News / workers-rights
-
1 min read
They Broke the Complaint Box
Read more . . . →The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted 2-1 on Tuesday to strip federal employees of their right to a hearing when they file a discrimination complaint. The agency whose one job is to hear you when your boss discriminates against you just voted to stop hearing you. Chair Andrea Lucas called the complaint process “susceptible to abuse.” The abuse she’s referring to is federal workers (prison guards who got groped, FBI agents who got passed over for being the wrong color) asking for their case to be heard by an actual judge. That’s the abuse. People using the system the way...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
$133 Billion and a Three-Minute Call
Read more . . . →Microsoft posted $133.7 billion in net profit this year. Up thirty-one percent. Then they fired 3,200 Xbox workers, some of them in three-minute phone calls from Montreal. Fifth round of layoffs in three years. The gaming division pulled in $21.8 billion and added two hundred million players. The people who built the games those players showed up for got a call shorter than a cigarette break telling them September is their last month. Hundreds of those workers are CWA union members who just organized and are fighting for first contracts. Microsoft started cutting while negotiations were still open. The union...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Green Flag, Empty Plate
Read more . . . →Yesterday Donald Trump took a lap around downtown Washington in an armored limousine, waved a green flag, and 150,000 people watched open-wheel race cars tear down Pennsylvania Avenue at 160 miles per hour. The Freedom 250 Grand Prix, part of the America 250 birthday bash, turned the National Mall into a racetrack. Meanwhile, buried in a report nobody covered on a Saturday: SNAP enrollment dropped from 42.2 million to 36.6 million in twelve months. 5.6 million people lost food assistance in the same year the president turned the capital into a speedway. Arizona alone lost more than half its recipients....
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
The Ref Works for Management Now
Read more . . . →The agency that exists to protect your right to organize just got handed to the people who spent their careers making sure you can’t. Senate confirmed two Trump picks to the National Labor Relations Board on August 7th, locking in a 3-1 Republican majority. One of them is a former chief labor counsel for Boeing. Yes, the Boeing currently under investigation for retaliating against workers who reported safety defects. Trump already fired the general counsel who was actually enforcing the law. A federal judge ruled he illegally fired the board chair. The administration shrugged and kept going. The NLRB is...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
He Bought the Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tesla just ended the longest strike in modern Swedish history. One thousand and twenty-one days of industrial action, and the company’s resolution strategy was to write severance checks to every remaining striker until IF Metall had nobody left to represent. The walkout started in October 2023 over something basic: Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement. In Sweden, where those agreements cover 90% of the workforce, that refusal was never a negotiation tactic. It was a declaration. Three years later, the agreement is still unsigned, and Tesla operates in Sweden with zero union representation. At the strike’s peak, 500...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
312 to 1 and Nobody Blinked
Read more . . . →The AFL-CIO dropped its annual number this week: 312. That’s how many times the average S&P 500 CEO out-earned the median American worker last year. It was 285 the year before. Average package: $22.8 million. Average worker: $73,000. One of these people sat in meetings. The other one did the work those meetings were about. CEO pay went up 21% in a single year while the people who generate the revenue got whatever their annual review felt like giving them. Then there’s Musk, who broke the spreadsheet entirely. His Tesla comp package was $158 billion — fourteen times the total...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
The Country That Invented Labor Day Is on a Watchlist Now
Read more . . . →The International Trade Union Confederation put the United States on its Global Rights Watchlist this year. First time ever. The category is “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC represents 200 million workers across 169 countries, and they looked at a nation that stripped collective bargaining from over a million federal employees by executive order and said yeah, that belongs on the list. The same kind of list the US waves around when it wants labor provisions in a trade deal. The ITUC called it “perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history.” Not one union. Not...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument.