Month: January 2020

Organizing Theory

“The U.S. wants to fight war without paying the bill. The human cost is so much greater than what is ever acknowledged by the military. And I think if we actually did have to pay that cost, people would really start to think about whether we should be doing this.” How Southern religious activists are helping soldiers who want to conscientiously object. 

Bloomberg’s Ben Penn takes a look at how worker centers are reacting to the DOL decision that CTUL is acting like a union, not a worker center. 

What’s Going on in the Workforce

Want to organize Amazon warehouses? Get yourself to Texas, which apparently has more of them than any other state except CA (where the Warehouse Worker Resource Center is already on the job).  That seems pretty necessary, given their recent bad safety reports in various places. In the words of one CA worker: “I can’t tell you how many times I saw somebody throwing up in a garbage can there because they don’t want to get fired for missing work.” Maybe it’s all the robots? 

Instacart workers are asking customers to boycott the company, over slashing of tips and performance bonuses. 

Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability

A look at how the introduction of Uber, Lyft & other TNCs caused the death of a nascent worker-owned taxi company in Philadelphia. 

Here’s an interesting possible UBI pilot—Santa Clara County in CA is considering giving $1K/mo to teens who age out of foster care, for 1-2 years. 

New York City may bail out taxi drivers trapped in usurious loans, now that medallion value has plummeted. 

Fascinating new paper from Columbia about how poverty in the US is undercounted. 

New Jersey just passed a suite of legislation designed to fight employee misclassification (but freelancer lobbying helped derail the AB5 companion bill that would have redefined independent contracting). 

Geeking Out

Check out this visual depiction of the distribution, by country, of the world’s wealth. Then ask yourself again, how can other countries provide health care and higher ed to their citizens, while in the US we’re always asked how to pay for it? 

Reputation, reputation, reputation

“We don’t trust our campus administration with the safe handling of this data, and even if we did, hackers or governments might force them to share this information, making students more unsafe.” Student groups are partnering with Fight for the Future to fight against the use of facial recognition technology by higher ed institutions. 

Is Airbnb using social monitoring software to decide whether or not you’re a psychopath? 

Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability

Today in “everything old is new again”—have you thought about renting a couch, instead of buying it outright? 

Indian trade unions just conducted one of the biggest strikes of all time, in response to Modi’s efforts to defang them.  And today, Indians are protesting Jeff Bezos in a speech there, while the Indian government investigates Amazon & Walmart for anti-competitive practices. 

From Partners

h/t to our friends at coworker. org, who put out this guide to supporting retail workers over the holidays. 

Raising the minimum wage by $1/hour results in fewer Americans committing suicide. It’s science. 

CWA has launched an effort to organize video game developers. 

What’s Going on in the Workforce

Cigna just became the first big US health insurance company to roll out access to primary care through telemedicine. Paging all health care regulators—the laws are not up to the technology, at the moment. 

In its continued fight against AB 5 compliance, Uber rolled out changes to the app on both the driver side and customer side, which are designed to give both sides more information about transactions (and ultimately to protect the company from claims of misclassification). 

The NY Times took a really excellent look at the impact of automation & app-based work on hospitality workers. 

Geeking Out

They may have taken our jobs, but now they’re losing theirs! Bay Area firms “lay off” robots. 

Organizing Theory

It’s always good to have something that you know from experience verified by academics. Protest waves do influence elections. 

Reputation, reputation, reputation

“In a recent experiment, the Harvard senior Max Weiss used a text-generation program to create 1,000 comments in response to a government call on a Medicaid issue. These comments were all unique, and sounded like real people advocating for a specific policy position. They fooled the Medicaid.gov administrators, who accepted them as genuine concerns from actual human beings. This being research, Weiss subsequently identified the comments and asked for them to be removed, so that no actual policy debate would be unfairly biased. The next group to try this won’t be so honorable.” Chatbots and AI could ruin our political discourse in new ways, soon. 

Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability

An alt-weekly in Akron, OH is becoming a community-owned paper, in order to survive. 

From Partners

Shout out to Micah Sifry from New York’s Civic Hall, for creating this civic health tracker for activists to use, to make sure that they’re not just armchairing it in 2020. 

What’s Going on in the Workforce

Amazon has threatened to fire employees for speaking out about the company’s impact on climate. 

Uber & Postmates have sued to overturn California’s new AB 5, which protects gig workers from misclassification. 

Geeking Out

Already stressed out by 2020? Watch some automatic harvesting of unidentified crops to unwind.