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      Biden stakes claim to being America’s most pro-union president ever

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      Just over 100 days into his presidency Joe Biden is showing that he is one of the most pro-union presidents in American history, declaring the “unions built the middle class” in his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.Union membership has declined precipitously in the US and accounted for about 10.8% of US employees last year, just over half the rate in 1983. Unions have also suffered notable setbacks in recent years, mostly recently failing to get the votes to unionize at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama.None of this has dampened Biden’s ardor for organized labor, or Republican opposition to it.Last Monday, Biden issued an executive order establishing the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, a move that aims to help unions expand their ranks. On Tuesday, Biden named Celeste Drake, to head his new “Made in America” program, which is designed to steer more federal money to US manufacturers. Drake is longtime trade expert at AFL-CIO, the US’s largest union federation.Also last week, the White House issued a fact sheet saying that Biden’s proposed $2.3tn infrastructure plan would create many union jobs in construction, clean energy and other fields – by, for instance, requiring companies that receive money under the legislation not to oppose unionization efforts.Biden’s new taskforce is seen as an important pro-union move – headed by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it includes most cabinet members and aims to have the entire executive branch promote unionizing and collective bargaining. In this way, Biden is undertaking an extraordinary effort to help reverse the decades-long decline in labor unions’ membership and power.In announcing the taskforce, the White House said “the shrinking of America’s middle class [is] associated with the declining percentage of workers in unions”.The taskforce, officials say, will recommend ways to use existing policies and programs to promote organizing and will also explore new policies to further that goal. “This is an all-hands-on-deck effort,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the president’s council of economic advisers, told the Guardian. “The marching order from the president is everything we do in the job market space needs to reflect the importance of unionization.”One White House official noted that the percentage of federal workers in unions, 28%, is lower than the percentage of state and local government workers. He said the administration might seek to increase that percentage by communicating with federal employees on the advantages of joining unions.Robert Bruno, a professor of labor relations at the University of Illinois, called Biden’s creation of the new taskforce “a significant historical step”. “The idea of the White House using this as a platform – it seems every cabinet member is on the taskforce – is a pretty profound statement about the importance the Biden administration places on collective bargaining and organizing workers.”A White House fact sheet seemed to acknowledge the complaints of many labor leaders who argue Democratic presidents have done too little to strengthen unions. “No previous administration has taken a comprehensive approach to determining how the executive branch can advance worker organizing and collective bargaining,” the fact sheet said.During his first 100 days, Biden has acted repeatedly to promote unions. On his very first day, he fired the National Labor Relations Board’s anti-union general counsel. On 28 February, he issued a video that some historians say was the most pro-union statement ever by a sitting president, one that many saw as indirect support for the unsuccessful Amazon unionization drive. Biden has vigorously supported the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, (Pro Act), the most pro-union legislation to advance in Congress since the 1930s. The House approved it in March, but it faces a filibuster in the Senate. Among other things, the Pro Act would take away some of corporate America’s most effective tactics in fighting unionization and give state and local employees in all 50 states the right to unionize.Biden has backed other legislation that labor strongly supports. He has pushed to lift the federal minimum wage to $15, and after a $15 minimum lacked the votes to pass the Senate, he issued an executive order on Tuesday setting a $15 minimum for federal contractors. Unions also applaud Biden’s efforts to create 12 weeks’ paid leave for new parents and workers who need to care for sick family members.“Biden has a long record of being very pro-union. The challenge now is figuring out what he can do with Congress, what he can do without Congress and what he’s willing to do without Congress,” said Rebecca Givan, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers. “Supporting organized labor is a win-win for him. It builds on his electoral base. It addresses what he sees as the key problems ailing our country, not the least of which is economic equality, and it builds broader support for Democrats up and down the ballot across the country.”Some labor experts say Biden may prove to be even more pro-union than Franklin D Roosevelt, who signed landmark legislation creating a minimum wage and giving workers a federal protected right to unionize. Givan said that for Biden to be arguably as pro-labor as FDR, he will need to go beyond rhetoric and take some far-reaching pro-labor actions and enact some important pro-labor legislation.Seth Harris, a White House labor adviser, told the Guardian: “In the past we’ve had very good-faith efforts by some presidents to do individual things, like executive order and regulatory actions [to help unions]. The question is, what about a whole-of-government approach? We never sit down and think about what it would be like if the whole government was organized around the principle that worker organizing was a good thing and not a bad thing.”Biden appears eager to use multiple tools and tactics to promote unions, including his procurement powers, through $600bn in annual federal contracting. That power might be used to organize the lightly unionized clean energy industry, officials said.“We know that about two-thirds of Americans approve of unions from a 2020 Gallup poll,” said Bernstein of the council of economic advisers. “We know that only 6% of private-sector workers are union members. There is a huge gap between the number of working Americans who want to be represented by unions and have collective bargaining and the number who are in unions. It could make a very big difference in this space to have a president who uses the bully pulpit to make this a front-and-center preference.”None of this has sat well with Republicans. Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the House education and labor committee, criticized Biden for creating the new taskforce, saying that move “further solidified his cushy relationship with union bosses; the same people responsible for swindling workers’ hard-earned paychecks and pushing radical, unworkable policies that lead to lower economic growth”.But for all his talk of bipartisanship, Biden seems keen to promote unions despite the potential blowback and is actively courting working Americans in his efforts. “Union workers earn roughly 13% more than non-union workers on a similar job site,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “They also experience drastically lower rates of labor standards violations,” like wage theft or safety violations. The fact sheet noted that 60% of the nation’s 16 million union members are women and/or people of color.In an interview, a senior White House official said Biden was very concerned about the weakened state of worker power and sees unions as the best method of increasing it. “His framing of worker power and unionization has always been a matter of getting a fair shake at the bargaining table,” the official said. “He looks at the bargaining table and sees a woman of color in the healthcare sector and on the other side of the table, a bunch of people with a lot more power than she has, and that’s what he wants to balance out.” More

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      Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to come

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      Antitrust is hot. In February, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021. Weeks later, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley proposed the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. Both bills are pending before the Senate judiciary committee.Hawley and Klobuchar have both published books. Hawley offers The Tyranny of Big Tech, and Klobuchar Antitrust. There is plenty of overlap but the substantive and stylistic differences are glaring.Hawley takes pride in owning the libs. Klobuchar criticizes the Trump administration’s lack of antitrust enforcement. His book is barbed. Hers methodical.On 6 January, Hawley gave a clench-fisted salute to pro-Trump militants and voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. On the page, he doubles down.Two weeks after the Capitol attack, Klobuchar told the presidential inauguration: “This is the day our democracy picks itself up, brushes off the dust and does what America always does.” She remains angry with Hawley and “Flyin’” Ted Cruz for the insurrection and its aftermath.Playing to type, Hawley has also provided the sole vote against a bill to crack down on anti-Asian hate crime and opposed renaming military bases named for Confederate generals. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s senior senator and the No 4 member of GOP Senate leadership, parted ways with Hawley on both. In the civil war, Missouri was a border state. A century and a half later, it looks like Hawley has picked the losing side.In his book, he upbraids corporate America, “woke capitalism”, Amazon, Google and Facebook. He demands that Google “be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market”.He would also have Facebook “lose” Instagram and WhatsApp, and accuses Amazon of destroying Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter funded by Rebekah Mercer, a Hawley donor along with her father, Robert Mercer and other Trump acolytes.Hawley’s embrace of antipathy toward big business – even that in which he invests – is not exactly new.In 2008 he published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness and approving of the 26th president’s relentless support for the little guy.Almost a decade later, as Missouri attorney general, Hawley launched an antitrust investigation of Google. Shortly after that, as a Senate candidate, he told Bloomberg News: “We need to have a conversation in Missouri, and as a country, about the concentration of economic power.”But Hawley is buffeted by contradictions. He has for example feted Robert Bork as a conservative martyr, even as Bork’s legal writings have served as intellectual jet fuel for those developments in the marketplace Hawley professes to abhor.The Tyranny of Big Tech makes no mention of the professor who wrote an influential anti-antitrust book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978, nine years before he was blocked from the supreme court.Klobuchar, by contrast, gives Bork plenty of face time.“For Bork,” she writes, “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not a relevant consideration for antitrust law.”Bork had issues with civil rights too. In 1963, when Jim Crow was still in full force, he branded what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority”.In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley also blasts corporate abuse of personal data and data mining – all while he looks to Peter Thiel of Palantir for donor dollars.Left unstated is that Palantir was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Cambridge Analytica was owned by the Mercer family and Thiel was an early funder and board member of Facebook. The circle is complete.Hawley’s book can be viewed as plutocrat-populism in print. Tucker Carlson’s praise is blurbed on the jacket. Inside, Hawley defends Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from purported predations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Both Murdoch and Zuckerberg are billionaires many times over.Hawley is on stronger ground when he revisits the nexus between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Google. Eric Schmidt, then head of the company, was Obama’s chief corporate ally. On election night 2016, Schmidt, wore a Clinton staff badge, having spent months advising her campaign.In her book, Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of US anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy.In a footnote, she commends Hawley for addressing the “turf wars” between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and their negative impact on antitrust enforcement. Unlike Hawley, however, Klobuchar vehemently disapproves of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision and characterizes it as opening “the floodgates to dark money in our politics”.In 2016, Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, wrote an op-ed titled: “Josh Hawley for [Missouri] Attorney General”. In his maiden Senate race, Hawley’s campaign received $10,000 from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund.Unfortunately, Klobuchar goes the extra mile and calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Her would-be cure is worse than the disease – an attack on free speech itself.The proposed amendment would expressly confer upon “Congress and the states” broad power to curtail campaign fundraising and spending. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press”.Not so curiously, it is silent about “abridging the freedom of speech”, an existing constitutional protection. Media barons rejoice – all others start sweating.In 2020, Klobuchar came up way short in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, she chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, where Hawley is a member.Both senators were law review editors: she at the University of Chicago, he at Yale. If Hawley has written a sort of campaign manifesto for the Republican presidential primary in 2024, Klobuchar’s book reads at times like an application for supreme court justice. It contains hundreds of pages of footnotes and pays repeated tribute to the late justice Louis Brandeis.Klobuchar also heaps praise on Stephen Breyer, a member of the court appointed by Bill Clinton and a former Harvard Law professor who in 1982 authored Regulation and Its Reform, a counter to Bork and the “Chicago School”.Klobuchar extends an array of “thank yous”. There is one for Jake Sullivan, her former counsel, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser; another for Matt Stoller, a former staffer to Bernie Sanders on the Senate budget committee and a sometime Guardian contributor; and another for Paul Krugman of the New York Times. All three come with definite viewpoints and are strategically placed.Increased antitrust enforcement by the DoJ, the FTC and the states appears to be more likely than wholesale legislative change. A government antitrust case against Google proceeds. Furthermore, Biden has already appointed two critics of big tech to key slots at the White House and the FTC. Who will lead DoJ’s antitrust division is an open question. Finding a suitable non-conflicted pick appears difficult.Klobuchar and Hawley will be heard from. Their books matter. More

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      Amazon’s sales up 44% as US economy soars 6.4% in first quarter

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      Amazon’s sales increased 44% to $108.5bn in the first three months of the year as the company’s pandemic boom continued into 2021.The sales figures from the online shopping and web services giant came after the release of slew of positive economic reports that suggest the US is shaking off the worst of the pandemic recession.Amazon made a profit of $8.1bn for the quarter – $2.7bn a month – beating analysts’ forecasts after a series of better than expected results from tech companies and others.While Amazon profited throughout the coronavirus downturn, there are now signs that the economic recovery is spreading.The news came after the commerce department said the US economy took off in the first quarter, soaring 6.4% on an annual basis as rising vaccinations, a massive round of government stimulus and a steady recovery in the jobs market helped reverse some of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.The annualized rate suggests the US economy is firmly on the road to recovery. In normal times US gross domestic product (GDP) – the broadest measure of the economy – grows at about 2-2.5% a year, but the pandemic triggered wild swings as the country went into lockdown and businesses shuttered.The news comes amid a flood of good news for the US economy. The corporate earnings season has seen many sectors of the economy from banking to automotive bouncing back from the pandemic. Apple too reported bumper results on Tuesday, the latest tech company to record booming sales during the pandemic. New York City, the center of the US pandemic last year, will fully reopen on 1 July, while 43% of the population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and more than a quarter of the US is now fully vaccinated.US stock markets set record highs again after the GDP report and copper prices, seen as key indicator of economic demand, rose to $10,000 a tonne for the first time since 2011.The outpouring of good news is all the more remarkable given the scale of economic woe the pandemic heaped on the US economy.A year ago US unemployment hit a post-second world war high of 14.8%, it has since fallen to 6%. The economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction in history last year, shrinking 32.9% on an annualized basis. It grew at 4.3% in the last three months of 2020 after recording a remarkable annual growth rate of 33.4% in the previous three months.“The increase in first-quarter GDP reflected the continued economic recovery, reopening of establishments, and continued government response related to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the commerce department said.Problems remain, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits each week is still high. On Thursday the labor department said 553,000 people filed for benefits last week. The number has been falling sharply but remains close to twice as high as pre-pandemic levels and the jobs market is still down 8.4m jobs.Racial disparities also remain. Black and Latino Americans suffered the hardest as the pandemic closed businesses across the US and their unemployment rates remain elevated in comparison with white Americans. Women, too, have been pushed out of the workforce by the shutdowns, triggering what some economists have dubbed a “shecession”. Lack of childcare and other issues have meant that 1.8 million women have left the workforce entirely.But the fast rollout of vaccines, the reopening of businesses and the Biden administration’s $1.9tn stimulus bill have boosted consumer confidence and fueled an impressive recovery.The US government sent cheques to 90 million Americans in March and consumer confidence is approaching pre-pandemic levels having risen for four months in a row. Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of US economic activity.Consumption growth surged 10.7% over the quarter and the US savings rate grew to 21.0% from 13.0%. Capital Economics expects those savers to start spending now that Covid-19 restrictions are lifting.“With the elevated saving rate, households are still flush with cash and, now that restrictions are being eased as the vaccination program proves a success, that will allow them to boost spending on the worst-affected services, without needing to pull back too much on goods spending,” the economic forecasting group wrote in a note to investors. More

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      In space, no one will hear Bezos and Musk’s workers call for basic rights | Robert Reich

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      Elon Musk’s SpaceX just won a $2.9bn Nasa contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Jeff Bezos.The money isn’t a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7bn. Bezos, $197.8bn. Together, that’s almost as much as the bottom 40% of Americans combined.And the moon is only their stepping stone.Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the survival of our species.“If we make life multi-planetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars,” he tweeted.Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. He envisions “very large structures, miles on end” that will “hold a million people or more each”.Back on our home planet, Musk is building electric cars, which will help the environment. And Bezos is allowing us to shop from home, which might save a bit on gas and thereby also help the environment.But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining upLast spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders “fascist” and tweeting “FREE AMERICA NOW”, Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it was safe to do so. Almost immediately, 10 workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least 450 Tesla workers had been infected.Musk’s production assistants, as they’re called, earn $19 an hour – hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk is virulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.Bezos isn’t treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks – often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the US median family income. And no paid sick leave.Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned they’d have to pay union dues (untrue – Alabama is a “right-to-work” state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the country’s fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers won’t be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17th century, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity – in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of today’s super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.But as earthly hazards grow – not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality – escape will become more difficult. Bunkers won’t suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.I’m grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish they’d set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.It’s understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But there’s really no escape. If they’re serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working people here on terra firma. More

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      The Guardian view on Amazon and unions: an unfair fight, but not yet over | Editorial

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      Goliath beats David isn’t half as good a story, but it is the usual way of the world. So last week’s news that Amazon has fended off an attempt by workers to form its first ever US trade union is unsurprising, if sad. What intrigues is the volume and variety of support that the struggle won across the US and the world, from faith leaders to the NFL players association to Republican ever-hopefuls such as Marco Rubio. In that intensity of interest lies the real surprise: the change in popular politics towards both big business and workers.As battles go, it was always ridiculously lopsided. In one corner you had the world’s richest man sitting atop corporate America’s second-largest employer, in perhaps the most anti-union country in the rich world. Opposing him were workers and activists in Alabama, one of the most conservative of all US states, trying something never attempted before in the land of the free: to unionise an entire Amazon warehouse, those hangars full of consumer goods and crushing conditions for workers that together define our way of life. No wonder Jeff Bezos won last week, with workers at the Bessemer warehouse voting more than two to one against forming a union. That result allows Amazon to continue hiring and firing at will. It also brings to a halt perhaps the most watched union drive in the US in years. The future of industrial relations inside a giant warehouse in the Deep South became a subject of debate across Europe, so vast is Amazon’s empire. In the UK, the GMB and Unite are both looking to organise more Amazon employees.Just why the defeat was so large is a question that has prompted much soul-searching among American progressives, with some blaming poor strategic choices by the activists and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union claiming Amazon pursued “egregious and illegal” anti-union tactics, allegations that the company denies. But perhaps the fairest assessment is that from the longstanding labour writer and activist Jane McAlevey: “If the rules for unionization in the US came close to being fair, they [pro-union workers] would have won. But the rules aren’t fair. Quite the opposite: they are outrageously unfair.”But there are two hopeful lessons that America and the rest of the world can take from this story of disappointment. First, it is now convention to argue that societies need strong unions. Last month, Joe Biden gave that message in a video address, but he is only catching up with some of his neighbours in Washington. Researchers at the International Monetary Fund have long pointed out the links between inequality and financial crises, and argued that “restoration of the lower income group’s bargaining power is more effective” than a crash in righting a giant wealth gap. In that battle between the billionaire Mr Bezos and the Alabama workers, it’s clear who those IMF researchers would have rooted for.Second, the excitement around that Alabama ballot shows how far sentiment in the capitalist heartland is moving against big business and towards labour. Opinion polls suggest American public approval for trade unions is the highest it has been in almost 20 years, at 65%. This is not a shift in mood that has been led by Mr Biden; rather, the president is being compelled to channel it, often under the tutelage of politicians and advisers further to the left. This is a very different kind of politics than seen in the era of Barack Obama. Where it goes next will be worth watching. More

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      Warren Buffett, Amazon, Starbucks and others condemn voting restrictions in letter

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      Amazon, BlackRock, Google, Starbucks, billionaire investor Warren Buffett and hundreds of other companies published a letter on Wednesday condemning “discriminatory legislation” designed to hinder voting rights in the US.The letter – the biggest statement yet from corporate America – follows weeks of heated debate over corporate opposition to a series of Republican-sponsored bills that critics charge will restrict voting rights in states across the US.“We Stand for Democracy,” the double-page, centrefold advertisement published in the New York Times and Washington Post, begins. “Voting is the lifeblood of our democracy and we call upon all Americans to take a nonpartisan stand for this basic and most fundamental right of all Americans,” the statement reads.The statement was organized by two of the US’s most prominent Black executives, Kenneth Chenault, former chief executive of American Express, and Kenneth Frazier, the chief executive of Merck. Both executives have been prominent in opposition to restrictive voting laws and in leading a response from the business community.The statement does not address specific election legislation in states but it is the clearest indication yet that US corporations are looking to present a united front despite calls from several senior Republicans, including the former president Donald Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, to stay out of politics.In an interview with the Times, Chenault said: “It should be clear that there is overwhelming support in corporate America for the principle of voting rights.” Frazier added that the statement was intended to be non-partisan.“These are not political issues,” he said. “These are the issues that we were taught in civics.”The effort to rise above partisan politics comes after several companies, including Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, found themselves at the center of a dispute over voting rights legislation passed in Georgia. Lawmakers in the state threatened to withdraw tax breaks after the companies spoke out against the measures and others, including Trump, called for boycotts.The new statement comes after Chenault and Frazier convened a Zoom call of 100 CEOs over the weekend and is notable also for several companies that did not add their names, including Coca-Cola, Delta, Home Depot and JP Morgan.Coca-Cola and Delta declined to comment, according to the Times, while Home Depot said in a statement on Tuesday that “the most appropriate approach for us to take is to continue to underscore our belief that all elections should be accessible, fair and secure.”The JPMorgan Chase chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made a statement on voting rights before many other companies, saying: “We believe voting must be accessible and equitable.”Some signatories, including Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, elected to sign personally rather than on behalf of their companies. Buffett has previously stated that businesses should not be involved in politics but he did not put his personal political views “in a blind trust at all when I took the job”.The statement follows a declaration on Tuesday by automakers ahead of voting legislation hearings in Michigan that they oppose election laws that would inhibit voting.In a separate statement, GM posted on Twitter: “We are calling on Michigan lawmakers and state legislatures across the nation to ensure that any changes to voting laws result in protecting and enhancing the most precious element of democracy.“Anything less falls short of our inclusion and social justice goals,” the company said. More

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      Amazon won the Alabama union fight. But don’t mourn – organize | Indigo Olivier

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      Nearly a week after Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, cast their ballots to determine whether or not to form a union, a final tally shows workers lost their campaign by a more than two-to-one margin. The results are being contested by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which claims Amazon coerced and intimidated workers with their belligerent anti-union campaign. Even if the results are thrown out and another election is held, the outcome is likely to remain unchanged.During the agonizing week-long vote count, all you could do was wait and hope. Little snippets of information trickled in, followed by more waiting. The loss, while not surprising, is a disappointment to not only the workers and supporters who threw so much into this campaign but to the labor movement as a whole.Postmortems abound about the warning signs of defeat, the tactical errors made by organizers, the urgent need for labor law reform, and the demoralizing effect this outcome might have on other workers. In any case, the final takeaway should always be: don’t mourn. Organize.While there is much to learn from the strategy deployed in Bessemer, the defeat is not so much an indictment of the specifics of this one union drive as it is of the balance of power between labor and capital as a whole.Amazon started off with the upper hand and used every tool it could to not only defeat Bessemer workers but to send a clear message to others who might try to organize at other fulfillment centers: you don’t stand a chance.For weeks, Amazon sent a barrage of anti-union messaging to its employees, posted “vote no” flyers in bathroom stalls, texted workers on a regular basis, waged a social media campaign linking back to the “Do It Without Dues” website, changed traffic lights outside the facility, held “captive audience” meetings with workers to dissuade them from voting “yes,” and spent nearly $10,000 a day on union-busting consulting firms.The company followed a familiar anti-union playbook; in fact, they went even further, pressuring USPS officials to install a private ballot box on company property all while denying the reality of their workers peeing in bottles and defecating in bags to meet merciless delivery quotas – a reality that was quickly confirmed by reporters.With all eyes on Amazon, the entire country has just seen the lengths corporations will go to prevent workers from organizing.While the legality of some of these tactics is being challenged by the RWDSU, the reality is that most of them are commonplace and, in the eyes of America’s lopsided and mostly toothless labor laws, fair game. Even if Amazon is found to have violated workers’ rights in Bessemer, it is unlikely that the company will face any serious consequences.More than anything, this defeat stressed the immediate importance of passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (Pro Act) which would ban captive audience meetings, severely limit corporate interference, invalidate right-to-work legislation and strengthen collective bargaining as a whole.The Pro Act, which would represent the most significant federal labor legislation in decades, passed the House in early May and is all but certain to be voted down in the evenly split Senate.President Biden has spoken strongly in favor of the legislation, but its passage is unlikely without eliminating the filibuster – an action for which Biden has withheld full commitment.The Pro Act would allow labor to move from the defensive to the offensive which is crucial when workers – especially at giant corporations like Amazon – already have the deck stacked against them.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the war to shift the focus of power from politicians to workersBiden has so far proven to be both the most pro-labor president in modern history and not nearly where we need him to be to deliver the goods. He sent a message of support to workers organizing in Alabama and around the country but stopped short of calling Amazon out by name. He’s encouraged Congress to pass the Pro Act without forging a viable path to follow through. Simply put, he lacks the courage to do what is needed to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen”.Unions and other pro-labor groups have taken it upon themselves to move things forward. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has shifted the national organizing infrastructure used for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to make hundreds of thousands of calls convincing people of the urgent necessity of the Pro Act.While the Bessemer vote is devastating, the public attention and enthusiasm that was shown to the organizers there is exactly what is needed to make any significant strides in the labor movement, especially if the Senate is going to stall for as long as it can with Green Eggs and Ham.Bessemer was the most high-profile union election in recent memory and it started a national conversation about organized labor and poor working conditions. This election saturated social media (when was the last time you saw a viral TikTok about the importance of union dues?) and has even prompted talk of organizing other Amazon facilities.A battle has been lost but an advance was made in the slow ideological war to shift the public focus of power from politicians to workers. Amazon may have been successful in temporarily exorcising any attempt to organize from within, but the specter still haunts them. More

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      The rich-poor gap in America is obscene. So let's fix it – here's how | Bernie Sanders

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      The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence.Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn.The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America.In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%.Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined.If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 a week less than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are actually losing ground.Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial-complex. But it must be done. Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future.We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in itWe need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, wastewater plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.We need to combat climate change by fundamentally transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels towards energy efficiency and renewable energy which will also create millions of good paying jobs.We need to do what virtually every other major country does by guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. Passing a Medicare for All program would end the absurdity of us paying twice as much per capita for healthcare as do the people of other countries, while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.We need to make certain that all of our young people, regardless of income, have the right to high quality education – including college. And that means making public colleges and universities tuition free and substantially reducing student debt for working families.And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America start paying their fair share of taxes.Growing income and wealth inequality is not just an economic issue. It touches the very foundation of American democracy. If the very rich become much richer while millions of working people see their standard of living continue to decline, faith in government and our democratic institutions will wither and support for authoritarianism will increase. We cannot let that happen. More