May 2021 – Page 4 – Lone Candle

What American Workers Really Want Instead of a Union at Amazon

Posted on May 22, 2021 by Lone Candle

“After an intensive, months-long election, only one-eighth of the workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse voted in favor of a union. More than twice as many voted against. Roughly half didn’t vote at all.

The election’s losers are incredulous that they could have fallen short on the merits. Challenges are already underway, accusing Amazon of unfair labor practices such as positioning a mailbox improperly. And to be sure, Amazon appears to have behaved obnoxiously, and perhaps even unlawfully in some instances.

But when nearly 6,000 workers have two months to cast ballots, and the union secures fewer than 750 “yes” votes, the idea that it has what workers want looks a bit ridiculous.”

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“Workers have shown that they dislike the hyper-adversarialism and political activism that American unions bring into their workplaces but are eager for more representation, voice, and support than they can achieve individually. What they want, and need, is a middle ground that neither side is offering.

Research has borne this out. In a landmark 1994 survey, Harvard professor Richard Freeman and University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers asked more than 2,400 nonmanagement workers whether they would prefer representation by an organization that “management cooperated with in discussing issues, but had no power to make decisions” or by one “that had more power, but management opposed.” Workers preferred cooperation to an adversarial stance by 63 percent to 22 percent, a result that held even among active union members.

In 2017, MIT professor Thomas Kochan conducted a similar survey and found that interest in joining a union had grown and workers wanted a wide range of services that a union could provide to them, including: collective bargaining; health, unemployment, and training benefits; legal assistance; input into work processes; and representation in management decision-making. On the long menu of options, the two that stood out as making workers less likely to join are exact the ones that seem to get union activists most excited: politics and strikes.”

How America’s one-click obsession is warping the future of work

Posted on May 22, 2021 by Lone Candle

“As recently as 1980, there were only a few parts of the country — mostly in Appalachia and the Deep South — that had median incomes more than 20 percent below the average, and then you had a small number of places that were 20 percent above the average, like DC and the New York suburbs, for example. But now whole swaths of the country are 20 percent below the average and it includes basically the entire Midwest, while huge strips of the coast are now above the 20 percent above the average.”

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“a two-step process: Amazon upends all of these brick-and-mortar retail businesses and then swoops into the areas where the laid-off employees live and hires them as underpaid bodies in their warehouses.”

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“We talk about coal miners getting laid off, but countless more retail workers have been laid off. The professional retail clerk took more losses than any other in recent years.

To put it simply, what you have now are the sort of jobs that once allowed a 55-year-old woman in Elmira, New York, to manage a jewelry counter at a department store being replaced by a warehouse job that pays less, involves much more strenuous working conditions, is far more socially isolating, and that same 55-year-old woman will have a much harder time hacking it.”

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“We’re talking about intensely rote and inhuman work. We’re talking about a company that uses algorithms to track productivity and bathroom breaks.”

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“These are really grueling jobs. There’s a reason why the turnover is so high. And if anything, the jobs have only gotten more rote and more repetitive and more isolated as the robots at the warehouses have gotten more automated.”

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“The company’s demands of local governments are extraordinarily aggressive. It seeks large reductions on its future tax bills, on the property taxes owed for the warehouse or data center, and sometimes also on the payroll taxes owed on the workers.”

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“if you’ve had your manufacturing base wiped out in Baltimore or southwest Ohio or wherever it might be, and then along comes this company that’s going to hire 2,000 people at a warehouse, it’s hard to say no.”

Northern Ireland is in the midst of its heaviest unrest in years. Here’s why.

Posted on May 22, 2021 by Lone Candle

“A great deal of the initial violence came after state prosecutors decided last month they would not charge the leaders of nationalist party Sinn Fein for breaking Covid-19 regulations in June by attending the funeral for Bobby Storey. Storey was a former top member of the Irish Republican Army, the paramilitary group that waged a violent campaign against the British and for a reunified Ireland during the Troubles

Many unionists perceived the decision to not prosecute the members of the party as a sign of political favoritism, given that unionists were told to cancel their traditional Twelfth of July parades last summer, and the loaded symbolism surrounding the funeral. The decision sparked outrage and protests.”

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“another major factor fueling the anger and protests is the way that many in Northern Ireland feel betrayed by the terms of Brexit — the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union — which was completed at the beginning of this year. Some unionists feel blindsided by the British government, which they believe has left them in the lurch”

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“Another complicating factor is that the period around the Easter holiday often features “increased communal conflict,” Politico notes, because of Irish Republican Army commemorations among nationalists in Northern Ireland on the one side and unionist parades on the other.
Further complications may be coming from criminal groups who might be trying to add to the chaos and exploit tensions over Covid-19 restrictions in order to cause problems for law enforcement.

There’s a complex array of factors that could explain what’s contributing to the current chaos — and given that swirl, it could evolve further in the future.”

What Biden’s plan to tackle housing prices is missing

Posted on May 15, 2021 by Lone Candle

“Bans on duplexes, fourplexes, accessory dwelling units, and apartment buildings ensure that the only homes that get built are single-family residences that are necessarily more expensive. The laws that dictate this are referred to as “exclusionary zoning.” To estimate the impacts of these policies, one study looked at Silicon Valley, where demand to live surged starting in the 1970s (but population between 1970 and 2010 “grew at less than half the rate that California did”). At the time, house prices there were only slightly above the national median. But its suburbs undertook a “multifaceted” effort to restrict the types of homes that could be built and “limit further densification.” Now, half a century later, house prices in Silicon Valley are “commonly ten times the national median.””

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“As part of the $2 trillion infrastructure package the administration introduced last week, Biden proposed a “purely carrot and not stick” program to allocate $5 billion to a new competitive grant program that “awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”
The approach is similar to President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program for education, which also set aside a few billion for states to compete over. And in some ways, modeling zoning reform similarly to education reform makes sense — both have been designated as local issues, and a lot of the infrastructure for direct reform exists at the local level.

However, while with education everyone has the same goal of “better schools” or “better-educated children” even if they disagree on methods, not everyone agrees with the goal of ensuring abundant housing.

At the local level, cities and suburbs (often with a high proportion of Democratic voters) have enacted policies and procedures that drive up the cost of housing, often due to aesthetic preferences for single-family homes and the people who usually reside in them.”

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“Many of the most exclusionary localities are uninterested in the extra money changing these rules would give them. After all, they’ve already left potentially billions on the table: According to a 2015 study by University of Chicago economist Chang-Tai Hsieh and UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, researchers find that because metropolitan areas have made it prohibitively expensive for middle- and low-income Americans to move to high-productivity areas, US aggregate economic growth was lowered by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.

“It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea; it just means that it’s limited in its ability to impact change,” Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, told Vox. “The fundamental problem we’re facing is the cities and suburbs that are most interested in excluding people are also the ones that are least needing of additional grants to pay for things.”

If Biden and his administration want to truly “eliminate exclusionary zoning,” as they claim, they’ll need a stick to go along with their carrot”

The Christian right is racking up huge victories in the Supreme Court, thanks to Amy Coney Barrett

Posted on May 15, 2021 by Lone Candle

“As the Court held in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), religious objectors must follow “neutral law[s] of general applicability.”

Ever since Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court last fall, however, the Supreme Court has been rapidly dismantling Smith…the Court fired a bullet into Smith’s heart. It ruled that people of faith who want to gather in relatively large groups in someone’s home must be allowed to do so, despite the fact that California limits all in-home gatherings to just three households.

Although the Court’s new 5-4 decision in Tandon v. Newsom doesn’t explicitly overrule Smith, the decision makes it so easy for many religious objectors to refuse to comply with the law that Smith is basically a dead letter.

The Court’s new majority has accomplished what amounts to a revolution in its approach to religion and the law, entirely through cases brought by churches and other religious actors seeking exemptions from public health rules intended to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The Court is serious about giving religious conservatives broad immunity from the law — so serious, in fact, that it is literally willing to endanger people’s lives in order to achieve this goal.”

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““California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise,” the majority opinion in Tandon claims, “permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time.

As Justice Kagan explains in her dissent, there are three very good reasons why a state might treat these secular activities differently than a gathering in people’s homes. First of all, “when people gather in social settings, their interactions are likely to be longer than they would be in a commercial setting,” and the people at social gatherings are “more likely to be involved in prolonged conversations.”

Additionally, “private houses are typically smaller and less ventilated than commercial establishments,” and “social distancing and mask-wearing are less likely in private settings and enforcement is more difficult.”

But, ultimately, none of these distinctions mattered to the Court’s majority. The practical impact of Tandon is that, so long as many religious objectors can cite any secular activity that is treated differently than a religious activity — no matter how distinct those two activities may be — this Supreme Court is very likely to grant the objector an exemption.

Tandon is not an especially surprising decision — the Court reached a similar conclusion last November in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a decision that I described at the time as a “revolutionary victory” for religious conservatives.”