#Company Unions

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Stellantis wants to make scabbing woke

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

I know, I know, it's weird when the worst people you know are right, even when they're right for the wrong reasons: like, the "Intelligence Community" is genuinely terrible, pharma companies are murderous crooks, and Big Tech really does have a dangerous grip on public debate. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, is what I'm saying:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

When conspiratorialists and reactionaries holler about how the FBI are dirty-tricking creeps who are framing Trump, it's tempting to say, "well, if Trumpists hate the FBI, then I will love the FBI. Who cares about COINTELPRO and what they did to Martin Luther King?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

It's a process called "schizmogenesis": forming new group identity beliefs based on saying the opposite of what your enemies say, and as tempting as that is, it's extraordinarily foolish and dangerous:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

It means that canny reactionaries like Steve Bannon can trick you into taking any position merely by taking the opposite one. Bannon's followers are even more easily led, so it's easy for him to convince them that we have always been at war with Oceania. The right has created an entire mirror world of "I know you are but what am I?" politics.

Anti-vax co-opts "bodily autonomy." Climate denial becomes environmentalism ("wind turbines kill birds"). Transphobia becomes feminism ("keep women-only spaces for real women"). Support for strongmen becomes anti-imperialism ("don't feed the war machine in Ukraine"). These are the doppelgangers Naomi Klein warns us against:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The far right has even managed to co-opt anti-corporate rhetoric. Culture warriors rail against "woke capitalism," insisting that when big businesses take socially progressive positions, it's just empty "virtue signalling." And you know what? They've got a point. Partially.

As with all mirror-world politics, the anti-woke-capitalism shuck is designed to convince low-information right-wing pismires into buying "anti-woke pillows" and demanding the right to pay junk fees to "own the libs":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

But woke capitalism is bullshit. Corporations – profit-maximizing immortal transhuman colony organisms that view workers and customers as inconvenient gut-flora – do not care about social justice. They don't care about anything, except for minimizing compensation for workers while maximizing the risk those workers bear; and locking in and gouging customers for products that are as low-quality as can be profitably sold.

Take DEI, a favored target of the right. It's undoubtably true that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives have made some inroads on correcting bias in hiring decisions, with the result that companies get better employees who would have been excluded without this explicit corrective.

However, corporations don't value DEI because they abhor their history of hiring bias. Instead, DEI is how corporate management demonstrates to workers that their grievances are best addressed by trusting corporate leadership to correct their error of their ways – and not by forming a union.

Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, corporations would create fake "Company Unions" whose leadership were beholden to the company executives. These were decoy unions: they looked and sounded like unions, but when they negotiated with management, they were actually working for the bosses, not the workers.

This is more mirror-world tactics. They're the labor equivalent of the "crisis pregnancy centers" that masquerade as abortion clinics in order to fool pregnant people and trap them with endless delays until it's too late to terminate their pregnancies. Company unions get workers to trust in negotiators who are secretly working for the bosses, who emerge from the bargaining table with one-sided, abusive contracts and insist that this is the best deal workers can hope for.

Company unions were outlawed 90 years ago, and for decades, labor had a seat at the table, with wages tracking productivity gains and workers getting protection for discrimination, unsafe labor conditions, and wage-theft. Then came the neoliberal turn, and 40 years of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and corporate rule.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, finally, we have reached a turning point in labor, with public approval for unions at levels not seen since the Carter administration and thousands of strikes and protests breaking out across the country:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

It's not just the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, either. For the first time in history, the UAW is striking against all the major automakers, and they are winning:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/10/striking-uaw-workers-win-key-battery-plant-concession-from-general-motors/

The automakers are getting desperate. Stellantis – Chrysler's latest alias, reflecting the company's absorbtion into corporate-human-centipede of global carmakers – has mobilized its DEI programs, trying to get marginalized people to believe that scabbing is a liberatory activity:

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/10/uaw-auto-strike-stellantis/

Stellantis calls each of its DEI silos a "Business Resource Group" (BRG): there's a "Working Parents Network," an "African Ancestry Network," "Asians Connected Together," a "DiverseAbilities Network," a "Gay & Lesbian Alliance" and more:

https://blog.stellantisnorthamerica.com/2021/07/20/business-resource-groups-drive-inclusion-and-diversity/

The corporate managers who lead these BRGs have established a scab rotation for each subgroup, calling on members to cross a UAW picket-line at a Michigan Parts Distribution Center run by Stellantis subsidiary Mopar:

Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team. Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on! Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!"

Now, these BRGs weren't invented by marginalized workers facing discrimination in the workplace. They come from literal union-busting playbooks produced by giant "union avoidance" firms that charge bosses millions for advice on skirting – or breaking – the law to keep workplace democracy at bay. All the biggest anti-union consultancies love BRGs, from Littler Mendelson to Jackson Lewis. IRI Strategies touts BRGs as a way to "union-proof" a business by absorbing workers' grievances in a decoy committee that will let them feel listened to.

BRGs, in other words, are the Crisis Pregnancy Centers of workplace discrimination. They're a Big Store Con, a company union dressed up as corporate social responsibility.

Now, let's not pretend that unions have a sterling record on race and gender issues. Giant labor organizations like the AFL had to be dragged into racial integration, and trade unions have sometimes been on the wrong side of anti-immigration panics:

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

But unions have also been the most reliable way for people of color and women to win better workplace treatment. The struggle for racial and gender justice was fought through labor organizing. Remember that MLK's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech was given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis:

https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/mountaintop

Black organizers have always been militant labor organizers. Labor Day commemorates the victory of the long, hard-fought Pullman strike, where Black workers brought one of the most powerful companies in America to its knees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

And women have always fought for gender justice through the labor movement: the New York shirtwaist strike is the Ur-example, when women-led unions fought thugs and scabs on icy New York streets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_shirtwaist_strike_of_1909

It's no surprise that labor activism, anti-racism and feminism go together. Since the earliest days, the labor justice struggle was also a social justice struggle. To learn more check out Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

The most exploited, underpaid, and abused workers in America are also the most marginalized (duh).

From nurses:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/kaiser-healthcare-union-says-week-long-strike-possible-early-next-month-2023-10-09/

To teachers:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-18/l-a-teachers-win-21-wage-increase-in-new-lausd-contract

To Amazon warehouse workers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Labor_Union

To publishing assistants:

https://apnews.com/article/harpercollins-union-strike-ends-0a94238718879066d9b21af6266be526

To baristas:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/29/business/starbucks-union-wages/index.html

To fast-food workers:

https://www.ufcw.org/about/

The vanguard of today's labor surge is Black, brown, female and queer. Without a union, workers who face discrimination are on their own, hoping that their bosses will voluntarily do something about it. Black workers in Tesla's rabidly anti-union shops face vicious racism, from slurs to threats to violence. Without a union, they have to rely on the shifting whims of an Apartheid emerald mine space-Karen for relief, or hope for help from the NLRB or a class-action lawyer:

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-racism-black-lawsuit-class-action-21c88bddf60eca702560be58429495de

The far right isn't wrong when they holler that woke capitalism is bullshit. As with so many of their mirror-world causes, they've got a point, but only a limited one. The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union. The problem with relying on Business Resource Groups to fight racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is that these struggles are all class struggles, and a BRG is never going to fight against the company that created it.

To understand how bankrupt woke capitalism is, conside this: Stellantis is calling on its "Working Parents Network" to scab this Friday. Stellantis is also being sanctioned by the Department Of Labor for discriminating against nursing mothers – the same "working parents" that the BRG is meant to protect:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2023/02/08/investigation-finds-stellantis-violated-rights-of-nursing-mothers-at-sterling-heights-plant/

Woke capitalism is just another kind of "predatory inclusion," like Intuit's campaign defending its "Free File" tax-prep scam, where they're claiming that ending this ripoff is racist because it denies Black families the right to be tricked into paying for something they are entitled to get for free:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/27/predatory-inclusion/#equal-opportunity-scammers

When I learned about Intuit's wokewashing, I thought I'd found woke capitalism's rock bottom, but I was wrong. Stellantis's call for woke scabbing is a new low.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/#inclusive-scabbing

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[556betrayed]

History lesson from 2015: heavy handed intimidation tactics from TWU 556 union leaders during the colossal failure of TA 2013.

[onlytiktoks]

[oliviawebsite]

how tf often are you all shopping at target that a 40 day pause is tantamount to a substantial boycott????? like i know im disparaging the effort and being a bitter communist or whatever but this makes me realize how little i buy shit that isn't 100% necessary for my immediate life/survival its kinda wild that 40 days without going to the sterile Treats and Slave Labor Products store represents a challenge to anybody at all sorry. if you're serious about taking action you might have to give up some of the comforts you like for a long time and you have to learn to be okay with it

[odinsblog]

From Wikipedia: “On December 12, 2024, SpaceX filed an official request to Cameron County authorities to have the site incorporated as a new city, named Starbase.”

Imagine, one greedy racist misogynistic oligarch controlling everything, from the schools, to daycare, to housing, to the police, to the hospitals - a town where the very government is all employed and controlled by Elon Musk.

👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/us/starbase-texas-city-elon-musk-spacex.html

👉🏿 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/today-explained/id1346207297

👉🏿 https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-education/elon-musks-montessori-preschool-reimagining-education-closer-fruition

[widowshill]

lowkey after like a week and a half of doing mild research into media archives I believe that most old tv should be public domain by default, considering studio execs were basically wiping their asses with the tapes but now want to posture about their copyright when it's a miracle from heaven any of the footage from that era exists

[notbecauseofvictories]

truly, credit to my colleague who lets me show up at the office once a week and regurgitate every opinion and thought I've had in the last seven days in her direction, solely in exchange for badmouthing the boss a little---and in that same "oh we'll be bad" voice white women use to order fries for the table.

[perrysoup]

This Isn't a Joke - Help Me Write my Resignation Letter and Make My Employers Life Hell! Update 3

We are sending the notice! It has a scheduled deliver time of 7:00 AM in the morning. I'll be confirming it sent and providing any updates as needed.

Remember these are our goals:

1) See if they will sign a contract without reading the ToS (like is done to us) 2) Be as audacious as possible so that it is spread throughout the company of the employer 3) See if they will dispute it and if so see if we can require "Reasonable Person" to be redefined and updated 4) See if we can can just make it annoying as hell for them 5) Have fun =D Tiktok communications here: https://www.tiktok.com/@perryvidja.ttv

[anetherealpoetess]

ricken's shitty self-help book radicalizing the innies is so funny it's like how generations of girls were quietly radicalized by the american girl doll books

[dunmeshiminimumwage]

back when i worked at [large chain coffee store], i tried to unionize my workplace. my manager sat me down and gave me a very guilt trip-y talk. lots of "but i thought we were a family :(" and "you don't *really* know what unionization does, do you?" i played dumb and managed to avoid being fired, but. chilchuck momence.

[political-us]

[lavendertarot]

ngl despite how much I love art that follows awful people in bad situations, I think my favourite theme in mouthwashing has gotta be the ways in which blue collar jobs not only involve intense amounts of physical labour but also mental and emotional labour, especially in the face of an uncaring and supposedly familial corporate sheen. like it's surface level, but it's good and it's real.

[itsbatman-butpoor-andmurderous]

Before anyone thinks that the SAG-AFTRA should have accepted the deal that included “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses, and more” I would like you to read this quote from the chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland

“They propose that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day's pay, and their company should own that scan of their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity. If you think that's a ground-breaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

And a comment from the AMPTP (the studios)

“The union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry”

Both quotes are from this BBC article.

The same group of people saying that the strike will cause financial hardships for thousands of people is suggesting they get a single days pay for getting digitally scanned. Afterwards said scan will be used to do the work the actor should be getting paid for.

[corsair-news-alliance]

There's a thought I've had

Supposedly Lancers fight for Union, well on the most base idea of a Lancer. Hell the place our thoughts go toare union funded and Albatross.

Sure KTB has theirs and all the companies got their own special flavor... But then you start thinking. Why the hell does Union use em.

Why do Lancers get sent to "bring peace" but then us mercs and those at MSMC get looked at like the scum of the stars for doing the same kind of shit. The same number of people die. The same amount of mana changes hands.

How many times have teams of Lancers done more harm than good?

When you're with one of the Merc companies you know what you're getting into...

But how many bodies coat the road to utopia?

I think I've been drinking too much

//Broadband\\

[warningsine]

[stickyshoelaces]

You hear heavy footsteps from down the hall…..

Meet UNION, my Lethal Company oc!

Just stay quiet. . .