Four out of 80

Years of organizing work to get to point where there would be four schools out of the 80 charters in New Orleans where the staff are unionized. That is, if BAE is successful. 

The vote is set for May 28, according to the release issued by United Teachers of New Orleans, a citywide union and local affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers that has helped the charter school educators organize.

Bricolage Academy Educators, collectively known as BAE-United, spent weeks petitioning the school's governing charter board to voluntarily recognize their union. 

Bricolage organizers have said 80% of eligible teachers and staff signed a petition in favor of organizing, and they submitted the request to the school's board of directors in late February.

Eighty percent of the staff signed up in advance of the vote is a good sign. It's only in the last few years that teachers have gained something like momentum in the long effort to overcome structural barriers to organizing imposed by the depowering and isolating nature of the charter arrangements. When New Orleans Public Schools made the big move to charters, it not only immediately fired 7,000 people, it set back the work of reclaiming power by at least a decade.  Four out of 80 would be better than three.  But there is so much left beyond that.

The price of crawfish

A group of seafood processing workers in Breaux Bridge are suing to get rid of a loophole that allows plant owners to pay a lower "prevailing wage" because they employ some migrant workers who are on H-2B visas.  

Basically, before issuing the certification that allows companies to hire temporary workers from foreign countries – using H-2B visas – the employer needs to show that pay will not be less than the prevailing wage for local American workers. The rub, according to the lawsuit, comes in showing what the prevailing wage actually is.

The 2015 Wage Rule modified existing regulations to allow employers to use their own surveys to set the prevailing wage and that rule change impacted the conditions and pay for similarly employed U.S. workers, according to the lawsuit.

This is just one small way the rules are deliberately written to take advantage of workers the government confers a more precarious status upon to lower the standard for everyone. It's an example of how allowing any class of workers to be exploited causes everyone to suffer. The lawsuit estimates the overall effect depresses wages by as much as $5 an hour. 

Of course, as we've seen before, the real costs of this system can be much higher. 

A BuzzFeed News investigation — based on government databases and investigative files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of court documents, as well as more than 80 interviews with workers and employers — shows that the program condemns thousands of employees each year to exploitation and mistreatment, often in plain view of government officials charged with protecting them. All across America, H-2 guest workers complain that they have been cheated out of their wages, threatened with guns, beaten, raped, starved, and imprisoned. Some have even died on the job. Yet employers rarely face any significant consequences.

Doing it the hard way

 Looks like the Bricolage board is choosing the way of pain. 

Bricolage Academy Educators United, a group of Bricolage educators seeking union recognition from the Esplanade Avenue charter school’s board, has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board after the charter’s nonprofit board failed to respond to the group’s February request for voluntary union recognition.

Since receiving the group’s Feb. 24 letter, the board has only met once. At that meeting, on March 10, the board met in a closed door session with its lawyers for advice on the union drive. After the private discussion, board president Yvette Jones said the board must do its “due diligence” before it would take a vote on whether to recognize the union. She could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Well it's April now and they still haven't finished the "due diligence" delaying so the teachers have to ask for an NLRB election which is an arduous process that is more or less designed to prevent an organizing campaign from succeeding. That doesn't mean the teachers can't win.  The International School staff unionized via an election in 2016 but not without a fight. And the Lusher board actually beat back a similar effort.

Of course, the PRO Act legislation waiting for action in the US Congress would make things easier. Call or text your Senator.

Can't have any of that fundamental change going on

Jane McAlevey's postmortem on the always doomed Amazon organizing campaign also explains why the PRO Act can never ever ever be allowed to pass.

The conditions most workers in the United States endure when trying to form a union make the recent actions by Georgia’s legislature to institute further voter suppression seem tame. If the Senate passes the PRO Act, there’s no question the unionization rate would increase quickly, which is one reason winning its passage in the near future seems oddly distant. Despite the nation having the most pro-union president in nearly 100 years, the Senate remains immovable on issues far less challenging than major labor law reform; it wouldn’t even accept a federally mandated $15-an-hour minimum wage. And progressives have been trying to pass labor law since Jimmy Carter’s presidency—without success.

And, no, the answer isn't "because Joe Manchin." There are a ton of things the Democratic Party led by this so-called "most pro-union president in nearly 100 years" could do to rein that guy in.  They choose not to, though.  A strong labor law would "fundamentally change" the power relationships workers have with their bosses and boost the political power of the working class in general.  But that's not what these Democrats were elected to do. 

The thing about bosses is..

 The bosses always lie.

Rep. Mark Pocan replied via tweet: “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a progressive workplace when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles,” echoing reports from 2018 that Amazon workers were forced to skip bathroom breaks and pee in bottles. Amazon’s denial was swift: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

1/2 You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us. The truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do, and have great wages and health care from day one.

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) March 25, 2021

But Amazon workers with whom I spoke said that the practice was so widespread due to pressure to meet quotas that managers frequently referenced it during meetings and in formal policy documents and emails, which were provided to The Intercept. The practice, these documents show, was known to management, which identified it as a recurring infraction but did nothing to ease the pressure that caused it. In some cases, employees even defecated in bags.

And when they aren't lying about the problems they cause for their own workers, they are shaming the workers for them. 

An email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.”

While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me.

Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”

The Bessemer Amazon workers are currently voting to unionize. That election period ends on Monday. The US Senate is able to give American workers their best path to organizing they will have had in decades if it just passes the PRO Act.  They're close but...

With Democrats holding a slim majority in the Senate, passing the PRO Act would require reforming the filibuster, as the prospect of 10 Republican votes for labor reform is beyond a fantasy. The number of high-profile Democrats joining the push to reform the filibuster has steadily grown, with Biden and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., endorsing unspecified changes to filibuster rules earlier this month.

The Democrats can choose to deliver this essential and potentially transformative piece of legislation which they claim to support.  But, you know, Democrats are a lot like bosses in certain regards so, stay tuned. 

Running out the clock

The first thing to understand about this "bi-partisan" stimulus proposal is that it is, in fact, a total cave on the part of the Democratic leadership.   

The top Democratic congressional leaders on Tuesday embraced a $908 billion coronavirus relief framework -- a massive concession meant to prod President Trump and Senate Republicans into accepting a compromise as covid cases spike and the economic recovery shows signs of faltering ahead of the holiday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that “we believe the bipartisan framework introduced by Senators yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations.”

The "framework" would amount to about a third of what the Democrats had been asking for which also was not going to be enough. And, of course, as a "starting point" it is only going to be watered down further from here. McConnell has already rejected this first offer, in fact. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has pushed for a smaller deal and it appears unlikely he is poised to support the bipartisan agreement.

He circulated a proposal on Tuesday that offered minimal aid to the jobless, in a sharp break with the bipartisan group that could represent an obstacle to a final deal.McConnell has also delivered an ultimatum, requiring any legislation to immunize businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits. 

Nothing is written into a bill yet so the details of the "framework" are still fluid, as they say.  But according to this article we know it aims at a $300 per week boost to unemployment benefits matching the now expired emergency stop gap written by Trump after the original $600 provided by the CARES act ran out.  Today we learned another 712,000 new jobless claims were filed this week.  A lot of headlines highlight that the number is "fewer than expected" or down from last week, but as Atrios points out, "Every week since this began has been higher than the peak week of the Great Recession," so what are we really looking at here?  An historically large number of people need help and will continue to need it. $300 is not really help. 

The starting point framework includes $160 billion for state and local governments.  The notion of any state and local aid at all has previously been a non-starter for Republicans so expect that figure to come down.  Our friend, Senator John Kennedy was seen "trashing it" on TV today, in fact.  In any case, the starting figure is not enough.  According to, still incomplete estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities  state budgets are expected to take a hit of at least $194 billion.  This Brookings study figures that state and local revenues will take a hit of well over half a trillion dollars in the next few years.  Obviously we aren't going to get where we need to go from this "starting point." 

Certainly this $160 billion (but likely much less) sop isn't worth trading this for. 

The measure, spearheaded by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, would restore lapsed federal jobless benefits, providing $300 a week for 18 weeks; would include $288 billion for struggling small businesses, restaurants and theaters and $160 billion for fiscally strapped cities and states; and would create a temporary liability shield for businesses operating amid the pandemic.

"Temporary" or not, there can be no compromise where the US government allows your boss to simply order you to your death with no repercussions. 

Anyway, the punchline to all of this is now that the vaccines are almost ready, the political pressure to do more emergency stimulus will quickly reduce to zero. So Joe Biden can say all he wants about how whatever comes out of the lame duck session is a "first step," come the new Congress, the focus will be on the quickest way to just vaccinate everyone and tell them to get a job. Nevermind that the jobs are half gone and what's left out there is gig-a-fied beyond all recognition. That's the "new normal" all of this has been leading toward all along.  McConnell has run the clock out all year and the bosses have won the pandemic. They're even going to be shielded from future liability. The rest of us will just have to get used to it.

Bollinger ICE raid

Not sure what, exactly, is going on here but the possibility that a company with so many critical ties to the Republican Party in general and to Donald Trump's campaign in particular, might be calling out ICE on its own employees probably needs consideration.

Federal agents staged an extensive search of the Bollinger Shipyards facilities in Lockport on Tuesday as part of an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" led by the Department of Homeland Security and also detained several immigrants in the country illegally at the facility, authorities said.

The operation at the Lafourche Parish shipyard on Tuesday was led by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. Cox referred additional questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser declined comment.

Cox said federal agents also arrested 19 "unlawfully present foreign nationals" at the Bollinger Shipyards location. Five of those people were placed in ICE detention while the other 14 were processed and released after being placed into deportation proceedings in federal immigration court, Cox said.

Of course it also says there is an "ongoing federal criminal investigation"  and it's the sort of thing that has ensnared other Republican Party figures in the state already.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

These are the guys who yell and scream about how we need tough immigration enforcement practices while they themselves are the ones profiting from the exploitation of migrant labor.  You ever wonder if maybe they just like to be able to threaten their workers?

It's going great

Everybody fired. Everybody being more than previously reported.

Recent news analyses have sketched out a dire picture of the scope of the jobless crisis in Louisiana and the extent of the expected damage that the state’s economy as the federal boost to unemployment benefits lapses.

But the true picture is actually worse than some of those reports have outlined. For instance, a Sunday story in The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate noted that more than 313,000 laid-off Louisianans had filed for state unemployment benefits as of July 18, the most recent data for which the state provided complete data. But that figure didn’t include the thousands of freelancers, independent contractors and so-called “gig” workers thrown out of jobs by the coronavirus crisis.

That latter group includes more than 152,000 out-of-work Louisianans who, although not normally covered by the unemployment insurance system, have been able to file for jobless benefits under a special federal expansion of the program to address the massive job losses during the pandemic.

Oh boy.  That's just Louisiana, of course. But this story cites a Brookings report that says New Orleans will be the third "hardest hit" metro in the country by the looming benefits expiration. On the other hand, the rest of the country is... well, it's not going so great there either. 

The number of Americans filing new claims for state unemployment benefits totaled 1.43 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

It was the 19th straight week that the tally exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the coronavirus pandemic. And it was the second weekly increase in a row after nearly four months of declines, a sign of how the rebound in cases has undercut the economy’s nascent recovery. Claims for the previous week totaled 1.42 million.

For those of you who are among the ever-dwindling number of still employed persons, let's try an exercise.  Please raise your hand if you have been obligated out of fear or lack of options to keep going in to work during the pandemic while becoming more frightened and demoralized with news of each death or of the rate of spread.

Okay well if your hand is up, Mitch McConnell says your boss should sue you now. 

The most obnoxious provision of the GOP proposal is one that shifts the liability in COVID cases from the employer to employee. This provision allows employers to sue employees or their representatives for bringing a claim for a COVID infection and offering to settle out of court.

Most specifically, the measure mentions "demand letters." These are communications to a prospective defendant setting forth the facts of the claim, evidence assembled by the plaintiff, a reckoning of the potential damages and a statement of how much the plaintiff would accept to make the case go away. Here's a sample letter published by the San Francisco law firm Rouda Feder Tietjen & McGuinn.

These documents are often designed as an opening brief in a negotiation; since neither side in an injury case really wants to go to trial, they make sense. The GOP bill would make anyone offering to settle, either through a demand letter or otherwise, liable to be sued for damages if the case they're making is "meritless." That's another term that's undefined in the measure.

Unlike the limitation on damages elsewhere in the bill, by the way, the punitive damages that can be awarded to employers bringing these lawsuits aren't capped.

The measure also gives the attorney general the right to bring his own lawsuit in such cases. As a result, Kennerly observes, Atty. Gen. William Barr would get the right "to sue unions, labor activists, lawyers, doctors — everyone involved in coronavirus claims."

Congress is choosing to send millions of people off of a cliff right now because 1) Republicans are openly hostile to everyone except the bosses and millionaires and 2) Democrats are running an election campaign based on the hope that they can get away doing nothing if everyone is miserable enough, because they just might blame the Republicans for it.

The first of the month is coming. (There's one every month!) But this time we're going in while deliberately cutting off everyone's income. Also the federal evictions moratorium is expiring and the courts are open.. or are they?

In-corona-herence

Political leadership: The virus is spreading! Everybody needs to stop going out and getting into big crowds and line-ups and stuff in public. Stay inside! Preferably under something.  Don't make us have to take away your go-cups. Okay well, see, we are taking away your co-cups now.


Also political leadership:  What's the matter with you people? Don't you know you're supposed to get out and go to work in our groceries and classrooms and places where people get into big crowds and line-ups and stuff in public? If you're going to just sit at home, don't expect us to help you.

Many Republicans detest the supplemental jobless aid, put in place by the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, arguing that it is a disincentive to returning to work because it exceeds what some workers can earn in regular wages. The Republican proposal, which has badly divided the party, envisions eventually shifting to a new system of calculating benefits that would cap payments at about 70 percent of a worker’s prior income, which would also amount to about $200 per week.

The problem

This is an article about the advance of workplace surveillance technologies.  Paranoid, profit-driven bosses are able to marshal a terrifying array of all seeing and all knowing machines to gain complete and intimate knowledge of workers' actions, associations and habits in order to predict and manipulate their behaviors.  We live in hell.

But we have always lived in hell.  Your boss may have super powerful computers and cameras to track you with now but the impetus to control and squeeze the absolute most value out of workers is a practice that stretches back to slavery.

In 1750, wealthy slave owners in Jamaica and Barbados would meticulously track and manage enslaved workers in order to maximize their productive output. What business schools today call “scientific management” actually has its very roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Plantation owners were determined to extract every last bit of labor they could get from enslaved workers, meticulously tracking, documenting, and analyzing their every move in order to maximize productivity and profit. According to Harvard Business School researcher Caitlin Rosenthal, these techniques were then adopted widely in the United States after a slave owner named Thomas Affleck advanced those surveillance techniques to include “sophisticated calculations” that “measure productivity in a standardized way,” thus allowing “planters to determine how far they could push their workers to get the most profit.” After years of capitalist development, the plantation owners and capitalist executives of today are armed with more intelligent technology that can, in a millisecond, do what Affleck once did with only his eyes and a hand-written spreadsheet. High-tech corporate monitoring of workers today undoubtedly stems from this legacy of meticulous and detailed tracking of enslaved workers in order to extract the most profit from them, and to quell potential rebellion and collective action.

And, of course, the COVID crisis has provided yet another opportunity to expand these practices. Bosses conflate their own desire to track workers' movements with the public health concern over "contact tracing" in order to deploy new and intrusive technologies.  The bosses win the pandemic again.

Anyway the real reason I flagged this article is that it contains a single paragraph that can be cut out and inserted into any story about any social and political conflict going on in the United States in the 21st Century and it will serve as the essential context for what is really being fought over.

Due to advances in workplace technology following World War II, the productivity of the workforce has skyrocketed. Yet wages grew to a lesser extent until 1973, when output soared and wages stagnated even further. Since 1978, CEOs’ salaries have increased by 970 percent, making nearly 300 times more than their average worker. While companies are increasing their profit with these technologies, workers aren’t seeing any corresponding increase in their wages. Instead, those profits are going directly into the pockets of corporate executives.

We may live in hell and have always lived in hell, but the specific bit of hell we're in right now extends from our failure to overcome this problem in particular.  One might expect a situation like that to become unsustainable the longer it persists.  And *gestures widely at everything around us unraveling* could indicate that, yeah, it's not holding up so well at the moment.  The new surveillance technologies are one response meant to hold the fraying system together. They may work too! But, until the underlying is resolved,  we can expect that more draconian and frightening responses than even this will undoubtedly appear.

Not gonna "implicit bias" train your way to justice

Systemic racism is a material condition that obtains through the numerous inequities linked to the development of institutions and governments over the long course of history.  Redress against its embedded corrosive effects demands a complete societal overhaul of the ways we distribute wealth and administer justice. It's a collective project of building a better world for everyone.

Very likely, though, your organization... and in particular your boss... is not interested in doing any of that.  Which is why they develop tools for re-casting the problem as a matter of individual virtue.

It’s not a coincidence that corporate human resources departments love to contract diversity consultants like DiAngelo to do anti-bias trainings. Trainings more than pay for themselves if they can demonstrate a commitment to an inclusive workplace in the event of later anti-discrimination lawsuits. They’re also a lot cheaper than paying workers better and addressing structural inequalities. The more that blame for discrimination can be shifted on to individual racist “Karens”, the less onus there is on powerful corporations, and the politicians who defend them, to make real changes.

We do know, for example, of a tool far more useful than unconscious bias trainings in creating respect and equality: unions. Recent work in the American Journal of Political Science notes that union membership reduced racial resentment among white workers and made them more likely to support policies that benefit black Americans.

The difference is between offering workers a collective path to improving the actual conditions of their lives vs. forcing them to take "personal responsibility" for proving to the boss that they are on board with a performative company PR plan.  It is a choice between establishing justice or defending capitalism. And the latter route always requires that we heap the burden onto relatively powerless individuals.

So it's no surprise to find irretrievably racist institutions like police departments, when confronted with demands to surrender their funding and their authority in order that a more equitable and supportive means of societal justice can be implemented, respond thusly.

New Orleans – The NOPD is proud to announce its participation in the “Implicit vs. Explicit Bias & the Impact of Social Media” training program led by LSU School of Public Health and RacialBias.org.  The university and 501(c)3 organization worked in collaboration to design coursework to better equip law enforcement officers with the tools necessary to better understand and empathize with the citizens they serve.

Will events and like these serve their purpose?  Likely, they will.  But do not be deceived that the purpose is to actually alleviate or eliminate racial injustice.  Instead it is to preserve the racist institutions themselves.

Getting all the kids infected so we can own the libs

Just in case the fast approaching benefits expiration and evictions cliff wasn't enough stress for everyone to handle at once, we've also got this.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will consider “minimum health and safety standards” for reopening Louisiana schools — triggered by a new law — during a special meeting Tuesday.

The public got a glimpse of what those standards will look like — and which could be up for debate — when Louisiana Department of Education State Superintendent Cade Brumley and BESE President Sandy Holloway spoke before the House Committee on Education Monday. The standards, drafted as emergency replacement bulletins for traditional schools and charter schools, include limits on class size, bus capacity, social distancing and cleaning requirements and largely reflect guidelines previously released by the LDOE.

The "standards" are, like the rules under which everything else has been operating under these circumstances, deliberately loose. Because we really are all just making this up as we go along.

Face coverings — which are, for now, required in businesses and public buildings for anyone over the age of eight as part of an executive order effective Monday — are a point of major political contention in the state and around the country. BESE’s draft language stops short of a mask mandate. It appears to offer schools some flexibility, saying children older than eight and adults inside a school building “must wear a face covering to the greatest extent possible and practical within the local community context.”

All of which is completely understandable. Everyone really is trying to feel their way through this. It might be a bit easier to figure out what is "possible and practical within the local community context," if we hadn't designed such a convoluted context to begin with.

Until this point, local and state guidelines have been largely based on federal guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have been packaged as suggestions, not mandates. Local Education Agencies, or LEAs, are in charge of their own plans. In New Orleans, most charter schools are considered their own LEAs and it’s been unclear what role the district might play in reviewing or authorizing any reopening plans.

The district did not respond to inquiries regarding whether it would be approving individual charter group plans.

The thing is, though, a virus doesn't care about any of this stuff.  So while it's fine for state agencies and charter boards to differentiate their "local contexts" and spheres of authority, ideally their plans for containing the virus should all be relatively uniform.  This is precisely the reason the governor has had to issue a statewide mask mandate.  Exceptions and discretion are going to come into play as a matter of course, but the baseline rules need to have some clarity. Devolving all the authority to individual school districts and charter boards is just inviting more chaos.

Keep in mind, also, inviting chaos may actually be the point.  At least from Betsy DeVos's perspective.

BASH: You're the Secretary of Education. So why do you not have guidance on what schools should do if there's a coronavirus outbreak just weeks before you want them to reopen?

DeVOS: There are really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/RBFxZ5OeFw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

All the schools MUST OPEN...  and, you know, we're sure they will figure out how.  Why would they be so deliberately cruel and disruptive? The short answer is, screw you, that is why.

Every push to "reopen" anything right now, be it a school or a hotel or a fish tank, or whatever is a push by the bosses to blame the workers they subject to unsafe conditions for their own peril.  A bill John Bel just signed into law protects certain employers, including school districts from liability if their workers or the people they serve get sick.  The Trump administration is pushing for similar measures to go into the next round of  federal "relief" legislation.

What is your company or organization telling you right now about leave time? What are the mixed messages they are sending you about "safety" on the job vs. your obligation to show up and put yourself and others in danger? That kind of chaos is happening in every workplace forced by policy makers in Washington to "reopen" with minimal guidance or support. The goal of the policy, as always, is a more frightened and compliant labor pool.

And it is being implemented with little or no regard for your safety or the safety of your children.