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[...] when you think of the long-standing idea of art in opposition to the dominant culture, if only by keeping its autonomy from the pursuit of money—the only common value great writers from right to left have acknowledged—you begin to sense what we have lost. Capitalism as a system for the equitable distribution of goods is troublesome enough; as a way of measuring success it is useless. When you begin to think the advances of doled out to writers by major corporations possess anything but an accidental correlation to artistic worth, you are finished. Everything becomes publicity. How many writers now refuse to be photographed? How many refuse to sit for idiotic “lifestyle” pieces? Or to write supplemental reading group “guides” for their paperbacks? Everyone along the chain of production compromises a tiny bit and suddenly Jay McInerney is a guest judge on Iron Chef.
This is the diamond of the mind, this ability. A lot of people know about it, but I didn’t know about it.
From then on when the panic crept in I could just push over the thread-thin edge to the other side, feeling the way to joy.
Joy is the knowledge that the thread is there.
A thread runs through the middle of your life, and if you find it, the second half can be comedy instead.
A place can make you want to die and then you can turn it over into the sweetest thing. You can do this yourself, if you have found the diamond in your mind.
I am less interested in zombie stories, though, than I am in this neighborhood’s particular light. The thing I most want to tell you is how the sunlight is here, but I don’t know how to describe it. It’s obviously the same sun that lights the rest of the city, but there is something different about it. Maybe it’s our lack of trees, or the reflection of the river, or the lowness of most of the buildings, or the supersaturated colors, deep reds and greens, the bright wild complicated graffiti. We don’t have the trees of South Brooklyn, the shady corridors of stoops, the tall stately brownstones of Fort Greene or Park Slope. We don’t have cobblestone streets. What we have is this naked golden light. It’s a thin, big-sky light, kind of Western, cinematic. Since the first day I saw it, it has alternately flustered and comforted me. Today its particular quality will have half the people in the neighborhood drinking in the afternoon. By five or six, some of the couples will already be fighting on the streets, one of them wrangling the drunker, more belligerent one home, because there is always a drunker, more belligerent one, and one who needs to feel like he or she is taking care of someone.
At the moment, though, a really tall guy on roller skates is coasting down the long steep slope of the pedestrian walkway with his legs and arms spread wide and the wind in his fingers. He has the biggest satisfied grin on his face. There are always a few people a day who roll like this, on bikes or boards or even just running, arms wide, falling down the bridge into Williamsburg, in the pretty light.
The conventional narrative about union decline places most blame on globalization and technological changes. These two forces of change are presented as facts of life and are considered somehow neutral, structural, inevitable. But humans—mostly white, wealthy men who can buy their access to decision makers—are behind every decision regarding robots, trade, workers, and unions (and the planet, too). Like the decision made by executives in Silicon Valley icon Apple, who began the assembly of iPhones in factories in China, where most iPhones are still made and where real unions—that’s independent unions—are forbidden.
this reminds me of blake's novara piece, and brian merchant's piece too [i guess it's a common enough sentiment]
That said, it’s helpful to think of a union as a mechanism: nothing makes it inherently good or bad, although its internal rules heavily influence its effectiveness. As is also the case with a government, a union can be good or bad based on the rules governing its respective elections, including campaign financing, whether the bargaining unit of the workers is fairly constructed or gerrymandered, and whether the people it represents have open access to decision-making processes. If the governance systems encourage participation by the best and most diverse workers, the union will reflect the best and most diverse workers’ values. Conversely, if the organization is a do-nothing union, it will reflect the least-good values among the workforce, just like elected politicians and their constituents. Unions often differ based on the culture of the employer and on the type of workforce, no different from states, which differ based on the types of people that make up its population. (Think Texas versus Massachusetts.) Unions, then, are far from monolithic.
[...] "[...] it felt awesome to walk around the hospital picketing and take ownership of it and be like, ‘This is our hospital.’ [...]" [...]
The strike line stretched the length of half a football field, a suburban block. One hundred percent of the nurses were out on the line, and of the techs like Rhodes, only seven workers ever crossed the picket line, meaning that they worked when everyone else was outside picketing: seven people from the lab who apparently received extra-sweet raises. Anyone who has ever been on strike before—and plenty of hospital workers in Rhodes’s new union had—understood that the dynamic on a picket line is crucial. And so union organizers brought big speakers and made song lists—more like dance mixes—selected by the workers in the days leading up to the walkout. People who were total strangers, often from the neighborhood, were coming to the line each day, picking up signs and marching with the workers. Folks were playing games like mannequin on the line: when the line stopped dancing, everyone would freeze and pose and make crazy faces, and someone would take photos so they could later vote who had the best pose, then start again. The nuns in the Catholic church adjacent to the hospital opened their doors for the workers, and often their kids, to use the restrooms throughout the day.
ahhh i love this
West Virginia in 2018 was already a right-to-work state, where workers have no right to collective bargaining, where union membership is voluntary, and where the entire apparatus of the state is aimed at preventing exactly what wound up happening: an explosion of worker power. To Peters and other raise-denied workers listening to the conservative legislators testifying in hearings about controlling what they could and could not do with their own paycheck, this piece of legislation was a pure, unmitigated insult to their intelligence.
The final two issues of the strike were financial: the rising cost of health insurance coupled with eight years with no raise. The proposals for their health care went beyond merely raising the employees’ share of the cost. The health insurance plan changes for 2018 also included a provision called Go 365, a phone app that required workers to wear devices like a Fitbit to transmit their personal data to offset some of the proposed copay increases. “It was a complete, total invasion of our privacy,” Peters pointed out. In addition, the health insurance would have been using a new calculation that based the charges on total family income, not the individual employee’s. “By adding my husband, I was facing a two-hundred-dollar-a-month increase,” Peters says. “So when the governor offered a one percent pay raise in January, people had had enough.”
yeah fucking everything about this
There’s something else that is fundamental to and instructive about these stories, something bigger and more important than any one issue: in order to unionize and win big, workers need to build and rebuild deep solidarity. People can choose their friends, but they can’t choose their comrades. Strikes, and good union campaigns to win big on issues, are the best political education because they unite all kinds of different people, encouraging and enabling people to get beyond the self-segregation and prejudices people hold about one another (and that antisocial media reinforce). In unions, most workers decide to vote to unionize not because someone tells them to—that’s never worked. No, they vote because the experience of a well-executed union campaign helps workers understand, on their own, that their employer’s effect on their lives goes beyond assigning them to an overtime shift and preventing them from getting time with their family; that their employer is part of a bigger system that is contributing to the failure of their kids’ schools, the rollback of anti-pollution and anti-gentrification laws, the gross inequities of the tax system, and more. It’s no accident that the states, cities, and counties with the strongest union presence have consistently voted in favor of progressive policies. This is the crucial reason the corporate right wing has been relentlessly attacking unions. A well-unionized worker is a woke worker, and woke workers can change the direction of this country.
[...] To win passage of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised by exempting two occupations dominated by African Americans—agricultural and domestic labor—from the provisions of the NLRA. This effectively condemned many African Americans to a second-class status under the first national labor law covering workers across the private sector. (This provision is still the law of the land, and today also represses many Latinx and other people of color.) Government workers were also excluded. It would take almost thirty years until another round of worker pressure, stemming from the civil rights movement, and a 1962 executive order by John F. Kennedy, to begin to soften the path for public-sector unionization, which I’ll discuss later in this chapter.
idk, useful as reference
The industries the unions were targeting to make major gains for all workers included steel and automotive industries, where the employer class was making the biggest profits. The unions knew that the governors controlled the state-based National Guard units. Unions went all out, raising more money for the campaign in 1936 than all previous union donations combined for the elections from 1906 through 1935. They also put record numbers of boots on the ground, not only for FDR, but also for the governorships in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two states that housed the biggest workforces in the targeted industries. After FDR’s reelection and the election of progressive governors in both of those states, unions started to build the foundation of the American Dream and chip away at inequality. When General Motors workers in Flint, Michigan, held a sit-down strike—they stopped working but stayed in the plants—they prevented any potential replacement scab workers from coming in to replace them. If Michigan’s governor had called out law enforcement to forcefully remove the striking workers, GM management would have won—but because unions had worked hard to help elect a governor they could better control, they worried less about the threat of law enforcement. Similar dynamics played out in the big steel strikes in Pennsylvania. After much effort on the part of unions, the federal government occasionally sent those forces first to defend unionizing workers, and, later, African Americans during the civil rights movement. Shifting the federal government’s apparatuses toward defending the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and later the rights of African Americans to vote and challenge discrimination, was all it took to build massive, decades-lasting structural achievements.
ah so THAT's why the sit-down strike is so lionized