#Daily Wage Workers

[klingercollection]

you do know that one of the most common tropes in american media for kids and teens is the bullied nerd, right? the implication that being knowledgable is naturally punished? a common phrase is "nobody likes a know-it-all". kids who spend a lot of time reading are bullied for it. parents often express concern that these kids arent developing properly and force them to do something "more productive". if i try to share a fact at the wrong moment i am told "ugh. why do you Know that?" being a "teachers pet" is a bad thing. a sports scholarship gets you further than good grades. you can have a 4.0 gpa and its the football captain they let into harvard. "they spend all of their time in the library? what a loser!" i got in trouble for reading when i had finished an exam early. they made me sit perfectly still in complete silence for 45 minutes because i knew the answers. "stop asking so many questions, its so annoying!" smart, nerd, and loser are synonyms. being smart or curious is culturally punished in the US.

[gogh-bitch]

trying to romanticize working a minimum wage job in customer service of all things but bro this shit is hard

[townpostin]

Bank Employees' Union Mulls Nationwide Strike in Jamshedpur Conclave

AIUBEA Meets in Jamshedpur to Address Worker Concerns Union Bank staff representatives gather to discuss employee shortage, wage issues, and potential industrial action. JAMSHEDPUR – All India Union Bank Employees Association convenes central executive meeting to address pressing workforce challenges. The All India Union Bank Employees Association (AIUBEA) has initiated a crucial two-day meeting…

[cyndaquillt]

So much love for people in my little heart that I don't know what to do with all of it and also so much hate for people in my little heart that I don't know what to do with all of it

[alien-in-the-mirror]

help out a south american trans woman?

hi everyone, happy holidays, it's me again. as you all know, things in my country are capital f fucked. over 60% of all people is under poverty and most of us can't even make it to the basic food basket threshold. minimum wage is 1/3 of it and i don't even make that, being an informal worker.

i've been busting my ass the whole month working through chronic illnesses and harassment and today my bosses just told me that i would not be compensated for my work this month during january, so once again i ask you all if you could lend me your aid to at least put a plate of food daily on my table, anything you can spare is more than welcome, even if it's just sharing this post around.

once again i'm sorry to impose on ny'all during the holidays, and i thank you from the bottom of my heart for having read so far.

paypal: https://paypal.me/V3nusP

kofi: https://ko-fi.com/S6S6IC6X

[boymanmaletheshequel]

Some subtle ways to honor Hermes 🪽💌

- Help guide or instruct lost or confused travelers to their destinations if you know how to

- regularly text and keep up with your loved ones and friends

- don’t snitch on shoplifters

- play string instruments like harp, guitar, or violin.

- be kind and respectful to your mail carriers

- enjoy your road-trips, vacations, or other travels.

- watch or support gymnastics events

- pirate media kept from you by corporate streaming services (hehe)

- watch and support those speaking in public

- engage in nuanced and eloquent conversations with people you interact with.

- invest in something that will bring you monetary wealth

- go for a nice drive or bus/train ride

- eat strawberries or strawberry flavored things

- be respectful and understanding of clerks, wage workers, and shopkeepers.

- watch the Olympics and especially the gymnastics.

If you like this post, and want to learn more about the gods of Hellen and Hellenic worship, please consider giving me a follow! I post daily. Blessed be your day 🏛️💙

[hellyeahscarleteen]

New donors needed to help keep Scarleteen’s queer, trans and gender nonconforming sex educators going!

We, the queer and trans, staff & volunteers at Scarleteen spend the vast majority of our time giving support. We very actively maintain a friendly and accessible website full of resources, advice and information, and provide a caring, safe and patient environment in all of our direct services. We continue to make a massive contribution towards sexuality education as a whole, as we have for the whole of our 25 year tenure. Everywhere we go we receive thanks from educators and service workers for the motivation we, and our founder Heather Corinna, have given them to do incredible work in their communities. However, for our daily survival and our dreams of the future, we need support too!

Unless our current trajectory changes we will not have the funding this year to give our volunteers end-of-year stipends to reward their generous efforts, nor bring our codirectors’ wages any closer to industry standard or even industry average rates of pay for their positions and tenure - averages which we continue to undershoot by quite some margin, nor will we be able to reimburse those staff for the many hours they have worked in excess of their basic 30 hours a week. We will also be unable to increase their healthcare benefits which for one disabled member of our team, will have been exceeded 4 times over by actual healthcare costs by the end of the year, which they have had to pay for out-of-pocket.

As part of our annual Pride celebration we are asking you to consider becoming one of the 50 (and fabulous) new recurring donors we are determined to find this week! Please consider supporting a few good queer & trans people to help us continue to deliver queer sex and relationships education, info and support, which remains free and open to all.

Recurring monthly donations of $10 or more are part of the treasured community of donors who give us peace of mind like nothing else can. We will need a further 250 recurring donors at that level or the financial equivalent to keep us on-track for our most modest projections through the coming years, so whatever help you can give us today to exceed our initial target of 50 will be cherished by us more than you can know.

Here’s some ways to help:

If you can become a new monthly donor, please do! We would love to welcome you to our valued bunch of fabulous supporters!

If you are already a donor, please consider tacking on an extra $10 per month, even temporarily, if you can!

If you cannot currently afford to donate an increased amount, or cannot donate at all, please consider reaching out to someone who you think can, so that eventually we can find that new donor. (And if you manage to sign someone up, do let us know so we can thank you!)

If you only want to or can give us a one-time donation we will still be incredibly grateful for that help at any level. We know a thing or 12 about deep financial limitations and having to choose very carefully where you give.

Please go to scarleteen.com/donate to begin your monthly donation, or if you have further questions head to scarleteen.com/contact drop us a message.

Thank you once more for your support and for being your queer/trans/allied/otherwise-awesome self,

Yours sincerely,

The Scarleteam …

of Scarleteen: queer sex ed for all since 1998❤️

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

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/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

[mesetacadre]

Any resources you would recommend about why proletarians would be against worker's rights? It's a topic that has been interesting to me lately

I don't know any specific resources, maybe Lenin touches on this in What is to be Done but I'm not sure. I think a better way to phrase the question is to ask why workers would go against their class interests, even in the most economicist and immediate struggles. Essentially, I'd say it's a concatenation of two facts: most workers lack actually consistent politico-economic education, and the propaganda of liberalism works more like an invisible mold than anything explicit you can point to and single out as a Propaganda Piece. No matter how angry a worker is at their own bad situation (which they might not even conceive of as exploitation), if they've spent all their lives soaking in liberal ideology everywhere from school to the generally accepted trains of thought to even the most innocent piece of media, it's not that surprising they might oppose, say, a rise in the minimum wage. Maybe they've bought into smart-sounding liberal economics and have some vague notion or memorized slogan about inflation rising. Or maybe they've internalized the narrative of individual achievement, they feel like they've "earned" having a better salary than minimum wage and feel it's unfair for others to begin at a better place than them.

Typically the first and only type of class consciousness that workers develop, what Lenin defined as economic-spontaneous consciousness, or consciousness from within (and the type of consciousness most anarchists love to praise), is the one that arises from the daily happenings of class antagonism. But this is a highly subjective and imprecise class consciousness. Without further education and a scientific approach (acquiring political-revolutionary consciousness, or consciousness from without), spontaneous consciousness can be easily misguided by the aforementioned liberal state of affairs or by the worker's own biases. Someone predisposed to racism for whichever environmental reason might take that imprecise, spontaneous class consciousness and assign the cause of their felt exploitation to the presence of migrant workers in the economy, and therefore support measures that harm that specific minority while also greatly benefitting the capitalists exploiting both. The worker aristocracy is also very vulnerable to supporting the imperialist system when their spontaneous consciousness, especially in regards to trade unions, aligns with imperialist interests. And besides all of this, some workers never develop any sort or consciousness and believe themselves potential equals to their exploiters

[phoenixyfriend]

An interesting and somewhat infuriating development in California:

The minimum wage for fast food workers has been raised from $16/hr to $20/hr, with a VERY specific exception for Panera. Turns out a major donor of Gavin Newsom's is a high school friend who now owns 24 Panera locations.

I first heard about this on Morning Brew Daily 2/29/24, where they go into detail on how the legislation impacts California, what induced it, and how the exception works. In text format, the story is also available here.

California's minimum wage in all fields is currently $16/hr, with certain cities and counties having much higher minimum wages. Unfortunately, despite legal protections, undocumented workers and other minorities are often paid at less than that, which is a lasting problem. Paying subminimum wages to disabled workers will also not be fully banned until 2025, a process that has been in the works since 2021.

If you live in Cali, I'd suggest calling your state reps (not federal) to express that you applaud the raise in minimum wage, but not the exception carved out for Panera specifically.

[tomhardyitalia]

📸 daily mail uk

And Tom Hardy is up there with one of the nicest guys in showbiz, along with Keanu Reeves and Hugh Jackman.

Tom recently offered to pay the wages of an entire TV set crew on the new Guy Ritchie series after a construction company went into liquidation.

The Venom star, 47, recently filmed scenes for Guy Ritchie 's upcoming TV series, The Associate, in London.

But around 50 freelance building workers were left devastated after Helix 3D, the construction company contracted to build sets, went bust, The Times reported.

This is when Tom stepped in and offered to pay the workers' wages that Paramount resolved the situation and set about sorting their paychecks.

And after Tom's sweet gesture this week, MailOnline takes a look at who the nicest guys in Hollywood are...

#TomHardy #thefixer #VenomTheLastDance

#GuyRitchie

[ancient-string]

Join comrades on the picket line against Coles and Woolworths. They make billions in profits while paying workers poverty wages and raising costs of daily necessities.

https://raffwu.org.au/nationalsuperstrike7oct/

After the strike was announced, which included a partial work ban, Coles announced they would stand down and refuse to pay any employee who took part in any single action. That includes wearing a union shirt and handing union materials to customers. Even talking about the strike is enough.

The Greens are organising a contingent to go down and support the striking workers. The more people who join the picket line, the better.

You can also contribute to the strike fund, to pay the workers taking part, who are being screwed over by Coles.

https://chuffed.org/project/superstrike

[opencommunion]

"The suit describes how incarcerated Alabamians are forced to work for free in prison and paid extremely low wages to work for hundreds of private employers — including meatpacking plants and fast-food franchises like McDonald’s — as well as more than 100 city, county and state agencies. And it alleges that the state keeps the scheme going by systematically denying parole to those eligible to work outside jobs. ... In the case of the government officials, they’re also accused of conspiring to increase the size of the Alabama prison population — which is predominantly Black — through the discriminatory denial of parole so the state can continue profiting from forced labor. '[Prisoners] have been entrapped in a system of ​‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money, for the benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ​‘employ’ them,' the suit charges. In Alabama, that charge comes with ugly historical baggage. Convict leasing — a practice of forced penal labor prevalent in the post-Emancipation South (in which incarcerated men were ​'leased' to private employers) — was a massive state revenue driver. Thanks to the Black Codes, a racist program to criminalize petty offenses both real and imagined, Black people were locked up at a massively disproportionate rate to their white neighbors. Many were then sent to work on plantations to fill the labor gap left by Emancipation. ... Convict leasing was formally abolished in Alabama in 1928, but prison labor has remained a significant source of income for the state. ... According to the lawsuit, Alabama reaped a $450 million benefit from forced prison labor in 2023 alone. ... Lakiera Walker worked for Jefferson County doing roadwork for approximately two years and was paid a $2 daily wage to handle large trash removal (including a Jacuzzi). She found out that the non-incarcerated workers on her team were making $10 per hour for the same job. One day, the lawsuit alleges, Walker’s boss attempted to coerce her into unwanted sexual activity; when she refused, he wrote her up on a disciplinary offense for ​'refusing to work.' She was then sent to work unpaid in the prison’s kitchen, and when her family called the commissioner and the warden to demand something be done, no action was taken. ... During Walker’s 15-year incarceration, she held a litany of unpaid jobs throughout the prison itself, too, including in the kitchen, housekeeping and healthcare. She even provided hospice care to dying patients. ​'The nurses really weren’t interested in taking care of sickly or terminally ill people, so they would get the inmates to do it,' Walker says. She says she was regularly required to work seven days a week, and she often had to work two shifts a day. None of these prison jobs were paid, and quitting or refusing work was not a viable option. ​'You can’t say, ​‘Hey, I can’t go to work today,’' Walker explains. ​'You would go to segregation, which was solitary confinement. … People were so tired and just hopeless at that point, they would kind of welcome solitary confinement, just to have a break.'

... Walker did finally make it home after all those years of forced labor, but many others are still trapped in the system. ... By 2022, the parole rate was 11% overall and only 7% for Black prisoners — meaning that 93% of parole-requesting Black prisoners were denied. That’s what happened to Alimireo English, a charismatic 48-year-old Black man who, according to a judge, should not be in prison right now. ... But instead of being back home with his family, at church with his faith community, or visiting his eldest son in New York, English is at the Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton, Ala. His case did not come before the parole board until November 28, 2023, more than two years after he’d already been acquitted, but he was denied anyway. His next parole date is November 2024. 'They gotta keep me for another year until they can find somebody else on the street that they can pull back in and take my place,' English tells me. ​'If they can’t replace you, they don’t let you go.'

... English works as a dorm representative for the facility’s Faith Dorm, where he is on call 24 hours a day, seven days per week. He is responsible for the safety and well-being of 190 incarcerated men, many of them elderly or medically vulnerable. He handles custodial duties and maintenance, screens dorm visitors and is also the first responder for drug and health emergencies. In his scant free time, he runs a therapy and counseling group for his fellow prisoners. He consistently works 12 to 15 hour days and, for most of the week, he is the sole individual in charge of the dorm; a retired prison chaplain comes in to assist him a few times weekly, but otherwise English is not supervised by any corrections personnel. As the lawsuit highlights, ​'Since Mr. English has been in this position, the Faith Dorm has had no fights, deaths, or overdoses.' The plaintiffs’ legal team estimates that ADOC saves roughly $200,000 a year by not having a corrections officer in that one dorm. Meanwhile, English is paid nothing. ​'The inmates basically run the prison, but the officers are getting compensated for it,' English says. ​'The wages the inmates are paid for their work hasn’t changed since 1927.'

Several of the plaintiffs I spoke to also mentioned ​'institutional need,' a specific designation that plaintiffs have reported is added to certain prisoners’ files to signify their utility to their current facility. According to Walker and her lawyer, institutional need is yet another trick used by the ADOC to keep especially useful incarcerated workers from leaving, so the state can continue benefiting from that person’s skills. ... 'Most people, it stops them from going home or making parole because it says that we need you more in prison than the world needs you in society,' Walker explains. ​'This lady, her name is Lisa Smith, she’s been in prison about 30 years, and every time she comes up for parole, regardless of her crime, she’s an institutional need. She can fix anything in the prison — she can probably build a prison — but she’s not getting paid. Sometimes they won’t even call in a free world contractor because she knows what to do. It’s looking bleak that she will ever make it out of prison, because they need her there.'

... Because of a 1977 Supreme Court decision, incarcerated workers in the United States — including those in ADOC’s work release program — are legally prohibited from unionizing. The Supreme Court decision barring incarcerated workers from unionizing has not stopped organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) from organizing labor actions, strikes and protests against prison slavery, or individual prisoners from finding their own ways to dissent. ... One of the founders of FAM, Kinetik Justice, is a plaintiff in the Alabama lawsuit. He has helped organize and lead several high-profile nationwide prison strikes since 2016. He’s been in ADOC custody for the past 29 years, and he has been repeatedly punished, harassed and tortured for his work organizing against forced labor. According to The Appeal, he spent 54 months in solitary confinement between 2014 and 2018 and has been repeatedly sent back into the hole. As he told Democracy Now! in 2016, ​'We understood our incarceration was pretty much about our labor and the money that was being generated from the prison system, therefore we began organizing around our labor and used it as a means and a method to bring about reform in the Alabama prison system.' He is no stranger to filing lawsuits on his own and his fellow prisoners’ behalf against ADOC, so it is fitting that this landmark class action suit bears his name."

[power-chords]

Ace & Jig is no longer our client but they make incredible organic clothes and pay their garment workers a living wage. I have been living in this Callie dress, which is comfortable enough for daily wear and can also be zhuzhed up for summer weddings.

[bfpnola]

about the ongoing hunger strike to ensure that the historic anti-casteism bill passes in california ^^ wanna support?

if you’re on mobile, go to: https://tinyurl.com/Signsb403

other devices, like laptops: https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/

—

sample email below from the mobile link, not my own writing:

Subject: Please Sign SB403 (Wahab) to End Caste Discrimination

I am writing to request the governor to sign the historic bill SB403 introduced by State Senator Aisha Wahab, which would end discrimination on the basis of caste. This bill aims to clarify existing California state law and make explicit that discrimination based on caste is illegal by adding caste to ancestry and defining caste in the Civil Rights Act, Fair Employment and Housing Act, and Education Code.

Caste systems are social stratification where each position is characterized by hereditary status, endogamy, and social exclusion. Caste discrimination manifests as workplace discrimination, housing discrimination, gender-based violence, and other physical and psychological forms of violence.

Caste discrimination occurs across industries, including technology, construction, restaurants, and domestic work. In these sectors, caste discrimination has included harassment, bias, wage theft, and even trafficking. Caste is today inextricably intertwined with existing legal protections in state and federal civil rights laws such that discrimination based on one’s caste is effectively discrimination based on the intersection of other protected identities. However, because of the grave discrimination caste-oppressed Californians face, these existing protections must be made explicit.

Caste is a workers rights issues, a women's rights issues, and racial justice issue. It is also a bill that has bipartisan support. That is why we are joined by Asian Law Caucus, Stop AAPI Hate, AAPI Equity Alliance, Tech Equity, Equality Labs, Alphabet Workers Union, Ambedkar Association of North America, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, Californians for Caste Equity, Hindus for Caste Equity, Jakara Movement, South Asian Network, Sikh Coalition, and Sikh American Legal Defense Fund. Every major legal association is in support of caste equity and the lawfulness to make caste equity explicit. This includes the American Bar Association, South Asian Bar Association, National Asian American Pacific Bar Association, and Asian Law Caucus.

That is why we urge you to make history and sign his bill without hesitation. Justice delayed is justice denied. Let's ensure California opportunity for all by ensuring that ancestry and caste discrimination is explicitly prohibited and make history across the country.

Thank You,

[Name]

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and if you don’t know what caste is? send in an ask @bfpnola or join our Discord server, link in bio, so we can answer you in real-time!

[solarpunkbusiness]

Reimagining waste management in Fortaleza, Brazil

Fortaleza has almost no citywide waste and recycling infrastructure. Like in many other Brazilian cities, an estimated 8,000 catadores — who are not formally employed by the city — form the backbone of its waste management system, providing most of its pickup services and selling collected recyclables to third parties to earn a living.

While the Brazilian government has made efforts to formalise the job in recent decades, most catadores face hazardous working conditions. Many pull up to 240 kilograms (530 pounds) of waste over the course of an 18-hour workday using hand-drawn carts. Salaries fluctuate based on how much each person collects and what they can sell it for, with the average Fortaleza waste picker often taking in just R$300 (about US$53) a month.

Meanwhile, trash accumulates. In 2023, a mere 6% of Fortaleza’s recyclables ended up in processing facilities, leaving curbsides crammed with trash bags and cardboard boxes. “Sometimes, Fortaleza is not a clean city,” admitted local restaurant owner Manu Duvale. “We live with trash as if it’s nothing.”

But for the past four years, Fortaleza’s recycling problem — and the catadores’ jobs — have been gradually improving. This is largely thanks to an innovative project called Re-Ciclo led by the Fortaleza government’s Innovation Laboratory. And e-tricycle warriors like Aires are powering the change.

Re-Ciclo has worked to both uplift Fortaleza’s catadores and expand its recycling infrastructure by redefining how the city manages waste. Central to this effort is a fleet of electric tricycles that has enabled the city’s first-ever door-to-door collection service for recyclables while also strengthening its cycling system for all residents.

Re-Ciclo has reimagined what a catador can do.

Through the programme, catadores now collect recyclables along specific routes through the city’s neighbourhoods, stopping by homes and apartments where residents have requested recycling pick-up. The recyclables are deposited at one of dozens of “eco-points” — a network of collection centres — where they are sorted and cleaned by waste pickers and then sold to recycling intermediaries. Re-Ciclo revamped this once ineffective collection infrastructure to support the programme.

But Re-Ciclo is not just a waste collection program. It’s also significantly improved the catadores’ working conditions.

In most cases, better recycling has translated to more efficient work and more stable pay for Re-Ciclo workers. Raquel Silva, president of the Moura Brasil Waste Pickers Association, explained that she can now visit 10-16 collection sites per trip before returning to the eco-points in the same time it used to take her to visit 3-4 sites.

The program also collects data along pick-up routes, enabling catadores to track the volume of their collected recyclables and drive better salary negotiations. Re-Ciclo encourages unaffiliated waste pickers to join associations to drive more collective bargaining power.

Thanks to a more stable income and reliable collection monitoring, most workers now receive significantly higher salaries — up to 500% above previous levels. “Today, the waste collector who is part of Re-Ciclo earns his daily wage for the goals achieved,” Pereira said. “[The waste collector] has transportation vouchers, has meal vouchers, and is now valued.”