More Perfect Union Profile picture
Apr 24, 2021 7 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1. Today, @Kroger is closing two stores in Seattle to retaliate against a local $4/hr hero pay law. More than 100 workers will be fired or dislocated.

Kroger made $2.8B in profit in 2020. CEO Rodney McMullen got a pay raise to $21M.

Some heart-breaking details are emerging.
2. At one of the stores, neighbors and customers raised $205.88 for each of the 51 impacted workers as a gesture of thanks.

Employees, "some with tears in their eyes," received a round of applause and kind words at a community farewell event.

seattletimes.com/business/local…
3. One of the shuttered locations has been an active grocery store for 44 years. Neighbors are lamenting the loss of convenience & a community hub.

No other grocery chain except Kroger, America’s largest, has closed locations to protest hazard pay laws.

capitolhillseattle.com/2021/04/90-in-…
4. Seattle isn’t the only place where Kroger is punishing its own workers to fight hazard pay.

Kroger closed additional stores in Long Beach, CA, last week over a city hero pay ordinance.

More closures are planned in Los Angeles next month.

5. Amid record profits, Kroger claims it is closing stores because they’re underperforming.

But local employees consistently say it’s not true.

Via @seattletimes:
We spoke to Kroger workers in Seattle earlier this year.

They wanted to be safe on the job and to be paid a fair wage for their work.

One employee told us that the extra $4/hour would be “a buffer between me and homelessness.”

7. Kroger is planning to shutter 3 additional stores in Los Angeles on May 15.

These are profitable stores where 250 people work. They will all be fired or have their jobs dislocated.

Workers are organizing with their union, @UFCW770, to fight back.

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More from @MorePerfectUS

Nov 19
THREAD: A small handful of companies are propping up the U.S. economy.

GDP growth is overly reliant on one sector: AI.

And the numbers are going up in no small part because these companies keep investing in each other. Image
On Tuesday, Nvidia and Microsoft announced that AI startup Anthropic will buy $30 billion of cloud computing capacity from Microsoft, “powered by Nvidia.”

As part of the deal, Nvidia agreed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion.

businessinsider.com/anthropic-nvid…
Nvidia is also investing in other companies in exchange for guarantees they’ll buy its chips.

Nvidia recently agreed to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI.

In exchange, OpenAI promised it would buy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia chips.

investopedia.com/nvidia-microso…
Read 8 tweets
Nov 12
Donald Trump is proposing 50-year mortgages.

What he doesn't want you to know is that if you take a 30-year loan on the average house, you pay around $824,000 over the life of the loan.

If you took out a 50-year loan for the same house, you’d ultimately pay about $1,213,500.🧵
Assuming a 6.2% interest rate, a 30-year plan on a $373,680 loan costs $2,288.68 per month.

A 50-year loan would cost $2,022.52 per month.

While homebuyers would see a small drop in their monthly costs, they would also see a meteoric rise in interest payments.

apnews.com/article/home-p…
For example:

Under this interest rate, if you take out $373,680 for a 30-year loan, you would pay $823,922.67 in total.

If you took out a 50-year loan for the same amount, you’d pay $1,213,513.87 in total.

This means you’d pay roughly $389,000 more in interest over the life of your loan.

apnews.com/article/home-p…
Read 7 tweets
Sep 11
The South has quickly emerged as a battleground between big tech and working people.

Companies are pouring billions into data centers, but Southerners are fighting to block them.

The outcomes could greatly affect residents’ economic security and the region’s water supply. 🧵
$200 billion worth of data center projects are being built in the South, according to a new report from @MediaJustice.

To keep up with the massive amounts of energy these centers consume, projects like gas pipelines and coal plants are also growing.

mediajustice.org/wp-content/upl…
@mediajustice The data centers, however, would likely exacerbate many of the issues that residents who live in the region are already facing.

Data centers often increase electricity costs for residents, and they also consume large amounts of water.

substack.perfectunion.us/p/how-data-cen…
Read 9 tweets
Aug 12
Companies are increasingly trapping workers with a move that looks a lot like indentured servitude.

The company will pay for training, then when you want to leave the job, the corporation will say you owe thousands of dollars for that training — unless you stay on the job.

🧵
The following article describes a nurse who switched to a better-paying job at a nearby hospital only to wind up with debt collectors at her door demanding she pay her former employer back for a loan she didn’t know she owed.

jacobin.com/2025/08/corpor…
And a cargo pilot who faced a $20,000 lawsuit over job-training expenses at a commercial airline that had just fired him for refusing to fly a plane under unsafe conditions.

jacobin.com/2025/08/corpor…
Read 6 tweets
Aug 7
Amazon tried to build a massive, water-consuming data center out in Arizona. Tucson’s city council unanimously killed it.

We were on the ground to tell the real story of how a community stopped Amazon in their tracks.

A thread 🧵
Back in 2023, Amazon Web Services outlined a plan to build a 290-acre data center—nearly the size of downtown Tucson.

It was one of the largest projects ever considered by the city, and was projected to use massive amounts of water and electricity.

azluminaria.org/2025/07/21/ama…
On June 17, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted to sell and rezone land for the data center.

The so-called ‘Project Blue’ was immediately marked by a lack of transparency, with the final user hidden and public officials bound by non-disclosure agreements.
Read 9 tweets
Jun 30
Republicans in Congress are currently trying to ram through a bill that would the biggest wealth transfer in history.

Here are some of the most extreme cuts, giveaways to the rich, and impacts that the bill will have.

What they're trying to do is simply shocking. 🧵
Due to the drastic Medicaid cuts in the bill, 1 in 4 nursing homes say they will be forced to close, and more than half would have to cut staff. Image
As a result of clean energy tax credits being killed, household electricity bills in EVERY state will go up.
Read 6 tweets

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