#Strikes

[animentality]

#twitter #strikes #protest #wga strong #sag strike

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

#class war #class warfare #classism #strikes #which side are you on?

[piinfeathers]

just in case anyone missed this in the news or maybe not in the loop, Disney is currently refusing to meet with or acknowledge the newly formed animation production workers union that just voted to join IASTE and become an official part of TAG, the animators and animation artists guild

production workers across all studios are currently voting to be recognized for their hard work and invaluable skill at keeping these productions running, but studios are refusing to meet with them to let them negotiate deals or even exist

as someone who works in animation as a designer i know i wouldn't be able to do my job at all without any of my production workers. they are the incredibly hard working people who oversee pretty much everything in animation. they make sure everything is running on time, that schedules are being followed, they have to know pretty much every single word of the scripts and beats from the storyboards to make sure nothing is missed, and most importantly, they make sure artists are being taken care of and not overworked. they really are the unsung heroes of the animation world

production workers are also by far the most exploited workers in animation currently. they make about a fraction of what artists make for just as much work put in, and currently have no agreement for health coverage or other benefits that artists protected by the union are guaranteed

BUT! there is some good news. right now there's a petition on IATSE's website that has over 80,000 signatures currently addressed to disney leadership to do the right thing and meet with this new union and recognized their vote to form. it still needs roughly 21,000 signatures and only takes a minute to sign! anyone with a zip or postal code can sign, meaning both US and Canadian residents can sign and help this union get the deal it deserves!!

#unions #IATSE strike #strikes #union strong #the animation guild #sag aftra #animation news #figured i would make this a sperate post just to try and reach more people! please consider signing!! #hot strike summer

[luckydiorxoxo]

Starting at midnight EST for 24 hours, DON’T CROSS OUR CLICK-IT LINE, that means no clicks, likes, reshares on:

GQ ❌

Vanity Fair ❌

Bon Appétit ❌

Architectural Digest ❌

Vogue ❌

Allure ❌

Glamour ❌

Epicurious ❌

Self ❌

Condé Nast Traveler ❌

Them ❌

Teen Vogue ❌

#Condé Nast #strikes #gq #vanity fair #glamour #allure #vogue #self #them #teen vogue #epicurious #architectural digest #bon appetit

[thetwistedrope]

because i've not seen a lot of coverage on it, hotel workers in LA are on strike right now, too:

(x)

(x)

please remember to support these people as well!

#los angeles #strikes #unions #hotels #labor rights

[justbritishproblems]

#british problems #british #britishproblems #uk politics #problems #british politics #politics #tea #strikes #good for them #may it soon bring the change we so badly need

[cryoverkiltmilk]

It's strange to see anyone surprised by Universal using a tactic as cruel as denying even shade to picket line members, in the heat-based hellscape that is Los Angeles. So let's try to condense the explanation.

By and large, executives are people who already come from wealth and privilege, and have that wealth and privilege protected throughout their life as they're escorted through whatever levels of education and then into employment.

Most of them have never received any kind of culture shock to make them aware of the struggles of 'lessers'. Their parents and peers had a vested interest in keeping the then-children from mixing with 'those people'.

They are insulated enough from daily life that they no longer see anyone outside their immediate wealth and influence bracket as human.

So a strike, to them, is not "people who want enough money to live and work in health", it's "The machine that makes us money is broken, get those workers back into their jobs so we can keep making money."

So the executives treat the strike like they would a broken machine or a disobedient pet. Hit it until it works, and replace it if it breaks.

And don't doubt for one minute that this wasn't at the advice of a Pinkerton or similar union-busting agency consultant. This is more than just petty; this is tactical cruely.

#strikes #executives #eat the rich #wga strike #sag strike #sag aftra strike #sag aftra #sag #tree law #universal pictures #los angeles #hot strike summer #hotstrikesummer

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics

Tomorrow (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. Tomorrow night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

It's been 143 days since the WGA went on strike against the Hollywood studios. While early tactical leaks from the studios had studio execs chortling and twirling their mustaches about writers caving once they started losing their homes, the strikers aren't wavering – they're still out there, pounding the picket lines, every weekday:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/how-hollywood-writers-make-ends-meet-100-days-into-the-writers-guild-strike.html

The studios obviously need writers. That gleeful, anonymous studio exec who got such an obvious erotic charge at the thought of workers being rendered homeless as punishment for challenging his corporate power completely misread the room, and his comments didn't demoralize the writers. Instead, they inspired the actors to go on strike, too.

But how have the writers stayed out since May Day? How have the actors stayed out for 69 days since their strike started on Bastille Day? We can thank the studios for that! As it turns out, the studios have devoted so much energy to rendering creative workers as precarious as possible, hiring as little as they can getting away with and using punishing overtime as a substitute for adequate staffing that they've eliminated all the workers who can't survive on side-hustles and savings for six or seven months at a time.

But even for those layoff-hardened workers, long strikes are brutal, and of course, all the affiliated trades, from costumers to grips, are feeling the pain. The strike fund only goes so far, and non-striking, affected workers don't even get that. That's why I've been donating regularly to the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps all affected workers out with cash transfers (I just gave them another $500):

https://secure2.convio.net/afa/site/Donation2?df_id=8117&8117.donation=form1&mfc_pref=T

As hot labor summer is revealed as a turning point – not just a season – long strikes will become the norm. Bosses still don't believe in worker power, and until they get their minds right, they're going to keep on trying to starve their workforces back inside. To get a sense of how long workers will have to hold out, just consider the Warrior Met strike, where Alabama coal-miners stayed out for 23 months:

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/

As Kim Kelly explained to Adam Conover in the latest Factually podcast, the Alabama coal strikers didn't get anywhere near the attention that the Hollywood strikers have enjoyed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvyMHf7Yg0Q

(To learn more about the untold story of worker organizing, from prison unions to the key role that people of color and women played in labor history, check out Kelly's book, "Fight Like Hell," now in paperback:)

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

Which brings me to the UAW strike. This is an historic strike, the first time that the UAW has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once. Past autoworkers' strikes have marked turning points for all American workers. The 1945/46 GM strike established employers' duty to cover worker pensions, health care, and cost of living allowances. The GM strike created the American middle-class:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/

The Big Three are fighting for all the marbles here. They are refusing to allow unions to organize EV factories. Given that no more internal combustion cars will be in production in just a few short years, that's tantamount to eliminating auto unions altogether. The automakers are flush with cash, including billions in public subsidies from multiple bailouts, along with billions more from greedflation price-gouging. A long siege is inevitable, as the decimillionaires running these companies earn their pay by starving out their workers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/general-motors-ceo-mary-barra-salary-auto-workers-strike-uaw-2023-9

The UAW knows this, of course, and their new leadership – helmed by the union's radical president Shawn Fain – has a plan. UAW workers are engaged in tactical striking, shutting down key parts of the supply chain on a rolling basis, making the 90-day strike fund stretch much farther:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-18-labors-militant-creativity/

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car's own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they're brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

This is especially true for staffing. Automakers are violently allergic to hiring workers, because new workers get benefits and workplace protection. Instead, the car companies routinely offer "voluntary" overtime to their existing workforce. By refusing this overtime, workers can kneecap production, without striking.

Enter "Eight and Skate," a campaign among UAW workers to clock out after their eight hour shift. As Keith Brower Brown writes for Labor Notes, the UAW organizers are telling workers that "It’s crossing an unofficial picket line to work overtime. It’s helping out the company":

https://labornotes.org/2023/09/work-extra-during-strike-auto-workers-say-eight-and-skate

Eight and Skate has already started to work; the Buffalo Ford plant can no longer run its normal weekend shifts because workers are refusing to put in voluntary overtime. Of course, bosses will strike back: the next step will be forced overtime, which will lead to the unsafe conditions that unionized workers are contractually obliged to call paid work-stoppages over, shutting down operations without touching the strike fund.

What's more, car bosses can't just halt safety stoppages or change the rules on overtime; per the UAW's last contract, bosses are required to bargain on changes to overtime rules:

https://uaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Working-Without-Contract-FAQ-FINAL-2.pdf

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM's "highly profitable" SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That's been the status quo for 11 years, but when bosses circulated the usual overtime signup sheet last week, every worker wrote "a big fat NO" next to their names.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen points out that this overtime addiction puts a new complexion on the much-hyped workerpocalypse that EVs will supposedly bring about. EVs are much simpler to build than conventional cars, the argument goes, so a US transition to EVs will throw many autoworkers out of work:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-20-big-threes-labor-shortages-uaw/

But the reality is that most autoworkers are doing one and a half jobs already. Reducing the "workforce" by a third could leave all these workers with their existing jobs, and the 40-hour workweek that their forebears fought for at GM inn 1945/46. Add to that the additional workers needed to make batteries, build and maintain charging infrastructure, and so on, and there's no reason to think that EVs will weaken autoworker power.

And as Dayen points out, this overtime addiction isn't limited to cars. It's also endemic to the entertainment industry, where writers' "mini rooms" and other forms of chronic understaffing are used to keep workforces at a skeleton crew, even when the overtime costs more than hiring new workers.

Bosses call themselves job creators, but they have a relentless drive to destroy jobs. If there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers – hence all the hype about AI and automation. The stories about looming AI-driven mass unemployment are fairy tales, but they're tailor made for financiers who get alarming, life-threatening priapism at the though of firing us all and replacing us with shell-scripts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This is why Republican "workerism" rings so hollow. Trump's GOP talks a big game about protecting "workers" (by which they mean anglo men) from immigrants and "woke captialism," but they have nothing to say about protecting workers from bosses and bankers who see every dime a worker gets as misappropriated from their dividend.

Unsurprisingly, conservative message-discipline sucks. As Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, for every mealymouthed Josh Hawley mouthing talking points that "support workers" by blaming China and Joe Biden for the Big Three's greed, there's a Tim Scott, saying the quiet part aloud:

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/republicans-uaw-strike-hawley-trump-scott/

Quoth Senator Scott: "I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely":

https://twitter.com/American_Bridge/status/1704136706574741988

The GOP's workerism is a tissue-thin fake. They can never and will never support real worker power. That creates an opportunity for Biden and Democrats to seize:

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

Reversing two generations of anti-worker politics is a marathon, not a sprint. The strikes are going to run for months, even years. Every worker will be called upon to support their striking siblings, every day. We can do it. Solidarity now. Solidarity forever.

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/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

#pluralistic #strikes #uaw #labor #automakers #big three #big car #eight and skate #work to rule #tactics

[quintin]

It is with great joy that I get to share this version of the breaking news meme

#destiel #destiel news #UPS strike #UPS strike update #UPS Teamsters #teamsters #labor union #strike tea #strikes #labor organizing

[animentality]

#twitter #ups #strikes

[anonymeower]

#unions #union strong #strikes

[robbie-verse]

long time no steddie

#FINALLY #ROBIN #STRIKES #BACK !!!!! #jesus three + weeks without drawing #BUT MY HIATUS IS OVER #art #my draws #artists on tumblr #artistic #artwork #drawing #drawdaily #digitial drawing #fanart #steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #stranger things #stranger things fanart #steddie fanart #steve x eddie #eddie x steve #joe keery #joseph quinn #steddie art #steddie fluff #robbie draws !

[high-quality-tiktoks]

The screenwriters are my comrades and I fully understand how they feel🫡

#video #tiktok #tiktoks #book #books #movie #movies #film #films #strike #strikes #writers guild of america #iron widow #xiran jay zhao #xiranjayzhao

[cleolinda]

Organizers of the "Pharmageddon" protest told NBC News that around 900 people in as many as 10 states could participate in the ongoing protest, which started Monday and will end Wednesday [November 1, 2023]. There was no way to independently verify that number.

Lannie Duong, a clinical pharmacist based in California, is one of the key organizers of the protests. She said that, along with sickouts and walkouts, members have discussed protesting at the corporate headquarters of Walgreens and CVS, which are in Deerfield, Illinois, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, respectively. Those protests are scheduled for Wednesday.

The protests are that much more notable because the pharmacists don't have a union and aren't asking for better pay. They primarily want their employers to hire more staff to alleviate the workload and to eliminate policies that push them to work faster. They say those conditions are making it more likely they will make a mistake that could harm a patient.

#strikes #psa

[stankrhodes]

my partner today messaging me about starting a union at his job just... really reinforced in me that we are truly witnessing the rise of a very important moment in history for the future of labor in the world. we shouldn't be living the way we do and my full support is with every single person, union, and entity that is fighting for workers' rights and the security of a livable life.

#strikes #labor movements #ups strike #sag strike #wga strike #writers strike #actors guild strike #writers guild strike #actors strike #wga #ups #sag-aftra #wga strong #sag strong #teamsters #unions #unionize #labor rights #labor unions #organizing #capitalism #teachers strike #nurses strike

[probablyasocialecologist]

The restaurant industry has long coordinated efforts to suppress labor costs through the NRA, a multimillion-dollar lobbying machine funded both by its restaurant members and by the fees workers pay for required food-safety classes, according to a recent New York Times report.

The group has spent its war chest on lobbying campaigns to preserve a subminimum wage for tipped workers — who are disproportionately young, women, and people of color, and far more likely to live in poverty than regular minimum wage workers — and to help block state and federal sick leave proposals and minimum wage increases.

But now, restaurant executives are on edge. Union campaigns are suddenly penetrating their industry, which employs about 10 percent of the American workforce and has one of the lowest unionization rates of any sector. Over the past few years, baristas have unionized nearly 280 Starbucks stores in the face of enormous odds, and dozens of other coffee shops and restaurants have followed suit.

[...]

“The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, every newspaper reports on every union win… when an unfair labor practice charge is filed, when there are challenges to elections,” said Felice Ekelman, a principal at Jackson Lewis, one of the oldest and most infamous union avoidance law firms in the country. “When did this become first page news?”

“And guess who’s reading it?” replied Laura Pierson-Scheinberg, one of Ekelman’s Jackson Lewis colleagues, as the two sat across from each other on the main stage of the summit. “My kids. Literally. I have an 18-year-old, my kids are into it.”

The two lawyers were discussing a new threat for the restaurant industry: the unexpected rise of union campaigns in workplaces that, for decades, have largely been immune from such organizing efforts.

[...]

“Before, I used to say… ‘[Unionization] isn’t a problem for you in the restaurant industry,’” said Pierson-Scheinberg. But now, she warned, “Kids do not care about paying union dues. Two percent of pay, are you kidding me? Their Netflix costs more. They think it’s a hell of a deal.”

The “kids,” she added, are organizing workplaces which would have previously seemed unreachable.

#trade unions #usa #unionisation #strikes #sicko_yes.jpg #restaurants