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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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Housing is a labor issue

There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.

Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class

The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:

https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/

She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/

She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079

UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.

As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics

So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:

https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46

While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.

Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":

https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf

LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:

https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf

And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law

UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.

Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:

http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf

It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"

Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:

https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/

Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby

A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/

Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."

The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy

Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/

States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:

https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4

New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:

https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/

New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:

https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/

The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

#pluralistic #labor #hot labor summer #eternal labor september #jane mcalevey #los angeles #weaponized shelter #housing #airbnb #equity strip noho #tenants unions #red vienna #jennifer abruzzo #nlrb #the rent's too damned high

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iww-gnv · 3 months

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Disneyland’s costumed characters and parade performers have announced their intent to unionize. Calling themselves “Magic United,” cast members in the Anaheim resort’s Characters and Parades departments said Tuesday that they plan to unionize with Actors’ Equity Assn., which represents 51,000 professional actors and stage members on Broadway and in live theater around the country. Labor organizers have begun circulating union authorization cards to 1,700 Disneyland workers and said they will seek voluntary recognition from the company when a majority have signed. If Disney declines to recognize the union, Actors’ Equity Assn. will file the cards with the National Labor Relations Board, which will schedule a union recognition election for the cast members.

#news #labor news #disney news #disney #actors equity association #actor's equity association #disney unions #disney union #magic united

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taylorvaughnsaidso · 6 months

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So interesting, as an American I just had this conversation not too long ago with a friend from the UK - we were talking about the latest season of You and their depiction of classism of the UK vs US. To put in plainly she explained this exactly, what James is saying.

Michael Gambon seems a little out of touch with that perception if you ask me.

^^^^

#james mcavoy #social issues #british arts #pop culture #gossip #celebrity gossip #the hollywood reporter #classism #equity #equity british trade union #film discussion #theater

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aqueerpolysocialist · 1 year

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Solidarity with my comrades in the US fighting against this vile legislation. I've made sure to share this with all my UK based drag contacts but don't have any direct US contacts so please do share this and make sure everyone who can get involved knows that the union is there for them.

Link to the tweet: https://twitter.com/ActorsEquity/status/1631743221322620929?t=Dc9Rvnyxlr9ZNQUuh6U_uQ&s=19

#us politics #news usa #actors equity #trade unions #politics #queer #queer politics #trans rights #transgender rights #drag race

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gramforgram · 10 months

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man. I'm just one guy on the internet, but seeing such blatant environmental warfare used against striking union members doesn't get me excited about "tree law," as this great opportunity to see justice for the proletariat

the act is done. those trees will be stressed, susceptible to disease, and forced to endure heatwaves. those trees may die and the only consequence will be more capital exchange

doesn't anyone else see? we share the same world, the same fate, the same struggle with those trees. in some ways, we are the same

and when men come to cut you down, their shears will give all the permission they need

#tree law #wga strike #sag strike #union strong #feeling a lot of feelings and needed to do some impromptu nonfiction poetry #Nazi punks fuck off btw #this is not about Jews this is about the very real media corps oppressing strikers and denying them a crumb of wage equity #liberals wake up and see what's going on #fellow colonizers see harm against nature to hurt people as the evil it is not just “for” people #anyhow I've had enough I'm gonna go get high

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percocet · 7 months

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i cannot believe what i'm reading what do you mean this was an email sent out to everybody

THESE are the posts "[celebrating] recent acts of terror and violence"??

#palestine is literally fighting to SURVIVE #'antithetical to the university's values'#the principles of [checks notes] academic freedom. INTEGRITY. responsibility. EQUITY. AND INCLUSIVENESS #???????????#it took me a couple years to get in hot shit with my undergrad's provost w/ the union. it may only take me two months here if i write #the email i want to write.

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snootyfoxfashion · 2 years

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when ur partner works at a bar in a popular theatre in auckland and they’re filming season 2 of our flag means death locally

he ordered a pilsner and then a gin and tonic btw

#for context equity is the new zealand actor's union #idk if i've said it on this blog before but the guy playing fang is one of my acting tutors #also my friend got a job on the ofmd set so thats cool #the nz film industry is SMALL lol #our flag means death #not fashion

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shakespearenews · 10 months

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Formed in 1913, Equity currently represents over 51,000 professional actors and stage managers. The Drunk Shakespeare Chicago union would not just represent the performers and crew, however, but the entire staff, including servers and bartenders. Union leaders were able to get 100 percent of the Chicago cast and crew to sign their authorization cards, which might not have happened if everyone’s concerns had not been addressed upfront, Fent added.

“It’s thrilling to be a labor leader at this moment in which arts workers across the country, like our colleagues in other industries, are claiming their power,” said Equity president Kate Shindle in a press release. “That’s exactly what the members of Drunk Shakespeare United are doing. These actors and stage managers, servers and bartenders have banded together to unionize in order to achieve a fairer, safer workplace, and Equity is eager to support their efforts. I hope that companies of other shows—who might not have realized that they too can have a unionized workplace—will be inspired by Drunk Shakespeare United’s decision to stand together and say, ‘We deserve better.’”

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Krull explained that during the first weekend in April, the Drunk Shakespeare D.C. team suffered a company-wide COVID-19 outbreak, and half of the staff were out sick. Instead of canceling the shows, they said, upper management pushed the few remaining company members to do back-to-back sold-out shows that Friday. Both managers were out sick, so no management was there that night, and actors were tasked with operating both the light and sound boards despite having no training on either, since no stage manager was present.

“Actors would run onstage to say a line, run off to support stage-management tasks, and then run around to deliver or reset a prop before [returning onstage],” Krull described. “We were fortunate that there were no incidents with inebriated patrons on this particular night, but the staff on duty did not feel supported, and it was a catalyzing factor in our unionization.”

#shakespeare #william shakespeare #drunk shakespeare #equity #actors equity #union #unions #chicago #theater #theatre #actors #american theatre magazine #crew #bartenders #dc #dc theater

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commiepinkofag · 10 months

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Exactly 14 years ago today—on July 24, 2009—the minimum wage was set at $7.25 while top 1% were worth $5T. Today, billionaire wealth is $45T+, meanwhile the min wage is still $7.25. This is what generational wage theft looks like. Pay workers. Tax billionaires. #RaiseTheWage

[@QasimRashid]

#qasim rashid #us politics #wealth #equity #disparity #chicago #congress #raise the wage #minimum wage #unionize

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pynkhues · 11 months

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If an actor were to go to Europe during the ongoing writer strike and film in a foreign country, would you consider that to be crossing the picket line and unethical? just wondering...

Mmm, that's a complicated question that I think depends a lot on the context, anon.

In the US right now, I think it's very important that actors and crews show solidarity to their writers. After all, without the work of those writers, those productions wouldn't exist at all, and by refusing to read and film those scripts until the writers get what they're owed is a powerful statement in and of itself.

That said, European writers aren't on strike, and European cinema has its own unions, its own standards and is, quite frankly, it's own industry. In that sense, no, I wouldn't personally view that as crossing a picket line at this stage (although my answer would / will be different if SAG-AFTRA goes on strike too).

It's also I think worth noting too that a lot of the international unions are currently in contact with the American ones.

I'm a member of the Australian Writers' Guild and we've had reps who've had meetings with the WGA to keep lines of communication open and to work not necessarily with the WGA, but to follow recommendations to ensure we aren't working against them. This has been distributed to all AWG members and ensures we know what we're doing, don't scab, cross picket lines or harm the WGA strike. That doesn't mean production in Australia has shut down in the way that it has in the States though. Australia has its own industry, just like Europe does, and these industries are still currently operating.

I know a number of Australian productions have American actors in them who are definitely members of SAG-AFTRA, but the projects being made here are covered by MEAA (the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance which is the banner all Australian writing, film, tv, theatre and journalism unions fall under, including the actors union). Knowing that MEAA, through AWG, has been in touch with the WGA makes me believe they've very likely been in touch with SAG-AFTRA too when it comes to working out what's appropriate for American actors in Australian productions in light of the strike.

I'd like to think it's at least fairly similar in different countries across Europe with the unions reaching agreements between themselves and recommendations being made as to the ways American actors are able to work in foreign industries outside of Hollywood right now.

Again though, I do think that'll change if SAG-AFTRA does go on strike too.

#here's hoping!#i'm actually mostly curious as to what happens with actors who are in both #like for instance sarah snook's definitely in sag-aftra but with the amount of aus work she's done and is doing again #i can't see anyway she's not in actors equity under meaa too #so does that mean she'll be on strike even with aus productions?#i'm not sure!#it's really complicated #the unions seem to be trying to work together at least to figure this side of things out #wga strike #welcome to my ama #industry stuff

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iww-gnv · 3 months

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Disneyland employees who perform as various Disney characters at the theme park are seeking to join the Actor’s Equity Association, which represents everything from actors on Broadway to strippers in Los Angeles. The union is seeking to represent the 1,700 Disneyland employees in the characters and parades departments at the park. It said after three days of collecting cards signed by employees, it already has more than the 30% support needed to file for a representation vote with the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees such elections. But it said it is waiting until it has the support of at least 60% before filing for such a vote or seeking voluntary recognition of the union by Disney. Performers doing the same work at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, are already in a union and have been for years. And until recently the Disney World performers were paid more than their Disneyland counterparts, according to the union. The union contract reached between a coalition of unions and management at Disney World last year pays the performers a minimum hourly wage that ranges from $21.30 to $23.00, according to the union. The Disneyland performers had been getting $20 an hour until the union organizing drive began late last year. The minimum pay went up to $24.15 an hour at the end of last year, according to the union. But the cost of living is significantly greater in Orange County, California, where Disneyland is located, than in Orlando. According to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, the cost of living is 50% greater in Orange County, California. Housing costs, which are more than twice as expensive, are the primary reason, but prices are higher across multiple categories. There are more than 21,000 Disneyland employees, who are referred to as cast members by the company, who are represented by more than a dozen unions. Those unionized jobs include everything from retail and food service workers to security guards, hair and make-up artists and pyrotechnic workers. But not the performers who dress up as characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy and interact with visitors.

#news #labor news #disney #disney news #actor's equity association #actors equity association #disney unions #unionize disney #disney face characters #disney parks #behind the magic

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