Aug. 29, 2023 ❧ Big labor news, fracking, and another racist mass shooting...
plus U.S. complicity in Saudi atrocities, migrant separation, the "moderate" Nikki Haley, avian egalitarianism, and more...
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STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
THE NLRB HANDS DOWN TWO HUGE RULINGS FOR UNION DRIVES
The National Labor Relations Board just handed down perhaps its two most significant rulings of the Biden administration, and possibly two of the most important in recent memory. In a decision this week against Cemex Construction Materials Pacific LLC, the NLRB re-introduced a standard that requires employers to bargain with unions if they are supported by a majority of employees or immediately file for an election. Additionally, if employers violate federal labor law during that election to the point where the election would have to be re-run, the NLRB will automatically order them to recognize the union. This is a major victory for the labor movement, coming after decades of employees using long election periods as opportunities to intimidate workers.
The ruling partially revives an NLRB standard established in 1949, “which had required employers to recognize their workers’ union and enter into bargaining if they’d refused to recognize the union after a majority of workers had voted for affiliation,” according to Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. The Joy Silk standard was thrown out by the NLRB in 1971, meaning that holding workplace-wide elections became effectively the only way to organize a union, and organizers could no longer use quicker means like collecting signature cards to demonstrate union support. As Meyerson wrote last year, the lengthy election process gave employers time to harass and intimidate employees into voting against the union:
Eliminating Joy Silk’s standard… led to an immediate increase in employer violations of the [National Labor Relations Act’s] letter and spirit…In the five years before Joy Silk was struck down, charges of employer intimidation totaled about 1,000 cases a year. Once the softball remedies of Gissel became the standard, charges exploded to a peak of 6,493 in 1981, after which they fell along with unionization efforts generally. Under Gissel, intimidation became the norm.
The end of Joy Silk coincided with a dramatic decline in union membership (real wages also flat-lined while worker productivity skyrocketed…hmmmm). Union membership in 1971 hovered around 27 percent. In 2022, that number had dropped to 10.1 percent:
NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo—arguably the most pro-labor person to hold this position in decades— has long advocated for a return of Joy Silk,
We should not be allowing those employers to delay recognition so that they can coerce these workers to think differently or choose differently. Many high-road employers have agreed to a card-check process and enjoy very good labor-management relations Employees aren’t economically dependent on their union for their livelihoods, unlike being economically dependent on their employers for their livelihoods. They’re less likely to be swayed by ‘bullying’ by unions than they would be by swayed by ‘bullying’ by their employer.
Speaking of this “bullying” by employers—which has been documented during union drives at Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, Apple, Trader Joe’s, and numerous others over the last few years—the new ruling makes that much more costly as well. Now, if employers are caught engaging in illegal union-busting tactics that would render a union election invalid, they will now be required to recognize the union instead of re-doing the election. For example, in 2021, Amazon was forced to re-do its union election in Bessemer, Alabama, after the company was found to have engaged in ludicrous union-busting behaviors that led many people not to vote—including surveillance, holding mandatory meetings about the downsides of unionizing, posting anti-union signs in the bathrooms, and having hired lackeys pester workers about the vote while on the job. These tactics led the NLRB to declare a second election, which failed despite being much closer than the first. Under the new NLRB standards, Amazon’s union-busting would have required them to recognize the union automatically.
The new requirements put companies under much more pressure to conduct clean elections. According to a Gallup poll from last year, a solid majority, 59 percent of workers, say they want increased unionization in their own workplaces. Yet only around one in 10 actually has a union. Making it easier to organize could be a massive help in an era of historic fervor for unionization.
For more on the fight for union recognition, check out our recent interview with Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor—the authors of the book ‘Rules to Live By: Power & Participation in Union Negotiations’—who discuss why the workers themselves (not an aloof, unresponsive team of professional negotiators) need to be at the heart of any negotiation. The lessons they offer are not just useful for unions, but as they explain, are practical for many other social movements who are trying to take on the powerful.
AROUND THE STATES
The United Auto Workers have voted to authorize a strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, with a historic 97 percent of workers in support. The union’s contract is set to expire on September 14th, and negotiations with Ford, GM, and Stellantis have revealed intractable conflicts. One of the main bones of contention is the “two-tier” employment system, in which workers hired after 2007 earn significantly less than their predecessors and have fewer benefits. The UAW has demanded an end to this system, along with wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, a 32-hour work week, and pensions for retiring workers (which were halted in 2007.) Rather than comply, Ford—which boasted a $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2023—has responded by secretly training white-collar employees to work manual jobs in the company’s parts warehouses. Along with being generally scummy, the practice presents a serious safety risk; when John Deere tried the same thing during a 2021 UAW strike, the scabs immediately crashed a large forklift into a utility pole inside a Deere plant. The approaching deadline will be the first major test for UAW president Shawn Fain, who was elected in March 2023 as part of the insurgent Members United slate, under the slogan “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers.” Already, Fain has made it clear that the current contract will not be extended to allow more negotiating time, refused to shake hands with Detroit CEOs, and thrown a counteroffer from Stellantis into the trash on a public livestream. The last time the UAW went on strike, it cost $3.6 billion for GM alone; this time, the automakers may have an even more serious fight on their hands.
A mass shooter, motivated by racism and neo-Nazi ideology, has taken the lives of three Black people in Jacksonville. Police say that 21-year-old Ryan Palmeter “hated Black people,” and that he left manifestos detailing a “disgusting ideology of hate” on his home computer. Carrying two legally purchased firearms—a pistol and an AR-15, the latter emblazoned with swastikas—he seems to have considered Edward Waters University, a historically Black college, as a target before being chased away by security guards. Palmeter then drove to a nearby Dollar General and opened fire, killing two shoppers and one employee. The tragedy is only the latest in a string of similar incidents, including racist shootings at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, and at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018. According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, racially motivated attacks were the largest category of domestic terrorist incidents between 2010 and 2021, while racist hate crimes more generally reached their highest rate in more than a decade in 2021 according to the FBI. The ease with which disturbed and hate-filled individuals can buy semiautomatic rifles has only made matters worse. According to an independent research group, the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 476 mass shootings (those in which four or more people were shot) in the United States in 2023.
President Biden made promises to roll back the Trump administration’s horrid family separation policies for migrants, calling them a “moral and national shame.” He ended the policy of family detention in 2021 (though he is reportedly considering re-starting it). However, his Department of Justice is defending the practice against families who have sought justice for their treatment under the previous administration. According to one recent case filed in Brooklyn, a Guatemalan mother, Leticia, and her 15-year-old son, Yovany, crossed the border in 2017 and were kept apart for more than two years by border enforcement. According to the suit,
Officers brought them to a facility known as a “hielera”– icebox or cooler – due to its frigid temperatures. While they were still wet from crossing the river, officers told them to take off their shoes and sweaters but didn’t provide them dry clothing and took hours to provide food.
Yovany has since been granted asylum, but his mother is still waiting six years later. They sued the federal government in 2022, alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, abuse of process, assault, and battery. But the Biden administration’s DOJ is defending the prior administration’s treatment of these migrants, saying the DHS cannot be held liable because it happened in a private facility and the government can’t be expected to “supervise ‘day-to-day operations’.” Nearly 40 lawsuits have been filed against the government by migrant families over the Trump administration’s draconian “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. While Biden calls the policies “abhorrent,” his DOJ is doing everything possible to avoid government liability for them and reduce payouts for the victims. Meanwhile, an estimated 860 of the nearly 4,000 children separated from their parents under the Trump administration have yet to be reunited.
AROUND THE WORLD
The BRICS economic bloc—which currently consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—just invited six more nations to join it. The group of developing economies—thought of as an emergent counterweight to the U.S.-backed G7—welcomed Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Argentina, Ethiopia, and Iran to join. It would be the first expansion of the bloc since it was founded back in 2010. More than 40 other countries also apparently want to join. The central tenet of the BRICS group is to establish independence from a U.S. dollar-dominated global economic system. Since the end of the Second World War, the dollar has been the world’s reserve currency, and the most widely used one for international trade (which gives the U.S. outsized influence in dictating global economic policy). BRICS has established its own development bank, which will soon issue its first bond backed by Indian rupees. But for now, it is seen as largely a symbolic institution rather than a genuine replacement to the U.S.-ruled International Monetary Fund. Some have compared BRICS to the “non-aligned movement,” which emerged among Third World countries that refused to cooperate with either the Americans or the Soviets during the Cold War. As Jonathan Guyer writes in Vox,
A reversal of [U.S.] domination is a long way off. Each of the BRICS countries is experiencing economic slowdowns; and unlike the Non-Aligned Movement, the five countries don’t seem to represent more than a sum of their parts ideologically or politically. But if the parts could come together, it would really be something: more than 3 billion people in those countries alone.
Introducing new nations to the bloc, particularly ones that are so rich in oil, could be a step towards forming BRICS (or whatever it comes to be called) into a more formidable economic entity.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has made homophobic hate speech a felony offense. The ruling, handed down on Tuesday after a 9-1 vote, affirmed that the country’s laws against racist speech must also apply to the LGBTQ community. Now, using anti-gay slurs or rhetoric will be punishable by two to five years in prison, whether the speech is directed against an individual or gay people as a group. The court’s decision comes as a response to persistently high levels of homophobic and transphobic violence in Brazil, which saw 273 murders of LGBTQ people in 2022. Erika Hilton, one of two openly trans members of Brazil’s National Congress, celebrated the ruling as a “victory against LGBT-phobia.” Still, there is room for doubt about whether policing and imprisonment are good solutions for prejudice since they do little to address the root causes. What’s more, it’s easy to imagine how the new legal framework could be misused. For instance, against gay people who use homophobic language ironically among themselves or reclaim historically hateful words like “queer.” The precedent could also be useful for a future right-wing government, following in the footsteps of Jair Bolsonaro, to restrict speech it disapproves of. Although Brazil’s judges seem to have had admirable intentions, there may be unforeseen consequences here.
Last week, we discussed harrowing reports about Saudi border guards firing at Ethiopian asylum seekers attempting to cross the border from Yemen, which killed hundreds of people, and perhaps thousands. A report from the New York Times, based on accounts from several U.S. officials, says that American diplomats have known about these atrocities since last fall, but said virtually nothing. The State Department only addressed them publicly and asked the Saudis to investigate after they were reported by Human Rights Watch last week. Despite pledging to take a tougher line on the Saudis for their wanton human rights abuses, the Biden administration has continued to turn a blind eye as they have sought to wrangle Saudi oil price hikes and bring them into an agreement with Israel. Last year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was granted immunity by Biden’s DOJ for his role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2019, and Biden opposed an amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders that would have banned support for Saudi airstrikes in Yemen, which have killed more than 9,000 civilians and been called “war crimes” by international observers. Under Biden’s watch, the Saudis’ monstrous war has continued—surpassing 375,000 deaths—and government repression has gotten even more brutal.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What are our politicians up to?”)
In the House of Representatives, the Freedom Caucus has issued a set of demands, threatening a government shutdown in October unless they’re met. Among other things, the far-right voting bloc declared that they would refuse to support any government spending plan that did not include the Secure the Border Act, a dramatic package of restrictions on immigration and asylum-seeking. They also want to “address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department" (a reference to Donald Trump’s ongoing legal woes) and “end the Left's cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon” (pure delusion.) In the last government shutdown in 2019, around 800,000 federal workers had to take unpaid leave or work without pay, seriously affecting their ability to make rent and buy groceries. Either the Freedom Caucus doesn’t understand that they’re playing fast-and-loose with real people’s lives, or they just don’t care.
THIS WEEK IN EVIL:
Sensible moderate: “Work until you drop dead.”
Americans are working for longer and dying sooner. According to a poll from earlier this month, increasing numbers of workers under 55 say they “don’t think they will ever retire” because they don’t think they can afford to. Between 1990 and 2022, the age at which Americans have been able to retire has increased across the board.
Surely the Republican Party—which Fox host Laura Ingraham recently dubbed “pro-working class”—has some sympathy for the plight of people who hope to retire at some point in their lives.
Let’s ask presidential candidate Nikki Haley what she thinks? The wisened sages in the New York Times called her recent debate performance “pragmatic,” “generally reasonable,” and “the most frank and levelheaded person onstage.” In fact, numerous publications, from CNN to Vox to Forbes have described her as a “moderate.”
Surely, she has a good plan to help weary Americans get some much-needed rest. Oh, wonderful, here she is talking about it on Bloomberg News!
Oh…oh no…no no no no…
So, according to Haley, 65—an age at which 80 percent of Americans have at least one chronic health condition— is “way too low” of an age to retire (Technically the actual retirement age for the vast majority of people—those born in 1960 or late—is 67, following a law passed by Reagan in 1983).
Who cares that workers over 55 are nearly twice as likely to get injured on the job and more than twice as likely to die on the job than their younger counterparts? Those geezers need to get their asses back in gear!
Haley says that the retirement age should be tied to “life expectancy.” But under that rationale, she should actually want to *lower* the retirement age. American life expectancy dropped by more than two years between 2019 and 2021, reducing 26 years of progress. It continued to fall in 2022, pushing us to 76.4 years by year’s end—the lowest point in decades. While Covid-19 obviously played a major role, the CDC estimates that it only accounted for about half of this decline—other major factors included overdoses, heart disease, liver disease, and suicide. Moreover, American life expectancy had already hit a plateau before the pandemic, leaving the U.S. to lag behind the continued rises in other developed countries. Additionally, life expectancy for Black and Native Americans is drastically lower than for other groups. The average life expectancy is as low as the mid-60s in some parts of the Deep South. Taking this into consideration, it means that under Haley’s proposal, large swathes of the country will be expected to work basically until they die.
This is the person liberal media types consider a sensible moderate? Their judgment is as sound as ever: Many of the same publications singing Haley’s praises did the same for the late warmonger John McCain and homophobic climate change denier Liz Cheney because they had the gall to be slightly critical of Trump (while still voting with him on most issues). It seems the label “moderate” has nothing to do with one’s actual policy positions anymore: Haley is (at least rhetorically) more extreme than Trump on this particular issue and often criticizes him for not being more open about the need to cut entitlements. But apparently, all you need to do to fool the media into thinking you’re a reasonable person is to speak with an indoor voice—the things you are actually saying are irrelevant.
LONG READ: In 2022, virtually every Republican who ran for Congress or governor in a swing state made vicious attacks on transgender people central to their campaign messaging and policy agenda. The belief by many conservative strategists who pioneered the strategy and far too many liberals was that trans people were a political liability and that Republicans would be able to exploit public sentiments against them to roll to a dominant midterm victory. Expecting it to carry them to victory, they shamelessly campaigned on lies about transgender people assaulting students in bathrooms and schools providing litter boxes to students who “identified as cats.” As Substack blogger and college-aged polling wunderkind Ettingermentum chronicles in his sprawling two-part series “The Electoral History of Transphobia” on Substack, virtually every GOP candidate that attempted to leverage fear of the LGBTQ community dramatically failed across the map:
Nearly every single Republican candidate in every major race in the country [in 2022] would engage in transphobic or “anti-woke” rhetoric to some extent… This is not a project that has come from the public. It has arisen, in every sense, from the elite level of conservative politics. It also has an extensive electoral track record, and it is an incredibly poor one. From North Carolina in 2016, to Kentucky in 2019, to the midterm elections in 2022, attempts by Republicans to change the course of any race [by] leveraging anti-trans fear have been met with failure. At best, their efforts have just been unable to break through, even with very right-wing voters in very red states. At worst, it has outright cost them votes
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
Want to see some altruism that is actually effective?
Meet the African Gray Parrot!
According to a recent study covered in The Guardian, “they help other birds get food despite no benefit to themselves, a behaviour only previously seen in apes.”
In the experiment, the birds were given metallic rings, which could be handed back to the researchers in exchange for tasty walnuts. The Guardian writes, “All were trained individually to exchange the tokens for food when a human held out their hand. The team found African gray parrots helped their neighbours by passing tokens to their neighbour when a human held out their hand, allowing the second bird to drop it through the hole and receive a tasty treat… However, the [researchers] stress the birds did not know at the outset that their favour would be reciprocated, suggesting it is something of a ‘selfless’ act.”
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here. Current Affairs is 100% reader supported and depends on your subscriptions and donations.
