Seems bad

Not really sure why anyone is wasting their time and energy under the delusion that the reactionaries in the legislature can be stopped or even reasoned with.  At some point you have to recognize that there's no reason to play in these sandboxes with them. 

State Rep. Jerome “Zee” Zeringue, R-Houma, flashed a thumbs-down Wednesday while away from the voting machine on his desk, indicating to the House speaker he was voting no on a controversial bill restricting union activities among government workers. The speaker acknowledged his vote, and his name lit up in red on the tally board. 

Moments later, it flashed to green. The bill passed 53-39, barely clearing the 53-vote threshold to pass the House. 

House Bill 571 by Rep. Raymond Crews, R-Bossier City, prohibits public sector union members, except for police and firefighter unions, from discussing or organizing union activities while working or on paid leave. It also nullifies any employment contracts that provide compensation, including paid leave, for the performance of such activities. 

Crews’ bill is opposed by several labor organizations, who have raised concerns that the bill violates the First Amendment. The bill would allow citizens to sue and be awarded costs for catching violations of the prohibition. The attorney general or a district attorney could also bring enforcement action. 

“Taking away the voices of thousands — tens of thousands — of workers, their rights to assemble and their freedom of speech is very alarming,” Matt Wood, a lobbyist for the Louisiana AFL-CIO said in an interview with the Illuminator. 

Zeringue was not the only member to have their vote changed. 

Rep. Jack McFarland, R-Jonesboro, had stepped outside the chamber at the time of the vote. Although didn’t give any other member permission to vote for him on Crews’ bill, he was recorded as a “yes” on the proposal. The final tally should have shown him as absent.

All of these outcomes are pre-determined. Why even bother with it? Why waste your time, your breath, your sanity? Nobody is listening. All they are doing is messing with you. 

During the convention, Landry and Beaullieu have also said no laws would be immediately changed. Instead, the governor has proposed only moving language out of the constitution and into what he has called a “super statute” in regular state law. 

“We are not rewriting the constitution. This is a refresh of the constitution,” Beaullieu said.

While relegating language from the constitution into statute won’t immediately change any law, it will make it easier for legislators to eliminate or change those provisions at a later date.

Constitutional language can only be removed with approval of two-thirds of the Louisiana House and Senate and approval from voters on a statewide ballot. A “super statute” would only need approval from lawmakers to eliminate or alter. 

In spite of Beaullieu’s assurances on protecting certain areas from constitutional cuts, legal experts have questioned whether that is possible. 

Several lawmakers and attorneys believe state law doesn’t allow for a “limited” constitutional convention, where certain items are declared off limits. If a convention is held, delegates could open up any portion of the constitution for alterations if they wanted, they said.

Bullying, "gaslighting" whatever you want to call it, they're gonna do whatever they want.  This is a fight that was lost a long time ago. Seems bad. What else is there to say?

The intolerable acts

The Landry steamroller is just getting warmed up. There's so much coming so fast that it is a struggle to get a bead on what specific historical period of horror our reactionary Governor and Legislature are trying to revive. Is it Jim Crow voting rights and incarceration policy? Or is it Gilded Age spoils politics and industrial scale corruption?   Whatever it is, they do exhibit a special fondness for the post-Reconstruction era. At the moment, they seem particularly focused on union busting. 

Emboldened by Louisiana’s election last fall of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature will try over the next few months to weaken public-sector unions and slash worker benefits.

A cluster of at least 15 proposed laws takes aim at public-sector unions’ ability to bargain with employers, the system for compensating workers sidelined by injury and a requirement that child laborers must receive lunch breaks. Others would cut unemployment benefits and limit how much doctors can make when treating people for workers' compensation claims.

That's a lot at one time. Last year I heard some low key talk among political watchers that maybe Jeff Landry as Governor wouldn't be quite so bad compared to someone like former LABI head, Stephen Waguespack. The thinking there was that, although, Landry is a fire breathing reactionary, he's also kind of stupid compared to a dead-eyed operator like Wags so maybe he wouldn't get quite as much done. Well, it turns out that was all cope. When there are Republican super-majorities in the Legislature, they could put Neuty the Nutria in the Governor's chair to sign off on everything and the agenda would sail on through undisturbed. 

The other thing they've got going for them is their decision to go for a maximalist agenda right off the bat.  The first year of a new Governor and legislature is always the best time to do this. There hasn't been enough time yet for the inevitable power conflicts among lawmakers and between the legislature and the Governor to develop.  That stuff usually starts to set in after the first round of budgetary decisions have to be made. Money has a way of breaking party solidarity even within a large majority. The policy decisions made now are likely to cause a fiscal reckoning down the road. But right now, it all just feels like patronage payola so it glides right through.

Anyway, as we've already said about the crime session, each measure passed this year represents a rollback of decades worth of organizing and agitating undone.  Every single thing they break will be its own eternity of hard work to put back together.  It's exactly the same with these anti-labor bills.  And just like the crime package, they're all coming, as Clancy Dubos says here, through a big "firehose."

Instead, Landry has embarked on a fast-paced, hard-right push that includes more culture wars, less government help for those struggling at the bottom, expanding the state’s already-generous corporate welfare programs, further privatization of public education and removing layers of consumer protection.

He also wants to rewrite Louisiana’s “bloated, outdated, antiquated, and much-abused” constitution. To that end, he’s pushing lawmakers behind the scenes to adjourn their annual session early so that they can convene for a third special session to hurriedly adopt an agenda set by the governor.

The current “regular” session began only last week, and many lawmakers are already tired of having to drink, metaphorically, from Landry’s firehose of proposals — little to none of which he talked about as a candidate last autumn.

Maybe he didn't talk very much about it as a candidate (there was barely a campaign anyway)  but it isn't like nobody could have predicted this was going to be the agenda. Landry's proposals are all drawn from longstanding LABI wishlists as well as model legislation being enacted by GOP controlled governments in many other states right now.

In fact all of this (including the constitutional re-write) was "on the ballot," so to speak in 2019. That year saw what was left of the State Democratic Party by that point band together in an all-hands-on-deck effort to re-elect John Bel Edwards and stave off Eddie Rispone. That campaign made it clear to voters that what we're seeing now as the Landry agenda was on the table then. In 2023, they barely said or did anything at all. 

Which brings us to the question, whose fault is all of this, really? It's one thing to step back and shake our heads at how bad it is when the bad people get to run the government. But if we're going to do anything about it, we have to ask why didn't anyone try to stop the bad people from running the government in the first place? That's what today's party leadership elections are all about. 

Once the results roll in from the Louisiana elections Saturday, March 23, we’ll know who voters have chosen to be on the Democratic State Central Committee, which should vote for party chair and other leadership positions next month.

There’s a total of 210 seats on the committee, two for each state House district. About half of those seats had only one candidate qualify to run, so they’re automatically on the committee. Another 24 had nobody qualify, meaning the next chair will appoint people to these seats after the April leadership election.

In other words, 84 seats are up for grabs on Saturday.

Vying for many of these seats are members of Blue Reboot, a group of both incumbent and new candidates committed to electing a new party chair. More than 40 Blue Reboot candidates also ran unopposed. In some of the New Orleans races, U.S. Congressman Troy Carter, a Democrat, has backed opponents of Blue Reboot candidates.

Some in the party blame current chair Katie Bernhardt for Democrats’ disastrous showing in the fall elections, often citing ads she made early last year in which she appeared to be considering a run for governor. There have also been many cases of infighting.

So far former state representative Randal Gaines, a Democrat from LaPlace, has officially thrown his name in the hat. Public Service Commissioner Davante Lewis is considering a run, and some have mentioned two-time statewide candidate Caroline Fayard’s name as well.

After Saturday, we’ll have a better idea of how strong momentum is for the Blue Reboot reform candidates from seeing how well they fare against longtime party players, some of which have more name recognition, and others in the state’s most liberal and conservative districts.

Perhaps you can tease out from those few paragraphs that even if "Blue Reboot" scores a win today, it's highly likely the Democratic "infighting" will continue. Clearly, Louisiana deserves a more forceful and organized opposition to Landryism than what they're getting from the Democrats as currently constituted. Merely firing the Chair is one very small step in what promises to be a long struggle for that.  Some of the Blue Reboot candidates appear committed to the longer project.  I'm not sure all of them are. 

Anyway you can see a list of Blue Rebooters here.  But there's more to the story than just their slate.  Antigravity has undertaken the immense task of telling as much of that story as can be uncovered. Their voter guide features blurbs on every DSCC and DPEC candidate on the ballot. (Insofar as there is enough information available on them.)  Meanwhile, DSA has its own take which includes a more narrowly focused slate of endorsements and recommendations.  These races can feel like bewildering inside baseball to most voters. All of those links should help. 

But electing more and better Democrats to party positions isn't going to stop Landry's anti-labor intolerable acts.  That's going to require more immediate and direct action.  Not sure what form that takes just yet.

The year of worst fears

Mardi Gras is over.* Time to start facing up to the realities of 2024, most of which will be bad.  Get used to it.  Here they come. 

Gov. Jeff Landry doesn’t want to make a public school teacher pay hike from last year permanent, frustrating teachers who have been pushing for the pay bump since early 2023.

“Of course, our worst fear came through,” said Cynthia Posey, legislative director for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers. “It’s really devastating to a profession where people are paid so much less than others with college degrees.” 

Landry’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes $198 million for a second round of stipends for teacher and school support staff, instead of permanent salary increases.

*Yes, I know there hasn't been the usual Mardi Gras posting on this site this year. It's coming. I've got a bunch of stuff to say about it before JP Morrell's promised April review of the Carnival ordinances, though. Coming soon. 

Folding up the con-profits

One of the interesting things about the recession* we're headed into is the specific way the non-profit sector is going to implode. 

Earlier this year, the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) abruptly laid off its entire helpline staff. The announcement came just two weeks after the helpline workers voted to form a union, Helpline Associates United (HLAU). Workers were informed that they were being replaced by an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Tessa.

NEDA, the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to providing support to people struggling with eating disorders, launched the helpline in 1999. The organization claimed that the layoffs were unrelated to the success of the union effort—a claim that the workers and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union representing them, categorically dismissed. Rather than having a phone helpline staffed by human workers, the association planned to run an online chat helpline operated exclusively by Tessa.

Incidentally, that's the A.I. bubble in a nutshell right now.  Capital is always looking for new and innovative ways to operate more efficiently ... um... intimidate workers into submission.  Does the chatbot even work?  What a ridiculous question. Everyone knows that's not even the point. 

Helpline staff continued their work when NEDA did a soft launch of the bot in late May. But within days, major problems emerged. People shared stories on social media about their disturbing experiences with Tessa; in one case, it dispensed weight loss advice. But shortly before NEDA planned to entirely eliminate the phone helpline and transition to Tessa on June 1, the organization announced that it would shut down both the helpline and the chatbot. NEDA no longer offers any resources by phone or online chat.

Who cares if a robot can actually replace the workers or not. Who cares if the job even gets done at all! This is far from the last we'll see of this phenomenon. So many ostensibly do-good missions will be thrown in the trash just so that workers can be punished as management hoards what's left of all the drying up donor cash.  And that cash is definitely drying up. This is very likely just the beginning.

 

* Yes let's call it that. We can argue about the technical "health of the economy" metrics in a different post later. But the short version is, in this economy people have been abandoned. Housing and health care costs are up. The COVID era safety net measures have been yanked away. Wealth concentration is worse than ever. Union density is lower than ever. And nobody has any belief that there's a better future ahead. The fact that stock prices haven't totally tanked doesn't help most of us. The fact that unemployment is low doesn't mean people have jobs that actually sustain them. 

Island hopping

The insidious thing about charterization is that it not only destroyed the union but it also set workers on a long struggle to claw it back independent school by independent school.  Nearly twenty years have passed and so far they've won 6 out of 71 schools back. 

Living School joins Rooted School, International High School, Bricolage Academy, Morris Jeff Community School and Ben Franklin High School as organized collective bargaining units. Teachers in New Orleans who do not work at a unionized school can join United Teachers of New Orleans.

A small percentage of New Orleans' 71 charter schools are unionized. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of public school teachers were fired and schools were taken over by the Recovery School District or transformed into charters, ending the contract between the city and the union.

And, of course, in the meantime, there have been thousands of lives uprooted and communities destroyed by the charter project that will never come back. Also one of the primary villains in this plot is about to be elected mayor of Chicago today.  

When Vallas went to New Orleans in 2007, the city was still reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which had made landfall two years earlier. In 2003, a Democrat-controlled Louisiana legislature had taken control of schools across the state by establishing the Recovery School District (RSD), which took over “underperforming” schools, the majority of which were initially in New Orleans.

The RSD fired the district’s teachers, who were unionized and mostly Black, middle-aged professionals, and replaced them with younger, whiter, out-of-town TFA recruits. Dix Moore-Broussard, a longtime arts teacher in New Orleans, told the TRiiBE that after Katrina, the district laid everyone off. (In 2010 Duncan, who was then secretary of education, said Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”)

“We got notice that they weren’t opening the schools and we could go pick up our last check,” she said. “Everybody just got $2,000, and it was the most insulting thing ever.”

But hey 6 of the 71 privatized schools now have their own little unions. Celebrate the little victories, I guess, but there's no justice here.

Company town

The highlight of yesterday's City Council hearing about the Cantrell Administration's stonewalling of union organizers came from JP Morrell. 

Lloyd Permaul, the executive director of AFSCME’s Louisiana-based chapter — which Cantrell previously acknowledged as city employees’ bargaining unit — told Verite that while Tuesday’s meeting should help, he doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen next.

“I don’t know how to tell you how I feel coming out of that meeting,” Permaul told Verite. “I can’t even tell you I’m optimistic with the group I’m working with up there, to be honest with you. I don’t know.”

Permaul said that he hasn’t faced similar issues with the other government agencies he deals with in the state, including in Baton Rouge, Jefferson Parish and Plaquemines Parish.

“She’s the only mayor within this state that hasn’t met with me,” Permaul said.

“We are supposed to be the blue island in a state of red,” Morrell said, referring to New Orleans’ reputation as the most Democratic-leaning part of the state. “But everything I’m hearing is that this city is more hostile to unions than Jefferson Parish is. Do you know how ridiculous that is?”

JP's full comments are better if you watch the video. Lot's of "this is stupid!" and I think at one point he even says, "This is the most asinine thing I've ever heard in this chamber." The sequence starts around the 1:39:00 or 1:40:00 mark. This link should get you there.  

At the same time, though, JP's casting of New Orleans as "the blue island in a state of red" is simplistic and misleading. Especially when it comes to labor politics. JP and anyone who pays a lick of attention should know well that this city's power structure both in and out of government is generally conservative and viciously anti-union.  The Cantrell Administration, in particular, is closely allied with the city's business and non-profit elite where the dominant ideology promotes privatization of public services and the outsourcing and gigification of work. 

With regard to city workers in particular, her administration has exhibited constant hostility. Just a few examples would include the tacit approval of Metro Disposal's use of prison labor to break a strike, the freezing out organizing efforts at EMS, Public Works, and NORD a well-documented and dishonest attempt to de-fund the library system, and an attempt to relocate City Hall premised explicitly on a plan to downsize the permanent workforce.  In 2020, the mayor moved to replace a member of the City Civil Service Commission for the stated reason that the commissioner was too favorable to unions. 

So, while, we can certainly understand and support Morrell's outrage yesterday, his framing of the matter as though it should come as some sort of surprise may actually do more harm than good. The first step to building a stronger working class and a more union-friendly city is recognizing the size and scope of the challenge. And pretending that Cantrell's behavior is some kind of outlier instead of entirely representative of the rabidly anti-labor company town we actually live in, does not help with that. 

The Advocate uses its manufactured crime panic narrative to aid Starbucks' war on workers

Much of this is copy/paste of a long tweet thread. But it, like most long tweet threads, seems like something that should have been blogged. So I'm blogging it.

Yesterday, the Advocate presented a long story about the closure of one of the two Starbuckses on Canal Street. The story touched off a bit of a row on Twitter over several points. The story's writer, business reporter Anthony McCauley got involved in some of the back and forth. I don't like to fight with reporters on Twitter. McCauley is actually one of the more thorough and informative on staff at the TP/Advocate. Generally, I think most of them are just trying to do a job.  The problem with most New Orleans commercial media (particularly at the Advocate and at our local TV stations) extends beyond the individual reporters. Rather, all of these companies are beset with an institutional right wing anti-worker bias that has worsened as the pandemic crisis has heightened irreconcilable economic tensions between labor and ownership. I don't think most reporters have a lot of control over that. But they do shape what the public sees of their work and this article is a prime example of that.

One complaint from readers about yesterday's article was that it did not sufficiently interrogate the company's dubious assertion that the closure was caused by "security concerns."  Instead it gathered statements from business ownership and real estate aligned figures whose biases and interests would appear to confirm the Starbucks point of view such as the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Development District, and haberdasher David Rubenstein. Readers pushed back on this point.  Was this really a "high incident store" to use Starbucks's terminology? What does that phrase even mean? Is there any data explaining it? As a result, the article has been updated. It now says we don't actually know what any of that is based on. Starbucks isn't telling us.

After publication of an earlier version of this story, Jefferies said that Starbucks did, in fact, keep an incident log at the store but the company declined to share any data on the number or types of threats faced by staff. But he said the decision to shutter the location was taken after consulting with staff, managers and "local leaders".

"This is certainly, unfortunately, a high incident store," he said.

Another issue raised by readers was the greater context of Starbucks's ongoing national campaign against organizing efforts by its workers.  Among the company's union busting tactics has been sudden and unexplained closures of stores all over the country so it's natural to wonder how the Canal Street closure might fit in. Starbucks's Maple Street location voted to unionize earlier this year.

Starbucks's reaction to union activity has been shockingly aggressive. There is even speculation that the company's strategy is to push the legal limits so far that we could eventually see the whole National Labor Relations Act scrapped by the right wing Supreme Court.  Here is an In These Times article describing  the sort of confusion and intimidation Starbucks has subjected its workforce to in order to discourage unionization.

That response fits a pattern of new initiatives Starbucks has rolled out in the wake of the organizing wave, which includes benefits that the company says it cannot guarantee for its unionized workforce. In May, the coffee chain announced wage increases for workers, but said that it was prevented from assuring raises in stores that were in the process of unionizing or that had successfully done so. Last month, Starbucks also hedged on offering abortion access benefits, including out-of-state travel expenses, to workers in unionized stores, citing contact negotiations.

SBWU has demanded that these benefits be extended to all employees, including those at unionized stores. ​“Starbucks is permitted by law to offer these benefits to workers at unionized stores,” the union wrote. ​“Our bargaining committees will demand that these modest improvements be given immediately to all the partners.”

See also this recent Chapo interview with three Starbucks workers who talk about their experience organizing and the constant bad faith and retaliation the company has subjected them to. Given this context we should automatically assume any action taken by the company, such as a store closure, and the reasons the company cites, are probably happening in bad faith or should at least be heavily scrutinized. As you can see from the ITT article, concerns over safety have been a point of contention between workers and management in Starbucks stores nationally.

It is reasonable to assume, given that Starbucks in fact says in the T-P article that the New Orleans store closure is among several they are deciding to do across the country for the same reason, that this move is related to their ongoing labor issues.

New Orleans is not the first nor the only city to see Starbucks closures because of security concerns. Shortly after the letter to staff was written in July, the company said it would be closing 16 stores for security reasons: a half-dozen each in the greater Los Angeles and Seattle areas; two in Portland, Oregon; and one in both Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Management does this sort of thing all the time and Starbucks is no exception. They make moves to intimidate workers, to confuse them, to divide them if possible, and to gaslight them with ham-handed draconian solutions to valid complaints.  Workers feel unsafe and ask for support. Instead the company just haphazardly messes with schedules, or transfers staff or closes a bunch of stores to show that they can. It's pure intimidation and it's very typical behavior

Meanwhile the T-P/Advocate's initial approach to this situation was to ignore the unionization angle entirely even though it may in fact be the central issue. In response to online criticism, they have grudgingly added it to the story today. However, in doing so, they've also attempted to reduce the matter to a mere question of whether or not the Canal Street store has a pending NLRB petition filed.  Surely we can see that the answer to this question does not change the overarching context. At the very least, we understand that most organizing activity happens prior to and outside of the NLRB process. Do we understand that? Maybe the paper doesn't want us to.

Ultimately, the problem here is the TP-Advocate aspires to function as a company newspaper in a company town. This week, for example, its "Virtual Panel On The New Orleans Economy" featured this lineup. 

The panel, sponsored by AARP, will feature Anne Teague Landis, CEO of Landis Construction Co.; James Ammons, Chancellor of Southern University of New Orleans; Lynette While-Colin, Senior Vice President of small business growth at the New Orleans Business Alliance; and David Piscola, General Manager of the Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel.

When the paper doesn't think a discussion about "the economy" deserves even a single voice representing labor or advocating for the poor in any sense, it follows that its reporting will default away from those perspectives as well. 

Which is how stories that are really about the economic hardship and sense of precarity visited on the city's most vulnerable populations as a result of the bosses having won the pandemic, are so easily converted by commercial media into crime panic sensationalism. Because from the point of view of those who hold power in New Orleans and seek to extract profit from it (and to the media institutions in their employ) the way to address these traumas is to remove and/or suppress their victims with a more brutal police state. Please see, again, this month's Antigravity for much more on that. Note, as well, this week the Wall Street Journal has jumped in to make New Orleans the latest exhibit in a national media crime panic narrative. I'm sure we'll hear more about that this weekend.

Just as I'm sure we'll be subjected to another round of dishonest and deranged reactionary filth from the Advocate editorial page.  But that's what we've come to expect there.  As readers who still rely on the paper to cover the public affairs of our city, we are most injured when that hostility infects and diminishes the quality of the reporting as well.  

The boss will decide if you are too sick to work

They will say they are citing CDC guidance, of course. But one thing that has become abundantly clear over the course of the pandemic is who the CDC actually works for. 

A union for flight attendants is accusing the CDC of loosening rules for quarantine after Covid-19 exposure at the behest of the airline industry, as the Omicron variant continues to rage across the globe.

"We said we wanted to hear from medical professionals on the best guidance for quarantine, not from corporate America advocating for a shortened period due to staffing shortages,” said Association of Flight Attendants-CWA International President Sara Nelson following the CDC announcement shortening the recommended quarantine duration from 10 days to five days.

“The CDC gave a medical explanation about why the agency has decided to reduce the quarantine requirements from 10 to five days, but the fact that it aligns with the number of days pushed by corporate America is less than reassuring,” Nelson said.

It really isn't even a big secret. When pressed on the matter, CDC leadership openly admits they are considering factors besides the public health question. They are, instead, prioritizing an agenda pushed corporate lobbyists which insists that sick leave time is a threat to"societal function." 

The decision to cut the recommended isolation time in half, which was hailed by business groups and slammed by some union leaders and health experts, reflects the increasingly tough decisions health officials navigate as they seek to strike the right balance between vigilance and normalcy as the nation heads into the pandemic’s third year. Even with a surging variant, President Biden has said he is not looking at lockdowns and stressed that people who are vaccinated and boosted do not need to fundamentally change their lives as they did at the start of the pandemic.

The guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “was based on the anticipation of a large number of cases might impact societal function,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in an interview with The Post. “There were starting to be limitations in society, not just in our health-care workforce but in other parts of society. We were seeing infections in many places that we realized this could be a harbinger of many other essential workers we needed.”

"There were starting to be limitations in society." In other words, workers were demanding to be treated as though their lives actually meant something and we just can't have that.  

Starbucks' union drive comes amid much a broader national labor movement spanning multiple industries across the country. Last month, in a strike wave known as "Striketober," tens of thousands of workers at companies like John Deere, Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg, and McDonald's organized work stoppages over unethical working conditions and low pay. 

According to Cornell's Labor Action Tracker, the share of workers on strike last month jumped to 25,000 – a marked departure from the three months prior, which saw an average of 10,000. Many experts and labor advocates told Salon that strikes are being driven largely by a growing sense of dissatisfaction amongst essential workers as the pandemic wanes.  

Corrina A. Christensen, Director of Public Relations & Communications of the BCTGM International Union, which represents workers at Frito-Lay, Kellogg, and Nabisco, said that the strikes have "everything to do with workers being fed up with employers bent on disrespecting their work and demanding take-aways in wages, benefits, forcing overtime…after they were upheld as 'essential.'"

That is the line the CDC is trying to hold. The bosses who have the ears of policymakers have succeeded in defining 5 days of additional sick leave as a "societal threat" so large that it actually outweighs the threat of pandemic COVID. The article quoted above is primarily about the organizing effort at Starbucks in Buffalo. In this article, the workers involved in that campaign refer to the "fear culture" brought to bear against them by management. 

“Most of the workers I talk to are almost immediately on board,” Murray says. He joined the organizing effort two months ago, and has been talking to his coworkers ever since. He says that not only do organizers have to educate everyone on what a union is all about, they also face a latent level of fear among employees that they could be targeted for retaliation, particularly now that the union drive has gone public. 

“[Coworkers] were saying, ​‘I’m scared, can Starbucks do something to us?’ That broke my heart, because that fear culture has already been cultivated,” says Gianna Reeve, a shift supervisor who has been helping with the organizing effort. ​“It really hurts. This is an opportunity that we can be stronger.”

Fear of retaliation is the greatest weapon the bosses have against workers. And it permeates the atmosphere of most service industry jobs like Starbucks where the boss can demand not only compliance in deed but also in attitude. Standards in service jobs are subjective. Workers can be made accountable not only for the amount of work they produce but for arbitrarily defined perceptions of that work. Here is what that looks like in practice.

In case you would like to know what it’s like working at Starbucks https://t.co/ke1BhXegX2 pic.twitter.com/3lZ0qHSMg9

— Cory Doctorow MOSTLY AFK (@doctorow) December 24, 2021

Did you show up for that twelve hour shift on a holiday? Were you on your feet the whole time mixing hundreds of pumpkin spice lattes during the fall rush? Ahhh but see you weren't quite "WARM AND WELCOMING" enough as you went about that so we are going to have to punish you again. 

Service industry bosses are absolute tyrants. Workers organizing against that kind of intense intimidation need all the help and encouragement they can get. Which is why having a strong labor influence in the halls of power is so important. When a government agency has a chance to step in and put its thumb on the scale, it can make a big difference.  Joe Biden's CDC has chosen to intervene on behalf of the bosses. It even seems like they are rubbing it in the workers' faces by amplifying the bosses' intimidating rhetoric.  

'The government and your boss put you in harms way. We took away paid sick days and unemployment supplements. Better get vaccinated so you don't starve.'

I'm not a health comms person so I can't evaluate how effective this message is. pic.twitter.com/rHtsD4McYP

— Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) December 29, 2021

 According to this CDC ad, workers have a clear choice. Their health or their job. If you are one of the good ones, the poster implies you will choose to work your shifts. If you are one of the good ones, in fact, you may not even "tolerate being at home."  At least that's what CDC says.

“Our guidance was conservative before. It had said 10 days of isolation,” Walensky told CNN. “But in the context of the fact that we were going to have so many more cases — many of those would be asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic — people would feel well enough to be at work, they would not necessarily tolerate being home, and that they may not comply with being home, this was the moment that we needed to make that decision and those changes.”

Clearly these people care about your well being. 

No, the problem is not a "worker shortage"

This article will tell you what the problem actually is but it doesn't do that until about 14 paragraphs in; long after the nonsense about "generous" unemployment benefits and well overshadowed by the OMG WHO WILL SERVE ME MY $12 BUD LITES AT THE SUPERDOME headline.  But it's in there. 

Worker representatives generally take the Biden view, noting that many of those who lost their jobs weren't eligible for assistance in the first place. Many are not anxious to return to low-paid jobs for a variety of reasons, including lack of child care, worries about their health and better alternatives on offer.

"Calling it a 'worker shortage' makes it seem like there are a lot of people too lazy to work," said Andrew Deibert, chief organizer for United Labor Unions in Louisiana.

"I think it should be framed as an 'ethical-employer shortage,' a shortage of companies willing to pay workers livable wages, provide decent benefits, and improve working conditions," he said. "Companies willing to do this don't seem to be having trouble finding workers."

Despite all the bizzaro world propaganda suggesting the opposite, the bosses have won a more precarious and desperate workforce in the pandemic.  The "worker shortage" manufactured crisis is just about locking it down.

 

Ony 76 more to go

 Four is, of course, one more than three but -- there is much more work to be done. 

Right now, only three other New Orleans charter schools -- Morris Jeff Community School, Benjamin Franklin High School and International High School -- active unions, out of about 80 public charters in the city.

Since they are run by independent boards, charters have more autonomy than traditional public schools and each management organization can make its own hiring and firing decisions.

In a news release, pro-union Bricolage teachers said they hoped to demonstrate to staff in other charter schools that unionization can be accomplished with enough solidarity.

Maybe this will help pick up the pace?  Remember the event from which the teachers are trying to recover happened in the blink of an eye. Also it happened almost 16 years ago. 

The Bricolage union is affiliated with the citywide teachers union United Teachers of New Orleans. UTNO represented educators throughout the city prior to the post-Katrina takeover of New Orleans public schools by the state-run Recovery School District. UTNO President Wanda Richard, Larry Carter, president of the statewide union Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and state Rep. Royce Duplessis were present on Friday and encouraged a union vote.

“We believe all teachers — no matter where they teach — deserve to have a seat at the table in this city,” Duplessis said.

Haven't had a "seat at the table" in this city for almost a generation now. 

The price of crawfish

Seems like we were just talking about this last month. It's worse than you might think and has been for quite a while. 

Two Mexican citizens who worked for Crawfish Processing LLC last year filed suit in Alexandria federal court Thursday, claiming the company and its owner, Charles Bernard, routinely failed to pay minimum and prevailing wages. Plaintiffs say they also did not receive federally mandated overtime pay while working more than 60 hours per week.

The company also collected $60 per week as rent payments for rat-infested trailers packed with eight or nine people, according to the lawsuit. Also allegedly deducted from weekly paychecks was a $3 fee for cashing checks at a retail market affiliated with Crawfish Processing.

Not surprising in a state like Louisiana, where the legislature continues to debate the "good and bad" of and, in fact, defend the legality of slavery, that this would be allowed to go on.  Even if the plaintiffs win in this case, don't expect these practices to change in the future.

Four out of 80

Years of organizing work to get to point where there would be four schools out of the 80 charters in New Orleans where the staff are unionized. That is, if BAE is successful. 

The vote is set for May 28, according to the release issued by United Teachers of New Orleans, a citywide union and local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that has helped the charter school educators organize.

Bricolage Academy Educators, collectively known as BAE-United, spent weeks petitioning the school's governing charter board to voluntarily recognize their union. 

Bricolage organizers have said 80% of eligible teachers and staff signed a petition in favor of organizing, and they submitted the request to the school's board of directors in late February.

Eighty percent of the staff signed up in advance of the vote is a good sign. It's only in the last few years that teachers have gained something like momentum in the long effort to overcome structural barriers to organizing imposed by the depowering and isolating nature of the charter arrangements. When New Orleans Public Schools made the big move to charters, it not only immediately fired 7,000 people, it set back the work of reclaiming power by at least a decade.  Four out of 80 would be better than three.  But there is so much left beyond that.

The price of crawfish

A group of seafood processing workers in Breaux Bridge are suing to get rid of a loophole that allows plant owners to pay a lower "prevailing wage" because they employ some migrant workers who are on H-2B visas.  

Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.

The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one small way the rules are deliberately written to take advantage of workers the government confers a more precarious status upon to lower the standard for everyone. It's an example of how allowing any class of workers to be exploited causes everyone to suffer. The lawsuit estimates the overall effect depresses wages by as much as $5 an hour. 

Of course, as we've seen before, the real costs of this system can be much higher. 

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Doing it the hard way

 Looks like the Bricolage board is choosing the way of pain. 

Bricolage Academy Educators United, a group of Bricolage educators seeking union recognition from the Esplanade Avenue charter school’s board, has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board after the charter’s nonprofit board failed to respond to the group’s February request for voluntary union recognition.

Since receiving the group’s Feb. 24 letter, the board has only met once. At that meeting, on March 10, the board met in a closed door session with its lawyers for advice on the union drive. After the private discussion, board president Yvette Jones said the board must do its “due diligence” before it would take a vote on whether to recognize the union. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Well it's April now and they still haven't finished the "due diligence" delaying so the teachers have to ask for an NLRB election which is an arduous process that is more or less designed to prevent an organizing campaign from succeeding. That doesn't mean the teachers can't win.  The International School staff unionized via an election in 2016 but not without a fight. And the Lusher board actually beat back a similar effort.

Of course, the PRO Act legislation waiting for action in the US Congress would make things easier. Call or text your Senator.

Can't have any fundamental changes going on out there

Jane McAlevey's postmortem on the always doomed Amazon organizing campaign also explains why the PRO Act can never ever ever be allowed to pass.

The conditions most workers in the United States endure when trying to form a union make the recent actions by Georgia’s legislature to institute further voter suppression seem tame. If the Senate passes the PRO Act, there’s no question the unionization rate would increase quickly, which is one reason winning its passage in the near future seems oddly distant. Despite the nation having the most pro-union president in nearly 100 years, the Senate remains immovable on issues far less challenging than major labor law reform; it wouldn’t even accept a federally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage. And progressives have been trying to pass labor law since Jimmy Carter’s presidency—without success.

And, no, the answer isn't "because Joe Manchin." There are a ton of things the Democratic Party led by this so-called "most pro-union president in nearly 100 years" could do to rein that guy in.  They choose not to, though.  A strong labor law would "fundamentally change" the power relationships workers have with their bosses and boost the political power of the working class in general.  But that's not what these Democrats were elected to do. 

The thing about bosses is

 The bosses always lie.

Rep. Mark Pocan replied via tweet: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a progressive workplace when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” echoing reports from 2018 that Amazon workers were forced to skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles. Amazon’s denial was swift: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021

But Amazon workers with whom I spoke said that the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails, which were provided to The Intercept. The practice, these documents show, was known to management, which identified it as a recurring infraction but did nothing to ease the pressure that caused it. In some cases, employees even defecated in bags.

And when they aren't lying about the problems they cause for their own workers, they are shaming the workers for them. 

An email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.”

While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me.

Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”

The Bessemer Amazon workers are currently voting to unionize. That election period ends on Monday. The US Senate is able to give American workers their best path to organizing they will have had in decades if it just passes the PRO Act.  They're close but...

With Democrats holding a slim majority in the Senate, passing the PRO Act would require reforming the filibuster, as the prospect of 10 Republican votes for labor reform is beyond a fantasy. The number of high-profile Democrats joining the push to reform the filibuster has steadily grown, with Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., endorsing unspecified changes to filibuster rules earlier this month.

The Democrats can choose to deliver this essential and potentially transformative piece of legislation which they claim to support.  But, you know, Democrats are a lot like bosses in certain regards so, stay tuned. 

Radio silence

The teachers at Bricolage Academy have formed a union associated with the United Teachers of New Orleans. This makes Bricolage only the the third school to unionize over the course of the decade and a half since UTNO's contract was torn up by the state. After the flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina that destroyed the city, some 7,000 teachers who made up the heart of the city's Black middle class, were summarily fired by the district. During the decade plus since, the balkanized and semi-privatized charter system has proven an effective obstacle to reestablishing worker power in the schools.  One might even say that is the entire point of the move in the first place.  Which may be one reason the Bricolage administration is having trouble knowing just what to say about this development.  

Board President Yvette Jones and Bricolage CEO Troave Profice did not respond to multiple requests for comment asking whether they supported the endeavor.

 

Running out the clock

The first thing to understand about this "bi-partisan" stimulus proposal is that it is, in fact, a total cave on the part of the Democratic leadership.   

The top Democratic congressional leaders on Tuesday embraced a $908 billion coronavirus relief framework -- a massive concession meant to prod President Trump and Senate Republicans into accepting a compromise as covid cases spike and the economic recovery shows signs of faltering ahead of the holiday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that “we believe the bipartisan framework introduced by Senators yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations.”

The "framework" would amount to about a third of what the Democrats had been asking for which also was not going to be enough. And, of course, as a "starting point" it is only going to be watered down further from here. McConnell has already rejected this first offer, in fact. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pushed for a smaller deal and it appears unlikely he is poised to support the bipartisan agreement.

He circulated a proposal on Tuesday that offered minimal aid to the jobless, in a sharp break with the bipartisan group that could represent an obstacle to a final deal.McConnell has also delivered an ultimatum, requiring any legislation to immunize businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits. 

Nothing is written into a bill yet so the details of the "framework" are still fluid, as they say.  But according to this article we know it aims at a $300 per week boost to unemployment benefits matching the now expired emergency stop gap written by Trump after the original $600 provided by the CARES act ran out.  Today we learned another 712,000 new jobless claims were filed this week.  A lot of headlines highlight that the number is "fewer than expected" or down from last week, but as Atrios points out, "Every week since this began has been higher than the peak week of the Great Recession," so what are we really looking at here?  An historically large number of people need help and will continue to need it. $300 is not really help. 

The starting point framework includes $160 billion for state and local governments.  The notion of any state and local aid at all has previously been a non-starter for Republicans so expect that figure to come down.  Our friend, Senator John Kennedy was seen "trashing it" on TV today, in fact.  In any case, the starting figure is not enough.  According to, still incomplete estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities  state budgets are expected to take a hit of at least $194 billion.  This Brookings study figures that state and local revenues will take a hit of well over half a trillion dollars in the next few years.  Obviously we aren't going to get where we need to go from this "starting point." 

Certainly this $160 billion (but likely much less) sop isn't worth trading this for. 

The measure, spearheaded by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, would restore lapsed federal jobless benefits, providing $300 a week for 18 weeks; would include $288 billion for struggling small businesses, restaurants and theaters and $160 billion for fiscally strapped cities and states; and would create a temporary liability shield for businesses operating amid the pandemic.

"Temporary" or not, there can be no compromise where the US government allows your boss to simply order you to your death with no repercussions. 

Anyway, the punchline to all of this is now that the vaccines are almost ready, the political pressure to do more emergency stimulus will quickly reduce to zero. So Joe Biden can say all he wants about how whatever comes out of the lame duck session is a "first step," come the new Congress, the focus will be on the quickest way to just vaccinate everyone and tell them to get a job. Nevermind that the jobs are half gone and what's left out there is gig-a-fied beyond all recognition. That's the "new normal" all of this has been leading toward all along.  McConnell has run the clock out all year and the bosses have won the pandemic. They're even going to be shielded from future liability. The rest of us will just have to get used to it. 

Update: Well at least somebody gets it. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday announced his opposition to the bipartisan coronavirus relief package gaining momentum in the U.S. Senate, as jockeying intensified among lawmakers eager to cut a deal to provide relief amid renewed signs of economic weakness.

Sanders said he would vote against the $908 billion relief framework that has attracted a flurry of interest from Democrats and Republicans since it was introduced earlier this week. Sanders said he would consider backing it only if it is “significantly” revised. That package, broadly embraced this week by both senior congressional Democrats and more than a half-dozen Republican senators, leaves out some priorities among liberals such as another round of $1,200 stimulus payments.

Bollinger ICE raid

Not sure what, exactly, is going on here but the possibility that a company with so many critical ties to the Republican Party in general and to Donald Trump's campaign in particular, might be calling out ICE on its own employees probably needs consideration.

Federal agents staged an extensive search of the Bollinger Shipyards facilities in Lockport on Tuesday as part of an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" led by the Department of Homeland Security and also detained several immigrants in the country illegally at the facility, authorities said.

The operation at the Lafourche Parish shipyard on Tuesday was led by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. Cox referred additional questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser declined comment.

Cox said federal agents also arrested 19 "unlawfully present foreign nationals" at the Bollinger Shipyards location. Five of those people were placed in ICE detention while the other 14 were processed and released after being placed into deportation proceedings in federal immigration court, Cox said.

Of course it also says there is an "ongoing federal criminal investigation"  and it's the sort of thing that has ensnared other Republican Party figures in the state already.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

These are the guys who yell and scream about how we need tough immigration enforcement practices while they themselves are the ones profiting from the exploitation of migrant labor.  You ever wonder if maybe they just like to be able to threaten their workers?

It's going great

Everybody fired. Everybody being more than previously reported.

Recent news analyses have sketched out a dire picture of the scope of the jobless crisis in Louisiana and the extent of the expected damage that the state’s economy as the federal boost to unemployment benefits lapses.

But the true picture is actually worse than some of those reports have outlined. For instance, a Sunday story in The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate noted that more than 313,000 laid-off Louisianans had filed for state unemployment benefits as of July 18, the most recent data for which the state provided complete data. But that figure didn’t include the thousands of freelancers, independent contractors and so-called “gig” workers thrown out of jobs by the coronavirus crisis.

That latter group includes more than 152,000 out-of-work Louisianans who, although not normally covered by the unemployment insurance system, have been able to file for jobless benefits under a special federal expansion of the program to address the massive job losses during the pandemic.

Oh boy.  That's just Louisiana, of course. But this story cites a Brookings report that says New Orleans will be the third "hardest hit" metro in the country by the looming benefits expiration. On the other hand, the rest of the country is... well, it's not going so great there either. 

The number of Americans filing new claims for state unemployment benefits totaled 1.43 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

It was the 19th straight week that the tally exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the coronavirus pandemic. And it was the second weekly increase in a row after nearly four months of declines, a sign of how the rebound in cases has undercut the economy’s nascent recovery. Claims for the previous week totaled 1.42 million.

For those of you who are among the ever-dwindling number of still employed persons, let's try an exercise.  Please raise your hand if you have been obligated out of fear or lack of options to keep going in to work during the pandemic while becoming more frightened and demoralized with news of each death or of the rate of spread.

Okay well if your hand is up, Mitch McConnell says your boss should sue you now. 

The most obnoxious provision of the GOP proposal is one that shifts the liability in COVID cases from the employer to employee. This provision allows employers to sue employees or their representatives for bringing a claim for a COVID infection and offering to settle out of court.

Most specifically, the measure mentions "demand letters." These are communications to a prospective defendant setting forth the facts of the claim, evidence assembled by the plaintiff, a reckoning of the potential damages and a statement of how much the plaintiff would accept to make the case go away. Here's a sample letter published by the San Francisco law firm Rouda Feder Tietjen & McGuinn.

These documents are often designed as an opening brief in a negotiation; since neither side in an injury case really wants to go to trial, they make sense. The GOP bill would make anyone offering to settle, either through a demand letter or otherwise, liable to be sued for damages if the case they're making is "meritless." That's another term that's undefined in the measure.

Unlike the limitation on damages elsewhere in the bill, by the way, the punitive damages that can be awarded to employers bringing these lawsuits aren't capped.

The measure also gives the attorney general the right to bring his own lawsuit in such cases. As a result, Kennerly observes, Atty. Gen. William Barr would get the right "to sue unions, labor activists, lawyers, doctors — everyone involved in coronavirus claims."

Congress is choosing to send millions of people off of a cliff right now because 1) Republicans are openly hostile to everyone except the bosses and millionaires and 2) Democrats are running an election campaign based on the hope that they can get away doing nothing if everyone is miserable enough, because they just might blame the Republicans for it.

The first of the month is coming. (There's one every month!) But this time we're going in while deliberately cutting off everyone's income. Also the federal evictions moratorium is expiring and the courts are open.. or are they?