What’s Going on in the Workforce
Plus.ai says they’ve completed the first-ever cross-country trip entirely driven by an autonomous vehicle—a truck containing 4,000 pounds of butter that traveled from California to Pennsylvania. Sadly, there is no news on what that butter will inevitably be carved into, for the PA Farm Show next month.
Meet one of the Instacart shoppers who has been organizing strikes of the company.
h/t to Tim Newman for pointing this one out: restaurant chain Sweetgreen set up a fund to allow its white collar workers to contribute to an emergency fund that workers in the company’s restaurants can apply for. Maybe just…pay them more?
When you’re at the movies, this holiday season, spare a thought for movie theater employees who don’t get overtime, thanks to a loophole in current labor law (and a lack of political will to change it, and movie theater owners who want to profit from it).
From Partners
From the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, a cost-benefit analysis of Amazon’s impact on the region.
Reputation, reputation, reputation
“There’s no question, if most people were followed around 24/7 by a police officer or a private investigator it would bother them and they would complain and seek a restraining order. If the same is being done technologically, silently and invisibly, that’s basically the functional equivalent.” Amazon’s Ring is setting up an unsupervised surveillance network in almost every neighborhood in the US.
Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability
“Opposition to higher minimum wage laws is increasingly based in ideology and orthodoxy rather than real-world evidence.” Don’t believe me, believe Axios.
A new study of a basic income program in Kenya shows that there are network effects for whole villages, not just the individuals who received cash.
Meanwhile in the US, tax policy and corporate greed has allowed the top 1% to triple their wealth over the past five decades.
Organizing Theory
Why do we persist in calling movements full of leaders “leaderless?”