To say, as some are, that Biden didn't really support the Amazon workers because he didn't say "Amazon" in the video is a big mistake. It would have been direct interference in a union election to do so. A huge mistake. Everyone knows who he is talking about.
Biden said workers should have the choice whether they wanted a union without employer interference. That's right! That's the correct message. To say they should vote for a union is the equivalent of the employer intervening in workers' choice. You don't want that.
I think there's a lot of ignorance out there about what unions actually do and how they operate and what happens in a union election because we want our politics to be presidents making big statements that make us happy. But that's not how it works.
Another issue here is the seeming assumption that Biden directly speaking to Amazon workers by name would help the workers win the union. How many of the white workers at that Alabama facility voted for Biden? You know it's very few.
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This Day in Labor History: March 2, 1937. U.S. Steel signed a contract with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Let's talk about this titanic victory for the early CIO!
This victory for SWOC was not only a critical early win for what would soon become the Congress of Industrial Organizations, but also ended an era of U.S. Steel being a leader in opposing any labor organizing.
It would certainly not end the resistance of steel companies to unionism, but it would make the eventual organizing of the industry quite likely.
If you like men who baselessly accuse other men of rape because of a political disagreement on Twitter--which I guess is Liz's bag--you will love Freddie!
Me, I think Freddie is a disturbed and pretty awful person who has treated a lot of people--myself included--in ways far out of bounds of any ethical considerations. But again, this I guess is OK if you hate the Democratic Party hard enough.
What I find interesting about this is that both Beltway media types and purportedly left media types will go full tribal warfare in defending their friends no matter how awful the story or behavior.
First term Obama was pretty horrible on labor. I don't think he would have raised one finger to pass the Employee Free Choice Act even if Democrats had kept the 60 vote majority in the Senate through the 2010 elections.
In a lot of ways, you can follow the slow decline of the respectability of neoliberalism through the Obama years, as he slowly moved left as the ideas he came of age with in the Clinton years became discredited. And now Biden shows just how discredited they are.
But Obama is still the type of guy who thinks techbros really are smarter than most of us.
As a born Westerner, watching the media fawn over horrible governors like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom and Gina Raimondo and Charlie Baker and then seeing them all suck at the second look is infuriating. Hey media, there are other states out there!
I got three governors for you:
Kate Brown, Oregon
Jay Inslee, Washington
Michelle Lujan-Grisham, New Mexico
These are governors who know how to run a state. Also not horrible people! But I realize the media would have to not be incredibly lazy in order to profile them.
And we can't have an incredibly lazy media, I mean why would someone want to spend time in [checks notes] Santa Fe or Olympia when they could just never leave the Beltway!
This Day in Labor History: February 27, 1869. The great workplace health and safety reformer Alice Hamilton is born. Let's learn about this unsung hero of the working class struggle!
Hamilton was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and was encouraged by her parents to achieve the education she desired. She wanted to become a doctor, which was very rare for women in these years.
But in 1893, she received her medical degree from the University of Michigan and at first dedicated herself to working with women and children, seen as more fit for the few women professionals at this time that settlement houses, for instance, were being established.
This Day in Labor History: February 26, 1972. A Pittston Coal Company slurry dam collapsed in Logan County, West Virginia. The ensuing flood of coal slurry would kill 125 people and demonstrate once again the contempt the coal industry has for the people of West Virginia!
Coal slurry is basically the toxic leftovers of modern industrial coal production. This was less of an issue in the days of underground mining, but with strip mining and later mountaintop removal, large scale residue became a real problem.
The coal is sifted and processed, washed of impurities, and transported to market by rail or boat. The leftover is the slurry. It includes heavy metals including arsenic, mercury, beryllium, manganese, selenium, cadmium, as well as a whole slough of toxic chemicals.