Original Content
Have you wanted to set up a social site for your union, but don’t want to give all your members’ data to Facebook? Check out my interview with Unionbase founder, Larry Williams Jr.
Thanks to all our supporters who keep this site going. If you like the original content on this site, please kick in a small contribution ($2/mo?) to help us keep it up and running.
Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability
No doubt you’ve seen the news that various Senate Democrats who may or may not have 2020 aspirations recently co-sponsored the biggest proposed changes to federal labor law in many decades.
Excellent worker-coop news out of Cleveland, where the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry is about to triple in size, thanks to their innovative partnership with the Cleveland Clinic.
Larry Mishel dives deep into the math of how he determined that average hourly wages for Uber drivers are less than $10 in this new paper.
The death of a Philly Caviar bike delivery person prompts the question: what kinds of compensaton benefits are gig economy companies avoiding, by classifying their workers as independent contractors?
What’s Going on in the Workforce
Unite HERE’s Culinary 226 is bargaining about the impact of automation on their workforce, in their contracts with Vegas hotels.
“The gig economy is not the future of work. The future of work, however, will center around and resemble today’s freelance economy because freelancing meets human needs.”
Chinese millennials in the tech industry are pushing back against the country’s “996” culture (referring to the expectation that people work from 9a-9p, 6 days per week.
“I know it when I see it.” New report from Barclay’s about the potential impact of automation on jobs is worth reading for no other reason than that it quotes the famous test of indecency, as an example of things that AI has a really hard time doing, and humans don’t.
Is technology helping to burn out doctors?
“Criminalisation renders sex workers unable to lay claim to any of the basic labour rights afforded workers in legal industries.” You’re not hearing much about the fight against FOSTA in labor circles, but it is a labor rights fight.
Reputation, reputation, reputation
Imagine if, instead of using algorithmic predictions to over-surveil communities of color, police departments used them to keep an eye on corporate criminals?
Geeking Out
While some of Boston Dynamics robots make us worried about the rise of Skynet, this one seems to be causing people no worries at all, as it looks like it will fall over in a hard wind.
Hi Larry,
I’m a democratic socialist and heard you being interviewed on Professor Wolff’s program.
I was very impressed with what you are doing.
Are you aware of the giant employee owned cooperative named Mondragon.
I think that’s a fantastic model for the United States.
In some cases, workers could pool their resources along with philanthropic other folks to start this employee ownership of companies.
What do you think?
Google Mondragon and you will get a wealth of information
Godspeed,
Norm Haller