Colorado's Worst Governor

Jared Polis, once again showing how he is a Republican in drag.

This time, he vetoed the repeal of Colorado's anti-union right-to-work law.

This is in addition to his commuting Tina Peters sentence for election fraud.

For the second time, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill that would have eliminated a unique second election requirement in the state’s union formation law, after business and labor groups failed to reach a compromise on how to tweak the measure.

“In the wake of (last year’s) veto and the substantial negotiations that preceded it, I would have hoped that both business and labor leaders could have worked to craft a long-term and durable agreement on this matter that would have served Colorado workers and businesses alike,” Polis wrote in his veto letter on Friday. “Unfortunately, because that did not happen, this issue will likely come up again next year and every subsequent year until it is addressed, which creates uncertainty for both workers and businesses.”

House Bill 25-1005 would have repealed the Labor Peace Act in Colorado. Unions can form with a simple majority, per federal law, but in Colorado they must win a second election with 75% of the vote to negotiate so-called union security — whether all workers need to pay into collective bargaining negotiations.

His political career needs to be ended. 

You Mess With the Bull, You Get the Horns

2 Years ago, Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast laid off about 20% of their staff.

Now they are begging their employees not to unionize.

Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, has a problem—no, not its cancelled video games. Its workers would like to unionise, and I'm just starting to get the sense that it really doesn't want that to happen. Just a smidge. A tiny inkling.

Late last month, WoTC employees from the Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their intention to form a union, giving the company until May 1 to recognise it voluntarily. Neither Hasbro nor Wizards of the Coast did so.

The motion to form a union now proceeds to a vote via the National Labor Relations Board, which would allow the union to form whether Hasbro/WoTC like it or not. In order to dissuade the union from forming, Wizards of the Coast has, workers claim, resorted to daily emails and scare tactics.

They have hired union busters as well, Fisher Phillips, and are almost certainly targeting labor organizers among their employees.

As an FYI, it doesn't help that the layoffs were largely indiscriminate, hitting some of WOTC's most successful projects. 

Today in Centrist Democrats

I give you Virginia Governor Abagail Spanburger, who just vetoed a bill expanding labor rights, particularly for civil servants because she finds treating employees with dignity and respect is a bridge too far.

The motto of the centrists in general, and the  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) in general is, "A bit less evil than the Republicans."

This is horrible policy and worse politics.

She sh%$ on the people who went to the wall for her in the last election. 

These people are far less likely to do anything in the next election now.

To quote someone who wasn't Talleyrand,* "This is worse than a crime, this is a mistake.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger vetoed a statewide collective bargaining bill Thursday to the chagrin of workers and her own party.

“I remain committed to continuing to work with the General Assembly, unions, localities, and public servants across the Commonwealth to develop a public sector collective bargaining system that works for Virginia,” the Democrat said in her veto explanation. “However, I believe additional amendments are needed to the enrolled bill currently before me."

The Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed legislation that would remove the prohibition on collective bargaining for state employees and mandate a collective bargaining right for local employees. Local employees currently have to wait for their local government or school board to opt in to collective bargaining.

“Governor Abigail Spanberger today betrayed half a million of Virginia’s public service workers by going back on her campaign promise to support collective bargaining rights for the people who keep our Commonwealth and communities running every day,” the Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition, a lobbying group that represents large unions like the Virginia Education Association and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. “Instead of aligning herself with General Assembly Democrats who unanimously supported this bill, Spanberger instead vetoed the bill just as her predecessor Glenn Youngkin did, sending Virginia workers the crystal clear message that they are no better off than they were under a Republican governor.”

The legislature rejected Spanberger’s sweeping amendments that labor unions claim weakened the bill. The original version removed a requirement that would have forced local governments or schools to hold votes to allow employees to unionize. The bill also creates a Public Employee Relations Board and codifies employees’ right to negotiate on certain issues, including staffing, working conditions and benefits.

Unfortunately, there are not enough Democrats in either the State Senate or House of Delegates to override the veto.

^*This quote is often attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, but likely comes from either Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe or Joseph Fouché.

Pay Enough to Live

It appears that someone at a Kimberly Clark warehouse is feeling very underappreciated by his employer.

They burnt down a 1,2 million square foot (111,000 m2) warehouse and shared the whole thing on social media.

I'm not sure that I'm particularly upset by his behavior.

Many workers’ pay is effectively frozen in an unforgiving labor market that hasn’t seen any meaningful increases in wages in decades. Meanwhile, the cost of living — not to mention the price of gas — continues to rise, making it difficult for low-income households to squeeze by.

One strategy we wouldn’t recommend is to set a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse filled to the brim with toilet paper and other highly flammable paper products on fire — which is exactly what a disgruntled employee at a paper products facility in Ontario, California did earlier this week, as the LA Times reports.

The resulting fire, which started just after midnight local time on Tuesday, was enormous, requiring 175 firefighters and 15 fire trucks to put it out.

And if you really, really can’t keep yourself from watching the world burn, we do not, under any circumstances, advise you to film yourself while doing it — which is also what 29-year-old Highland resident Chamel Abdulkarim has now been accused of doing.

The NFI Industries employee was promptly arrested in connection with the blaze after a video showing a man lighting tall stacks of toilet paper on fire went viral online.

“All you had to do was pay us enough to live,” the man could be heard saying in the video. 

We now have a corollary to that old adage, "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

People who own warehouses full of highly flammable paper products should pay their employees enough to live.

While on the Topic of Charities Betraying Their Missions

We have to talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which aggressively retaliated against union employees and gutted its investigations of white supremacists following Donald Trump's election.

For five years, I wrote about far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and served as one of its spokespeople. Then, one day, I wasn’t there anymore. I never publicly explained why I was no longer with the SPLC, and I took a year off from social media after I left. On Posting Through It, the podcast I co-host with Jared Holt, I’ve occasionally hinted that something went wrong at the SPLC without getting into specifics. With my book Strange People on the Hill publishing on Tuesday, I’m going to explain what happened here—clearly and in full. 

Some of what follows reflects poorly on the SPLC as an institution. It should be said, though, that many union members there are people I respect and care about. They’re still fighting for a better organization and doing important work in a difficult, often repressive environment. After the right-wing authoritarian shift the SPLC had warned about for years arrived, the organization chose to reduce its public profile. That isn’t on these workers. They deserve better, and so does the broader civil rights community.

………

Donors to the SPLC may not realize that the organization purposefully discarded not only me but also the entire editorial team operating within the Intelligence Project—the division focused on far-right extremism—before Trump took power again in January 2025. That’s why you’ve seen fewer investigative pieces from them, even as open displays of hate have become increasingly common in American life. 

………

That’s why I agreed to become a union steward at the end of 2022. I had seen enough of that type of dysfunction. There were other, related issues. Extremists threatened my friend Hannah Gais’s physical safety during a reporting trip, and the Huang-picked Intelligence Project director didn’t even seem to know what was happening. But my primary goal in becoming a steward was to help us do our jobs without interference from leadership. We wanted to publish the investigative work on the radical right that we believed our donors expected of us.

The SPLC’s unionization effort began before I arrived—a response to underpaid staff working in palpably toxic conditions. (When you’re done reading here, check out the comments on the SPLC’s Glassdoor page for some dark comedy.) Before I became a steward, I had a spotless employment record, and leadership treated me as one of their own. I was once pulled into a Zoom call Huang held with CBS News to feed her talking points in real time. I also participated in ongoing chats with leadership and communications teams, advising them on how best to respond to breaking news. All that changed overnight when I became a steward. 

For those who have never experienced actual union-busting tactics firsthand, consider yourselves lucky. It really, really sucks. Throughout 2023, the SPLC’s leadership team called me into Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred. In one case, leadership put in writing quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale. 

……… 

You hear a lot of liberal and Democratic rhetoric about how dire this moment is. I agree. The only thing I have ever wanted, for the SPLC and for everyone living through this extraordinarily challenging moment, is for us to act like it.

Cowardice and union busting.  Now there is a toxic mix.

In Unity, There is Strength

As near as I can tell, this is the earliest recorded example of a labor strike.  It's in Egypt, around 12,000 BCE.

Artisans were not being paid in a timely manner to make art glorifying Pharaoh, so they stopped until they got paid.

“1768 is really when the word ‘strike’ begins to develop out of the UK.”

That’s the view of classicist Sarah E Bond, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

As Bond explains, the word ‘strike’ comes from a moment when sailors in the port of Sunderland decided to literally strike down the topsails of their ships, immobilising them until their demands were met by their bosses. The tactic worked, spread south to the shipyards of the Thames, and quickly entered the political vocabulary.

I did not know this entomological fact, but now I do, and so do my reader(s).

………

One of the earliest, clearest examples of what would now be termed a ‘strike’ comes from ancient Egypt – a civilisation that was rigidly hierarchical and dominated by unquestionable royal authority. Beneath the monumental architecture and other cultural feats, Egyptian society depended on a vast pool of labour.

In the second millennium BC, during the reign of Ramesses III, Egypt had passed the peak of imperial expansion it had enjoyed a century earlier. Ramesses III ruled during the early 12th century BC, at the end of the New Kingdom, a period marked by mounting economic pressure, as well as internal and external instability.

Ramesses III presented himself as a traditional warrior-pharaoh, defending Egypt against repeated Libyan incursions and threats from other foreign enemies, such as the mysterious ‘Sea Peoples’. Reliefs and inscriptions depict the pharaoh’s decisive victories, but modern historians view his reign as one of crisis management, with Egyptian prosperity faltering. Not only was the kingdom embroiled in expensive wars, but agricultural output was stalling.

Despite these pressures, Ramesses III occupied an impossibly powerful position. The Egyptian pharaoh was viewed as a divine intermediary, responsible for maintaining maat – a religious notion of cosmic order that guaranteed harmony between gods, people and nature. Feeding workers, paying temple staff and sustaining major construction projects were all part of that sacred duty.

……… 

The strike itself unfolded at Deir el-Medina, a purpose-built village housing the highly skilled artisans who carved and painted the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. These workers were salaried state employees, exempt from agricultural work, housed by the government and supplied directly from royal granaries. Many were literate, and they left behind letters, complaints and administrative records that give historians a rare view into the lives of non-elite Egyptians.

But because they didn’t farm their own food, missed deliveries of their payment left them vulnerable. When Ramesses III’s administration fell badly behind on promised rations, families at Deir el-Medina faced serious consequences.

“The necropolis workers decided that they were going to go on strike until they got the rations and payment that they were promised by the pharaoh,” Bond says.

The workers peacefully withdrew their labour entirely and carefully chose their protest site. Their actions were documented by local scribes, making this the earliest recorded labour strike in human history.

“They decided that they were going to go and sit in the back of a temple, and that they were simply going to refuse to work until they were given the back payments.”

Temples in ancient Egypt were sanctuaries of non-violence. Fighting and bloodshed within them was taboo. It’s for that reason that “going and sitting in peaceful protest at the back of a temple, or just outside a temple, was something that became extremely common in Pharaonic Egypt, and continued well into the Ptolemaic period and beyond.”

A note here, for those of you who are not familiar with the history, this was in the midst of the Late Bronze Age collapse, which likely contributed to the problems.

Neat stuff. 

How Unbelievably Petty

It looks like everyone's favorite drunkard, Pete Hegseth, is trying to remove Harvey Milk’s name from the replenishment ship (T-AO-206) that bears his name.

They are also looking at removing the names of Harriet Tubman (Because they are pro slavery), Medgar Evars (Because they support the assassination of uppity n*****s), Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cezar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Suffragette Lucy Stone.

The Trump White House is occupied by nothing but small pathetic people.

Headline of the Day

The Democrats’ One and Only Union-Busting Governor

—The American Prospect

Colorado Governor Jared Polis never fails to disappoint.

He just vetoed a bill that would have repealed the requirement that unions in Colorado have a 2nd election, and get ¾ of the vote in that election, in order to effectively collect union dues.

His reason is bullsh%$, and Jared Polis is bullsh%$. 

On Friday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-controlled legislature that repealed the state’s sui generis right-to-work law. Colorado legislators had voted to pass the Worker Protection Act (SB25-005) by a 22-to-12 margin in the Senate and by 43-to-22 in the House, in both cases along party lines.

Existing Colorado labor law—the Labor Peace Act—was enacted in 1943 before the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act enabled states to pass right-to-work laws that curtailed unions’ ability to collect dues from all the workers they represented in collective bargaining. Colorado’s Labor Peace Act prefigured those right-to-work laws in several ways. Under its terms, once a majority of workers vote to form or join a union, it requires that union to win 75 percent of the workers’ votes in a second election to be able to collect dues from all the workers it represents once it has successfully bargained a contract with the employer.

The difficulty unions have in clearing that second bar—a hurdle unique to Colorado—explains in large part why the percentage of unionized Colorado workers is so low. Data from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that Colorado’s union density (7.7 percent in 2024) much more closely resembles that of right-to-work states (with an average of 6.2 percent in 2024) than non-right-to-work states (15.8 percent in 2024). Colorado is the only state with Democratic trifecta control of government to have such a law.

This man is pond scum.

This Ain't Good

We now have reports that Elon Musk's merry band of vandals have download sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

By "Sensitive Information" I mean confidential legal discussions, the names of whistle blowers, and list of labor organizers.

Any guess as to what the famously union averse Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is going to do with this information?

In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board.

The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.

………

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.

(Emphasis mine)

Criminals acting like criminals.  It should be noted here that this shows that Elon Musk's Evil Minions™ had specific criminal intent, which makes prosecution under statutes like the CFPA much easier. (I offer the caveat that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit! ⃰)

The employees grew concerned that the NLRB's confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure. Eventually, the disclosure continued, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI.

The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk's SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB's independence, they said.  

The new revelations about DOGE's activities at the labor agency come from a whistleblower in the IT department of the NLRB, who disclosed his concerns to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in a detailed report that was then provided to NPR. Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

Elon's thugs are not just criminals, they are terrorists.

They need to be treated as such.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Guillotines for Sale!

Order now, demand is spiking.

In a surprise to my reader(s) I am not talking about the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™, I'm referring to Mark Andreeson, who is arguing that must make everyone (but him) completely destitute to achieve utopia.

He has explicitly stated that his goal for the world is to reduce wages of everyone (but him) to basically nothing:

Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the massive venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — which has its fingers in pretty much every pie in tech — has revealed an eyebrow-raising detail in his "techno-optimist" vision of the future.

In a recent tweet, the American billionaire investor casually proclaimed that AI must "crash" everyone's wages before it can deliver us an economic utopia — one that'll definitely happen, and certainly not create a permanent underclass of have-nots.

"A world in which human wages crash from AI — logically, necessarily — is a world in which productivity growth goes through the roof, and prices for goods and services crash to near zero," Andreessen wrote. "Consumer cornucopia. Everything you need and want for pennies."

So fret not, lowly laborer: you may be destined for financial ruin, but paradise is right around the corner. Pinky promise.

………

Andreessen's tweet is a revealing example of the ruthless economic logic that underlies tech moguls' utopic visions of the future, in which progress is a foregone conclusion, rendering everyone's economic suffering in the interim merely a means to an end. Like overzealous fitness instructors, they always choose to emphasize the need for pain to achieve anything.

………

Above all, many of these ultra-rich tech types like Andreessen can't help publicly fantasizing about punishing the poor.

Larry Ellison for instance, cofounder of the software outfit Oracle, drooled about how AI would supercharge the surveillance state, ensuring that "citizens will be on their best behavior."

These folks are the problem, not the solution.

The only good news is that rat-fucks like Mark Andreeson went all in on AI, and they are taking a bath now that Deepseek's incredibly inexpensive artificial intelligence has eaten Big AI's lunch.

Funny That

You may recall that the Senate failed to appoint a new chair for the National Labor Relations Board.

They could have, but Kamala Harris did not make it to the Senate in time to cast the tie breaking vote.

So...Kamala Harris coulda broken the tie on the NLRB vote, but she wasn't there to cast the vote, and her brother-in-law is the chief counsel of Uber, which has tangled with the NLRB. https://t.co/CwYJlnedeo

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) January 8, 2025

Time for me to don a tinfoil hat, but her brother in law, Tony West, took an outsized role in her campaign and fought tooth and nail against anything that might inconvenience the. "Great malefactors of wealth."

When Rep. Khanna suggests that Harris was somehow just out of pocket and unavailable, he is likely being far too charitable.

F%$# Scott Walker

One of the lasting legacies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the infamous ACT 10, which essentially banned unions for government workers (except for cops and firemen) in Wisconsin, has been struck down.

It turns out that the exception for cops and firemen, who were given said exemption because they endorsed Walker, was not sufficiently defined, and the statute could not stand without that:

A Dane County judge on Monday sent ripples through Wisconsin's political landscape, overturning a 13-year-old law that banned most collective bargaining among public employees, consequently decimating the size and power of employee unions and turning then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker into a nationally known political figure.

The effort to overturn Act 10 began in November 2023 when several unions representing public employees filed the lawsuit, citing a "dire situation" in workplaces with issues including low pay, staffing shortages and poor working conditions.

In July, Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost ruled provisions of Act 10 unconstitutional and denied a motion filed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to dismiss the case.

The lawsuit argued the 2011 law violated equal protection guarantees in the Wisconsin Constitution by dividing public employees into two classes: "general" and "public safety" employees. Public safety employees are exempt from the collective bargaining limitations imposed on "general" public employees.

Frost agreed. He said he couldn't sever Act 10's definition of "public safety employee," which he said is "irrational and violates the right to equal protection of the laws," and also keep the rest of Act 10 intact.

"I cannot solve Act 10's constitutional problems by striking the definition of 'public safety employee,' leaving the term undefined and leaving the remainder of the law in place," wrote Frost in Monday's ruling.

Frost added that "Act 10 as written by the Legislature specifically and narrowly defines 'public safety employee.' It is that definition which is unconstitutional. The Legislature cites no precedent for this bold argument that I should simply strike the unlawful definition but leave it to an agency and the courts to later define as they see fit. I am unaware of any such precedent (...)."

In the earlier ruling on the motion to dismiss the case, Frost pointed out the law treats different groups of public safety employees differently.

"Nobody could provide this Court an explanation that reasonably showed why municipal police and fire and State Troopers are considered public safety employees, but Capitol Police, UW Police and conservation wardens, who have the same authority and do the same work, are not," Frost said.

The law was all about political payback, and while I understand why Judge Frost was disinclined to state reality, that is the reality.

The law was a corrupt political and electoral thing, and the fact that it has been overturned is a good thing.

H/t Lawyers, Guns & Money.

This is Going to Get Interesting

Talks between International Longshoreman's Association (ILA) and the East Coast port operators have broken down, and the current contract ends, and a strike could commence, on January 15.

The ILA walked away from negotiations with USMX scheduled to last for four days after just two days.

In a statement issued on 13 November ILA said, that the first day and half of talks had been productive. “However, late yesterday, talks broke down when management introduce their intent to implement semi-automation – a direct contradiction to their opening statement where they assured us that neither full nor semi-automation would be on the table. They claimed their focus was on modernisation, not automation."

The USMX similarly said initial talks had been positive but were unable to make progress on a range of technology. “Unfortunately, the ILA is insisting on an agreement that would move our industry backward by restricting future use of technology that has existed in some of our ports for nearly two decades – making it impossible to evolve to meet the nation’s future supply chain demands,” USMX said.

I think that a strike is likely, though I also think that Trump will go full Reagan/PATCO on the strikers.

Labor unions have experience some success lately and Donald Trump and Evil Minions™ will be determined to roll that back.

This is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$ (Still Cannot Make Planes Edition)

Elizabeth Lund, who was appointed Sr. VP of commercial aircraft safety at Boeing has announced her retirement.

She's only been in the position since just after the door blew out of the 737, so I think that she has concluded that she was in a no-win scenario:

Elizabeth Lund, senior vice president of quality at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and one of the company’s most prominent female executives, will retire next month, the company said Monday.

Lund, 59, was given the job of restoring Boeing’s quality control after a door-sized fuselage panel blew out in-flight on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in January.

With Boeing in crisis ever since, she has been constantly under the spotlight, required to answer questions publicly from regulators and Congress about how the serious lapses happened, and explain the plan to fix the quality management system.

In an internal message to employees, Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Stephanie Pope wrote that Lund had planned to retire this year after more than 33 years at Boeing. Pope thanked Lund “for her strong leadership during a challenging year and her remarkable contributions to Boeing.”

………

A month after the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, Lund was tapped to lead the quality organization after the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix its management of product quality.

Interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board in June, Lund admitted that a major push in 2019 to cut the number of Boeing quality inspectors by Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, then head of quality at Commercial Airplanes, had been a mistake.

“We are undoing much of what was done there,” Lund told the NTSB. “We have undone it, and I don’t think that we appropriately controlled and looked at all the risks when they did it.”

Later that month, Lund made a misstep at a press briefing when she commented on details about the Alaska Airlines incident that had not previously been publicly disclosed. She was rebuked by the NTSB for breaking strict disclosure rules about ongoing accident investigations.

As a result, Boeing was sanctioned and its access to the NTSB’s investigative information on the incident was withdrawn.

Out after 10 months means something, and it ain't good.

In related news, someone at Bloomberg (of all places) has run the numbers on the machinist deal, and observed that, given the insane cost of living in the Seattle area, the post strike wage increases amount to a barely living wage.

When Covid-19 brought the US economy to a standstill in the spring of 2020, America’s top executives called for a “national conversation” about the need for workers to return to work, warning of an “economic catastrophe” if they didn’t. I wrote at the time that a conversation we also needed to have was one about giving workers the security of a living wage. So, when I read the news that Boeing Co.’s machinists approved a new labor contract on Monday, locking in a hike of nearly 44% over four years, it was clear to me that the deal they struck was inevitable.

A shocking percentage of full-time workers don’t earn enough to raise a family, and that was true even before the recent spike in inflation made everything a lot more expensive. As much as two-thirds of full-time workers age 25 and older can’t cover the basic necessities for a family of four with one parent working, according to wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and living wage estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

………

In the Seattle area, where Boeing produces most of its aircraft, a living wage is roughly $50 an hour for a family of four with one adult working, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, or about $104,000 a year based on a 40-hour work week. It’s probably no coincidence then that Boeing’s labor deal will raise the average machinist’s annual wage to $119,000 over four years. Assuming 3% annual inflation, a living wage for a family of four will be closer to $117,000 in four years, very nearly matching what Boeing’s workers agreed to.

………

Why should investors care? Because Boeing demonstrates that cutting corners with your workforce carries a cost. 

Now it seems as if Boeing merely delayed a reckoning, one that Covid may have accelerated but which would have eventually come. I can imagine Boeing executives saying a decade ago that they couldn’t afford to pay workers more, even though their own financial statements would have betrayed them. The truth is they couldn’t afford not to. How much of the company’s recent travails — the design flaws, the loose bolts, the sliding quality, the rumored coarsening culture — could have been avoided with greater care for its workforce? Most of it, I suspect.

Again, this article is remarkable because of the source, an asset manager and Bloomberg columnist.

Even he realizes that creating a disaffected workforce through relentless squeezing of the workers, costs the company big in the long run.

After all, they are the source of Boeing product and Boeing profits, not the overpaid and pampered executives, particularly in the case of Boeing.

 

Missed in the Run Up to the Election

Boeing machinists have voted to end their strike.

It's a decent contract, though I would have liked to see them get their defined benefit retirement package back:

The Boeing strike is over after 53 days.

Machinists union members voted Monday to approve the company’s most recent contract offer, enabling Boeing to restart work at assembly plants in Everett and Renton and at parts plants throughout the region.

Results announced late Monday showed the offer was approved with 59% of ballots cast in favor. 

………

The 33,000 Machinists in Boeing’s Puget Sound factories walked out Sept. 13, kicking off a strike that has left the company’s factories sitting idle and its financial position increasingly precarious.

Before Monday’s vote, Machinists had rejected two offers from Boeing as they pushed for greater concessions on wages, which have failed to keep up as living costs skyrocketed in the Seattle area over the past decade. The latest contract offer, put forward by Boeing on Thursday, included a 38% general wage increase over the next four years, which compounds to roughly 43% over the life of the agreement.

And still only 59% of union members voted to support this.

………

Under the latest proposal, wages increase 13% in the first year, then 9%, 9% and 7% in subsequent years.

The Machinists also get a $12,000 cash bonus. That sum is a combination of the previous offer’s $7,000 ratification bonus and one-time $5,000 contribution to 401(k) retirement accounts.

The offer did not restore the defined benefit pension plan. Compared with the prior contract that expired this year, the latest proposal would bump up the Boeing matching contribution to the 401(k) to a maximum of 12% of annual income. That’s unchanged from the previous offer. 

Unfortunately, they still have management that will f%$# the workers, the customers and safety

First Friday of the Month ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Jobs added


Relative Weather Impact


Unemployment RateWhile the unemployment rate was unchanged, there were only 12,000 new non-farm payroll jobs created last month, well under the 125,000-150,000 needed to account for natural workforce growth.

The consensus estimate of 100,000 was also under the replacement level, but not near as bad. 

Obviously, the Boeing strike and hurricanes Helene and Milton had a lot to do with this, but these are very weak numbers:

Job growth slowed sharply last month, with workers sidelined by hurricane effects and the Boeing strike. The report, released just four days before the presidential election, could play a key role in how people view the economy as they head to the polls.

The Labor Department on Friday reported that the U.S. economy added a seasonally adjusted 12,000 jobs in October, versus a September gain of 223,000. That wildly missed even the muted expectations of economists, who had forecast 100,000.

Still, the unemployment rate stayed steady at a historically low 4.1%. That was in line with economists’ expectations.

Hurricanes Helene and Milton put thousands of people out of work across the Southeast, while the Boeing strike took more people off the job. Economists generally reckoned that the bulk of October’s downdraft was temporary, and didn’t affect the larger dynamics of the market. Wages, for example, continued to rise.

………

Still, the report’s timing four days before the election isn’t great for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Gee, ya think? 

Absolute crap jobs numbers 4 days before the election might be a problem for the incumbent?

………

Over the last several months, the general pace of job growth appeared to be slowing. Then, the September report released a month ago blew past expectations. Economists are now trying to figure out which is the one-off and which is the trend. The noise in Friday’s report makes it difficult to interpret.

Economist Brian Bethune of Boston College estimated that without the effects of the fall hurricanes, the Boeing strike and further adjustments, the October job-creation figure would have been 130,000, instead of the 12,000 the government reported.

Mr. Bethune's number would basically be treading water.

………

The unemployment rate is based on a separate survey of households. Respondents who say they had jobs but weren’t at work because of bad weather are still counted as employed. The same goes for workers with jobs who are on strike.

Some context:

The Boeing strike began in mid-September. The Labor Department’s monthly report on strike activity, released last week, said that there were 33,000 Boeing workers on strike for the entire pay period that included Oct. 12. Friday’s report showed a loss of 46,000 manufacturing jobs, driven by a decline of 44,000 jobs in transportation equipment manufacturing that the Labor Department said “was largely due to strike activity.”

To some degree, the hurricanes’ effects have already dissipated. Initial claims for unemployment insurance moved notably higher in early October, but last week they slipped to their lowest level in months.

Meanwhile, the economy has continued to grow solidly, with the Commerce Department reporting Wednesday that gross domestic product grew at an inflation-adjusted 2.8% annual rate in the third quarter.

Those last two numbers are good.

Now I wonder what the f%$# the Federal Reserve will do when it makes its interest rate decision 2 days after the election. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

………

Even though the economy and the labor market appear poised to keep buttressing one another, there are also limits to how many jobs the U.S. can sustainably keep adding without driving unemployment down to the point that wages start running too hot, noted Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. Immigration added to the pool of available workers for much of this year. But with the number of people entering the U.S. down sharply since the spring, that supply has been curtailed.

Meanwhile, with population growth slow, more people reaching retirement age, and the share of Americans aged 25 to 54 who are employed near its highest level in a quarter-century, finding qualified workers is no easy chore for companies looking to hire.

That all suggests to Brusuelas that the economy might only need to gain somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 jobs each month to keep the unemployment rate steady.

I do not know what this means for the economy, nor do I know what it means for the Federal Reserve, but it ain't good political news.

The Studios Are Refusing to Distribute? Imagine That

The award-winning documentary about the successful union effort at Amazon's JFK 8 warehouse in Staten Island, Union has been unable to find a studio willing to distribute the film.

There could be a number of reasons for this, the increasing hostility of the studios towards unions generally, the fear of retribution from Jeff Bezos, etc. 

Basically, studio executives are being chicken-sh%$s:

To someone not completely enmeshed in the state of the entertainment business, the documentary Union might seem like it has the trappings of an attractive nonfiction sales title: a dramatic story arc culminating in a history-making news event, close access to key players, a charismatic central character, glowing reviews and a premiere at a prestigious film festival.

And yet the film, which documents how an unconventional grassroots group organized the first-ever U.S. union at an Amazon warehouse, is coming to select theaters on Friday without the backing of any major entertainment companies. Months after the Brett Story and Stephen Maing-directed film screened at the Sundance Film Festival and won a special jury award there, the filmmakers announced they had turned to theatrical self-distribution in the absence of any major studio or streamer deals. With the move, a press release in June noted, the team was “recognizing the difficulties faced by political documentaries in distribution of late.” 

Social-issue documentaries have had a rough time of it lately, with longtime impact-driven company Participant Media shutting down in the spring and consolidations reducing the number of buyers interested in this kind of fare in the space. But Union, with its detailed portrait of a consequential American labor story, is an especially salient example. The filmmakers’ current self-distribution plan may ultimately target their intended audience just as effectively, or even more, than a conventional, mainstream release. But their story also offers a glimpse into the bind that some nonfiction filmmakers are facing in a cost-cutting, risk-averse market. 

Naah, the executives are chicken-sh%$s, and they are still suffering from butt-hurt from the strike earlier this year.

This was never goping to make a lot of money for the studios, but it would have made money nonetheless, but they won't want their workers to get uppity, I guess.

Yet another reason why the big studios should be broken up.

And the Strike is Over Suspended

Following an improved offer on wages, the International Longshoremen’s Association has agreed to suspend its strike until January while further negotiations continue.

Basically, I think that the United States Maritime Alliance expected Biden to invoke Taft-Hartley to force the longshoremen back to work, and Bidens strident refusal to do so, basically f%$# no, forced them back to the bargaining table:

The International Longshoremen’s Association agreed on Thursday to suspend a strike that closed down major ports on the East and Gulf Coasts. The move followed an improved wage offer from port employers.

The strike, which the dockworkers’ union began on Tuesday, threatened to weigh on the economy five weeks before national elections. Employers, represented by the United States Maritime Alliance, have offered to increase wages by 62 percent over the course of a new six-year contract, according to a person familiar with negotiations who did not want to be identified because the talks were continuing. That increase is lower than what the union had initially asked for, but much higher than the alliance’s earlier offer.

As an FYI, that's about a 10.1% a year increase per year when you figure in compounding.

In a statement, the union said that it had reached “a tentative agreement on wages” and that its 45,000 members would go back to work, with the current contract extended until Jan. 15. The union said it was returning to the bargaining table “to negotiate all other outstanding issues.” The alliance issued a similar statement.

The agreement came after the White House pressed both sides to reach a deal to end the strike, the union’s first full-scale walkout since 1977. The wage increase is a clear victory for the I.L.A. and its combative president, Harold J. Daggett, a 78-year-old, third-generation dockworker who has led the union since 2011.

 ………

 A 62 percent increase would raise the top longshoremen’s wage to just over $63 per hour at the end of a new six-year contract, from today’s $39 per hour. And at $63 an hour, the wages of East and Gulf Coast longshoremen would slightly exceed those that will be earned by West Coast longshoremen, who belong to a different union, at the end of their contract in 2027.

In the resumed talks, the issue of how much automation can occur at the ports could divide the sides. The union has also been pressing for improved retirement benefits.

Another potential sticking point is the pay of longshoremen who are just starting out and don’t earn the top wage rate. Mr. Daggett’s son, Dennis A. Daggett, a senior official at the I.L.A., said in an interview on Tuesday on a picket line in Bayonne, N.J., that the union wanted to get higher wages for less experienced members.

This is a good thing, though I would have preferred that the union suspend the strike for a shorter period. If Trump wins, they will have to conclude negotiations with the certainty of a Taft-Hartley back to work order on January 21.

In Related News, Water is Wet

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Amazon has illegally refused to bargain with its drivers’ union.

We really need to start prosecuting these rat-f%$#s criminally. 

If Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy spent a few years cooling their heels in Club Fed, or even a few days waiting for bail to be adjudicated, there would be a lot less law breaking.

Whink of it as "Broken Windows Policing" for white people:

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed charges against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has illegally refused to bargain with a union representing drivers who are frustrated by what they claim are low wages and dangerous working conditions.

Back in August, drivers celebrated what they considered a major win when the NLRB found that Amazon was a joint employer of sub-contracted drivers, cheering "We are Amazon workers!" At that time, Amazon seemed to be downplaying the designation, telling Ars that the union was trying to "misrepresent" a merit determination that the NLRB confirmed was only "the first step in the NLRB’s General Counsel litigating the allegations after investigating an unfair labor practice charge."

But this week, the NLRB took the next step, signing charges soon after Amazon began facing intensifying worker backlash, not just from drivers but also from disgruntled office and fulfillment workers. According to Reuters, the NLRB accused Amazon of "a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities" organized by drivers in a Palmdale, California, facility.

Amazon has found itself in increasingly hot water ever since the Palmdale drivers joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union in 2021. The NLRB's complaint called out Amazon for terminating its contract with the unionized drivers without ever engaging in bargaining.

Amazon and its executives knew what they were doing, and they made extensive plans to do so.

That's a felony, and is also covered by the RICO statutes, and it's a felony.

Frog march them out of their offices in handcuffs.

And It Is On

So, following an overwhelming vote against the Boeing offer, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is on strike.

Heard a bit of coverage on NPR today, and once again, they were subtly anti-union in their slant, as they always are.  Remember that at pledge time. 

The numbers are kind of mind boggling, 94.6% voting to reject the contract, and 96% voting to strike.

The IAM members clearly have no f%$#s left to give.

While a lot of this is about the fact that the last deal was not a good one, there were a lot of concessions, I also think that a lot of this is that the rank and file want to make airliners, and they feel that management is an impediment to their doing so.

Boeing Machinists union members voted Thursday by an overwhelming majority to reject management’s contract offer and go on strike.

Boeing’s 33,000 blue-collar workers were instructed to walk out at 12:01 a.m. Friday and stay out indefinitely.

International Association of Machinists District 751 President Jon Holden, who on Sunday urged members to accept the deal, announced the result to raucous cheers and chants of “Strike! Strike! Strike!” to about 80 Machinists late Thursday at the union headquarters in South Park.

“This is about respect, this is about addressing the past and this is about fighting for our future,” Holden told the crowd. “We strike at midnight.”

He said 94.6% voted to reject the contract and 96% voted to strike, more than the two-thirds majority required by union rules to authorize a walkout.

At a news conference after the announcement, Holden said “I’m proud of our members, proud of them for standing up and fighting for more, for each other, for their families, for the community.”

………

Even before Holden delivered the result, a team of union officials outside was busily cutting holes in large metal barrels, carving the initials “IAM” into the side of each and adding a cylindrical chimney on top. They’ll be used as “burn barrels,” with fires lit inside to keep pickets warm in the nights and days ahead.

Inside the hall, buckets were filled with premade “On Strike” signs.

Votes were tallied from polling places across the Puget Sound region, as well as in Moses Lake; Portland, Ore.; Victorville, Calif.; and Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California.

………

They did not even accept that Boeing’s stated wage increase was really 25% over four years as the company presented it, since the Machinists at the same time lost their annual bonus, which might have been worth around 4% each of those years.

Do the math:  25% -(4%  x 4 years) = 9% over 4 years.  Given the Federal Reserve's target of 2% inflation, that is awfully close to running in place.

Brandon Phelps, 35, a former U.S. Air Force mechanic who installed weapons systems on Boeing F-15s in Afghanistan and is now a team lead in the Renton 737 assembly plant, said the increase is just over 10% over four years once that takeaway is considered.

Boeing's, has been very conciliatory since the walkout, with its CFO saying that the aerospace giant is eager to return to negotiations.

Boeing's new CEO is actually in the process of moving to the Seattle area, where he bought a home in the tony Broadmoor gated community, a move likely intended  to mollify the palpable anger of Pacific Northwest employees.

The workers are in the drivers seat here.  Boeing has been hemorrhaging cash for some time, and its credit rating is currently Baa3 according to Moody's, one step above junk bond status, so it is NOT in a position to raise money easily or cheaply.

They need to get their assembly lines up and running quickly, particularly the lucrative 737 lines.