News / labor
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1 min read
LIRR Workers Are on Strike and Good for Them
Read more . . . →3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight, shutting down the country’s busiest commuter rail for the first time in over 30 years. The MTA offered 9.5% over three years. The workers asked for 16% over four years to keep up with inflation. Everyone’s going to tell them they should feel bad about this. The MTA runs on a $21 billion annual budget. It took a full service shutdown to get wages taken seriously. These workers went thirty years without striking, kept the trains running through the pandemic and every fare hike that followed. The city...
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1 min read
Walmart cut 1,000 corporate jobs and pretended it wasn't about AI
Read more . . . →Walmart is the largest employer on earth and they just cut about a thousand corporate jobs in product, design, and tech. The internal memo was co-signed by the exec who runs “AI acceleration.” The memo somehow forgot to mention AI. They called it “platform consolidation,” which is the new corporate way of saying we bought software that does your job and we’re hoping you don’t read the news. The tell is what they’re still hiring for. Cashiers. Stockers. Warehouse pickers. The salaried middle gets the slide deck and a flight to Bentonville if they want to reapply for their own...
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1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
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1 min read
The Ghost of Spirit Airlines
Read more . . . →Spirit Airlines is gone. Not “restructuring,” not “emerging stronger” — actually gone. Yellow planes parked in the Mojave, gates absorbed by Delta and United, flight attendants told to file unemployment claims via a QR code on the breakroom wall. The closest thing America had to a working-class national carrier just bled out in bankruptcy court while everyone pretended this was inevitable. It wasn’t. The DOJ blocked the JetBlue merger to “protect competition,” which sounded reasonable right up until competition turned out to mean letting hedge funds peck at Spirit’s bones for two years until the carcass collapsed on its own....
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1 min read
3,000 Rallies Today Because the Tariff Revolution Was a Scam
Read more . . . →Three thousand May Day rallies across the country today. Five hundred labor unions marching. The National Education Association — three million members — calling a national walkout. The slogan is “Workers Over Billionaires,” which is apparently still a controversial position in 2026. Trump said tariffs would bring the factories “roaring back.” A year later, 100,000 manufacturing jobs are gone. A Kearney report confirmed the tariffs didn’t drive reshoring or reduce import dependence. What they did was hand every American household a $1,500 tax bill — the largest tariff increase as a share of GDP since 1993. The factories didn’t come...
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1 min read
Snap Fires 1,000 So a 2.5% Shareholder Can Feel Good
Read more . . . →A hedge fund called Irenic Capital bought 2.5% of Snap, put up a website named savesnapnow.com, and uploaded a PowerPoint titled “6 Steps to 7X.” Two weeks later, Snap fired a thousand people. The stock jumped. Evan Spiegel got on the earnings call and described it as “a new way of working,” which translates from billionaire into English as “we figured out we can stop paying a thousand people and the market will applaud.” This is the whole model now. You don’t have to own the company to gut it. You buy a slice of the cap table, post a...
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1 min read
ProPublica's Journalists Had to Strike Their Own Newsroom
Read more . . . →ProPublica’s entire thing is holding the powerful accountable. They’ve won Pulitzers doing it. So when 150 of their own journalists walked off the job last week — the first major U.S. newsroom strike partly over AI protections — the irony wasn’t subtle. The people who spend their careers investigating corporate abuse had to picket their own employer just to get basic contract negotiations moving after two years of management stalling. Two years. ProPublica sat across the table from the union representing the reporters who generate all the prestige and all the revenue and refused to budge on wages, AI guardrails,...
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1 min read
Harvard Sits on $50 Billion While Grad Workers Beg for a Living Wage
Read more . . . →Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. Fifty. Billion. And they just told their graduate workers — the people who actually teach the classes and run the labs — that a 74% pay raise to equalize teaching fellows with research assistants is too much to ask. Their counter-offer? “Modest raises.” The strike vote passed with 96% support. April 21 is the deadline. One bargaining session left. This is the same playbook every corporation runs. Doesn’t matter if it’s a meatpacking plant in Colorado or the most prestigious university on the planet — the people at the top would rather blow the...
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34,000 NYC Building Workers Are About to Remind Manhattan Who Actually Runs It
Read more . . . →Thirty-four thousand NYC doormen, porters, and supers are gearing up to strike because the real estate industry — the one that made billions turning housing into a speculative asset — can’t stomach paying them a fair contract. These workers make about $62k a year in a city where rent on a shoebox is $4,000 a month. They keep your building running, accept your packages, fix your pipes, and somehow haven’t burned the whole thing down yet. The Realty Advisory Board’s counter-offer? Try to gut their healthcare and strip legal aid from immigrant members. Classic. If they walk out on April...
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1 min read
68,000 LA School Workers Are About to Shut It All Down
Read more . . . →Sixty-eight thousand education workers in Los Angeles — teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, janitors, special ed assistants — are set to walk out on April 14th. Three separate unions, all at once. You know things are cooked when even the principals are joining the picket line. The district is offering a staggered 4% raise while teachers are pushing for 13% to starting salaries because rent in LA costs more than most people’s entire paycheck. The district is sitting on a billion-dollar reserve fund. They have the money. They just don’t want to spend it on the people who actually run...
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