labor strikes – The News Desk

31Oct

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Entertainment

What the U.A.W. Won | The New Yorker

The six-week rolling strike by members of the United Auto Workers union seems to be at an end. After making deals with Ford and Stellantis last week, U.A.W. leaders reached a tentative agreement with General Motors on Monday, opening the way for a full return to work. Although some details of the agreements haven’t yet been made public, it’s clear that the U.A.W. has achieved a historic victory for its members. Capitalizing on the industry’s high profits, a tight labor market, and support from President Biden, the union forced the Big Three automakers to make big concessions not just on wage rates but in other areas, too.Shawn Fain, the leader of the U.A.W., has hailed the outcome of the strike as a major win for the entire labor movement, and he’s right. Like the recent deals between the...

Stellantis to put second EV battery plant in town where EVs threaten current jobs

11Oct

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Technology

Stellantis to put second EV battery plant in town where EVs threaten current jobs

New York CNN — Stellantis and Samsung plan to build a second EV battery plant in Kokomo, Indiana, a town where many current Stellantis workers see such plants as a threat to their current jobs. EV battery plants are a critical part of the plans of traditional automakers to transition from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles in coming decades. But they could be a threat to existing jobs building engines and transmissions, which are not needed in an EV. Stellantis has four plants in Kokomo alone building engines and transmissions, employing more than 5,000 hourly workers between them. Stellantis, which builds cars under the Jeep, Ram, Dodge and Chrysler brands, along with unionized rivals Gener...

Why Obama’s “Car Czar” Thinks Biden Should Stay Out of the U.A.W. Strike

4Oct

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Entertainment

Why Obama’s “Car Czar” Thinks Biden Should Stay Out of the U.A.W. Strike

Last Tuesday, President Biden joined members of the United Auto Workers on a picket line in Belleville, Michigan, as part of the union’s strike against Detroit’s big three automakers: General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler. Biden was the first American President to ever appear on a picket line, a signal that the Democratic Party, under his Administration, is increasingly willing to embrace labor unions, which in the past several years have reached their highest levels of popularity in more than half a century. (The next day, former President Donald Trump also travelled to Michigan, and gave a speech castigating the Biden Administration at a non-union manufacturing shop.)Biden’s support for unions, especially compared with other recent Presidents, has not been met with u...

29Sep

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Entertainment

So Long, “Strike Force Five”

“What would happen if five of America’s top eleven most beloathed talk-show hosts all talked on top of each other for an hour?” Jimmy Kimmel says at the start of the first episode of the intriguing and short-lived podcast “Strike Force Five.” “We’re about to find out.” For a handful of episodes (currently eight, plus a few more in the can and on the way), Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver became a podcast-host supergroup—riffing, regaling, and reading ads—in a high-profile effort to support their shows’ staffs during the writers’ strike. As the W.G.A. negotiated for rights that its members should have had years ago, including protection against A.I. and fair pay for work shown on streaming platforms, “Strike Force Five,” on Spotify, reminded us why we’ve ...

Joe Biden’s Visit to a U.A.W. Picket Line Was a Powerful Political Gesture

27Sep

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Entertainment

Joe Biden’s Visit to a U.A.W. Picket Line Was a Powerful Political Gesture

At lunchtime on Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. President to join a picket line. Outside General Motors’ Willow Run Redistribution Center, in Belleville, Michigan—not far from Detroit—Biden greeted a group of striking members of the United Auto Workers union. He told the workers that they had saved the automobile industry during the economic crisis of 2008-09 and made a lot of personal sacrifices. (These included taking wage cuts.) Now that the auto industry was doing “incredibly well,” Biden said through a bullhorn, “you should be doing incredibly well, too.”It wasn’t a new message. The day the strike began, Biden said that record profits at the Big Three U.S. automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis—should mean record pay contracts for the U.A.W. workers. But it’...

The U.A.W. Strike Threat Poses a Tricky Political Challenge for Biden

12Sep

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Entertainment

The U.A.W. Strike Threat Poses a Tricky Political Challenge for Biden

With just three days until their current contract expires, nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members of the United Auto Workers (U.A.W.) union are preparing to walk out from their jobs at the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (the parent company of Chrysler). Negotiations are ongoing, but in recent days Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president, dismissed the companies’ initial contract offers as grossly inadequate. “If we don’t get our justice, I can guarantee you one thing—come this Thursday at midnight, there will be action,” Fain said.Recent years have seen a resurgence of labor activism, with strike threats from railway workers, UPS drivers, and other groups seeking to raise their wages and improve their employment conditions. The auto workers have asked for a four-...

Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage | The New Yorker

30Jul

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Entertainment

Hollywood’s Slo-Mo Self-Sabotage | The New Yorker

“Black Mirror,” the anthology series best known for dreaming up dystopian uses for near-future technology, took aim at its own network in the timeliest episode of its most recent season. Settling on her couch after a difficult stretch at work, a woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) logs on to Streamberry, a barely veiled stand-in for Netflix, and stumbles upon a TV show based on the events of her day: “Joan Is Awful,” starring Salma Hayek. The program proceeds to ruin her life, but it’s nothing personal; Streamberry, which runs on cutting-edge algorithms, made “Joan Is Awful” with no human input. Not a single writer or actor is involved in the production: the scripts are churned out by artificial intelligence, and the performances are elaborate deepfakes. The “Black Mirror” episode, which débu...

How UPS and the Teamsters Staved Off a Strike—for Now

28Jul

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Entertainment

How UPS and the Teamsters Staved Off a Strike—for Now

There was a time when it might have been useful to start this story by tracing the journey of a single cardboard box. I would explain that the air fryer or couch or deeply discounted jeans you recently bought online were made and packaged in Asia, then moved by boat and container truck to a warehouse not far from where you live. I would explain that to travel the last few miles from the warehouse to your home, the box would pass through the hands of overnight sorters and loaders and the delivery driver who walks right up to your door. By now, deep as we are into the mail-order way of life, facilitated by Amazon and cemented by the pandemic, all of us already know this. We’re pros at checking the time stamps and location updates for the stuff that we buy online. The system works so well, s...