Links are at the end, in the sanctuary.
It’s not May Day, but May Day should be the only May date.
Before we get to the workers portion of today’s programme, though . . .
“. . . ultimately we also need an American electorate that understands it’s better to choose between the two parties than to deny them the opportunity to govern.”
That’s former Democratic Leadership Council flack Ed Kilgore, now making a decent living at New York Magazine both-sidesing—tri-sidesing, in this instance—the shit out of whatever issue comes to hand.
The issue here is the alleged fight over the debt ceiling, which as previously established isn’t a fight, but rather Republicans offering to line up impoverished military-veteran mothers who rely on food stamps and the VA to get by and shoot them in the head, and Democrats (so far) declining the offer.
The upshot (haha) is that Kilgore thinks Democrats are at fault for … something; what is ain’t exactly clear, but they should stop doing it, and both Democrats and Republicans should stop trying to do what their bases want them to do, to whatever extent they’re really doing so.
Activists in both parties have constantly urged their elected officials to fight fight fight for them. It has become a bipartisan tradition of uncompromising partisanship. If leaders of either party flinch and “cave,” it will simply confirm the activist tendency to treat politics as purely a matter of superior will, which in the context of a debt limit crisis means superior willingness to risk sending the country down the road to perdition.
What Kilgore wants is unclear; other than exhorting voters to elect slightly center-right and slightly center-left politicians who will triumphantly do almost nothing any voter wants them to do, he offers no solutions. Guessing, he wants Democrats to offer a compromise debt ceiling package that will only wound our military-veteran mothers, maybe requiring an amputation but not a funeral, and then he wants Republicans to grudgingly accept it.
But who knows. He’s far from the only pundit to blame primarily voters, and among them primarily activists, for the country’s political woes. Surely there must be a centrist solution to global warming and gun control and medical bankruptcies and people dying from poverty and lack of medical care.
Right?
Fuck this guy. When I saw the headline I thought oh, that must be Jonathan Chait, and then when I saw it was Kilgore, I thought oh, maybe Chait got fired or seriously injured by a less-than-lethal ideological munition, but no, it’s just that New York Magazine has a centrist fuckwad fetish.
Will no one think of the Centrists!1
“Investigators also determined two 10-year-old children were employed – but not paid – and sometimes worked as late as 2 a.m.”
This story didn’t quite make May Day, but neither did I, so.
Two 10-year-old children were found working at a Louisville McDonald’s restaurant — sometimes until 2 a.m. — the US Department of Labor said Tuesday.
The revelation was part of an investigation into the child labor law violations in the Southeast. The agency also found three franchisees that own more than 60 McDonald’s locations in Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland and Ohio, “employed 305 children to work more than the legally permitted hours and perform tasks prohibited by law for young workers,” the Labor Department said in a statement.2
The labor department described the 10-year-olds as “employed – but not paid,” which, isn’t there a word for that? I think there is.
The report landed just as “11 states have either passed or introduced laws to roll back child labor laws,” says Ariana Figueroa, writing in the Idaho Capitol Sun, at the behest of ‘‘industry trade organizations and mostly conservative legislators as businesses scramble for low-wage workers.”3
The illegal use of child labor is increasing, the labor department says, which is why some people want to run the government like a business, where if a law undermines profits, one simply does away with the law.
“There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time. There was one man who had a watch. . . . It was taken from him and given into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day.”
Alex Press has three labor stories in Jacobin, two posted on May Day and one today. The first reviews a film, Unrest, based on cartographer-turned-anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin’s seminal experience in a Swiss watchmaking town.4
The film, [Cyril] Schäublin’s second feature, is a dramatization of the anarchist’s time in the Swiss mountain town of Saint-Imier. Schäublin comes from a family of watchmakers like those portrayed in the film, and his use of a nonprofessional, largely local cast gives the period piece a surprisingly modern feel. The film’s title is a play on the word for the tiny spiral wheel that balances the mechanism at the heart of a watch: unrueh, the unrest.
Despite what some may expect of a film about the anarchist movement, Unrest is without dramatic action, much less violence. Director of photography Silvan Hillman frames characters at the very edge of shots, where they are dwarfed by the surrounding architecture or the area’s idyllic scenery, with forest and sky taking up the bulk of the frame. Revolutionary messages are exchanged wordlessly, on matchbooks passed between smokers. Members of an anarchist union cooperative deliberate while working before voting to send a portion of their wages to striking railroad workers in Baltimore.
The review is a good and, for people who tend to think of anarchism as nihilism, perhaps an educational one.
The second May Day piece looks at the good and bad of labor’s current circumstances. Chief among the good is the surprising success of rank-and-file workers overthrowing calcified and-or corrupt leadership cabals in the UAW and Teamsters, but unions have made broad inroads in a number of environments.5
[L]ast week, Shawn Fain, the newly elected president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) traveled from Detroit to Washington, DC, to meet with Sean O’Brien, who won in an upset over James P. Hoffa’s chosen successor to take the helm of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The same week, the Teamsters announced that they had organized a union of Amazon delivery drivers in California and negotiated the first tentative union contract of Amazon workers in the United States (though what followed is complicated), and workers voted to unionize their 1,100-person workplace at logistics giant DHL.
Also last week: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) went to federal court seeking an injunction to reinstate fired Starbucks worker Jaysin Saxton, and the board wants a nationwide cease and desist order against Starbucks for firing union supporters. Workers at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble filed an NLRB petition for a union election; they are not the first location to do so. Some 5,700 graduate students at Stanford University also filed with the NLRB, the largest union election petition of the year thus far; University of Minnesota graduate students won a union by a landslide, with 2,487 votes in favor of unionizing and a mere 70 against; and University of Michigan graduate students continued to strike even in the face of police harassment and arrests.
Of course things aren’t all depressed owners and downcast Pinkertons; capital in its various guises continues to enjoy success both busting unions and ignoring them when workers do manage to organize. But there’s enough good news in isolation to make one feel a bit optimistic.
Press’s third story, this one from today, looks at the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike which got underway last night.6
[T]he terms of the strike are stark: the studios want to gigify writing, eroding the stability on which the career, and the work it produces, depends as well reducing the number of jobs that exist.
Additionally, distance remains between the two sides on the matter of residuals, the money writers receive when their work gets reused. That income cushions the frequent downtime between jobs and can account for a significant proportion of a writer’s annual earnings. Writers receive far lower residuals for streaming than for broadcast television, and now that the former dominates the industry and nearly half of all writers are working for the contract’s minimum compensation level regardless of experience, the current setup leaves them unable to make a living. A WGA report finds that writer pay has declined 4 percent over the past decade, which amounts to 23 percent when adjusted for inflation.
One widely-disseminated encapsulation of the opposed factions came from Adam Conover as interviewed on CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, one of the companies targeted by the strike, and the president of which made $250 million last year.7
Ah well.
Trippin’ with the Music
Herron Oblivion and Public Practice have spent some time listening to acid rock. Priests probably have as well, but aren’t so overtly influenced by it.
Priests, “Nothing Feels Natural;”8 Herron Oblivion, "The Chapel;"9 Public Practice, "Gentle Grip."10
That, Comrades, is all there is
Next year I’m gonna arrive at May Day right on time. Meanwhile, if you like what you see here, please share it, and if you’ve not already subscribed, please consider it—subscriptions are free unless you want to pay.
Be well, take care.