#shawn fain

[liberalsarecool]

MAGA/GOP is the problem.

You will NEVER solve an issue with GOP policies or rhetoric. They are structural bad faith.

[iww-gnv]

For as long as anyone can remember, the Indiana city of Kokomo has been a conservative stronghold. Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale in Kokomo. Bill Clinton lost twice. So did Barack Obama. The current mayor, a Republican, is running unopposed for re-election. It’s a town known for something it would prefer to forget: a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1923 that was the largest ever. Yet somehow Kokomo produced a union leader whose rhetoric is aimed at toppling the conservative and moneyed classes — a rebel who rejects the niceties of an earlier era in favor of a sharp-edged confrontation. “Billionaires in my opinion don’t have a right to exist,” says Shawn Fain, who is leading the United Automobile Workers in a multifront labor battle against the Big Three carmakers that has little precedent and is making a lot of noise. In interviews, in speeches and on social media, Mr. Fain hammers the wealthy again and again, making the cause of the union’s 150,000 autoworkers at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis something much broader. “There’s a billionaire class, and there’s the rest of us,” he said at an impromptu news conference outside a Ford plant in Wayne, Mich. “We’re all expected to sit back and take the scraps and live paycheck to paycheck and scrape to get by. We’re second-class citizens.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:

As President Donald Trump drives the stock market down, and his approval rating along with it, by implementing massive tariffs on China and potentially the rest of the world, Democrats across the ideological spectrum have largely stuck to the same script: The tariffs are chaotic, damaging, unnecessary and ill-advised. But small deviations have revealed the latest phase over the party’s seemingly never-ending ideological clash, as moderates have complained about Democratic politicians’ use of qualifiers when condemning tariffs, arguing it gives unnecessary credence to one of the Republican president’s most unpopular ideas. Those politicians have often, but not always, come for the party’s progressive wing. “Trump made a world historic, substantive and political mistake, and caveating your attack on him for this catastrophic error, it makes no sense, either substantively or politically,” said Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the center-left Democratic group Third Way. Progressives, however, see a bigger issue at play, suspecting moderates are trying to enforce ideological purity and reverse influence the left gained over the party’s economic agenda under former President Joe Biden. Biden’s administration used tariffs more aggressively than his Democratic predecessors — though at nothing close to the levels Trump is deploying them at. Progressives and unions have argued smartly-targeted tariffs can help protect critical industries like clean energy and prevent outsourcing. “The intra factional debates are all about who gets to be the ideas person for next time around,” said a progressive strategist who requested anonymity to speak frankly about intra-party splits. “And what wing of the party gets to beat up on the other wing. And I think that’s what you’re seeing from a resurgent middle.”

[...] For what’s it worth, noting some tariffs can be useful is far from the worst message Democrats could be deploying, even if it’s not the ideal argument. A memo prepared by the Democratic pollster Blue Rose Research and obtained by HuffPost found arguments emphasizing “responsible” tariffs were in the middle of the pack in terms of messaging effectiveness. The most effective arguments pointed out tariffs were a tax hike on the middle class, and tied them to broader trends in Trump’s administration, including his threats to Social Security and Medicaid and proposed tax cuts for wealthier Americans. Less effective arguments focused too much on the stock market or on personally insulting Trump. (The two worst-testing arguments were comments put forward by two centrist figures: Never-Trump Republican David Frum and billionaire Democratic surrogate Mark Cuban.) Regardless of what Democrats are saying, the tariffs — and the resulting increased risk of a recession and chaos in financial markets — are taking a clear toll on Trump’s approval rating, which has hit new lows this week, driven in particular by new lows in his handling of the economy. Clear majorities of the public oppose the tariffs in public surveys, and consumer confidence is dropping precipitously. “[Trump] is underwater on the economy, he is underwater on trade,” the progressive strategist said. “It’s not like a couple of Democrats going out and saying that they think tariffs are a good tool but Trump is not using them well is having much impact on that.”

There are also a handful of Democrats and aligned groups who are absent from the conversation entirely, or are even directly praising Trump. And those voices come from both of the party’s ideological wings. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has been relatively subdued on the issue, as has moderate favorite Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, whose district could benefit from Trump’s tariffs on Canadian lumber. And both Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), another moderate, and the United Auto Workers, led by the progressive Shawn Fain, have outright praised the tariffs, though Fain backed off some of his prior praise in a livestream on Thursday night. “We support the use of some tariffs on automotive manufacturing and similar industries,” Fain said. “We do not support reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.” Progressive and moderate operatives alike viewed both men’s support as both sincere and as a clear effort to appeal to Trump-supporting constituencies: Golden’s district voted for Trump by a 7-point margin in 2024, and Fain’s union has a significant number of Trump supporters in its ranks.

The Democratic Party’s response to Trump’s tariff tax hike has largely been oppose his tariffs, and as we’ve learned with the Gretchen Whitmer White House appearance debacle, each other.

[cyarskaren52]

the wga, culinary workers, the united auto workers union, and now sag-aftra. The unions just keep winning this year

unions work

GIF by choicesraccoon

[cyarsk5230]

the wga, culinary workers, the united auto workers union, and now sag-aftra. The unions just keep winning this year

unions work

[thoughtportal]

general strike that is actually being organized

[probablyasocialecologist]

For Fain, the Bible is more than a source of feel-good inspiration. It boasts a sharp economic justice edge, leaving no doubt that God takes sides in the perennial struggle between the haves and have-nots. He insisted that the UAW’s is a “righteous fight” and commented, “There’s one more piece of scripture I like,” citing Matthew 19:23–24, in which Jesus declares, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Fain went on to offer a hard-nosed interpretation, mapping the gospel’s stark contrast between the Kingdom of God and hell onto the inequitable landscape of the modern United States: Why is it easier to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God? I have to believe that answer, at least in part, is because in the Kingdom of God no one hoards all the wealth while everybody else suffers and starves. In the Kingdom of God no one puts themselves in a position of total domination over the entire community. In the Kingdom of God no one forces others to perform endless, backbreaking work just to feed their families or put a roof over their heads. That world is not the Kingdom of God. That world is hell. Living paycheck to paycheck, scraping to get by? That’s hell. Choosing between medicine and rent is hell. Working seven days a week for twelve hours a day, for months on end, is hell. Having your plant close down and your family scattered across the country is hell. Being made to work during a pandemic and not knowing if you might get sick and die, or spread the disease to your family, is hell. And enough is enough.

[...]

As anyone acquainted with the longer histories of Christianity and labor knows, there’s no paradox here. When Fain quotes scripture in the service of the UAW’s fight, he is tapping into a deeply pro-labor vein of Christianity, one that we haven’t heard much about in recent years but in its heyday helped galvanize powerful working-class movements. For countless workers throughout American history, traditional faith and labor militancy have gone hand in hand. In this wider context, Fain emerges on the national scene not as a paradox but as the latest in a long line of labor prophets who have stoked the flames of egalitarian faith and held big business’s feet to the fire. From the labor movement’s earliest days, workers insisted that they organized because the Bible told them so. Union-friendly newspapers brimmed with scriptural quotations. The Gospel of Luke supplied some perennial favorites: “Woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation” (6:24) and “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (10:7). Perhaps none was as scintillating as the fifth chapter of the Epistle of James, which reads, “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted. . . . Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (5:1-2a, 4).

[thekeypa]

“The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice.”

[tomorrowusa]

Shawn Fain, head of the UAW, led in 2023 what is arguably the most successful strike in the US this century.

He spoke at a Senate committee hearing about lazy freeloaders who live off the labor of others. Yes, he stuck it to Wall Street vampires and the mega rich who are usually big contributors to Republican candidates. When Republicans are in power, one of the first things they do is approve massive tax breaks for those massively wealthy contributors.

The GOP is big on reducing the rights of workers, eliminating Medicaid and Social Security, and opposing the minimum wage. Given clueless recent Republican comments on slavery, they are probably open to bringing back that institution in some form.

A reminder that last month the UAW endorsed President Joe Biden.

UAW's Shawn Fain says union will 'fight like hell' for President Joe Biden

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pinkdrunk Linkdump

Today (November 18) at 1PM, I'll be in Concord, NH at Gibson's Books, presenting my new novel The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

On Monday (November 20), I'm at the Simsbury, CT Public Library at 7PM

Happy Saturday! As is so often the case, I have finished the week with more stray links that I can fit into my blog, so it's time for a linkdump post, in which an assorted assortment is assembled. This is my tenth such linkdump – here are the previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

While nostalgia is a toxic impulse (h/t John Hodgman), there's no denying that there once existed an old, good web, and that it has given way to the enshitternet. I don't want to bring the old, good web back, but I would welcome a new, good web, and by studying the factors that contributed to the old, good web's rise and fall, we can both conjure up that new, good web – and protect it.

Above all, the old, good web was contingent, a series of lucky accidents, like Tim Berners Lee's decision to make the code and ideas and protocols for the original web as open and free as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

This meant that there was no way to use the law to capture the web. Contrast that with, say, AOL or Compuserve. If you were the Compuserve's CEO and one of your rivals started using your servers to deliver a service that your users preferred, which shifted value from you to this new rival, you could just pull the plug on them. If they came back – using reverse-engineering or fake signups or whatever – you could sue them. Compuserve's bosses made the rules, any rules they wanted, and could kick you off if you violated them. If you pressed the issue, they could get the government to come and fine you, or, in extreme situations, arrest you.

But the open web didn't have these enforcement hooks. If you ran an early website and Yahoo deeplinked to it, you could change the link, but you couldn't make Yahoo stop. The open web was competitive, and that prevented anyone from exercising a veto over who could make the web, and how. It meant that the web was always up for grabs, with key chokepoints like browser market share swinging around wildly from one vendor to another (until Microsoft started illegally tying blocking rival browsers in Windows).

That meant that the "governance" of the web was often just a matter of the technical details of its standards. Code may not be law, but it was sure law-like – if something was in, say, a W3C browser standard, then all the browsers would support it, and then anyone trying to do something cool on the internet could rely on every potential user having it.

Naturally, this made standards development organizations into the sites of vicious power-struggles. These SDOs are classic "weak institutions," lacking the robust rules of, say, a competition regulator, to say nothing of the investigative and enforcement powers of the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

But in the old, good web days, the SDOs had an important advantage: the corporate fragmentation of the web. Because of TBL's decision not to create IP chokepoints, even the wildly overcapitalized companies of the go-go dotcom bubble days weren't able to control the web. No one company was indispensable to the web.

If Microsoft wanted to tilt a W3C standard to its advantage, it couldn't threaten to leave the consortium if it didn't get its way. For one thing, the consortium had such a diversity of membership that losing any one member's dues wouldn't sink the org's finances.

For another, if Microsoft boycotted the W3C, that would just mean that the web standards that all those other companies were making wouldn't reflect its priorities or desires. By staying in the W3C, Microsoft got to participate in rulemaking – if it left, it would be relegated to rule-taking.

But the DoJ and FTC spent the ensuing decades in something like a coma. After a failed bid to break up Microsoft – killed when GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the case – America's antitrust enforcers snoozed through decades of consolidation, and the transformation of the old, good web into "five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

This turned SDOs into increasingly fraught battlegrounds where giants duked it out among each other for control of the web. In the days of the old, good web, the W3C was able to continue TBL's chokepoint-free ethos, creating rules that forced members to surrender their patents at the door:

https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/

But once the enthitternet was fully in force, the largest corporate members became so important to SDOs' ability to operate that even the W3C wasn't able to resist. They started turning out IP-encumbered standards that were so proprietary that even filing bug-reports against browsers could mean jailtime:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

Within a couple years, it became functionally impossible to implement a web-browser without a license from one of a tiny handful of gigantic, monopolistic corporations, who could use the license to exercise a veto over both who could make a browser, and what that browser could do:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Standards development is one of those esoteric, hugely important activities that almost no one knows anything about. Good standards are key to an open, free internet, and as governments around the world grapple with Big Tech monopolies, their plans often include a block that basically reads "insert good standard here."

As exciting as the EU's Digital Markets Act and US proposals like the ACCESS Act are, the "insert good standard here" stuff is wildly underspecified and undertheorized. Making a good standard – one that is robust, flexible and secure – is hard enough even under competitive competitions where the SDO can play independent referee, more powerful than the participants. But making good standards under monopolistic conditions is really hard.

And yet, it happens! Look at the Fediverse, powered by Mastodon and its adaptation of a W3C standard called ActivityPub. The Fediverse has done more for an interoperable, decentralized web than all the other projects of the past decade combined:

https://fediverse.party/

How did something so useful and capture-resistant emerge from the enshitternet, from the same standards-body that gave us a proprietary "standard" that allowed three giant companies to seize the right to authorize the production of web browsers themselves?

Therein lies quite a tale. In a talk for this year's Association of Internet Researchers conference, Robert Gehl talks about the weird, highly contingent factors that delivered a fit-for-purpose Fediverse standard:

https://fossacademic.tech/2023/10/15/APnonStandard.html

Gehl starts by describing ActivityPub as a "non-standard standard." The technologists who created it at the W3C were largely unpreturbed by the Big Tech members, who viewed ActivityPub as unimportant, a folly. While this meant that the ActivityPub creators were free from Big Tech attempts to corrupt the standard, they were also insulated from the discipline of Big Tech standards people, who are expert at propelling a standard to completion while resolving conflicts to create a single, unified spec.

By contrast, ActivityPub's creators made seven different specs, resolving factional disputes by letting everyone get their way. Critical parts of these standards – including support for federation! – was marked as optional in group's charter.

Then along came Mastodon, implementing the draft spec for ActivityPub. This triggered two extensions to the deadline for ActivityPub's completion. ActivityPub moved to final draft against the backdrop of the real-world experiences of early Mastodon users. Four of the five ActivityPub authors self-identified as queer, and they set out to make Mastodon more harassment-resistant than corporate social media:

https://fossandcrafts.org/episodes/053-fediverse-reflections-while-the-bird-burns.html

The early success of Mastodon shifted the focus of ActivityPub authors and implementers. In Gehl's words, "half of ActivityPub" is now ignored. Gehl's essay shows how many needles Mastodon threaded to get to where it is today, and while there's an argument that there was a Fediverse-shaped hole in the internet that something was going to fill, the Mastodon-inflected flavor of ActivityPub we got is pretty great.

Gehl is working on a book about this for Oxford University Press, "Move Slowly and Build Bridges":

https://fossacademic.tech/2023/08/17/OxfordUP.html

One of the more contingent elements of the nascent new, good web is Signal, the secure, robust, easy-to-use encrypted messaging tool that has stepped in to fill the gap that encrypted email tools like PGP struggled to fill for years (though that doesn't mean that secure email is impossible!):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/01/end-to-end-encryption-is-too-important-to-be-proprietary/

Like Mastodon, Signal threaded a bunch of different needles to get to its current status, and it's still threading needles. In a new article, Signal's amazing new president, Meredith Whittaker and Joshua Lund explain what it costs to keep Signal running:

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

Bottom line: Signal costs $50m/year. The breakdown is fascinating and weird. Signal pays a fortune to send SMS messages to verify your number when you sign up. Here's an irony: as Signal displaces SMS, telcos are making up for lost revenue by charging Signal ever-higher rates to send those signup codes – Signal's spending $6m/year on SMSes!

Storage costs Signal another $1.3m/year. Servers are $2.9m/year. Bandwidth is $2.8m/year. Signal's storage and compute costs are low because they're privacy-first, so they're collecting, processing and storing as little data as possible. Add a couple more zeros per user to approximate the costs for high-surveillance alternatives to Signal.

Because Signal is end-to-end encrypted, they can use untrusted (and cheap) third parties for bandwidth, relaying and storage. Your phone encrypts the data before it leaves your device, and no one can decrypt it except the person you're talking to. That lets Signal shop around for server infra, saving much more. Even so, voice and video calls consume a lot of bandwidth, and it gets more expensive because they jump the connection through multiple servers to prevent the people you're talking to from capturing your IP address.

Signal's got 50 full-time employees – a "shockingly small" team by industry standards. But still: 50 developers, managers, designers, accountants, etc all add up to $19m/year (the org pays "as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit").

As Signal scales up, it is discovering new and exciting bugs and problems. A one-in-a-billion bug that may never crop up in a small service can suddenly start occurring on a daily basis once you hit scale. That means Signal will continue to hire engineers to crush these weird little bugs, and they're going to be the kinds of specialists who can preserve privacy while fixing servers.

Signal is amazing. It's been six years since they figured out how to transmit userids, numbers and photos as fully encrypted blobs. Not one of their competitors – not even the "secure" ones from giant Big Tech companies – have managed this. Even Signal's system for embedding animated GIFs is privacy-preserving – the system doesn't reveal your search terms to the GIF repositories.

Today, Signal is tooling up to create "post-quantum resistance" to the system, anticipating the arrival of functional quantum computers that will (theoretically) make short work of existing encryption techniques.

The article ends – logically enough – with a plea for donations. I'm a Signal donor already:

https://signal.org/donate/

The Signal and ActivityPub stories reveal the important interplay between principled individuals and sustainable institutions. Benevolent dictators – whether that's Tim Berners Lee, or Mastodon's Eugen Rochko – work well, but fail badly. No matter how benevolent a dictator is, they are not infallible or omniscient. A critical juncture in any good project is its transition from a dictatorship to a democracy – an individual to an institution.

Take the Archive of Contemporary Music, the largest archive of popular music in the world. It was founded in 1985 by Bob George, who had amassed a collection of 47,000 LPs in a loft he'd lived in since 1974:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/nov/16/archive-of-contemporary-music-new-york

George and his co-founder, David Wheeler, have since grown the collection to 3m pieces of media with 90m songs. They were the first people to start seriously collecting and preserving music that others viewed as ephemeral and disposable. The collection wandered from place to place before settling in a Hudson Valley facility that it is about to outgrow.

In part that's because they're still one of the only places where others' collections can be reliably consigned. When Keith Richards wanted to turn his blues collection over to a facility for long-term preservation, he chose ARC. Now, ARC is working with the Internet Archive to digitize and make available its vast holdings.

But that's a fraught and contingent business, too. The Internet Archive has been targeted with one of those bowel-loosening record-industry lawsuits last seen during the Napster Wars, with Sony, Universal and others seeking damages that would permanently shutter the Archive and bankrupt its founder, the wonderful Brewster Kahle:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/08/14/internet-archive-responds-to-recording-industry-lawsuit-targeting-obsolete-media/

The suit argues that when a library makes 78RPM recordings available for its patrons to check out over the internet, they cannot avail themselves of the copyright exemptions that have been a feature since copyright's inception. Remember, libraries are an order of magnitude older than copyright! The core of this suit is that libraries cannot move into the digital world.

Rather than doing what libraries have done since (literal) time immemorial – collecting works, preserving them and making them available – digital libraries can only license time- and circulation-limited copies of works that can't be preserved. It's a grim vision of a future without libraries:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/they-want-to-kill-libraries/

Giant corporations are an existential threat to human thriving. After 40 years of neoliberalism, there's a growing recognition that the market's invisible hand would like to swat you like a bug. Hence the rise and rise of the labor movement. Though "union density" (the proportion of unionized workers) is still at an historically low ebb, union support among the public is higher than at any time since the New Deal.

That's why UAW president Shawn Fain is planning a general strike in 2028, calling on other unions "to align your contract expirations with our own" so that all the contracts come up for renegotiation at the same time:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-auto-workers-general-strike-contract-labor-unions

This is a very clever way to overcome America's ban on sympathy strikes, which was introduced in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley Act. Sympathy strikes – where all unionized workers refuse to provide any service to employers who won't bargain fairly with their own workforce – are a hugely powerful tool for labor movements. Look at Sweden, where Tesla has refused to bargain with the technicians who fix its cars.

In response, the entire Swedish workforce has united against Tesla. Dockworkers won't unload its cars at the port. Electricians won't fix its chargers. Cleaners won't clean Tesla showrooms:

https://www.wired.com/story/sweden-tesla-strike-cleaners/

This is how it's done. Musk has made his fortune by crushing worker power in every one of his businesses, joining the ranks of Apple and Amazon as one of the world's leading maimers and killers of his workforce:

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-11-18/us-lawmakers-urge-scrutiny-of-spacex-worker-injuries-after-reuters-report

While Musk's latest turn toward open antisemitism is grim, especially in light of his ownership of Twitter, it's perfectly in character for a man whose businesses have always been charnel houses of "crushed limbs, amputations, head injuries and death."

But Musk can't fire or even intimidate the dockworkers who won't unload his cars. Sympathy strikes enlist workers who are beyond the reach of intransigent employers in aid of workers who are subject to retaliation for striking. That's why Taft-Hartley abolished sympathy strikes.

But if all the major unions are negotiating their contracts in 2028 – as Fain has called for – they can all strike without falling afoul of Taft-Hartley. That's some shrewd tactics.

Even if you believe in markets as a force for increasing human thriving, it takes an act of will to miss how corporations who can exploit their customers or workers will. When it comes to exploitable customers, prisoners are the ultimate captive audience. Most of us are familiar with the horrors of private prisons – especially after the acute phase of the covid pandemic, when corporate prison managers simply left America's prisoners to die.

But prison privatization is fractal. You can privatize a prison facility, but you can also privatize the commissary, the library, the mail, even phone calls and visitations. Some of the slimiest prison profiteers are the ones providing telecoms facilities to prisons. These companies lobby to ban in-person visits and mail and then provide "free" phone service to state facilities – service that can cost prisoners and their families $10/minute.

One of the worst of these companies is ViaPath (formerly Global Tel*Link). Not only did they charge prisoners sky-high rates for contact with their families, they ran a wildly insecure service that breached the data of 600,000 users:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/prison-phone-company-leaked-600k-users-data-and-didnt-notify-them-ftc-says/

These prisoners and families had "sensitive personal information" exposed online in unencrypted form, and were not informed of the breach, according to an FTC complaint:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/Complaint-GlobalTelLinkCorp.pdf

The company went on to defraud state and local prison systems whose contracts they were bidding on, by claiming to have never have suffered a breach.

The sleaze of the prison-tech system is the worst imaginable – which is about what you'd expect. After all, prison-tech is at the very foot of the shitty technology adoption curve:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The prisoners who are abused by companies like Viapath are test subjects for technology that will work its way up the privilege gradient, moving on to mental patients, asylum seekers, kids, blue collar workers, white collar workers – then, everyone.

This makes prison-tech a great oracle for understanding what's coming for the rest of us in a decade or two. That's why I made prison-tech the McGuffin of The Bezzle, the sequel to my 2023 novel Red Team Blues, which comes out next February:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

High-tech forensic accountant Marty Hench is back in The Bezzle for a story of early-2000s internet consolidation, LA Sheriffs Department gangs, prison privatization, collateralized debt obligations, and the absolute depraved sleaze of prison-tech privateers. If you still have a Twitter account, you can enter this sweepstakes to get an early copy:

https://twitter.com/torbooks/status/1725544405879447745

(There will be other ways to get an early peek for non-Twitter users, rest assured!)

Attentive readers will note that The Bezzle will be my fourth book in 14 months. I'm presently touring my third book of 2023, The Lost Cause, a climate emergency book that Rebecca Solnit described as "a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Book tours are exhausting and exhilarating. They have the weirdest social dynamic, where you're bouncing to a new city every day or two, having high-speed social contact with hundreds of people at a go, then hunkering down alone in a hotel room to do press calls and answer publicity emails. I've been doing this since 2006 or so, and one mystery I've pondered all that time is the weirdness of stinky hotel soap:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53339503041/

Go to any Marriott, any Hilton, a Comfort Inn or a Holiday Inn, and you will find yourself in the Kingdom of Beige. The wallpaper, art, carpets and bedspreads are all calculated to be as generic and invisible as possible. But the soap and shampoo stocked by these redoubts of nothingness are wildly perfumed. I'm not a big fan of floral perfume anyway, but the hand-soap in your typical hotel bathroom makes Axe Body Spray seem innocuous. No taxi air-freshener, no urinal puck, not even the most lethal of 1960s-era douches ever aspired to the eye-watering, clinging, scent of hotel soaps, shampoos, conditioners and hand-cream.

It's like hygiene perfume is the mid-priced hotelier's equivalent of 1980s Wall Street traders' suspenders: while everything else must be absolutely uniform and staid, this is the one realm where you can really let your freak flag fly. I'm always up for a unfettered freak-flag, but holy shit does this stuff stink.

I'll get a chance to ponder this anew on the tour for The Bezzle next February, and again for Picks and Shovels, the February 2025 Martin Hench novel that's already pending.

I need to get ready for my bookstore event, but before I sign off, one more bit of science fiction publishing news. An indie filmmaker in Paris is working with the brilliant John Varley on an adaptation of his sf classic Titan, and they're trying to raise $65k on Kickstarter to pay for it. I kicked in – a world with more Varley in it is a better world:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/superstory/themis-the-next-frontier

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/2023/11/18/collectanea/#bricabrac

Image: Famartin https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021-01-06_12_15_43_Cranberry_trail_mix_with_cranberries,_peanuts,_raisins,_walnuts,_almonds,_sunflower_seeds,_pepitas_in_the_Franklin_Farm_section_of_Oak_Hill,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[liberalsarecool]

The US worker needs investment and strong unions. Democrats are leading the way.

#VoteBlue

[iww-gnv]

More than half the workers at the sprawling Volkswagen auto assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., have signed cards signaling that they want to be represented by the United Auto Workers union. And they did so in less than 60 days, revealing a level of enthusiasm that suggests one of the largest nonunion auto plants in the Southeastern United States could produce a major breakthrough in the UAW’s effort to organize workers in parts of the country that have been dominated by anti-union forces for generations.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sam Delgado at Vox:

It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today.

It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement.

What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama?

Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members.

Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant.

The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant.

[...]

Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going?

The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members.

The UAW is leading a unionization drive at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Hope it wins. #UAWVance #UAW #1u

[cyarskaren52]

the wga, culinary workers, the united auto workers union, and now sag-aftra. The unions just keep winning this year

unions work

GIF by choicesraccoon

[originalleftist]

That speech by Shawn Fain was breathtaking. I might have forgotten something, but don't think I've ever seen such an unapologetic Left-wing speech at a Democratic convention, and I certainly didn't expect to.

He blasted Trump and Vance as "lapdogs of the billionaire class", got the crowd chanting "Trump's a scab" on multiple occasions, gave a resounding endorsement of Biden and Harris's support for labour, and even addressed how bigotry is used by Republicans to divide the working class. Fucking brilliant!

Then they followed him up immediately with Ocasio-Cortez, who was met with enthusiastic cheers and chants of "AOC!", and who made a point of Harris's support for a ceasefire in Gaza- and bringing the hostages home.

The progressive wing (I'm talking about actual progressives, not Horseshoe Theory Tankies) won big tonight. As a former Sanders supporter- this felt like victory. And any progressive who isn't happy after this never will be.

[fabiansociety]

love to hear a union guy that just flatly says that rich people are the problem and bosses are scabs