The Biden administration and the state of California are working on a medium- to long-term solution to the supply chain problems affecting the nation, but in the short term—extending well into 2022—problems will persist.
President Joe Biden announced 24/7 operations at the Port of Los Angeles last month in an effort to ease backups there by moving an addition 3,500 containers a week.
After an action-packed—and sober, thanks to one of their own being hit by a car and killed near a picket line—week, John Deere strikers may have a deal. The UAW and management announced a tentative agreement, pending a vote by the workers, on Saturday.
Latina Equal Pay Day fell on Oct.21 this year. That’s the day when, starting on Jan. 1, 2020, Latina women have finally been paid what white men were paid in 2020 alone. It followed Black Women’s Equal Pay Day on August 3 and Equal Pay Day (averaging all women) on March 24. Latinas are paid 57 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and have to work an extra 294 days to earn the same amount of money.
Peter Doocy isn’t just a Fox News disinformation peddler. He’s a hereditary Fox News disinformation peddler and, perhaps, the most pathetic failson being publicly promoted by the network. Tucker Carlson is dangerous. Junior Doocy can only try to be so dangerous, but he’s so bad at his job that mostly he just makes White House press secretary Jen Psaki look really, really good.
Last week, the Biden administration announced it was making a big but temporary fix to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, offering a new chance for people who had been turned down for loan forgiveness on a series of technicalities despite making 10 years of payments. But now a settlement in a lawsuit is making an even bigger fix.
Women over 40 have been particularly hard-hit by the COVID-19 economy—and, in this as in just about every other piece of bad economic news, Black and Hispanic women have had it the worst. According to a recent AARP report, 14% of women aged 40 to 65 lost their jobs, 13% had their work hours cut, 9% were furloughed, and 4% had their salary or wages cut. Overall, 41% of women in this age group lost job-based income.
The delta variant of COVID-19 continues to leave its mark on the economy with another disappointing jobs report. Earlier in the summer, job creation rose dramatically, only to sink again as coronavirus cases spiked. Again. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added just 194,000 jobs in September, and labor force participation dropped slightly—yet another piece of evidence that increased unemployment benefits were not keeping people from looking for work.
President Joe Biden on Thursday pressed companies to put COVID-19 vaccination mandates into place while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) completes a new rule requiring companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination or routine testing.
Around 2,000 health care workers at South Buffalo Mercy Hospital are on strike after weeks of negotiations left them without a deal. The workers’ own health care costs are at issue, as are staffing ratios to ensure the best care of patients. There’s an important point made in the tweets below:
My wife gets the travel nurse notices for these kinds of gigs. The pay is insane to scab.
Sen. Joe Manchin and just about every Republican—probably every single one, once the counting is done—are opposed to investing $3.5 trillion over a decade in revitalizing U.S. infrastructure. But let’s be clear: with that, they’re opposed to creating jobs.
Happy Labor Day, if a Labor Day that represents the cut-off date for unemployment benefits for millions of people and on which the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen for well over a decade offers much to be happy about. But it is a day to celebrate workers—and the labor movement that has built what power U.S. workers have.
So let’s take a few minutes to make clear the difference that unions have made, both to their members and to all workers.
The Supreme Court didn’t just silently overturn Roe v. Wade by allowing a Texas law banning abortion at six weeks to go into effect. The Supreme Court, with its three Trump justices—two of them appointed through precedent-shattering Republican maneuvering—allowed Texas to put a bounty on the heads of anyone involved in any way in an abortion performed after six weeks gestation.
COVID-19 vaccination rates rose in August after dipping down earlier in the summer. But anti-vaxxers remain a danger not just to themselves but to everyone around them. We see the danger to individual anti-vaxxers in one story after another about their miserable deaths. We see the danger to the population as a whole as the pandemic continues to rage because we haven’t reached the vaccination levels that would tamp it down.
Good things were happening with jobs in July:
There is still a big gap in the labor market, but even with some slowing from this pace of job growth, we will be back to pre-COVID health by the end of 2022—a recovery *five times* as fast as the recovery following the Great Recession, thanks to the vaccine and to the ARP. 2/ pic.twitter.
Donald Trump isn’t just a sore loser. He isn’t even just a sore loser who indiscriminately lashed out and encouraged his supporters to riot. Donald Trump was at the head of an actual, methodical coup attempt last December and January, a fact that’s starting to draw more and more notice as details emerge.
Rep. Virginia Foxx wants the world to know exactly how committed she is to keeping workers down, and what better opportunity to broadcast it than the sudden death of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka? Foxx saw that opportunity, and she took it:
. @virginiafoxx on the death of Richard Trumka: pic.twitter.
The Fight for $15 kicked off in November 2012, with a relatively small—yet also historically large—group of New York City fast food workers making what seemed an audacious demand: $15 an hour minimum pay and a union. The latter goal hasn’t advanced much since then, but $15? That has become solidly mainstream, and has brought big wins. A new report from the National Employment Law Project quantifies just how big.
The federal minimum wage remains just $7.
The National Labor Relations Board has a new general counsel after Vice President Kamala Harris broke a tie in the Senate to confirm Jennifer Abruzzo, 51-50. President Joe Biden fired Donald Trump’s NLRB general counsel, Peter Robb, on Inauguration Day after Robb refused to resign.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions also moved forward with two of Biden’s NLRB nominees this week.
In the news today: The Biden-Harris administration faced pushback from activists on more than one front. COVID-19 continued to surge, and Republican politicians continued to say and do some of the worst things imaginable about it. Republicans also maintained their commitment to standing in the way of policy that would strengthen the economic recovery.
Here’s some of what you may have missed.
● Republicans say agreement on infrastructure is close.
The new message on COVID-19, as the delta variant spreads, is that this is now “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Presumably this message—coming from the Biden administration (I’m definitely looking at you and your Twitter feed, White House chief of staff Ron Klain), the CDC, and the media—is intended to convince people to get vaccinated. Whether it works, I don’t know.
Workers suffered during recent heat waves around the country, and hitting the Pacific Northwest especially hard. We’ve talked about the need for heat protections for farmworkers, but they’re not the only ones.
HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson looks at the heat complaints to Oregon OSHA, finding that restaurant workers were hit particularly hard. According to a complaint from a Carl’s Jr.
Around 600 workers at a Topeka, Kansas, Frito-Lay plant have been on strike for more than a week, citing low pay and brutal working hours that the company is fighting to preserve in contract negotiations.
“A lot of people here, they barely see their wives, they barely see their husbands, kids. Sometimes a few of us will get stuck here on holidays.
Massive food bank lines became some of the most iconic and disturbing images of the COVID-19 economy. Now, unemployment is dropping and the Biden administration has increased food aid—but advocates are warning that hunger remains a problem.
“Hunger is fading back as an unseen issue,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’ve seen a drop-off in volunteer numbers.
Nevada’s “right to return” law has gone into effect, requiring employers to rehire many hospitality workers laid off during the pandemic to their original jobs, or equivalents, as those jobs become available again. Workers will get 24 hours to decide whether to accept a job, and must be available to start within five days.
Sure, “hate” is a strong word. But as applied to food, it can be entirely appropriate. Food, after all, is an essential part of life and it can inspire serious physical reactions—for good or bad. You don’t have to be a picky eater to have one food you really, really can’t eat (for reasons other than health).
It’s a holiday weekend, so let’s chat.
The nation’s largest teachers union voluntarily put itself in the crosshairs of Republican attacks on critical race theory.
The U.S. economy is up 850,000 jobs, according to the June jobs report, and the past two months’ jobs reports were adjusted upward by 15,000. June’s jobs report is the strongest result in 10 months.
The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 5.9%, while the number of people who have been jobless for six months or more rose to 4 million, and “Black unemployment remains in deeply recessionary territory at 9.
Republican state cutoffs of federal unemployment aid are drawing some pushback. In Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a bill that would have ended the unemployment aid supplement, while in other states workers are suing to block the benefits cut-offs.
When workers at Du Nord Craft Spirits decided to form a union, joining UNITE HERE Local 17, the company voluntarily recognized them without any delay and in fact publicized the occasion itself. Du Nord bills itself as the first Black-owned distillery in the United States.
“The production staff of Du Nord Craft Spirits chose to form a union because we enjoy and appreciate working here,” the workers said in a statement to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
For all the talk of “post-COVID life” or anything like it, the coronavirus pandemic remains very much with us. Talk of its end is premature. But we do know something about how our lives have already changed, and maybe a sense of what new or continuing changes we can plan for once the pandemic is really over.
That can be enormous or tiny. Too many of us have been very sick, or have lost loved ones, or both.