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US inflation climbed to 8.5% in March, highest rate since 1981
US inflation climbed to 8.5% in March, highest rate since 1981War in Ukraine drives up energy costs as figures strengthen expectations Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next month Prices in the US climbed at their highest rates since 1981, rising 8.5% over the year to the end of March as the war in Ukraine drove up energy costs for Americans, the labor department announced on Tuesday.The latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which measures the prices of a basket of goods and services – comes after the index rose by 7.9% in the year through February, the fastest pace of annual inflation in 40 years.Driven up by continuing supply chain problems, soaring demand and rising energy prices, inflation is now at levels unseen in the US since Ronald Reagan took the White House from Jimmy Carter.Biden heads to Iowa to unveil plan to reduce gas prices as inflation soars – liveRead moreThe price increases are broad – with the cost of rent, gas and food causing particular hardship for lower income Americans and represent a major blow to the Biden administration, already facing tough odds of retaining control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.Soaring gas prices were the main driver of the rise. The gasoline index rose 18.3% in March and accounted for over half of all the items’ monthly increase. Gas prices have begun to fall, in a sign that some economists have argued may suggest inflation has reached its peak.The food index rose 1% in March compared with February, and is up 8.8% compared with the prior 12 months. Canned fruit and vegetable prices rose 3.8% from February to March, rice prices rose 3.2%, potatoes 3.2% and ground beef 2.1%.Andrew Hunter, senior US economist at Capital Economics, said energy prices would come down in the months ahead and there were signs that price pressures appear to be moderating.But, he added, the figures were likely to strengthen the Federal Reserve’s plan to increase interest rates as it struggles to tamp down inflation.“With Fed officials sounding more hawkish by the day, the March data won’t change their plans to up the pace of rate-hikes to 50 basis points per meeting from next month. Even so, it does support our view that, having been slow to realize that the initial surge wasn’t transitory, Fed officials are now being a bit too pessimistic about how quickly inflation will drop back,” he wrote in a note to investors.The White House warned ahead of the report it was expecting a bad set of figures. On Monday White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the labor department’s previous report had not included the majority of the jump in oil and gas costs caused by the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.“We expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin’s price hike,” Psaki said.There are two versions of the CPI, one that includes all the prices consumers face and another – core CPI – which excludes food and energy prices, which tend to be more volatile. Core prices climbed 6.5% in the year through March, up from 6.4% in the year through February.The core index did suggest the pace of inflation was slowing, rising 0.3% from February, compared with 0.5% the prior month.Psaki said the administration expected a wide disparity between the two measures because of the soaring price of gas. Nationally the average price of a gallon of gas is now $4.11, compared with $2.86 a year ago, according to AAA.“At times, gas prices were more than one dollar above pre-invasion levels, so that roughly 25% increase in gas prices will drive tomorrow’s inflation reading,” Psaki said.Joe Biden addressed the latest inflation figures at a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, where he announced plans to use more ethanol in US fuel during the summer in an attempt to tackle high gas prices. “I am doing everything in within my executive power to bring down the Putin price hike,” he said. TopicsUS economyInflationEconomicsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
Virtual Reality is Impossible, Like Perpetual Motion
Over a hundred years ago, most scientific evidence pointed toward an impending invention which would change the world, encapsulated in the paradoxical expression “perpetual motion.” Ultimately that invention proved to be impossible because of the brand-new scientific discovery that energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
Nowadays, a similarly profitable fantasy builds on a similarly paradoxical expression: “virtual reality” (VR). Turns out Nature says VR won’t succeed either, because VR will inevitablyinduce “simulator sickness,” as it always has.
The Industrial Revolution started with steam, allowing fuel (coal) to do the work of many men. As the technology improved, more and more power became available. Part of that power came from burning more coal. Another part came from improved mechanical efficiency, that is by recovering and reusing waste heat, force and momentum. Many tinkerers were convinced that by using clever mechanical trickery, such as lifting weights over here in order to drop them on lever-arms over there, engines could in fact “recover” more energy than went in. Evidence made this hypothesis reasonable, because the trend of recovered energy had been rising upward steadily for decades. Hopefully it could pass 100%.
The idea behind perpetual motion was that if the trick worked — that if a machine could essentially harvest its own momentum to keep itself running forever — then even a tiny excess of power could be amplified and scaled, and no one would need to burn actual fuel any more.
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Back then physics and physicists didn’t really exist, but thoughtful people ever since da Vinci have known perpetual motion was a fantasy. A hundred years ago, they proved it scientifically by finding a deeper principle at work, one which absolutely limited the amount of energy in play. The new science said that energy is not created, not destroyed, and certainly not free. The total energy must be “conserved” (kept fixed). No free lunch from Nature. But optimistic tinkerers kept trying anyway, until the US Patent office stopped allowing applications altogether, killing the “technology” for good.
Virtual Reality or Unreal Virtuality?
That fantasy repeats itself with so-called “virtual reality.” According to the evidence, VR gets better every year. An extrapolation of that trend would let VR replace the boring physical world we’re usually stuck in, literally creating whole new universes (or metaverses) and whole new streams of revenue, almost out of nothing. Free reality.
I know VR cannot work because I happen to know how nervous systems work. New technology won’t fix that mismatch, but at least new research explains it. That research explains both human and machine learning in the same terms; neuroscience and data science account for both as signal bandwidth. So formerly fuzzy questions about how brains work now have mathematically absoluteanswers. In the case of VR, as with creating energy, it turns out there are absolute limits on what brains can and can’t do, limits not provable before.
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There are many ways to prove that VR makes people sick; two will do for now. One involves how different senses mix together in the brain. The other involves how much time a brain takes to mix and make sense of them.
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Vertebrate brains evolved 500 million years ago to do exactly one thing, a task which even now is far more difficult than memory or speech: making 3D pictures out of tiny input pulses (a computational process called “tomography”). Our everyday experience bears this out. The sensory inputs into our bodies (and outputs from nerves into the brain) come from eyeballs, eardrums, taste and smell receptors, and especially from millions of vibration-sensors spread throughout the body. Airborne sound hits ears and skin together, and our brains combine them into a single unified experience so solid and believable that we know for sure the world exists, even behind us, even when we can’t see it. Lived sensory experience is unified by the hardware of our brain: that’s how brains work and what they do. Neuroscientists call the process “sensory fusion.”
Obviously, a brain fabricating a single unified experience is the opposite of fabricating two inconsistent, competing experiences, which is what VR forces on our brains. For example, a gamer’s eyes may be convinced that he is flying high-G rolls inside a fighter plane aloft, because VR is so good at creating visual illusions, making every visible cue consistent with all the rest….looming, moving, twisting, occluding, dropping, all synchronized so the visual world makes 3D sense.
But vision isn’t everything to brains, not even half. In the gamer’s case, all the other senses agree that the body is not moving or flying, but sitting in a chair. Neural signals from the inner ear, the legs, the gut, the spine all confirm no barrel-rolls, no upside-down, no special forces pulling or pushing. No jet engine sounds rattling the body, just injected in the ears. In this configuration roughly half the brain is convinced the body is quite still, the other half convinced it’s flying hard and fast. A brain can’t hold such a deep contradiction for very long, so “simulator sickness” makes the gamer nauseous. That problem hasn’t changed in 40 years, and won’t, ever, because brains can only feel one reality at a time, and the real reality is always centered in your gut, regardless of what the eyeballs say.
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Vision and motion
Another insoluble problem with VR is how fast it responds to self-motion. In the regular real world (no VR yet), every time you move your body, neck, head, or eyeballs, the image into your eyeballs (and onto your retina) changes with that motion. To make its picture of the world, the brain anticipates the physical shift before it moves its muscles, and uses that anticipation to predict what it will see. The brain uses an interactiveprocess of continual exploration and zooming (neuroscience buzzword: “sensory contingencies”). Because the brain makes plans, then sends pulses., And then the head and eyes begin to move., The brain therefore creates internal expectations long before any motion could be visible from outside.
But at best VR can measure your self-motion from the outside, after the fact. It can’t measure things which haven’t happened yet. (Even access to your brainwaves would not solve this problem, since even brain waves are merely delayed traces of yet smaller and more subtle processes). So even an ideal VR response would be fatally delayed, relative to how your eyes and brain normally work. What VR shows your eyeballs is not exactly what would come from a real world, but milliseconds slower, and only approximate. The faster you move your head and eyes, the more weirdly a fake world slips under them.
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The core problem is not with VR, but with brains themselves because their task is nearly impossible already. It’s clear most humans see the world in high-resolution (HDMI or better in space, seamless motion in real time). But synthesizing high-resolution 3-D moving images is hard even for supercomputers and MRI machines. It’s even harder for the brain to synthesize so much data (teravoxels) if it gets a million pulses per second of input from two jiggling spheres of jelly (the eyeballs). That’s about a million data points synthesized for each single input pulse. It’s a miracle that Nature can leverage such internal fakery, then erase the artifacts so perfectly the result seems not merely realistic, but absolutely real. Unfortunately for VR, that miracle is utterly dependent on the 3-D world actually being there. There is no mathematical way to make a consistent world-image from partial, delayed, corrupted data injected into only part of a brain’s input stream, while ignoring all the rest. Our brains need real-live 3D data like our lungs need air, and no amount of hype will change that fact.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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‘The model is listening’: union’s win at Amazon hatched in a small apartment
‘The model is listening’: union’s win at Amazon hatched in a small apartment A suburban two-bedroom apartment was the HQ from which Amazon’s multimillion-dollar anti-union effort was defeatedThe living room of the small two-bedroom apartment in Staten Island – sometimes called New York City’s “forgotten borough” – is overflowing with office supplies, mail, red union stickers, and flyers with information about unions.It seems almost unbelievable that amid this chaos, and armed with just $120,000 that they raised on GoFundMe, its occupants, Amazon workers Brett Daniels and Connor Spence, helped successfully unionize workers at the nearby gargantuan 855,000-square-foot Amazon warehouse – the first of the company’s warehouses in the US to vote for a union.‘The revolution is here’: Chris Smalls’ union win sparks a movement at other Amazon warehousesRead more“This is a monstrous win for the working class,” said Daniels. “The Amazon Labor Union showed what seemed impossible is possible.”The apartment in a two-floor suburban house was the headquarters from which Amazon workers pulled off one of the biggest wins for US unions in decades. Beating Amazon’s multimillion-dollar efforts to stop them organizing involved tireless organizing, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and a lot of free homemade food. But most of all, said 29-year-old Julian Mitchell-Israel, an Amazon worker and one of the original organizers with the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), they listened.“It’s not that we’ve established a new model of organizing here,” said Mitchell-Israel. “The model is listening and highlighting people’s stories, and when we build a platform, using it to lift up their stories, because that’s what’s been compelling for the workers, that’s what’s gotten people to vote yes.”Amazon Labor Union defied the odds without any affiliation to national labor unions and precious little support from the political class which has seen other efforts to organize at Amazon rebuffed.The surprise victory has been hailed as historic in the US media, and its organizers have been bombarded with interview requests from around the world. Elected officials and prominent figures have issued public declarations of support, including Joe Biden and several members of Congress, all attention that had been lacking leading up to the vote as most media outlets and elected officials, including ostensible supporters of labor unionizing efforts, ignored the ALU’s efforts.The union has also received inquiries from Amazon workers at warehouses and delivery stations around the US and internationally, requesting assistance and asserting interest in organizing unions at their own work sites. There are meetings scheduled with New York elected officials in Albany and with Sean O’Brien, president of the powerful Teamsters union, who has also pledged to unionize Amazon.For Mitchell-Israel the noise is distracting attention from how ALU achieved its victory. “There’s just so much talk about this union in a way that, I think, abstracts it and makes it into a phenomenon that it’s not. It’s just people and stories and love and necessity, and that’s what it comes down to,” he said. “You go and you listen and rather than telling them they should vote yes, telling them here’s how you organize, you just ask them the right questions, and people will come up with their own answers to it. People have different answers, and because they’re the workers, they’re the ones being affected, it’s going to be the right answer.”With more than 1 million employees in the US, Amazon is the country’s second largest private employer. The company has faced public scrutiny for years over workers reporting abhorrent working conditions, high injury rates, and immense productivity pressures, which have contributed to annual turnover rates of about 150%.On Staten Island the Covid-19 pandemic brought the clash between Amazon and its workers to a head. ALU founder Chris Smalls, then as assistant manager at Amazon, helped lead a walkout in March 2020 over lack of Covid-19 protections and was fired shortly after. Leaked memos showed Amazon executives denigrating Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in a meeting with the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, and suggesting it would be a win for them if they made him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement”.“Welp there you go!” Smalls tweeted last week.@amazon wanted to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against them…. welp there you go! @JeffBezos @DavidZapolsky CONGRATULATIONS 🎉 @amazonlabor We worked had fun and made History ‼️✊🏾 #ALU # ALUfortheWin welcome the 1st union in America for Amazon 🔥🔥🔥🔥— Christian Smalls (@Shut_downAmazon) April 1, 2022
“The workers that I organize with are like my family now,” Smalls told the Guardian. “To bring this victory to them is the best feeling in the world next to my kids’ birth.”Smalls’s story proved a powerful one on Staten Island. “When I do talk to workers, I tell them I was fired wrongfully because I tried to protect workers’ health and safety, and that can happen to you,” Smalls said after helping to form the group. “You can complain or submit a grievance, and they could just terminate you or target you to be terminated, or retaliate against you. And there’s no protection, so the only way we’re going to be protected is by forming that union.”The ALU’s fight is far from over. Organizers are currently bracing for the upcoming union election at the LDJ5 sorting center in Staten Island, which begins on 25 April, and cementing resources, such as finding office space, ahead of the fight to negotiate a first union contract with Amazon, which continues to vehemently oppose unions.The tech company may have lost this battle but it continues the fight. “We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees,” said Amazon in response to the union win. “We’re evaluating our options, including filing objections based on the inappropriate and undue influence by the NLRB that we and others (including the National Retail Federation and US Chamber of Commerce) witnessed in this election.”Shortly after the union victory, internal documents leaked to the Intercept revealed a planned internal messaging app for employees would block the use of words or phrases such as “union”, “pay raises”, “living wage” or “representation”.Amazon has a record of firing workers involved in organizing activities and automatically terminating workers for minor infractions, including Jason Anthony, a picker at JFK8 on Staten Island and a labor organizer and founding member of ALU.In the summer of 2020, Anthony was automatically fired from Amazon when his unpaid time off went in the red. He had run out of his prescription medications and transportation to the warehouse was limited due to Covid-19 restrictions and staffing issues with public transit.Anthony had to wait over a year to be able to get rehired, but currently has a case being investigated with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about Amazon’s alleged lack of accommodations for workers with mental disabilities. He is currently on short-term disability leave from a back injury sustained at Amazon during peak season in December 2021.He has known Chris Smalls from long before Smalls emerged as a celebrity in the US labor movement. “Chris was the best person you could work with. He cared about his employees from a human perspective, not just as a manager,” said Anthony, “When he got fired in 2020, I went to the building to support him and when I got fired several months later, I called him and asked him for his support, so since then, we developed a brotherhood that will never ever be broken. We could argue, have internal disagreements here and there, but at the end of the day we always come together.”Now the ALU will begin its negotiations with Amazon with the aim of improving working conditions, pay, breaks and their lives as workers. The union plans on building out these efforts in the US and abroad at Amazon.New York is a union town and replicating the Staten Island victory may prove difficult across the US. Another effort to organize in Alabama hangs in the balance with Amazon currently ahead in the votes. But Anthony is convinced change is coming. “This victory is only the beginning of a global revolution,” he said.TopicsAmazonThe ObserverUS unionsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More - in US Politics
Tax the rich: these one percenters want people like them to pay higher taxes
Tax the rich: these one percenters want people like them to pay higher taxesMembers of the Patriotic Millionaires say the income gap in the US has become a disaster – and it’s time to ‘take that money back’ The sound system played Pink Floyd’s Money as the Patriotic Millionaires assembled in the boutique Eaton hotel in Washington DC last week. After compulsory Covid tests there was a lot of well-heeled hugging and laughter among a crowd that looked like extras from Succession as they sat down at tables stacked with M&Ms stamped with “tax the rich”.This was the first time since the pandemic that the Patriotic Millionaires had assembled together in person. The group, founded in 2010, is made up of high net worth individuals who believe – counterintuitively these days – that the really rich should pay more taxes. And after a dozen often frustrating years some of them now believe change is coming.In the White House, Joe Biden has proposed new taxes on households worth more than $100m. The war in Ukraine has shown that the international community can, and will, crack down on oligarchs. Some of the workers who made fortunes for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Starbucks’s Howard Schultz have successfully formed unions despite the millions both companies spent fighting them off.“No one was talking about taxing the rich when we started,” said Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world.Even the conversation seemed ridiculous under Donald Trump, Pearl added. “We have seen a huge change. You have a president talking about taxing the rich, people are talking about wealth taxes – those weren’t even fringe ideas 10 years ago. I’m not saying it’s going to happen and pass into law but there are conversations at the highest levels.”Part of the reason why those conversations are happening is that the situation has got so bad. Speaker after speaker at the one-day conference highlighted how the very, very rich have hijacked the political system around the world, run down wages and exacerbated income inequality, ramming home the title of the conference: Oligarchs vs All of Us: The Fight for Power & Money.Another member, Gary Stevenson, a British trader turned inequality economist, believes things are only going to get worse. Billionaires made fortunes from soaring stock markets, property prices and other assets during the pandemic. Government handouts have largely helped the rich, he argues. “If nothing is done this is going to be a massive disaster,” he said. “However bad you think things are, I guarantee they will get much, much worse.”When the pandemic struck there was talk of it being a great leveler – we were all in this together. In fact, Covid-19 exacerbated economic and racial inequalities. US billionaires received a $1.1tn windfall as their wealth soared to record levels. The billionaire class boomed in Asia and reached record levels in the UK. But as we emerge from the shadow of Covid-19, hoi poloi find themselves struggling with soaring inflation and rising cost of basics such as rent, utilities and food.For Stevenson this enormous explosion of wealth is “end of civilization stuff”. “There is one thing and one thing only that we can do,” he said. “We have got to take that money back.”But are rich – and overwhelmingly white – people the right people to push that message? Abigail Disney thinks so. Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, co-founder of the Walt Disney Company, sees her family as a synechdoche for what has happened to the rest of America.The Disneys were already super-rich by the time Disney, 62, was born but their wealth grew enormously just as the gap between rich and poor has grown. “Money changed my family,” she said, and not for the better. Now, she says, those rich people live in another world and are unable to see what the consequences of rising inequality will be. Hearing that from one of their own breaks that barrier, she believes.“The only people billionaires will listen to are other billionaires and multimillionaires. You need at least the two commas. And if they won’t listen, there are their children and their wives, and they will listen,” she said.While her money opens the doors of power, Disney finds her message also discombobulates ordinary Americans. She is regularly assailed on Twitter for daring to suggest rich people should pay more taxes. The problem is that people have been convinced that “every single person in this country is a billionaire waiting to happen”, in an orchestrated campaign she believes was engineered to protect the wealth of the 1%.The last four decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth. Only problem is it went to those who were already wealthy. https://t.co/anTolPYv5g— Abigail Disney (@abigaildisney) April 5, 2022
Hearing one of the 1% suggest that maybe that dream is a nightmare makes people crazy, she said. “The pushback I get is: ‘You never worked a day in your life! You don’t know anything!’ Well, you are right, you are making my point for me! I should not have this power and influence. Just keep making my point for me,” she said.“For me to be speaking out against my own supposed self-interest has a wow factor that catches the attention. I don’t want to ever stop doing that. We need to model what it looks like to not defend your own self-interest all the time. When you are fine and other people are not, you put aside your own self-interest and stick up for somebody else.”The chance of Biden’s tax cuts making it through Congress are slim. US politicians rely too heavily on the wealthy and some Democrats as well as Republicans will balk at taxing them more. But Disney argues that the debate has changed. After the pandemic, US oligarchs aren’t the heroes they once were and, notably, Republicans have so far steered clear of an all-out attack on Biden’s proposal.“Four years ago if you’d said ‘billionaires tax’ then they would have said you can’t bash billionaires, you’re encouraging class warfare. I haven’t heard a whiff of that,” said Disney. “Let’s not kid ourselves, the other side has tested that and found it isn’t working. That class war rhetoric isn’t working any more. And that’s good news. Because if we don’t ruffle some feathers now, we are going to have a class war. A real one.”TopicsUS income inequalityIncome inequalityUS politicsInequalityUS taxationfeaturesReuse this content More - in UK Politics
Glitch in post-Brexit customs system adds to major Channel lorry chaos on Kent roads
Problems with a key post-Brexit IT system for customs checks are contributing to Easter traffic chaos in Kent as thousands of lorries are parked up awaiting Channel crossings.A 23-mile coastbound stretch of the M20 was closed from junction eight (Maidstone) to junction 11 (Westenhanger) heading for the Port of Dover or Eurotunnel as part of Operation Brock, causing chaos on surrounding local roads.The A20 Roundhill Tunnel is closed under the Dover TAP scheme to prevent HGVs jumping the queue.Some delays to Channel crossings are being driven by the suspension of P&O Ferries sailings after the operator sacked nearly 800 seafarers without notice last month, with rival DFDS warning it no longer has capacity to take stranded P&O customers.However, the Road Haulage Association said HMRC is “continuing to have issues” with its new post-Brexit GVMS system for customs declarations, without which lorries cannot move goods between Britain and the EU.Without the system, drivers lack scannable barcodes needed for the rapid check of lorries at ports including Dover.A temporary workaround could be in place until Monday, the RHA said.An HMRC spokesperson said: “We have put in place contingency processes to ensure businesses can keep goods and freight moving while we return to full service.”A message on the HMRC site says: “We are undertaking robust investigations into our systems to address the underlying issues behind this outage. We will provide a further update by midday, Monday 11 April. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”Operation Brock involves using a moveable barrier to create a contraflow system enabling lorries to queue and other traffic to keep moving in both directions.However, the system has been overwhelmed, with Kent hit by long queues every day since 1 April when poor weather also disrupted crossings.The Port of Dover said in a statement it handled 30,000 departing passengers last weekend, which was a three-fold increase on the total during the corresponding weekend in 2021.It added it is “expecting another busy weekend” as it urged customers not to arrive before their booked sailing.Trevor Bartlett, leader of Dover District Council, said the port will be “under severe pressure throughout the busy Easter getaway” as he warned residents to prepare for “some disruption again this weekend”.He said he has “made it clear” to Kent Police, Kent County Council and the Kent Resilience Forum – a partnership of local organisations and agencies – that “we will not tolerate another weekend of gridlock in Dover”.The Conservative councillor went on: “For too long, local residents and businesses have had to endure disruption and, quite frankly, deserve better.“We share your concerns about the impact of gridlock on local businesses and access to vital health and social care for our most vulnerable residents.“Many are rightly worried about how the emergency services would be able to respond to a major incident when all routes into the town are effectively cut off.”Ashford MP Damian Green called for changes to be made to Operation Brock.He told KentOnline: “What we need is to make Brock work. We have established that up until now it does work, even in times of stress, because the motorway is kept open.“Once you close the motorway it makes it impossible, so the Kent Resilience Forum needs to look at what changes need to happen so Brock can cope with what is a very unusual situation, where more than half of the freight-carrying capacity at Dover has disappeared in one time.”P&O Ferries announced on Wednesday that it is preparing to resume cross-Channel sailings.A spokesman said: “P&O is looking forward to welcoming back vital services and we expect to have two of our vessels ready to sail on the Dover-Calais route by next week, subject to regulatory sign-off, namely both the Pride of Kent and Spirit of Britain between Dover-Calais.” More
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Teamsters president vows to pressure Amazon after New York votes for union
Teamsters president vows to pressure Amazon after New York votes for unionSean O’Brien says it’s vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has ‘total disrespect’ for its workers The Teamsters’ new president has pledged his powerful union will step up the pressure on Amazon and mount its own efforts to unionize the company after workers in New York voted to form the company’s first US union.In an interview with the Guardian Sean O’Brien said it was vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has “total disrespect” for its workers and was putting downward pressure on standards for unionized warehouse workers and truck drivers across the US.“You have an employer like Jeff Bezos taking a joyride into space, and he bangs on his workers to be able to fund his trip,” said O’Brien, who was inaugurated as Teamsters president on 22 March. He asserted that Amazon workers would benefit greatly from joining the Teamsters, saying that Amazon’s drivers and warehouse workers are treated and paid considerably worse than their unionized counterparts at other companies.“They’re awful, they’re disrespectful the way they treat their employees,” O’Brien said of Amazon.On Friday, a final vote count showed that Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize, 2,654 for a union, 2,131 against. Another vote to organize workers in Alabama hangs in the balance. Amazon beat off the union drive by 118 votes but the final tally is awaiting a review of 416 challenged ballots.O’Brien said he applauds any organization that seeks to take on Amazon: “I commend anybody who tries to take on a schoolyard bully like Amazon.”The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is seeking to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, while a new, independent union, the Amazon Labor Union, was behind the organizing at two Amazon facilities on Staten Island.O’Brien said that no union is better positioned than the Teamsters to organize Amazon because his 1.3-million-member union has decades of experience in unionizing and winning good contracts for warehouse workers and truck drivers. “This is the only union that has the proven track record of organizing workers in these industries,” O’Brien said.He said the Teamsters needed to organize Amazon as an obligation to “our members” and “our largest employers”, most notably United Parcel Service and DHL. Concerned that Amazon’s lower pay is undercutting Teamster employers and Teamster contracts, O’Brien said he didn’t want Amazon to threaten the livelihood of Teamsters or “diminish the standards established by collective bargaining agreements”.“We have to organize Amazon,” he said. “We have to have a plan in place. We have to execute that plan and not be scared to change that plan if it doesn’t work at times. Even a world champion team doesn’t win all the time. Hopefully we will have a favorable win-to-loss ratio.”Before winning a five-year term as Teamsters’ president, O’Brien headed a large Teamsters local in the Boston area for 15 years. He succeeded James P Hoffa, who stepped down after 23 years as Teamsters president.“We the Teamsters have the best resources out there, not just financially” to unionize Amazon, O’Brien said. “We have the ability to utilize our members who work in the industry, who know the benefits of working under a collective bargaining agreement and having dignity and respect in the workplace.“We have a lot of work to do,” he continued. “We have a plan to focus on the big metro cities,” where he said the likelihood of winning unionization elections would be greatest. He said that the Teamsters would mount “non-traditional campaigns” that include up lining politicians’ support and extensive community support behind unionization. He stressed the importance of worker-to-worker organizing: “We need to utilize our best organizers: our worker members who work in these industries.”Amazon officials say their company’s pay levels are competitive – $18 for a full-time entry-level worker in Staten Island and nearly $16 in Alabama. The company notes that its benefits, including health coverage, begin for full-time workers the day they join the company.Amazon officials have repeatedly said they are committed to maintaining an environment where its employees can thrive and feel appreciated and respected.News of the Staten Island victory comes as union activity is experiencing a resurgence in the US. Joe Biden has positioned himself as the most pro-union president in generations.“The Biden administration has done a great job for unions right out of the gate,” O’Brien said. “An administration that’s not afraid to endorse unions is great.” He praised, in particular, a 2021 law that Biden backed that helped secure the pensions of millions of union members and retirees, including many Teamsters whose pension plans were seriously underfunded.O’Brien said the Teamsters and other unions need to do a far better job explaining to Americans how unions lift workers and the nation as a whole. He said many Americans view the Teamsters favorably despite the movie The Irishman about scandals inside the Teamsters a half-century ago. “During the worst pandemic we’ll ever face people saw that we delivered packages, did trash pick-ups, did food and grocery deliveries,” O’Brien said. “We’ve proven our worth providing goods and services to keep this country moving.”He talked at length about the importance of holding politicians accountable, especially when they fail to back workers and unions. “I can’t remember people’s birthdays. But I can remember the last person that screwed me. That’s how we’re going to deal with those politicians who vote against us. We’ll run people against you. We’ll campaign against you.”TopicsAmazonUS unionsBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
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‘I know how much it hurts’: Biden to release US oil in bid to lower gas prices – as it happened
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‘Incontrovertible evidence that this [war] has been a strategic disaster for Russia’ – White House
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Romney: $10bn ‘agreement in principle’ over Covid relief
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Biden confirms draw on oil reserves to lower gas prices
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Biden confirms draw on oil reserves to lower gas prices
Joe Biden says his plan to release 1m barrels daily from the US strategic oil reserves will: “Ease the pain families are feeling right now, end this era of dependence and uncertainty and lay a new and new foundation for true and lasting American energy independence.”
The president is speaking live at the White House to announce the move, which he said would last up to six months and which will represent the largest ever draw ever on the country’s emergency supplies.
“I know how much it hurts,” he said of rising gas prices that have followed the decision by the Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
“Putin’s price hike is hitting Americans at the pump.” More
