There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else - environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.
"While American Ethane was run in 2018 by American John Houghtaling, 88 percent of the firm was owned by three Russian nationals—Konstantin Nikolaev, Mikhail Yuriev, & Andrey Kunatbaev."
@pluralistic Thatcher did the same, at the same time as Reagan...they were in cahoots about how to destroy the social and working fabric of the nation.
@hvdsomp@pluralistic Sadly the workers have been slow, hogtied and so brutalised by the Thatcher/Reagan era that collective action has been very slow to take off again and be effective. I'm heartened though recent positive news from the US unions/workers. UK workers are still on their knees with the added blow of Brexit on top of yrs of RW destruction of the country.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Take the 2019 LA #TeachersStrike. As #JaneMcAlevy writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:
Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The #HotLaborSummer transitioned to an #EternalLaborSeptember, and it's still going strong, with #UAW president #ShawnFain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 #GeneralStrike:
She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:
And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:
She's also nuking #TRAPS, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:
(As with every aspect of the Biden admin, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other appointees smashing worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)
A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the #LawAndPoliticalEconomy project, #UNITEHere attorney #ZoeTucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:
She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:
What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. #StepanKazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of #EquityStrippersNoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:
While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from #PrivateEquity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays - and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:
Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new #JunkFee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.
Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service.
A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing #MeasureULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":
And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:
UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.
Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.
It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing - and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"
Vienna has the most successful housing of any major city in the world. It's a city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened, without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of #RedVienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:
Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) - housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:
Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. #RentControlworks:
Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:
And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take #CareWork: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:
Care work is a #TripleDignityInvestment: first, it improves life for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it is better for people who need care.
"It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."
The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:
Congress stripped many of the care provisions from #BuildBackBetter, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":
The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass - and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.
That was an incredible, awe-inspiring, and eye-opening read, Cory. It was a hint at what can be done when priorities are aligned with responsibility to the public. Thanks for sharing it, and all your fantastic posts.
@pluralistic I'm DONE with politicians in Amer. They have FKED things up soooo badly, we may never recover. Washington + big $ and corporations are KILLING the planet and all of us with it.
There are a ton of mirror accounts to Xitter for #UAW but there is no direct #UAW account on the #fediverse so it's very one way and not two way currently.
Someone needs to reach out to them an ask them to join the #fediverse 💯🧐
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