January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.
News / labor
-
1 min read
A 'Nonprofit' With $18 Billion Sent Untrained Nurses to the Nursery
Read more . . . →A “nonprofit” hospital chain sat on $18 billion in cash and decided the place to save money was the room with the newborns. Ascension’s nurses at Saint Agnes in Baltimore walked out this week because management has been floating med-surg nurses into the postpartum unit — nurses who don’t have the training to care for a baby in its first vulnerable hours — rather than hire the people the floor obviously needs. The union’s phrase for it was “trying to save pennies by shifting people around.” Pennies. On $18 billion. And the money is right there. Ascension cleared $608 million...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
Volkswagen Lost China. 100,000 Workers Get the Bill.
Read more . . . →Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Chevron Bought a $53 Billion Company. The Bill Went to 8,000 Workers.
Read more . . . →Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
PECO Made $814 Million. Its Workers Are Striking on the Fourth of July.
Read more . . . →For the first time in more than a hundred years, the people who keep the lights on in Philadelphia are walking off the job. At 12:01 AM on July 4, roughly 1,600 PECO workers — the linemen and gas techs who climb the poles in the storms you’re hiding from — go on strike. They’re not asking for a yacht. They want pay that matches what the same job earns at every other utility, and an end to a two-tier retirement scheme that quietly shortchanges anyone hired after some arbitrary cutoff. PECO’s answer, across five months of talking, was a...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
2 min read
They Finally Found A Worker Worth Defending. Not Yours.
Read more . . . →The Trump administration would like you to know it has discovered a conscience. Early this month the U.S. Trade Representative proposed slapping fresh tariffs on more than 60 countries — 10% on the ones it calls partial offenders like the EU, Canada, and Mexico, 12.5% on everyone else, China and India included — over their failure to keep goods made with forced labor out of the supply chain. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade envoy, called that failure “unacceptable,” and said it forces “American workers to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.” The report names the usual horrors: rice picked in...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
2 min read
They Found Forced Labor In 60 Countries The Same Week Their Tariffs Got Struck Down
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court threw out Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, so the administration needed a new doorway to walk the exact same policy back through, and on June 3 it found one: forced labor. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it had investigated 60 trading partners — China, Japan, the U.K., the EU, basically everyone — and discovered that all 60 of them fail to properly ban goods made with forced labor. Every single one, guilty. The proposed punishment is a tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent, which, by pure coincidence, lands almost exactly where the old illegal tariffs were...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
2 min read
They Voided 30,000 People's Stock, Then Handed The New CFO $26 Million Of It
Read more . . . →This spring Oracle fired up to 30,000 people, most of them by early-morning email, and booked something like $2.1 billion in restructuring costs to do it. The number that matters isn’t the headcount, though — it’s the fine print on how they were cut loose. Under Oracle’s severance terms, anyone laid off lost their unvested restricted stock the instant they were terminated. Whatever stock had already vested, you kept, sitting in your Fidelity account. Everything you’d been promised and hadn’t yet crossed the finish line on simply evaporated the moment HR hit send. Workers on Blind and TheLayoff started comparing...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
2 min read
They Threatened Him, Interrogated Him, Then Fired Him — But Sure, The Timing Was A Coincidence
Read more . . . →On Tuesday the Fifth Circuit handed down its ruling in the Starbucks union case out of Sylmar, California, and you have to read it twice to believe the shape of it. The court looked at what the company did to a worker named Untaran during the 2022 organizing drive and agreed, on the record, that Starbucks broke the law. It agreed a manager illegally threatened him over the union. It agreed he was illegally interrogated about it. The judges signed their names to all of that. And then the same worker got fired, and the court turned around and said...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
He Set The Fire, Then Showed Up With A Hose
Read more . . . →On Tuesday Trump stood inside the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and told the workers he’d saved them. “I imposed a 25-percent tariff on medium and heavy-duty trucks so that Mack Truck could do very well with this factory,” he said, on camera, surrounded by people who still remember what happened in early 2025. Because that’s when Mack warned it might cut up to 350 jobs at this exact plant, and blamed the tariff chaos coming out of his own White House for the call. About 170 of them got laid off. Roughly 150 were eventually recalled, which the...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
92% Voted To Stop Building Their Own Replacements
Read more . . . →Hyundai wants 25,000 Boston Dynamics Atlas robots on its own assembly lines by 2028 — the humanoid kind, the ones in the viral clips doing backflips. The company that owns Boston Dynamics plans to build 30,000 of these a year, and most are headed straight for the factories where actual humans currently work. So this week 39,668 of those humans voted, and 92% of them said: strike. They are being asked, very politely, to spend the next two years assembling the machines that will assemble their own pink slips, and they declined. What they want instead is almost quaint. A...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.