January
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News / labor
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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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1 min read
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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1 min read
Oracle Made $6 Billion Last Quarter and Said Thanks by Firing 30,000 People at 6 AM
Read more . . . →Oracle made $6 billion in profit last quarter — a 95% increase — and then fired 30,000 people via email at 6 AM. A mass email signed “Oracle Leadership” that said “today is your last working day.” Thirty thousand people woke up, checked their inbox, and found out they’re unemployed so Larry Ellison can spend $156 billion building AI data centers. The man is worth more than most countries’ GDP and his company just posted its best quarter in years, and the thank-you note to the workforce was a pink slip at dawn. This is the part they don’t say...
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1 min read
No Work, No School, No Shopping — May Day Is Coming
Read more . . . →The “No Kings” marches put millions in the streets last month and now they’re aiming for the jugular: a full general strike on May 1st. No work, no school, no shopping. The AFT, the Chicago Teachers Union, Starbucks Workers United, the UE, and dozens of local labor councils have signed on. This isn’t a hashtag. This is organized labor remembering what it was built for. And the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Trump just spent the last week slapping 100% tariffs on pharmaceuticals and jacking metals tariffs to 50% while the Supreme Court already told him half his tariff scheme...
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1 min read
The People Who Make America's Bullets Can't Afford Groceries
Read more . . . →1,350 workers at Olin Winchester’s Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Kansas City walked off the job Saturday morning. These are the people who literally manufacture the bullets for the U.S. military — the actual supply chain behind every “support the troops” bumper sticker — and the company couldn’t be bothered to offer them a raise that keeps up with inflation. The workers cited garbage wages, forced overtime, and zero work-life balance. Olin posted $1.8 billion in revenue last year. But sure, the problem is that workers are too greedy. This is the part that never stops being darkly funny....
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1 min read
Meatpackers Are Striking for the First Time in 40 Years and Nobody's Talking About It
Read more . . . →Meatpacking workers are on strike for the first time in four decades. These are people standing in freezing plants for ten hours a day dismembering animals at line speeds that would make an ER doctor flinch, and they finally said enough. Meanwhile the companies posting record margins on your $9 ground beef can’t be bothered to negotiate in good faith. The last time meatpackers walked out, Reagan was president. It took forty years of getting ground down for these workers to hit the breaking point again. And where’s the coverage? Wall Street gets a live ticker for every quarter-point rate...
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1 min read
Your CEO Makes 600 Times What You Do
Read more . . . →Aptiv’s CEO took home $18.8 million last year. The median worker at that same company made $9,052. That’s not a typo. Someone working full-time at Aptiv earns less than what most people spend on rent, while the guy running the place pulls in more per day than his employees see in a month. Ross Stores — same story. CEO gets $17 million, median worker gets $9,602. A hundred major companies are running this exact playbook and nobody blinks. Meanwhile the national conversation is about tariffs and culture war nonsense instead of the fact that corporate America built a caste system...
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1 min read
Jack Dorsey Fired 4,000 People and Called It Innovation
Read more . . . →Jack Dorsey just cut 4,000 jobs at Block — nearly half the company — and proudly announced it was because of AI. Not a restructuring. Not a pivot. He looked at thousands of people who built his platform and said a chatbot could do their jobs better. This is now the largest single workforce reduction explicitly blamed on AI in corporate history, and Dorsey is wearing it like a badge of honor. The stock went up. Of course it did. Here’s the part that should make you sick: some of those workers got “quickly rehired.” Meaning they were fired, stripped...
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