I've just posted some important personal and professional news about my health crisis on my website. please read and share with relevant folks in our struggle for justice. My best to you all--
Craziest morning news headline: hospitals are so short staffed against Covid, they are going to keep nurses who test positive working. We need to create emergency pandemic tax on companies earning stiff profits off the pandemic, and pay workers to stay home when they are sick.
@scottheins
@thehousered
Imagine if you had been sent the equivalent amount of communication, but it was home test kits for COVID, high quality N95 masks, and an official letter to your employer stating that if you got COVID, you had the legal right to full pay for the isolation period????
The book is out! The first negotiations book written by a negotiator for workers. Rules to Win By uses the lens of union negotiations but is applicable to any setting where the working class pulls up to win against today's hyper greedy corporate class. 1/10
Tesla found guilty of union busting. The Tesla auto workers in blue state CA want a union. There's nothing innovative about Silicon Valley's union busting culture--all the tech elite are so last century. Enviros in CA need to aggressively support UAW organizing at Tesla.
The NLRB judge wrote that Tesla management perpetrated "pervasive unlawful conduct." "Respondent [Tesla] by numerous supervisors and agents, including its chief
executive officer [Elon Musk] and chief people officer committed many violations of the Act."
1/7 That the main "coalition" national groups which local groups put their faith in to make the call for mass direct actions today is still silent is a repeat of Florida in 2000. The strength of the Democratic Party Industrial Complex cannot be underestimated.
First copies of the actual book showed up! The colors on the cover are more beautiful than my phone shows... you can get a 40% off the hardcover list price up until Jan. 7, the publication date, here
"Strikes are the only tool left in the basket. Until we find our way to massive strikes, the country we once knew, problematic as it was, is done." Celebrating May Day Starts by Taking Workers Seriously via
@thenation
There's simply nothing better than a winning NLRB election count. And I do mean nothing. Congrats to these workers and their entire effort
@SBWorkersUnited
BREAKING: Starbucks location on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo has voted to become Starbucks' first unionized store in the U.S., by vote of 19-8.
Here was the moment workers realized they had enough votes.
@WBFO
Neoliberal Dems are totally complicit in deliberate destruction of USPS. And most else cherished, and needed by, the working class. And they wonder why they lose major elections.
I am tired of defeats.
But still more tired
Of friends who, after each defeat, explain
That actually it was a 'victory'.
They talk like that
So as not to be so tired of defeats
That they succumb to them
But that kind of talk
Leads to that kind of victory
--By Erich Fried
Two forward-thinking teachers unions in CA declare Covid means schools can't open safely, and demand serious improvements to crisis distance teaching & learning, as well as real societal supports for students and parents. Science, justice & safety.
So refreshing to see a labor leader going after the CDC for following corporate America's needs and not the needs of workers. This wasn't sound science, it was driven by profit. Break the patent, give the world access to produce the vaccines. Go
@FlyingWithSara
, GO!
Flight Attendants Association President Sara Nelson criticizes the CDC for shortening quarantine period from 10 days to 5 days.
Nelson says this doesn't focus on public health at all, "but it was all about the staffing issues" to satisfy corporate America.
Tonight
#UTLAStrong
House of Reps voted 80% to endorse
#BernieSanders
, following the most comprehensive member engagement process UTLA ever conducted for a political candidate. Like UTLA, Sanders believes in building a national movement for lasting change.
I tweeted several versions of this last year. Harris occupied the top of the list when the subject was "most donations from billionaires." Get strike-ready folks. The corporate wing is popping bubbly.
It is 1933 in America folks. As I say in the opening of my new book, "Before workers decided to build power through collective action and form the UAW in 1935, conditions in the auto plants weren't any different from the abysmal ones in today's average Amazon warehouse."
Berlin hospital workers held an incredibly important "warning strike" today. Why so important, versus just great? The bosses attempted 3 legal injunctions to stop them and they defeated each injunction from Friday until today. They beat the bosses legal actions by organizing! 1/5
I can't f*cking stand when NPR goes on about the "actually good numbers" of the economy. People and their communities, not markets, matter. Get a reality check for something sake, pain is everywhere.
Markey defeating "the" family dynasty is a YES for the Green New Deal, YES for unions, YES for people over privilege, and more. All are related. Biden, take note!
Privileged to spend Tues 4-23 waking up live with Amy & Juan on
@democracynow
re current and future of working class organizing. We are in exciting yet perilous times. I am super fortunate to then head talk with
@BrianLehrer
re BIG UAW win and small stuff like saving democracy.
If Bernie wins NV, it means the Reid machine was defeated. It will be a very strong indicator that the national DNC elite can be overcome by the Sanders campaign. That’s huge. The Culinary flap was a sub-story w/in the Reid story.
Can't read enough articles about defeating Bezos! Will be good when the articles are about Amazon warehouse workers winning their union. But this is good, solid organizing vs big $. Amazon Cash Fails to Oust Seattle Socialist Kshama Sawant via
@thenation
7/7 I wanted to be more wrong than ever today. But no. And now the national Party is playing Lucy with the football with the movement. The Call to the streets should have gone out the minute Trump held his press conference, if not long before.
3/7 Meanwhile, the forces behind Trump are right on schedule, they don't worry about acting like grown ups but focus on winning. As planned, they framed the narrative while national liberal groups, and national unions, are still debating whether to take to streets.
@meaganmday
A related item, the President doesn't want to weigh in to assist workers on strike. Which I'd argue is a policy decision. After 4 years of a guy who occupied the White House dismembering the regulatory systems which support workers, Biden's refusal is unacceptable.
Just out: my analysis of Glacier and how to prepare for where this pro-plutocrat court is heading on the right to strike. My focus, our strategy and what we can do now.
How Should Workers Respond to the Supreme Court's Ruling in “Glacier Northwest”?
I've just written a morning missive about how ordinary workers are willing & ready to fight back--and challenging our nat'l organizations to heed to the call & enable effective mass action!
Rail Workers, Nurses, Teachers are Fighting from the Bottom Up
Dreaming of workplace strikes? Rent strikes? Democracy?
2 min. video: Strike School starts 24 Sept, six live classes until 13 Oct. Twice per day! Build strike-ready unions, and, high participation structure-based organizations! A great team of strike-experienced teachers!
2/7 Not having gotten a text or email from Protect the Results late last night, let alone by now, is beyond troubling. Biden is doing as I predicted, following the "we are the grown ups, we should act like the grown ups."
Throughout Latin America, bold, risk-taking, well organized trade unions are at the center of genuine democracy movements. They are contesting for power and winning. Strike are key to their electoral successes. Hmmmm.
Continue the struggle!!! Sign up for the course I developed and have, w/ about 20 GREAT organizers, taught to 40,000 workers in 111 countries. The WORK must go on!
@rls_organizing
Starts May 7th--groups of 10 or more!!! Go, fight and WIN! 🩶
Very sad to hear this news from
@rsgexp
. Sending all of our love!
Organising 4 Power has played such an important role in shaping our strategic direction over the past 5 years and we will be forever thankful! Sign-up to the next edition!
@rls_organizing
My first opinion piece in the NYTS, today, on strategy, on how to win, on how to defeat the forces behind Trump! Time to shift from rage to productive strategy, fast.
5/7 I have been saying we'd be lucky if we could drag a terrible candidate across the finish line, but enough groups worked hard enough that drag-we-likely-did--and to not do the defense of that hard work today is a strategic error, potentially fatal.
F*ck you Mayor Pete for framing CHOICE against Warren and Sanders. He needs to be out of this race along with Biden. Playing the "choice" bullshit card mid debate renders him a tool of the bosses. UGGG. Go Sanders (nice to see him) and go Warren. DOWN with Mayor whoever.
K'Shama Sawant is to Bernie and the Squad what Chicago Teachers
@CTULocal1
were to the WVA education strike and
@UTLAnow
and
@Ish_the_Dish
. She got this shit going years back and she won. Again. Amazing. Beating Amazon. IT WAS REAL ORGANIZING, & structure tests!
“I come from the Marshall Ganz school of organizing,” she said, referring to the activist turned sociologist. “I try and avoid using negative language on campaigns.”
How Did a Socialist Triumph in Buffalo?
Figuring out direct action during Covid, this is good tactical, creative thinking--get you brain juice brainstorms going. This is smart mobilizing. Need to use time at home for smart organizing, too (for those at home, vs pulling huge hours at work).
BREAKING: Almost 100 cars here on multiple blocks, surrounding the Hudson County Detention Center in New Jersey!
The detention centers must be emptied before they turn into death camps. ICE won’t do it; only Governors have the emergency powers to save these lives. ACT
@GovMurphy
"To abandon the strike is to abandon the concept of wage labor; for the essence of wage labor, as opposed to slave labor, is refusal to work when conditions of work become unbearable." John Steuben, Strike Strategy, 1950. The opening lines of the closing chapter of my new book.
Watching sneaky Pete throw progressive policies under the bus to embrace a consultant-tested talking point is unintentionally revealing. A guy who received a total of 8,500 votes in his last election now wants to be POTUS because he believes in his own ambition above all else.
“United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers… is not a party to the labor dispute, but said its members would not cross Local 99’s picket lines. The work stoppage will be the first joint walkout by the district’s two largest unions.” 1/4
Unionize Amazon.
@lil_yenta
points out if there was a union, hed be forced to share his obscene riches, earned by seeing people--whether workers or communities--as disposable. No should be able to be a trillionaire. Or billionaire.
This quote reveals a total lack of understanding, as do the apps, of the purpose and beauty of real organizing.
"The less time organizers can say the same thing over and over, and the more time they can spend strategizing, the better."
Making sure students have their basic healthcare needs met is a vital part of public education and caring for the whole student.
Today CTA co-hosted the 3rd annual free mobile dental clinic providing much-needed dental services to up to 150 low-income high school students. 🦷😁
"The Postal Service is too precious to be left in the hands of DeJoy...."
@NicholsUprising
outlines an urgent campaign that requires unity across every segment of progressives.
Fire Louis DeJoy! via
@thenation
If workers want it and build real collective power, we can negotiate 4 day work weeks (have done it). Also, negotiating self- scheduling, which gives workers the ability to swap shifts as needed, to 'lie flat,' w/ out bosses involved.
Work Is a False Idol
Waiting and watching to see which candidates running for President, aside from Bernie (good job!), show up in person, say they will improve strike laws, & stand with workers for this strike and others.
6/7 Talk to me tomorrow about how many times I have said, and written, that the pollsters are wrong. That highly charged, highly polarized elections are the bosses strategy, moving division and futility.
One of the most f**king annoying thing about the pundit class is that they are wildly confusing primary analysis from general election analysis: for the record, very different people vote in each, and, do very different things.
4/7 As a result, the people trusted to 'protect the results,' have fallen into the trap and even though some groups, like some local or statewide unions are calling for actions, the turnout will be lower and thus, it will not look good.
People, this shit isn't rocket science.
@AdamAhlgrim
Are you unionized?? That's the solution, a good academic union, strong enough to negotiate for housing, childcare, and fixed minimum pay for your PhD. Our UCs have contracts covering your needs, so do some of the other grad worker unions. Fight, organize, don't quit, win change.
Evidence backing what most of us who have run campaigns already know: Dems thinking they will win by courting Rs and dissing progressive wing is idiotic.
An interesting dynamic in latest CBS poll:
Only 5% of Republicans say they’re voting for Joe Biden.
Right now that’s lower than the 8% of Republicans who voted for Obama in 2008, 6% of Republicans who voted for Obama in 2012, and 7% of Republicans who voted for Hillary Clinton.
Student and worker protest movements have always pushed the UC to the right side of history. As UC demonstrates in an article on their own website, it is the students and workers who remain the driving force of change in the UC system.
I have lost track of how many times stories right above or below each other reveal what a craven, cruel, profit-driven, non-scientific approach the USA has taken to this pandemic. Led by chicken sh*t politicians sacrificing our health and lives. Today's juxtaposing headlines.
"INVESTORS" ARE NOT HUMANS IN NEED OF HOMES. It should be illegal for them to buy homes. As it shoukd be illegal fir corporations to be people under election law. Revolution time. Need way stronger movements. Unions need housing as top issue.
The rank & file created the wealth, and the money the boss "found" after July 5th. In the hottest month on earth, all working class organizations have to do more.
The Teamsters’ Proposed Agreement with UPS Is a Great Victory by and for the Workers
What you should not bother reading this Sunday: the special section
#workingwhilefemale
. Like the
#metoo
special, an entire section about working women with NOTHING ABOUT UNIONS. For f*ck sake. I could dissect it all, but why? Negotiate with your colleagues in a union.
Umm, trade union organizing 101 here, framed as academic discovery. Good unions have practiced, race-class-gender conversations and "messaging" for a couple hundred years. Those of us that win start w/ teaching semantics & how to have a SOC-Structured Organizing Conversation.
This is a powerful reminder of why unions (and progressives) need to especially recruit veterans into organizing & strike efforts; they bring solidarity, experience w/ troop formation, are racially diverse working class, committed to plans-to-win, and more.
Can't think of a worse, or more dangerous, development than this one. Hope NY education & healthcare unions are getting prepared for the fight of their lives.
@thehousered
That's your challenge, and 'ours'. To help them connect the dots between ready to challenge their bosses, to them coming to see their bosses as part of a larger system that is really hurting and undermining them. I love organizing.
If you are wondering what to do given the US Supreme Court's anti-democratic and truly radical right consolidation of power, rather than despair, I recommend a short class on organizing. Applies to many countries, not just the USA.
via
@voxdotcom
Sadly, most public schools don't have any where near the level of ventilation required to stand a chance at keeping people safe. Decades of austerity and run down buildings are one key reason school buildings have to stay closed. Tax the rich.
Great piece by
@jonathan4212
laying out how to prepare for a 2028 mass strike.
Shawn Fain’s New Year’s Resolution Is to Lay the Ground for a National Strike
Bravo! When we fight (smart, united and hard), we win!
@WGAWest
@WGA
Looking forward to the details, and the process of engaging leadership bodies and all members is just beginning, but really impressive collective action!
We did it. We have a tentative deal.
Over the coming days, we'll discuss and vote on it, together, as a democratic union. But today, I want to thank every single WGA member, and every fellow worker who stood with us in solidarity. You made this possible. Thank you.
#WGAStrong
To effectively challenge unfettered global capitalism, we need a powerful global working class movement. Each country organizing against the same bosses, then uniting across borders. Our courses are taught twice a day to accommodate the world, in 12 languages. Kick off is May 10.
Speaking of Bezos, everyone should send Sawant $. Put aside puritanical dogma and send her money. I am, right now, because he's a billionaire twisting our democracy to his 1% side. Amazon Is Spending Big to Oust Seattle’s Socialist via
@thenation
Prop
#22
on CA ballot is such an outrage for so many reasons. The ballot's language instituting a 7/8th majority vote to ever amend the Prop
#22
law, if it passes, today's serious pet peeve. That's a structural assault on democracy. Rich, PAY YOUR TAXES!
So great being on strike with tens of thousands of my colleagues at UCB. Day one picket lines were fantastic. Time to end precarity in higher ed, and everywhere! Brought out my pink pussy hat for 2nd picket shift of the day. Go, fight, win!
@UAW5810
@uaw2865
#FairUCNow
I have a new essay on the presidential election, out today in
@nybooks
. Sharing lessons from the Florida recount, and our slide into strong-man authoritarianism.
I work in many countries with "sectoral bargaining," and I can assure you, it alone is not the promised land. Direct worker participation in the process, and strikes, and strike ready unions, and power, is what gets the goods. Please read this letter, it is important.
The nursing home industry is 1 of the endless reasons we need a single payor health care system. More than half their income is paid by taxpayers, and giant corporations make billions.
‘They Dumped Him Like Trash’: Nursing Homes Evict Vulnerable Residents
The disruption of the impeachment hearing today is an exact replica of the coup aka the Florida Recount. I was there for the "Brooks Brothers" mob, which was a brilliant tactic--they staged it to give Scalia the power to declare the FL Recount 'out of control'; enter, SCOTUS.
We need to abolish the electoral college in the USA and it starts with members of unions abolishing the proto-electoral colleges inside our unions. Watch this video on the historic opportunity to win direct democracy in the UAW.
@UAWD_Reform
@MorePerfectUS
NEW: As 10,000 John Deere workers are on strike, UAW members are furious at union leadership for contracts that favor corporations and have led to a decline in membership.
Now
@UAWD_Reform
is fighting to democratize UAW and throw out leaders with a history of corruption.
Folks, the Amazon news is amazing. There will be backlash, aimed at AOC, I am guessing. Stand proud and strong, it's good for NYC not to lower itself to union busting, rent increasing, tax avoiding, billionaires who pay workers CRAP. The reason was fear of unions
@DougHenwood
Oakland's teacher union strike in 2019 built their organizational capacity to defeat way better funded Billionaire school board candidates. Strikes and strike-ready unions, working w/ comm groups, are a key to rebuilding solidarity, civil society and democracy
@OaklandEA
Wow! Solid reporting on anti-Sanders media bias. Meanwhile, I was with 1000 most female teacher leaders,
@UTLAnow
annual Leadership Conference, where Sanders fired up the room, and specifically when he linked the attack on teachers to sexism & racism.