what Brooklyn Friends does have is social justice,” the former faculty member said. “When the board makes decisions like currying the favor of the Trump-dominated NLRB to try to decertify a union, in addition to feeling dishonest it seems like one of the stupidest things the school could do.”

If someone asks you why “The Left” hates comfortable liberals, it’s hypocrisy, and this is about as good an example of that as you could hope to find.

*Hickman is a serial killer much admired by Ayn Rand who kidnapped and dismembered a 12 year old girl.

About F%$#ing Time

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Yesterday, the California AFL-CIO released a resolution stating that they intend to disaffiliate with police and border patrol unions, citing how both perpetuate racial and economic injustice, as well as violent oppression. They write in the resolution:

“The California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, will continue to build and support the movement for income equality by confronting racial and economic injustice and commits to vanquish oppression, authoritarianism, and cruelty in all their form, disassociating from unions who perpetuate these acts of violence. (i.e., police unions and the border patrol union) and expel from this body any member or affiliate who is a member of any Fascist or White Supremacist organization or member or affiliate who pursues policies and/or activities directed toward the purposes of any Fascist or otherwise White Supremacist Ideology.”

The resolution is the first one in the nation passed by a state AFL-CIO board and could be a sign of things to come.

Seeing as how police departments have always been the sharp (and enthusiastic) end of the spear when it comes time to suppress organized labor, this should be a no-brainer for the national union.

This is a Direct Result of the Pandemic

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California child care providers have overwhelmingly voted to unionize.

We have seen an explosion of union activities in the United States since the start of the pandemic, and this is because employers have shown themselves to be completely disinterested in the well-being of their employees, which leaves a union as the only way that those workers can protect themselves:

Today California child care providers announced they have voted to be represented by the statewide child care provider union, Child Care Providers United. This result, which comes after providers succeeded in their 17-year battle to win authorizing legislation from the state, gives care providers the ability to bargain together for higher pay, better training, and the kind of improvements that mean their families will no longer have to struggle just to pay for necessities. With an overwhelming vote for CCPU, the 45,000 family child care providers will gain official recognition and bargaining rights with the state of California.

………

The 97% CCPU yes vote also comes as child care providers are increasingly recognized for their essential role in California’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and its widespread economic fallout.

………

Child care providers, many over the age of 55, have continued to work daily, providing essential early learning for the children of grocery store clerks, nurses, and other frontline workers. At the same time, they’ve faced added financial pressure from reduced enrollment. Providers said winning this union election means they will have a strong platform from which to work with the state to keep their home-based child care businesses open to parents who are counting on them now more than ever. The pandemic has also revealed the need for providers to have a voice to bargain for the kind of training and protective equipment needed to keep their families and those they care for safe.

………
For a workforce that is mostly women and 74% people of color, succeeding in winning union representation is also a significant step forward in their fight for racial justice for their own families and the young people they educate. Last Monday, providers in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco led children in their care in art projects and discussions on the theme of racial justice as part of the Strike for Black lives, calling on the government to value each child equally, whether brown, Black, white, API or Native American. Doing so, they said, requires rebalancing the economy and creating opportunity for children of color by ensuring corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share so our communities can invest in early care and education.

………

Today’s vote culminates providers’ decades-long fight for union rights. Last fall, after many years of being denied the rights that other workers have — the right to form a union and bargain for higher pay, family-sustaining benefits, and other improvements — the legislature passed and Governor Newsom signed into law AB 378 (Limón) which enables child care providers to bargain for important, lasting improvements to the child care system.

The vote was a mail-in secret ballot election conducted by the American Arbitration Association under the direction of the California Public Employment Board. Family child care providers have been working to win their rights since 2003 by organizing in their communities, forming their union, and working with elected officials.

It took 15 years for the legislature to grant basic labor rights to child healthcare workers.

That’s 15 years too long.

How Is This Not Attempted Bribery and Extortion?

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In response to Maryland Delegate Gabriel Acevero promoting legislation repealing the so-called “Maryland Police Bill of Rights”, his employer, Montgomery County Government Employees Organization Local 1994, browbeat him over his bill, and then fired him when he refused to withdraw the bill. (Local 1994 has a few Montgomery County deputy sheriffs among its members)

When Mr. Acevero noted that the meeting was completely inappropriate, they fired him:

The movement for greater accountability in policing poses a dilemma for organized labor. Union federations include and indeed welcome police organizations. Yet police unions can use their clout to win protection from complaints of officer brutality and other misconduct.

We offer no advice as to how union leaders should address this conundrum, but it is clear what they should not do: expel unionists who take a principled position in favor of police reform. And that is what Local 1994, which represents Montgomery County’s public employees, stands accused of doing to one of its salaried employees.

The staffer, Gabriel Acevero, 29, doubles as a member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, having represented District 39 in Montgomery County since January 2019. Mr. Acevero, who is black, has been outspoken against police abuses and is sponsoring a bill to provide greater transparency on misconduct cases: A key provision gives complainants access to previous documented allegations against accused officers. Mr. Acevero calls his bill Anton’s Law, after a 19-year-old African American from Caroline County, Anton Black, who died in policy custody in September 2018 under still-unclear circumstances.

In December, Local 1994 president Gino Renne, whose union also includes Montgomery County deputy sheriffs, summoned Mr. Acevero to meet with him, as well as deputies and an official of the county’s Fraternal Order of Police unit. The topic, according to an email from Mr. Renne: Mr. Acevero’s “support of legislation that interferes with our members’ employment rights” and “is in direct conflict with [the union’s] representational obligations and responsibilities.”

Mr. Acevero reiterated his position and said he considered the meeting inappropriate — whereupon Mr. Renne fired him. “I can’t have someone on my payroll who is slandering the very people who pay his salary,” Mr. Renne told us in an interview. Mr. Renne offered Mr. Acevero $35,000 severance if he would promise in writing not to discuss his firing publicly. Mr. Acevero refused, and instead filed a formal complaint against Mr. Renne’s union at the National Labor Relations Board last month. 

Gino Renne should be under criminal investigation, because this was a clear attempt to offer something of value to influence the actions of a public official.

Renne should be frog-marched out of his offices in handcuffs.

Wage Theft is the Goal

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Shipt, the delivery service owned by Target, is facing a strike over its shift to an algorithm based pay structure, which workers are claiming will cheat them out of pay.

This is no surprise.  Opaque pay structures like this are intended to cheat workers out of their pay:

Workers for the Target-owned grocery delivery service Shipt are striking Wednesday in protest of the company rolling out a less transparent payment structure nationwide.

The walk-off will coincide with the day that the new pay model will take effect in 12 metro areas, including Chicago, Tampa, Richmond, Va., and Portland, Ore.

Shipt shoppers are raising alarm over the change, which they say would likely reduce shopper pay by at least 30 percent based on a similar pay shift that occurred at the end of 2019.

While Shipt previously had a simple model for calculating payouts — a 7.5 percent commission on all orders plus $5 — the model, dubbed V2, rolled out in some markets last year doles out pay based on a black box algorithm.

“We do not like the transparency because we’re not able to calculate or figure out exactly how it is that we’re being compensated,” Willy Solis, one of the strike’s organizers and a shopper in Texas, told The Hill on Monday.

………

Shipt gig workers’ experiences in areas where the V2 model has been tested do not line up with that claim.

Jeanine Meisner, a veteran shopper in the Kalamazoo, Mich., area told The Hill that she saw an immediate drop in the dollar amount of offers when V2 came to her area.

………

“For six months now we have tirelessly, endlessly provided screenshots, we’ve called, we’ve texted, we’ve emailed about these lowball offers that we’ve gotten and we’ve got nowhere, we get a cut and pasted response,” she said.

Shoppers across V2 markets felt similar impacts, according to Solis.

“Collectively we joined forces and started keeping tabs and calculating … and shoppers were losing significant money,” he said.

So not a surprise.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Algorithmic pay schemes always end up cheating workers, because they make doing so effortless.

Another Example of Misaligned Incentives in Policing

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The New York Police department is seeing a surge in retirement requests as a result of the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests, but this is not because the cops are feeling “under seige”, but because their pensions are dictated by their pay in their final year, and so the explosion in overtime leads to an explosion in the pensions.

This is completely f%$#ed up.

First, including overtime in determining a pension is just insane, and second, it creates an incentive for cops with one foot out the door to pack on the overtime.

This means that you have senior officers on the job who are so fatigued that they are not thinking straight.

This is incredibly bad policy:

New York’s Finest are putting in for retirement faster than the NYPD can handle — while citing a lack of respect and the loss of overtime pay, The Post has learned.

A surge of city cops filing papers during the past week more than quadrupled last year’s number — as the city grapples with a surge of shootings — and the stampede caused a bottleneck that’s forcing others to delay putting in their papers, officials and sources said.

………

Sources also said the flood of overtime tied to last month’s protests — which will boost pension payouts for eligible retirees — and the expected loss of overtime due to the recent $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget were also factors.

“This is the best time to leave,” one cop said.

“You’ve padded the numbers as high as you can pad them.”

Another cop noted, “When they cut the OT, a lot of people were done.”

………

A Brooklyn cop said the NYPD was facing a “perfect storm,” noting that “cops made the most overtime they will for a long time — at least until next year” and citing rumors that “grade promotions” for detectives and “special assignment money” for sergeants and lieutenants will be canceled. 

It being a New York Post story, they bury the lede, that cops are trying to cash in on an extraordinary level of overtime that they have received recently, and they completely ignore the policy implications.

Every time I look into police union contracts, I am horrified at what I see.

A Win for Justice and Transparency

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The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that, notwithstanding a contract with the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, state law prohibits the destruction of police disciplinary records, so this contract provision is unenforceable.

In response, I expect the police to ignore the law and destroy the records anyway, because, for them, laws are only for other people:

Chicago police misconduct records that are more than five years old will remain available to the public, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday, turning away an attempt by the city’s police union to have them destroyed as a matter of course.

The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police had sued, contending that such records should be eliminated after five years under the city’s police collective bargaining agreement. A court arbitrator had called for the city and the FOP to come to an agreement on the issue, but the city had successfully challenged that decision at the appellate level.

The state’s high court found 6-1 that the arbitration outcome violated clear public policy in the state’s Local Records Act, siding with City Hall.

“In sum, we find there is a ‘well-defined and dominant’ public policy rooted in state law concerning the procedures for the proper retention and destruction of government records,” the majority wrote.

………

FOP President John Catanzara on Thursday said he “couldn’t be more disappointed” with the court’s decision, and said he is instructing the union’s lawyers to see if there is a way to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It goes against every ounce of logic there is,” Catanzara said. “The contractual rights that were in our collective bargaining agreement for the better part of four decades were set in stone.”

And that provision was probably illegal that whole time, so Mr. Catanzara can go Cheney himself.

Provisions like this has allowed cops to literally get away with murder for years.

46 Years of Anti-Union Politics Will Do That

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This is an Embarrassment

The United States hasn’t had a President who was not hostile to Organized labor since at least the Ford administration, so it is no surprise that America has been ranked as having the worst worker’s rights environment among all the developed nations:

The U.S. has the worst record among major developed countries when it comes to workers’ rights, according to a survey of labor unions.

The world’s largest economy is ranked a 4 in a scale by the International Trade Union Congress, meaning there are “systematic violations of rights.” Every other Group of Seven country ranks 3 or better.

How about card check and repealing Taft-Hartley the next time the Democrats controll the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate?

Those Buffalo Police ERT Members Who Quit Were Driven out by Their Own Union

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The officers who quit the unit (they are still employed by the Buffalo PD) quit because Buffalo Police Benevolent Association notified them that they would be on their own if they needed a lawyer.

You will recall that the BPBA claimed that they had quit in solidarity with their fellow officers, who have been charged with assault.

Once again, the police lied:

………

Two officers of the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team spoke with 7 Eyewitness News under the condition their names not be used.

The officers are part of the 57-person volunteer assignment team that resigned Friday, following an incident involving two of their members Thursday night in Niagara Square. They did not resign from the police department, only from their roles on the team.

The officers we spoke with said the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association’s statement asserting all 57 officers resigned from ERT in a “show of support” with the two officers that were suspended without pay is not true.

“I don’t understand why the union said it’s a thing of solidarity. I think it sends the wrong message that ‘we’re backing our own’ and that’s not the case,” said one officer with whom we spoke.

“We quit because our union said [they] aren’t legally backing us anymore. So why would we stand on a line for the City with no legal backing if something [were to] happen? Has nothing to do with us supporting,” said another.

A representative from the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association told 7 Eyewitness News Reporter Hannah Buehler the officers resigned in “disgust” with how the two officers were treated.

………

7 Eyewitness News was not able to reach PBA president John Evans to confirm this information or get a response to several officers shooting down his assertions, but we did obtain an email sent to PBA members by Evans.

It states, in part:

In light of this, in order to maintain the sound financial structure of the PBA it will be my opinion the PBA NOT to pay for any ERT or SWAT members legal defense related to these protests going forward. This Admin in conjunction with DA John Flynn and or JP Kennedy could put a serious dent in the PBA’s funds.

If you get a quote from a police spokesman, fact check it.

If it comes from the PBA, you need to confirm every word, including the “and” and the “the”.

The New York Times has Turned Into a Complete Sh%$ Show

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The New York Times published an OP/ED by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) that called for the activity military to come in to put down the anti-police brutality protests with guns blazing.

Needless to say, the Times staffers, prticularly those of color,  have completely lost their sh%$ over this, stating (correctly IMHO) that this put staffers, particularly staffers of color:

The internal fallout from the New York Times’ decision to run an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, which called for the U.S. military to be deployed to American cities to crack down on protests against police killings of Black people, continued apace on Friday during a company all-hands meeting.

Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Chief Operating Officer Meredith Levien all offered opening statements. But as always, the most informative parts of the meeting came from the lengthy question-and-answer portion. Staffers asked for an autopsy of the piece and how it was published; if company leaders were planning to address James Bennet’s leadership of the opinion section, which has had “several misfires”; whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for “openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves”; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.

The newsroom first revolted Wednesday, shortly after the op-ed was published. Dozens of staffers tweeted a variation of the phrase “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” along with a screenshot of the op-ed’s headline. The paper’s union put out a statement about the column as well.

In a development that can only be described as mind boggling, Bennet said that, “He had not read Mr. Cotton’s essay before it was published,” even though it is clear from the Times own account that there was extensive review and editing from inside the editorial division.

Fire Editor-in-Chief Dean Banquet and Opinion Editor James Bennet, and for good measure, have them take Bret “Bedbug” Stevens, whose hobby appears to be threatening reporters on the news side of the paper, with them.

This is a Strong Argument for Abolishing the Police

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After 2 officers were suspended for throwing an elderly man to the ground and leaving him there with blood pouring out of his ears, the the entire Buffalo, NY resigned from the team.

I can think of no better example to show how the entire police force is bad apples, either directly, or as a result of peer pressure:

Fifty-seven officers in the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team resigned Friday from their positions on the unit in support of two of their colleagues who were suspended for shoving an elderly man onto the ground during a protest Thursday, putting him in the hospital.

“The cops who are resigning over this are proving they shouldn’t have been on the force in the first place,” tweeted CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair. “I hope many more of them resign. And soon.”

To be clear, these guys have not left the force, just the Buffalo ERT.

The Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, the department’s AFL-CIO-affiliated union, claimed in a statement announcing the mass resignation that the two officers caught on camera shoving 75-year-old Martin Gugino to the ground with no provocation were only following orders.

It’s unclear what orders led to the unprovoked assault, after which Gugino lay motionless on the ground, blood pouring out of his ear.

“This is an example of officers doing exactly what they’re supposed to,” union president John Evans told the Investigative Post Friday.

I wonder what percentage of police forces are broken this way.

My guess is that over 90% are infected with the “Thin Blue Line” disease.

The Impact of Police Unions

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I came across a fascinating Twitter thread about the effect of police unions upon on law enforcement.

The study is preliminary, and the author is very clear on this, but the results are striking.

Police unionization has increased pay and benefits, no big surprise there, and a slight decline in police employment, which might correlate with the increase in the cost, which is also not a surprise.

The big take away is that there is a substantial increase in the lethality of law enforcement, with the death toll of minorities accounting for the bulk of the increase.

The number (admittedly preliminary) is stunning, “We find a substantial increase in police killings of civilians over the medium to long run (likely after unions are established) with an additional 0.026 to 0.029 civilians killed in a county each year of whom the overwhelming majority are non-white.”

Given that there are (Googling furiously) 3,143 county equivalents in the United States, this means that we would see about 82 extra deaths a year, and over the past 40 years, this would be more than 3200 excess deaths.

The obvious conclusion is that the decrease in accountability of police officers has resulted in increased violence and police racism, though as is frequently stated, correlation is not causation.

Additionally, court rulings over the past 50+ years have had the effect of reducing police accountability for the use of force as well, so teasing out the effects specific reductions of accountability would be difficult.

The obvious take-away though is that we need greater accountability for our police forces.