Don’t believe corporate America’s “labor shortage” bullshit. This is an unofficial general strike.
For the first time in years, American workers have enough bargaining leverage to demand better working conditions and higher wages – and are refusing to work until they get them.
Here’s where that leverage comes from. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services. But employers are finding it hard to fill positions to meet that demand.
The most recent jobs report showed the number of job openings at a record high. The share of people working or looking for work has dropped to a near-record low 61.6 percent. In August, 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs, the highest quit rate since 2000.
Republicans have been claiming for months that people aren’t getting back to work because of federal unemployment benefits. Rubbish.
The number of people working or looking for work dropped in September – after the extra benefits ran out on Labor Day.
The reluctance of people to work doesn’t have anything to do with unemployment benefits. It has everything to do with workers being fed up.
Some have retired early. Others have found ways to make ends meet other than a job they hate. Many just don’t want to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage jobs.
In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death, peoples’ priorities have shifted.
The media and most economists measure the economy’s success by the number of jobs it creates, while ignoring the quality of those jobs. Just look at the media coverage of the September jobs report: The New York Times emphasized “weak” job growth. For CNN, it was “another disappointment.”
But when I was Secretary of Labor, I met with working people all over the country who complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required unwieldy hours. Many said their employers treated them badly.
With the pandemic, it’s even worse. That’s why, in addition to all the people who aren’t returning to work, we’re also seeing dozens of organized strikes around the country – 10,000 John Deere workers, 1,400 Kellogg workers, over 1,000 Alabama coal miners, and thousands of others.
Not to mention the unauthorized strikes and walkouts since the pandemic began, like the mostly Black sanitation workers in Pittsburgh or the Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island.
In order to lure workers back, employers are now raising wages and offering other incentives. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour over the last year. But clearly, that’s not enough to get workers back.
Corporate America is trying to frame this as a “labor shortage.”
But what’s really happening is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage.
Unless these shortages are rectified, this unofficial general strike will continue. I say it’s about time.
Create beautiful art and help make our food fair for all! Help support the movement for Fair Food by creating a poster that activists across the country can use.
The award-winning documentary film Food Chains, about farm labor in America today, is inviting artists to interpret the movie poster in order to create striking images that this movement can use to propel this issue.
This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “Against Cozy Catastrophies: Cowering in a luxury bunker is a lousy retirement plan.” It’s a column about the failure of a market-based, individual based approach to the collective problem of retirement savings.
One of the major contributors to the national wealth of the world’s “advanced economies” after World War II was the advent of universal retirement programs. Some of this came from the private sector: employer-provided defined-benefits pensions (guaranteeing a proportion of your final salary from retirement until death). Some of it was public: Social Security programs.
The revolutionary idea was to treat retirement as a social problem, not a personal one. It acknowledged that people with low wages will struggle to put away enough for retirement, forcing them to stay in the workforce (making harder for their kids’ generation to get jobs), or to rely on their families for support (hamstringing their kids’ generation as they launched their careers).
In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter’s IRS created a new kind of pension: the 401(k), a tax-sheltered, personally directed “market pension.” In other words, it was a way for the government to encourage workers to gamble in the stock market.
At first, this seemed like an attractive proposition: employers made generous matching payments to their workers’ 401(k) contributions and the IRS gave generous benefits to workers who used their savings to gamble on stocks.
As Tom Fraser writes for Jacobin, the shift from employer-based, defined-benefits pensions to market-based, speculative pensions was key to neutralizing union demands for good employer pensions, and labor demands for good Social Security benefits:
This was a catastrophe. Today, most young workers have little or no pension savings (indeed, most American households have less than $400 in savings overall). Workers who are forced into retirement by layoffs or exhaustion have to liquidate their family homes and/or burden their children.
These workers — who will soon be forced into an impoverished, precarious retirement — weren’t reckless spenders whose lack of foresight led to their inadequate savings. Rather, 40 years of wage stagnation and spiraling housing and education costs left many workers with no discretionary income to put into market pensions.
Even for workers who did manage to save, disasters like the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 forced many to liquidate their pension savings (selling into a weak market and incurring huge penalties). All this highlights how lucky those of us with savings really are.
In my column, I describe one of the classic cons: you get a phone-call from a stranger who predicts that a certain team will win tonight’s sport’s match. The prediction comes true, and you get another call from the same tipster, with another tip. That one comes true, too. Then another, and another. Finally, the tipster calls and says, “Now that you’ve seen how good I am at this, I’m not going to give you any more tips for free. The next one costs $100,000.”
This is pretty convincing, from the mark’s point of view — but once you know how the scam works, it’s obvious that the con artist has no special insight. Rather, he starts off by making 32 phone-calls and predicts a win for one team with 16 of them, and a loss with the other 16. After the first match, he discards the 16 marks he gave bad advice to, and splits the remaining 16 in two groups. Eight of them get calls with a win prediction, and 8 with a loss. After that match, he does it again, discarding the 8 bad prediction marks and splitting the remaining 8 into two groups of 4. Then again. Finally, there’s just two marks, and each of them gets the $100,000 demand. The con artist nets $200k from 62 brief phone-calls.
As the mark, it’s easy to think you’re watching a dazzling demonstration of skill. As the scammer, you know that it’s just dumb luck. Those of us with pension savings lucked out. We had a job that produced discretionary income surpluses we could invest. We made bets that didn’t sink our savings. We avoided forced liquidations during the 2000 and 2012 and 2020 crises.
But even though we’re lucky, we are by no means guaranteed a comfy retirement. J Paul Getty said, “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” The corollary is that when one person lacks retirement savings, that’s their problem; when most people lack retirement savings, that’s everyone’s problem.
If tens of millions of people who worked all their lives are forced out of the labor market and into precarity and poverty, burdening their children or being forced to choose between food, heat and rent, they won’t take that lying down. They won’t dig holes, climb meekly inside, and pull the dirt in on top of themselves.
Your retirement savings won’t buy you a ticket to a comfortable dotage — it’ll buy you a front-row seat to a cozy catastrophe. “Cozy catastrophes” are Brian Aldiss’s term for post-WWII English sf novels in which middle class people weather disaster from behind the walls of fortified country farms, while gangs of proles maraud through the land (think Day of the Triffids).
The only thing worse than retreating to your walled retirement compound and trying not to hear the cries of your former co-workers who are clawing at the gates is to be those retired co-workers. That’s why I have a retirement savings account — for the same reason I have private health insurance. The only thing worse than having it is not having it.
But I don’t kid myself that because I’ve “solved” this as an individual, I’ve actually solved anything. Like public health, retirement is a social problem, not a personal one. Your first class berth on the Titanic may guarantee you a seat in one of the half-empty lifeboats, from which you can listen to the pleas of the steerage passengers as they run out of energy and drown. But no one with an iota of compassion can say that this is a good outcome.
[Image ID: A lush lawn and garden hedge wall; through the gate and over the hedge, we see a smouldering, apocalyptic landscape. Desperate hands reach over the wall. In the foreground is a No Trespassing sign.]
the left will fail and keep failing as long as it doesn’t offer joy or a vision of the future. Like chris smalls and the union organizers didn’t win by writing scathing op-eds about Amazon and sending out long dry newsletters with donation links about Amazon’s unfair labor practices to employees, they won by literally meeting people where they were at, at the bus stop where the workers gathered to go home, and hosting cookouts and bonfires. He ate with people and smoked with them and talked to them about their lives and the job, about their rights as workers and how life could be better. He brought joy to them!!! And food and community!! And that’s how one of the biggest victories for labor in a century was won. If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution
It’s funny that you mention dancing because after my library’s vote to unionize passed, we actually had a dance party. Rented out a room, got a former employee who supported our organizing to DJ, and just…celebrated. At the end of the night he played “Solidarity Forever” and we all stood in a big circle with our arms around each other and danced. Still one of my favorite moments.
Bruh why they green screen a bar ??? They can afford a set hello?
This isnt even the most egregious example, they cgi’d a tranquilizer gun in one of the spider-man movies
PDs, art directors, set decorators and set dressers have unions.
Post houses are run like sweatshops.
Fuck disney
That. That’s why Disney is all green screen and CGI now. Because all the traditional methods have unions, but digital artists don’t. It’s predatory as fuck, and why a lot of people outside the digital artist industry have been really pushing for them to unionize, because their lack of a union undercuts the jobs of everyone else.
Today we celebrate labor unions and collective work for Black Futures Month. This powerful poster was created by Alyssa Etoile @etoilearts. Also find her at instagram.com/alyssa_etoile and twitter.com/alyssaetoile
A recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, delves into the unfair dismissals of black teachers after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Gladwell pieces together a narrative drawn extensively from archival sources, including oral histories from Duke University Library’s collection: “Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South.”
Gladwell explains that as school systems consolidated, white educators kept their teaching or administrative positions and black educators were fired in many cases or pushed out through marginalization. The National Education Association (NEA), as an advocate for the fair hiring practices of educators, drew attention to this inequity through the dissemination of reports, lawsuits, and statistics for decades after the ruling. The archives of the NEA are held by GW Libraries Special Collections and contain details of this injustice.
After our NEA Archivist, Vakil Smallen, heard the episode he immediately went to the collections to look for further original documentation of what Gladwell described. He found many sources and over the next few weeks we will share examples on our Tumblr.
What follows are some of the examples of the mistreatment endured by educators of color in the Louisiana public school system documented in this 1970 report:
Former administrators being demoted to teaching or janitorial positions in newly integrated schools.
In one case, an elementary school principal with 27 years of experience was asked to teach a subject he was not certified in and he was later terminated on the grounds that he was unqualified to properly instruct on this subject.
Some accounts detail former principals being reduced to offices in closets or given menial tasks such as being put in charge of attendance or distributing textbooks instead of leading schools.
Black teachers were far less likely to receive the school assignment of their choice and had to accept assignment to an unwanted school or quit.
Black teachers were instructed that they could not discipline white students for misbehavior.
Images above:
1. Photograph taken from the December, 1967 issue of the Southern Education Report.
2. Report Snapshot: Sample text from the NEA’s report on Desegregation in Louisiana
3. Headline taken from the Oct. 6, 1968 issue of The Advocate, a Baton Rouge based paper serving the entire state.
“Customers need to know that just ‘cause you hit one-click buy, it’s not magic. These are real people being affected. We want you all to stand in solidarity with these workers. They come from y'all community, they’re your neighbors.
The first thing we’re fighting for is job security. They hire and fire people all the time. There’s people that are homeless and people in shelters working there that we help.
We’re fighting to make everybody a shareholder again, which they stopped in 2018, and bringing back the monthly bonuses for productivity and attendance. They stopped that in 2018, as well. Bring back hazard pay.
They think the pandemic is over. People are still working, catching covid, still being sick. And, also, providing a better quality of life: a pension, free college…everything a union can provide, we want to provide.”
This panel contains nothing but the title of the cartoon, in large, friendly letters.
TITLE: CEOs, EXCEPT WITH SUBTITLES
PANEL 2
This panel shows a friendly-looking man, seated behind a desk, wearing a three-piece suit and talking directly to the viewer. He is the CEO. In this panel, and in all the following panels, the CEOs dialog is at the top of the panel in a comic book font, while there’s a subtitle “translating” what he’s saying in a more mechanical font at the bottom of the panel.
CEO: Greetings! As CEO, I want to talk to our entire company family about a serious issue: Unionization.
SUBTITLE: Listen up, serfs!
PANEL 3
The panel shows a wall-mounted flatscreen TV; on the TV, the CEO, in the same shot as panel 1, is talking, his right hand on his chest over his heart.
CEO: I think of us as more a family than a business.
SUBTITLE: A family where papa gets paid 271 times as much.
PANEL 4
A room is filled with people watching the CEO on a wall-mounted TV. The TV is flanked by a security guard on one side, and a manager-looking woman on the other, both watching the crowd in an unfriendly manner. On TV, the CEO has raised his hands and looks angry.
CEO: We don’t need union outsiders in our family!
SUBTITLE: "Outsiders" like pro-union workers who have worked here for decades.
PANEL 5
A shot of the CEO in his office. We’re now off a bit to one side, so we can see the camera the CEO is talking to, a boom microphone, and the corner of a big photography light aimed at the CEO. The CEO is raising an index finger and looking stern.
CEO: The consequences of unionization could be terrible for all our company’s workers.
SUBTITLE: We will be illegally firing union organizers.
PANEL 6
The same shot as panel one, with the CEO looking straight at the viewer and smiling, his arms folded on the desk in front of him.
CEO: In closing, to the union, I say: You don’t scare me!
SUBTITLE: In all the universe, nothing frightens me more than unionization. I literally just peed my pants.
As a matter of fact, if your employer fires you for anything relating to forming a union, that’s retalition, and it’s illegal under federal law. If this happens to you, vontact the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
