Evelyn Reynolds

The Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s block on senior US military promotions in protest of Pentagon policy on abortion is “reckless and dangerous”, eight Democratic senators told Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, in a letter published on Monday.“It falls to you to act now, for the safety and security of our nation,” the Democrats wrote to McConnell, of Kentucky. “We urge you to exercise your leadership and prevail on senator Tuberville to end his reckless hold.”The protest by the former football coach and Donald Trump ally has stretched for months, leaving the US Marine Corps without a permanent leader for the first time since before the civil war and even threatening leadership of the joint chiefs of staff.Tuberville is seeking to bring down a Department of Defense policy that allows service members based in states which restrict abortion rights to travel to ones where such healthcare remains available.The secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has defended the policy. He has also said nearly 650 senior posts requiring Senate confirmation could be unfilled by the end of the year.Tuberville wants a Senate vote on the policy. Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said last week Democrats “would not object to” a vote but added: “The bottom line is it’s up to the Republican leadership. They are risking our security, and it’s up to them to fix it.”In their Monday letter, the eight Democratic senators – led by Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and including Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois) and Jacky Rosen (Nevada) – expressed “deep concern for the stability of our armed services and national security and call on [McConnell] to exercise your leadership to protect the readiness of our military”.Tuberville’s block was “threatening our national security”, the senators said, adding: “We know you share our concerns … and as the leader of your conference, we urge you to take stronger action to resolve this situation”.McConnell has said he does not support Tuberville’s protest but has not moved to end it.The senators added: “Although there are numerous ways to legislatively change this policy, senator Tuberville has failed to convince a majority of the Senate to agree with his position.“He continues to try to force his personal beliefs on the women and men who volunteer to serve our country, creating unnecessary havoc and punishing service members for a policy they had no part in writing.”Describing the effects on service members denied promotions, the senators said: “Families who were ordered to move are now living in temporary family housing, children aren’t able to ready themselves for new schools, and spouses are missing vital employment opportunities.”Also on Monday, Tuberville took delivery of a petition from the Secure Families Initiative, an advocacy group for military families.It said: “No matter your political beliefs, we must agree that service members and military families will not be used as political leverage. It’s time to end this political showmanship and recommit to respect the service and sacrifice of those who pledge to defend this nation.”The petition was also sent to Schumer and McConnell. In his own petition last week, Tuberville claimed support from more than 5,000 military veterans.The eight Democrats who wrote to McConnell also said the Kentuckian, as Republican leader, should hold “colleagues accountable when they recklessly cross boundaries and upend senatorial order.“Senator Tuberville’s continuation of this stalemate is reckless, dangerous, and must end.” More

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the picket line of film and television actors and writers represented by Sag-Aftra and WGA in front of Netflix’s New York City office on Monday.The liberal congresswoman from New York criticized the wealth of studio executives as new contract negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents the studio bosses – and unions have been at loggerheads.The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents about 11,500 film and television writers, began striking on 2 May. The US actors’ union Sag-Aftra, which has 160,000 members, called their strike on 13 July.Both unions are pushing for residuals from streaming services and terms on how the industry uses technology such as artificial intelligence. The strikes have halted the majority of film and television production in the US.“How many private jets does David Zaslav need? For real. How many private jets do the CEOs need?” Ocasio-Cortez said on the picket line, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, who received a $246.6m compensation package in 2021.As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Ocasio-Cortez continued: “It is insatiable. It is unacceptable. I do not know how any person can say I need another $100m before another person can have healthcare.”Liz Shuler, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the US, also attended the picket line.The picket line on Monday included high-profile actors such as Tatiana Maslany, Sandra Bernhard and F Murray Abraham.“We have workers all across the country either currently on strike or gearing up to be on strike because at the end of the day we are all facing the same challenge, which is the concentration of wealth and corporate greed in America,” Ocasio-Cortez added.She also expressed encouragement to workers on strike and emphasized the effect their strike is having on the labor movement throughout the US.“Direct action gets the goods, now and always,” she said. “The only way that we can do this is by showing them that we are stronger. That our solidarity is stronger than their greed, that our care for one another will overcome their endless desire for more.” More

Not once has Donald Trump veered from his core campaign theme.Recall the first rally of his 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas – exactly 30 years after a deadly siege between law enforcement and the Branch Davidians resulted in the deaths of more than 80 members of that religious cult and four federal agents.He opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing “Justice for All”, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He praised the rioters of January 6.He raged against the prosecutors overseeing multiple investigations into his conduct as “absolute human scum”. He told the crowd that “the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”He then declared:“Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”Since then, as indictments have piled up against him and his poll numbers among Republicans have risen, Trump’s “final battle” comes into ever sharper focus: it is a battle against the rule of law and democracy.The mega indictment we have all been waiting for – the indictment against Trump for his attempted coup against the United States – will be announced very soon.Trump is prepared to use it in his final battle.Tuesday, on an Iowa radio show, he warned it would be “very dangerous” if Special Counsel Jack Smith put him in jail, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020”.Unfortunately for the nation, the Republican party is uniting behind Trump’s side of this battle line.If not defending the January 6 rioters outright, Republican lawmakers are attacking Special Counsel Jack Smith, the justice department, the Manhattan district attorney, and other current and prospective prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable.A Trump indictment for attempting the overthrow of the constitutional order and the verdict of the electorate will guarantee that 2024 will be more of a referendum on Trump than a referendum on Biden, as was the 2020 election.It will make it harder for Republican candidates across the nation to focus on their fake nemeses – “woke” teachers and corporations, trans youth, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and “socialism” – and force them instead to defend Trump’s side in the final battle.Trump and the Republicans will lose this battle. Even if they win Republican primaries, they will lose the general election.Recall that last November, virtually every 2020-election-denying Republican who sought office in a truly contested election went down to defeat.Those who care about democracy and the rule of law should welcome the battle, and not just because it will help Biden and the Democrats.It will also help clarify what’s at stake for the nation in 2024 and beyond.It will show how eager Trump and the Republican party are to abandon democracy and the rule of law in order to gain power. It will show that the vast majority of Americans reject their position.Americans hold different views about many things, but most of us oppose authoritarianism. We reject fascism.We value the constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are committed to democracy, even with its many flaws. We support the rule of law.We want to live in a nation where no one is above the law. We want to be able to sleep at night without worrying that a president might unleash armed lackeys to drag us out of our homes because he considers us to be his enemy.The pustule of Trump has been growing since 2016, and the authoritarian impulses underlying this infection have been allowed to fester for decades.Folks, it is finally time to lance this boil. It is time to decidedly rescue democracy and the rule of law. It is time to defeat Trump and his enablers who are determined to defy the core values of America.Let the battle begin.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

Researchers at the University of California-Riverside recently released a study showing poverty is the fourth leading cause of death nationwide. Poverty kills more people than homicide, respiratory disease, gun violence and opioid overdoses, the study showed.It’s stress, it’s starvation, it’s disease. And it’s all unnecessary.Policymakers have many tools to counter the death by poverty that is ravaging America. But they have neglected the simplest one in their toolkit for far too long: raising the federal minimum wage. Monday marks 14 years since the last federal minimum wage increase, the longest period America’s lowest-paid workers have gone without a raise since the minimum wage was first put into effect in 1938.The minimum wage has been stuck at an unlivable $7.25 an hour under three presidents. Adjusting for inflation, today’s minimum wage is now worth less than at any point since 1956. Nearly a third of the workforce, or 52 million people, earn less than $15 an hour, including 47% of Black workers, 46% of Hispanic workers, 20% of Asian American and Indigenous workers, 40% of working women and 50% of working women of color. Raising the minimum wage to even $15 an hour would lift 7.6 million people – many of whom are women, immigrants, Black, Latinx or parents – out of poverty and give more than 50 million people a raise.According to the Economic Policy Institute, a worker paid the $7.25 federal minimum wage earns 27.4% less in inflation-adjusted terms than what their counterpart was paid in July 2009 when the minimum wage was last increased, and 40.2% less than a minimum wage worker in February 1968, the historical high point of the minimum wage’s value.Courageous workers in the Fight for $15 and the union movement have pushed 14 states and the District of Columbia to adopt $15 minimum wage laws. We’re proud to have marched with, prayed with, and even gotten arrested with these workers as they’ve demanded living wages and a union. But the sad fact is that 20 states remain stuck at the federal minimum of $7.25 – and working people in those states, the majority of which are in the south, need help now. That’s why, earlier this year, we hit the road with Bernie Sanders and stood alongside workers across the south to demand living wages.These workers are 46% more likely to be paid less than $15 than workers in the 30-plus states with minimums higher than $7.25, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And, according to EPI, there isn’t a place in the country where even a single adult without children can get by on less than $15 an hour. There’s no city, county or state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom rental, a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition showed.Yet instead of raising pay for fast-food cooks, home care aides, warehouse workers, retail clerks and others, politicians push a false moral narrative of religious nationalism, trying to trick us into believing that poverty is a moral failing on the individual and that the real moral issues of our time are standing against LGBTQ+ people and a woman’s right to choose while defending tax cuts and gun rights.We will not be duped: the real moral question for our country is where we stand in relation to the poor. Instead of pushing culture wars and partisanship, lawmakers should focus on the 800 people dying each day from poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth. Our politicians have failed to act, and leaders who stand silent in the face of these injustices are guilty of policy murder.Indeed, our demand for a living wage is the moral issue politicians should be focused on. Isaiah 10 says, “Woe unto those who legislate evil and rob the poor of their rights, and make women and children their prey.” And President Franklin D Roosevelt adopted the moral argument of the Social Gospel when he declared that “no business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” It is a moral travesty that as a nation we continue to expand the military budget in surplus, but refuse to guarantee basic human rights like healthcare and living wages.We are putting our nation’s leaders on notice, across party lines, that we need living wages now. If they don’t act, we’ll vote them out. Poor and low-wealth people make up nearly 40% of the electorate and have the ability to decide elections. We are calling for a Third Reconstruction to lift our nation’s 140 million poor and low-wealth people from the bottom up. This includes raising the outdated minimum wage to a living wage as well as updating the also-obsolete official poverty measure to reflect what it takes to secure a decent standard of living today.America has gone 14 years without a raise. It’s literally killing us. And it’s time for it to change.
The Rev D William J Barber II is founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School
The Rev A Kazimir Brown is executive director of Repairers of the Breach More

For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all.The recent Turning Point USA conference brought thousands of young conservatives to Florida and there was no doubting the main attraction: former president Donald Trump, who made a glitzy entrance accompanied by giant stage sparklers. In a less than rigorous poll, 86% of attendees gave Trump as their first choice for president; DeSantis, who polled 19% last year, was down to 4%.Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse. Hutchinson and Chris Christie, outspoken Trump critics, are polling in single digits, sowing doubts about voters’ appetite for change. Never Trumpers have reason to fear that his march to the Republican nomination may already be unstoppable.“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. “The Trump challengers’ candidacies have been astonishingly poor and learned nothing from 2016. When the leading candidate gets indicted and all of his opponents besides Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson just echo his fake persecution complex talking points, it’s going to be hard to beat him.”The Never Trump movement is almost as old as the celebrity businessman’s hostile takeover of the Republican party. In 2016, 50 senior Republican national security officials from past administrations signed a letter saying they would not vote for him, even though Trump was the nominee. Republicans including Colin Powell, a former secretary of state, openly backed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, albeit in vain.Hopes that Trump would “grow” into the presidency were soon dashed. In 2018, White House whistleblower Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous column in the New York Times under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, describing the president as unfit for office. Taylor went on to build a network of former government officials and advisers aiming to deny Trump a second term.Former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project welcomed Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and hoped his part in a subsequent insurrection at the US Capitol would finally break the fever. But Senate Republicans squandered a chance to end his political career by failing to convict him in an impeachment trial.Since then certain members of Congress have proved willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are implacably opposed to him. But many others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been purged.As the 2024 election looms, there is no coordinated plan on how to derail the Trump train or alter the trajectory of a race that is still his to lose. Even critics admit that the external events many were counting on to thwart his candidacy have not hurt his standing.Indeed, criminal indictments in New York and Florida have led some voters who were entertaining an alternative to return to Trump’s fold while handing him another fundraising bonanza. His campaign announced that he raised more than $35m during the second fundraising quarter, nearly double what he raised during the first three months of the year and well ahead of his competitors.Trump’s opponents within the party are running out of time and ideas. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “They were all hoping that Trump’s legal troubles would kick him to the side of the road but every indictment or potential indictment just strengthens him among the base, eats up all the oxygen in the room and makes him the likely nominee. They’re probably as frustrated as can be.”Many Never Trump hopes were pinned on DeSantis but the governor is already cutting staff and experiencing fundraising setbacks. Donors ignored the warnings of longtime political operatives who said DeSantis was “undercooked”, had a glass jaw and lacked the personal warmth and charisma required for retail politics. These appear to be have been borne out by a stagnant campaign in which the more exposure he receives, the less popular he becomes.Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, said: “They all bet on DeSantis without knowing who the fuck he was, without understanding that he’s really bad and weird with people and also mean and cruel, even more so than Trump. They put all their chips on DeSantis before they knew who he was. That was a mistake because they don’t have an alternative.“There’s only one lane in this Republican party. That’s the Trumpy lane and DeSantis is in that lane with Trump. His problem is he can’t get past Trump but the base wants somebody like that and so there’s no other alternative. They’re really kind of screwed.”Ominously for DeSantis, Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, who had previously given the governor copious airtime and favourable coverage, has reportedly gone cold on him and resigned himself to the prospect of another Trump nomination. Fox News this week unveiled a line up of prime time hosts who have lauded the former president.Republicans are doing little to dispel an air of inevitability around the former president securing the nomination again. When it emerged this week that he faces a third indictment, this time over his attempt to subvert democracy, rivals including DeSantis again parroted his claim that the cases are politically motivated.Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, where Trump had notched far more endorsements than his rivals, told reporters: “If you noticed recently, President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for reelection. So what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their number one opponent.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust as in 2016, Trump is also benefiting from a divided opposition. Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggests that Never Trumpers coalesced around DeSantis too soon. “The strategy shouldn’t have been necessarily backing that horse but sitting out a little bit to see how the field settled, to see if someone would emerge. Then you come in.”Individual ambition has prevented Republicans from uniting around a strategy to stop Trump. Steele observed: “The party was unwilling in the first instance to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the candidates other than Trump and say, ‘OK, I get it, y’all want to be president but none of you is going to get there if you all stand so I need one of you to do that duty. So that means the rest of you get behind that one.“‘Is it Nikki? [Haley] We’re all behind Nikki. Is it Christie? We’re all behind Christie. But one of you.’ And so that’s the word we send out to the party faithful … At the end of the day, this game is about winning general elections, not winning primaries and the Republican party is stuck on winning primaries to prove a point. And what’s that point? Oh, we lose general elections.”The election is still more than 470 days away and the race is far from done. During the 2008 election campaign, for example, Hillary Clinton appeared to have a decisive lead for the Democratic nomination over Barack Obama while the eventual Republican nominee, John McCain, did not emerge as the frontrunner until January 2008.In theory, Trump should be vulnerable. He comes with excess personal baggage including legal troubles that appeared to converge this week with fresh momentum. On Tuesday Trump revealed that he had been named as a target in special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of interference in the 2020 election.On the same day Dana Nessel, the attorney general of Michigan, announced criminal charges against 16 people who signed paperwork falsely claiming Trump won the election in that battleground state. Meanwhile Fani Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, is preparing to present a case to a grand jury over Trump’s election subversion efforts there.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “There’s still a chance that the steady drip, drip, drip of indictments and other problems will open up a larger portion of the party to an alternative because they see him as increasingly risky, as someone who might well not only be indicted but convicted of a major crime, or more than one, during the presidential campaign.“Will a lot of Republicans quietly come to the conclusion that’s not a risk worth taking? I don’t know. I find it very difficult to understand my own party and impossible to understand the other side.”Christie and other critics have also made the case that Trump is an electoral liability, pointing out that, after his narrow win in 2016, Republicans lost the White House, House and Senate. They did regain the House in last year’s midterms but underperformed expectations. Trump’s campaigns are always risky and haphazard: he recently criticised Iowa’s popular governor, Kim Reynolds, for her seemingly cosy relationship with DeSantis while she purports to be neutral.Several groups that oppose Trump’s candidacy have begun spending big money on efforts to undermine his support. Win It Back Pac, an independent Super Pac with ties to the conservative Club For Growth Action, recently spent $3.6m on an advert that features a purported Trump supporter who has grown tired of the former president’s antics. Americans for Prosperity Action, part of a network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has also sought to weaken Trump through door knocking and phone calls.But for now, Trump is still the 800lb gorilla of the Republican party. He is dominating polls, drawing huge crowds and shaping the narratives by which other candidates define themselves. Just as in past recent elections, that leaves Never Trump Republicans with few palatable options except to put country before party.Walsh, the former congressman, said: “If you really believe Trump is unfit then you have to do what me and Liz Cheney and so many others have done and that’s just say we’re going to throw our support behind the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, even though it goes against our policy interests, because Trump has to be stopped. Clearly he can’t be stopped in the primary so he has to be stopped in the general.” More

As a UPS delivery driver in Dallas, Texas, Seth Pacic is intimately familiar with the dangers of extreme heat. After a long day’s work through record-breaking temperatures in summer 2011, he found himself dry heaving in the parking lot, incapable of driving home until he spent an hour and a half in the air-conditioned office.“It was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had in my entire life,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I fully recovered for a couple of weeks.”For some, the heat has had even more serious consequences. Last June, Pacic’s friend and coworker had a heat stroke while driving home from work; he is still recuperating, Pacic said. That same summer, 24-year-old UPS driver Esteban Chavez collapsed and died in California as temperatures soared into the high 90s; his family filed a wrongful death lawsuit and later settled with UPS. And the year before that, Jose Cruz Rodriguez Jr, 23, died of a heatstroke while driving a UPS truck in Waco, Texas.It’s a widespread issue. At least 143 UPS employees were hospitalized for heat injuries between 2015 and 2022, according tothe company’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration records obtained by the Washington Post. As the climate crisis pushes up temperatures, the problem could get even worse.At the state level, only California, Oregon and Washington require heat breaks for all outdoor laborers, and during a record-breaking heatwave last month, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, eliminated municipalities’ ability to mandate water and shade breaks for laborers.This summer, amid record-shattering heat across the US, Pacic and some 340,000 other unionized UPS workers have made heat a central issue of their ongoing contract negotiations with their employer.On 16 June, UPS’s 340,000 Teamsters union members said if their demands for improved working conditions – including heat protections – are not included in UPS’s new five-year contract, they will be prepared to hold one of the largest single-employer strikes in US history starting on 1 August.This week, UPS agreed to resume bargaining with the Teamsters, following a collapse of negotiations earlier this month.The union notched a major win last month, when the company tentatively agreed to equip all new delivery trucks in its 94,000-vehicle fleet with air conditioners starting in 2024, and also install new heat shields and fans.The victory showed how worker organization can be a key tool for climate justice, said Mijin Cha, an urban and environmental policy professor at Occidental College who studies labor and climate issues.“We’re seeing a fundamental reshaping of what we consider ‘occupational safety,’” said Cha. “In the extreme heat, any kind of work outside is dangerous … and as more workers organize, they’ll be better able, hopefully, to stay safe.”Driving for UPS is a grueling job in any season, said Matt Leichenger, who works in Brooklyn, New York. On a typical day, he makes up to 150 stops to deliver hundreds of packages, often having to walk long distances and climb up multiple flights of stairs while carrying large items such as mattresses.In the summer, things get even harder. Temperatures in the back of the truck can top 130F (54.4C) as the dark brown steel radiates heat “like an oven”, he said. Because loads are not always well organized, workers must root through piles of boxes that can weigh up to 150lb each.“There are days where you step out of the back of the truck into 95F weather and you feel like you’ve entered blissful, perfect temperatures, but in reality, you’ve just escaped hell,” said Leichenger, who helped organize a rally outside the UPS’s Foster Avenue warehouse in Brooklyn last summer demanding that the company provide air-conditioned trucks.Jim Mayer, a spokesperson for UPS, said the company has taken steps to protect workers from heat this summer, including distributing cooling sleeves and hats and installing fans in some of their delivery vehicles.“The health and safety of our employees is our highest priority,” he said.He also said employees are encouraged to stop working when they’re feeling the effects of the heat.“Our policy is simple: stop work, contact your manager, and when in doubt, call emergency services/911,” he said.Leichenger said workers feel pressure to move quickly. UPS measures efficiency with surveillance cameras and sensors inside trucks, and uses a computer program to calculate how long a route should take.Juley Fulcher, a worker health and safety advocate with the nonprofit Public Citizen, said surveillance can also make workers feel less comfortable taking bathroom breaks, causing them to drink less water.“If you add dehydration to heat stress, that’s something that can make you ill very, very quickly,” she said.It’s not just UPS workers who are suffering amid the heat. A Texas United States Postal Service driver last month died of heat exposure amid triple-digit temperatures.Right now, dozens of striking Amazon drivers in California are also demanding better heat protections.“The back of the truck is basically hell,” Rajpal Singh, a striking Amazon delivery worker in Palmdale, California, said. “I’ve been back there to the point where I’ve actually seen spots and started feeling like I was about to pass out.”(Eileen Hards, an Amazon spokesperson, said that the striking laborers work for a third party company called Battle Tested Strategies, with which Amazon terminated its contract last month; the workers said that the company only ended the contract after they formed a union, prompting Teamsters across the country to picket in solidarity.)Because UPS is such a large employer, new official heat protections could spur change across the logistics sector.“Amazon workers, FedEx workers, postal workers are all dealing with similar issues,” he said. “I’m proud of Teamsters for starting to trailblaze.”The new UPS contract language on heat could inspire other workers to push for climate-related protections in their contracts. But the tentative agreement won’t be enacted until a final contract agreement is signed.Even when that happens, the language will leave something to be desired, according to Seth Pacic, the Dallas-based UPS driver. UPS agreed to install ACs in every car purchased after 1 January 2024, dispatching new vehicles to the hottest parts of the country first. But it could still be years before all delivery drivers have access to air conditioned trucks, he said.“Until then, I think we’re still going to see workers die,” Pacic said.Before they reach a final agreement, the UPS union is still holding out for other protections like increased wages, the elimination of a two-tiered employment system, and an end to harassment from managers. These protections could provide additional protection from the heat, Pacic said.Workers who are free from harassment will be more likely to take breaks. And higher wages could ensure workers don’t take second jobs which can increase their heat exposure, and help them to afford equipment like UV cooling sleeves, ice pouches, coolers and pricey electrolyte drinks.Experts say these provisions are all the more necessary in the absence of strong governmental heat protections.Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2021 said it would publish a heat standard to protect workers from high temperatures, but Juley Fulcher, the safety advocate, said it could be years before it’s completed – and that the agency has not initiated an interim heat standard.Actions like Texas governor Abbott seeking to eliminate water and shade breaks showed what workers are facing, said Cha, the urban and environmental policy professor.“It’s part of a larger war on workers. With the dominance of capital in our system, any kind of concession toward workers is seen as a loss – even something as simple and necessary as water breaks,” she said. “The only challenge to capital is labor … so the more workers are able to organize, the better.” More

As a Republican congressman, Ron DeSantis was a supporter of legislation that made moderate reforms to the federal prison system intended to reduce recidivism and mass incarceration – a cause that was also championed by then president Donald Trump and his deputy, Mike Pence.Five years later, DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, and Pence are struggling to overtake Trump’s lead among Republicans as they vie for the party’s presidential nomination, and have turned against the criminal justice measure they both supported in an effort to win over conservative voters.“Under the Trump administration, he enacted a bill, basically a jailbreak bill. It’s called the First Step Act. It has allowed dangerous people out of prison, who have now reoffended and really, really hurt a number of people,” DeSantis told the rightwing pundit Ben Shapiro in a May interview, vowing that “one of the things I want to do as president is go to Congress and seek the repeal of the First Step Act.”Pence echoed a similar message, telling the Washington Examiner that as president he would “take a step back from” the law.Their comments were the latest instances of Republicans wooing voters with promises to crack down on crime, a time-tested tactic for the GOP that last year helped the party win back control of the House.But conservatives who supported the First Step Act in 2018 say there’s no reason to repeal it, nor do they believe attacking it will help Pence and DeSantis overtake Trump’s substantial popularity advantage among Republican voters.“You’re in a political, what I call, silly season of you say a lot of things, and crime is a concern, public safety is a concern across the country,” said Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who introduced an early version of the act.He said the law was “not an issue until it was brought up, and it’s not an issue that seems to be gaining a lot of traction out there, especially when the facts of the bill were put out there for Republican voters.”One of the biggest pieces of criminal justice reform legislation Congress has passed in years, the First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum sentences for some drug-related crimes, created new rehabilitation programs for released inmates, banned the shackling of pregnant women and expanded time-served credit for most federal prisoners.Only a minority of America’s prison population, the largest in the world, is incarcerated in the federal system, but one of the act’s chief goals was to create programs that helped people released under the act keep out of prison for good.According to justice department data, the recidivism rate for those released under the law is just over 12%, as compared to the 45% rate the Government Accountability Office says is the baseline for federal prisoners overall.“When we see policymakers talking about the First Step Act, and trying to make some sort of misguided connection with crime, we have to be really realistic that the research and the evidence doesn’t point that way,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive non-profit.The act’s passage represented one of the few instances in which Trump and his Republican allies in Congress joined together with Democrats, and their legislative push was endorsed by outside groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the conservative benefactors Koch Industries.The version of the act Collins introduced mostly dealt with ways to reduce recidivism, and DeSantis voted for the bill before resigning later in 2018 to mount his successful campaign for Florida governor. The Senate then added provisions dealing with sentencing reform, and as he signed it, Trump said the legislation “brings much-needed hope to many families during the holiday season”.Two years later, Covid-19 broke out and crime spiked nationwide, a phenomenon that appears to be relaxing but which has had an enduring impact on American politics. The former president currently leads the polls among Republican presidential candidates, but doesn’t say much about the First Step Act, having now shifted his demands to calling for Congress to slash the FBI and justice department’s funding over their investigations against him.DeSantis, meanwhile, has made an about-face on criminal justice policy since announcing his presidential run in May. While he signed a major criminal justice reform bill in 2019, he last month vetoed two measures dealing with expungements and probation violations, despite them passing with overwhelming support in Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature.Writing in RealClearPolitics, Steve Cortes, a spokesman for the DeSantis-aligned Never Back Down Pac, said that as a congressman, the governor only supported the initial “law-and-order version” of the First Step Act, and not the one that Trump enacted.“This obfuscation on Trump’s jailbreak points to an even more serious problem for the 45th president as he seeks re-election: he remains unable or unwilling to admit policy mistakes and to propose appropriate reversals or reforms,” Cortes wrote.Arthur Rizer, a conservative advocate for the act who co-founded ARrow Center for Justice Reform, remembers DeSantis as a supporter of the law during his time in Congress. Pence, meanwhile, at one point went to the Capitol to personally negotiate with GOP senators on getting the bill passed.The former vice-president is currently polling in the single digits among Republican candidates, while DeSantis is in a distant second place to Trump.“I think that they sense that there is a potential to create another wedge issue. And they are taking this opportunity to distinguish themselves from Trump. They can’t go out for Trump for the indictment stuff, so they’re looking for ways to pick at him,” Rizer said of the attacks on the First Step Act.“It actually breaks my heart to see people turning on something that’s done a lot of good for people who were in prison for relatively minor stuff. And now that they’re out with their families, and we’re using it as a political football, to score points and to dunk on the other side.” More

It became known as the winter of discontent. After the Labour government tried to freeze wages to stem inflation, Britain was convulsed by labour strikes and disruptions in public services. Rubbish piled in the streets, bodies went unburied – and a fierce political backlash swept Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives into power.Forty-five years later a summer of strikes is roiling industries from coast to coast in America.Unions have launched or are threatening stoppages that could affect everything from airline travel and parcel deliveries to car manufacturing and film and TV production. They could also disrupt the economic growth that Joe Biden wants to campaign on in 2024.“It takes him off message because strikes are visual, strikes are hot video, and they’re a focal point for media,” said John Zogby, an author and pollster. “It becomes lame trying to explain, ‘But the numbers are good, but the numbers are good, but the numbers are getting better,’ when the video just doesn’t appear to show it.”The coronavirus pandemic had many aftershocks and labour turmoil may be among them. Hollywood production is shut down as the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are striking, partially over concerns about streaming revenues as well as artificial intelligence taking away jobs from creative workers. The action has put films and TV shows in limbo and could cost the economy an estimated $3bn.There is also the prospect of a United Auto Workers strike as contract talks get under way and the industry wrestles with a transition toward electric vehicles. The Teamsters union said its drivers might walk off the job as they struggle to reach a new contract with UPS (United Parcel Service). And more than 26,000 flight attendants at American Airlines are set to hold a strike vote over the coming weeks.Among other examples mushrooming across the country, thousands of hotel workers in Los Angeles have also been striking this month while healthcare workers at a major Chicago hospital are planning to do likewise in a dispute over wages and lack of staffing.And last month there were localised walkouts at Amazon, McDonald’s and Starbucks, while hundreds of journalists across eight states went on strike to demand an end to painful cost-cutting measures and a change of leadership at Gannett, the country’s biggest newspaper chain.Drexel Heard, a public affairs strategist based in Los Angeles, said: “This is what I believe is the start of a trend that was inevitable post-pandemic: workers knowing and understanding that things cannot go back to normal. We all work hybrid now, for the most part.“People are understanding that their need for healthcare is something that’s critical. Their need for better pay and better work hours is essential, especially when we have things that happen like a pandemic, and people want to feel safe. The only people who are fighting for workers’ rights are unions.”Scenes of industrial strife heading into winter would provide fodder for rightwing media who already accuse Biden of embracing the leftwing ideas of Senator Bernie Sanders. It might also create a headache for a president who is focusing much of his re-election campaign on the strength of the economy.On Thursday he was at the Philadelphia Shipyard in Pennsylvania to promote “Bidenomics”, a recently adopted slogan. The president said: “We have a plan that’s turning things around pretty quickly. ‘Bidenomics’ is just another way of saying ‘Restore the American Dream’.”But that message is still struggling to break through with voters. In a CNBC All-America Economic Survey released this week, 37% approve of Biden’s handling of the economy and 58% disapprove. In a Monmouth University poll, only three in 10 Americans feel the country is doing a better job recovering economically than the rest of the world since the pandemic.There is a baffling disconnect between these opinions and data that shows America defying predictions of recession and curbing price rises faster than other major economies. Inflation has fallen from 9% to 3% and is now at its lowest point in more than two years.Indeed, Biden may have helped create the very conditions that make strikes more likely. White House officials say that unions are empowered to press for more benefits and better pay because of the strong job market. Unemployment is just 3.6% and job openings are relatively high.This is one reason why Robert Reich, a former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton, does not believe that the current wave of strikes and potential strikes will overwhelm Biden’s effort to highlight economic growth.He explained in an email: “(1) the strikes and potential strikes still represent a tiny segment of the American workforce, (2) overall job gains and wage gains continue to roar, (3) a big reason workers feel able to strike is that the labor market continues to be tight, which is another good sign for Biden.”Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a Guardian US columnist, added: “The potential problem for Biden isn’t the wave of strikes and potential strikes but the seeming determination of the Fed to continue to raise interest rates, thereby risking a recession before Election Day.”Widespread industrial action would pose a fresh test for Biden, a self-proclaimed “union guy” born in blue-collar Scranton, Pennsylvania. Past attempts to intervene in such disputes have not always gone smoothly.Last year his administration helped forge a tentative agreement between rail companies and their unionised workers to avoid a strike that could have rocked the economy before the midterm elections. The tentative deal prevented a strike but failed to appease workers, and Congress ultimately had to intervene by imposing an agreement.Biden, who is pushing the Senate to confirm Julie Su as his new labour secretary, has already expressed support for the striking Hollywood actors and writers, insisting that all workers deserve fair pay and benefits. Such an approach could work to his advantage against Republicans seeking to rebrand themselves as the party of the working class.Faiz Shakir, chief political adviser to Sanders, who met with Biden and young labour organisers at the White House this week, said: “When you think about some of the working-class people who are in the swing voter category, they tend to carry an anger and frustration about an economy that hasn’t been working for them.“It would be wrong to go back to them and tell them, ‘Hey, everything is much better since I was president.’ I think you want to say, ‘I’m fighting for you and I’m improving the situation for you. However, there’s way more work to do and the people who are standing in the way are these corporate bosses, and I’m taking them on from you.’In the UPS dispute, Shakir argues, Biden should make clear he stands with the workers. “Stand boldly with those workers. Say, ‘I stand with you. You want to go on strike? That’s fine. Yes, there will be costs to consumers, yes, there will be some challenges in the economy, but your work is essential and important and you deserve your fair share.’“What I think will end up happening is you usually get some criticism from the business elite who are going to say, why is the president of the United States siding with these workers and making it even harder for these people to reach a negotiated outcome? To that, I say that is good for politics, because when working people see that you’re sticking your neck out for them, they will reward you. They see you taking arrows for them.”Shakir also believes that the dispute will be resolved in a few weeks with a positive outcome for labour, and that Biden will be able to justifiably claim that he helped improve the lot of hundreds of thousands of workers.In his remarks in Philadelphia on Thursday, Biden was again careful to align himself with workers and unions against Wall Street and companies that made record-high profits during the pandemic. If a disruptive wave of strikes comes to pass, this is likely to be the least risky strategy.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank, said: “It’s my distinct impression that support for labour unions has gone up significantly so we’re not talking about [British miners’ leader] Arthur Scargill in the 1970s. We’re talking about an extended period during which a lot of Americans believe that workers have got the short end of the stick.“They’re much less worried about ‘big labour’ than they used to be, in part because labour isn’t as big as used to be, especially in the private sector where labour unions have weakened enormously. There’s a basic sense of fair play operating to increase support for not just working people but organised labour, so I don’t think this is a bad time to strike and I don’t think that will necessarily redound to Joe Biden’s discredit.” More