With so much union & workers rights news; it seems like a place for this might make sense.
“CEO Howard Schultz painstakingly created a culture at Starbucks with union deterrence in mind, placing a strong emphasis on notions of “partnership” and “community” as a substitute for worker solidarity. Now Starbucks Workers United is leveraging that inclusive and egalitarian language against the company. And it’s doing so at a time when the labor movement in the coffee industry is growing.”
“The narrative that all employees, regardless of rank and pay grade, are partners who each contribute and are equally valued by the Starbucks community is little more than a brand-specific version of the oft-repeated anti-union slogan “We’re a family here.” As Ashley Rodriquez of the coffee industry newsletter Boss Barista has written, the “perks” offered and “fun” environments in coffee shops are dangled before underpaid staff as bonus features that cancel out the need for a union.”
Buffalo is just one of 8 or 9 coffee shops to organize in the past two or three years.Based on the number of coffee shops just within ten miles of here, they have a very long way to go…
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Not the Guardian UK, obviously
“ Employees at Netflix will halt work on Wednesday in a virtual walkout to condemn the streaming platform’s handling of complaints against Dave Chappelle’s new special.
The action is the latest in a string of highly visible organizing efforts in the tech sector, as workers increasingly take their grievances about company policies and decisions public.
“Three years ago, a worker walkout at a major tech company would have been unthinkable,” said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings. “White collar workers across the world now understand their labor power, and their ability to change the unethical practices of their employer by withholding their labor.”
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By some estimates, over 100,000 workers are currently on strike or have recently voted to strike. They include 38,000 Kaiser Permanente health workers, 1,400 Kellogg’s plant workers, and thousands of nurses in Massachusetts and New York. Over the weekend, 60,000 members of the film and television union IATSE narrowly avoided a strike in a last-minute deal, though by some accounts many of those workers didn’t think the contract negotiations went nearly far enough.
The strikers join the 30 million workers who have quit their jobs this year, in what has been termed the Great Resignation but could more accurately be described as the Great Reassessment of Work. One explanation for this seismic shift is that workers simply have more leverage as employers struggle to retain them, particularly in low-wage, customer-facing jobs. Another might be that the people who worked through the pandemic are experiencing that vague but suddenly omnipresent condition of burnout. But the pandemic also magnified the lines between professional classes, where one group of workers spent the last year and a half Zooming in sweatpants as another trundled off to do “essential” and dangerous work, often for significantly lower pay. As the striking John Deere workers’ slogan goes: “Deemed essential in 2020, prove it in 2021. Can’t build it from home.” Which makes it all the more satisfying to watch their salaried counterparts being forced to don hard hats by upper management, as if the uniform is all it takes to do an essential job.
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Now they’ll support a grad student union?
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As per the usual, Beau is on it:
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I hope this isn’t behind a paywall:
This is very much what I needed to hear right now.
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Watch the news media blame squid game.
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Here’s a direct link to the video’s playlist file.
https://vp.nyt.com/video/hls/2021/10/15/96625_1_20op-quitters_wg/master.m3u8
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It’s a great message, for some. I did think the nod at the end to those who can’t afford to quit was too cursory.
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Which has not found space for its own narrowly avoided labour dispute.
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Hell yes! American workers have been sold the bill that “unions are no longer necessary”. Buuulllshiitt! I’ve been union almost my entire working life. There is no way employers would voluntarily give me the pay and benefits I receive. Collective bargaining is a powerful tool. It’s time for workers to reclaim it.
Know your worth and claim it.
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Am still holding out hope, even though Alabama didn’t work out well:
Fkn NYTimes… broken clock right time twice a day, blah blah blah.
Et tu, Virigina?
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