Seize the Means
Unions
It is 2022 and - in an unexpected twist - union support is on the rise. Approval of labor unions is at its highest levels since 1965. Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s and other anti-union corporations are seeing more locations call for representation.
However, these companies have spent decades cementing their reputations for union busting. Starbucks has fired dozens of workers involved in union efforts, and this week, when the time came to negotiate with 5 union groups, it immediately backed out of negotiations, alleging remote workers were recording its negotiators. Amazon thwarted efforts at a warehouse in Albany, causing a California drive to back out of a vote. Elsewhere, the NLRB said Amazon’s CEO violated labor laws in a speech. Trader Joe’s fired a union organizer as its first store prepared to vote. Starbucks has been closing stores citing ‘safety concerns’ that also happen to be unionized or seeking representation. Apple extended benefits to all retail employees except those in a newly unionized store.
In a country with strong labor laws, all this behavior by corporations seeking to undermine and intimidate unions would be illegal, harshly punished, and workers would be offered protection from retaliation. We obviously do not live in such a country, and companies freely engage in open aggression against unions. It is heartening that, despite everything these multi-billion dollar behemoths have thrown at workers making little more than minimum wage, union drives across the country are multiplying, and succeeding.
Why is the NLRB able to do little more than voice its displeasure or levy allegations at company executives that carry no penalties? Federal labor law protecting workers is - by design - weak at best:
There are several structural shortcomings in the NLRA. First, there are literally no monetary penalties against employers that illegally retaliate against workers for exercising their NLRA rights. If an employer is found guilty of illegally retaliating against workers by firing them, refusing to hire them, or demoting them to lower-wage jobs, the National Labor Relations Board—established to investigate and prosecute violations of the NLRA—cannot, under current law, award compensatory damages to the worker for the harm caused by the retaliation or impose a monetary penalty against the employer for its illegal conduct.
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A second consequential shortcoming of the NLRA’s anti-retaliation protections—and where it falls short of other anti-retaliation laws—is its lack of a mechanism for workers to pursue their cases on their own if they choose.
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A third shortcoming in the NLRA is that it lacks provisions for ensuring that workers with meritorious cases get their jobs back on an interim basis while their cases are pending. Under the current system, cases take many months, and sometimes years, to resolve. The NLRB investigates a worker’s charge, determines whether the charge has merit, files a complaint, and then litigates the case before an administrative law judge.
Essentially, the NLRA outlines a largely bureaucratic framework that is woefully inadequate in the real world. While a company can fire, harass, intimidate, or retaliate against employees, the NLRB can do little to punish them in real time. The best an employee can hope for if they win an NLRA claim is some back wages, months or years after they were demoted or fired. Companies can make workers’ lives hell with no fear of meaningful punishment. If not for the media’s constant coverage of union organizing, companies would have little incentive to ever come to the bargaining table.
Decades of capitalist and conservative forces undermining and gutting union power in this country got us to this point - weak, passive laws and a government regulator unable to meaningfully protect workers. Despite all that, thousands of workers around the country are forming and joining service worker unions which, contrary to most of what we talk about around here, is some actual good news for the future of this country.
In other news, a second major railroad workers union has rejected the tentative agreement Biden orchestrated between carriers and workers. If one were feeling cynical, one could say Biden pushed for the agreement to delay a strike that could be costly for his party in the midterm elections. If one were feeling hopeful - a feeling the midterm elections seem likely to evaporate - one might posit that staunchly pro-union Biden wanted to wait until after the election to throw his weight behind a much more worker-friendly agreement. Either way, it’s back to the negotiating table for the country’s greedy railroad barons and the tens of thousands of workers who power much of our country’s supply chain. Should be fun.
Greg Abbott
I do not enjoy messing with Texas in these pages, but in many ways it is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a political party ruthlessly seizes power in a large state with key exports - oil and gas - and forces an extreme ideological agenda on tens of millions of people.
At the heart of Texas political extremism is Greg Abbott, a governor with near dictatorial power over his state. Before we get into what he’s done with and how he’s consolidated that power, let’s acknowledge it was his predecessor - the infamous Rick Perry - who set the precedent for a unitary state executive:
Abbott’s predecessor, Republican former Gov. Rick Perry, set the stage for building power through appointments. Over 14 years, Perry, a former state representative who became Texas’ longest-serving governor, positioned former employees, donors and supporters in every state agency.
Basically, a Texas governor can appoint 1,500 people to various courts and agencies around the state. Over multiple terms, you can see how this adds up, as governors stock agencies and courts with political donors and ideological allies.
Another way Texas governors wield power is through vetoes, and due to Texas’s sparse legislative schedule - it convenes every two years, unless the governor calls an emergency session - it’s ripe for abuse:
While the Legislature can override a veto, governors often issue them after the legislative session ends. The governor is the only one who can call lawmakers back.
So, the governor can load his cronies into agencies, and effectively stonewall the state legislature for two years at a time if they don’t do what he wants. That is…not a great way to run a government?
Rick Perry laid the groundwork for Abbott to use vetoes and appointments to rebuild Texas government in his image, but Abbott dreamt up new ways to remove checks on his power:
Abbott has benefited from appointments and vetoes, but he has also taken advantage of emergency orders and disaster declarations like no other governor in recent state history.
In 2017, after Hurricane Harvey, Abbott issued a disaster declaration giving him wide leeway to issue executive orders and take actions that would normally require legislative approval. Every 30 days, the governor’s office can extend the declaration. Abbott extended the Harvey declaration for four years, until COVID-19 came along and he made it the impetus for his still-ongoing disaster authority.
To their credit, the Republican-controlled legislature has tried to rein in the governor’s power but, uh, they can’t because he’s unironically declared Texas a permanent disaster:
Last year, state lawmakers filed 13 bills aiming to curb the governor’s powers under the state’s disaster act, including Republican proposals that would require the Legislature’s permission to extend executive orders, which the governor now does every 30 days.
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During the last legislative session, the only measure that passed — and was signed by Abbott — is a bill that removed the governor’s authority to restrict the sale, dispensing or transportation of firearms during a declared disaster.
So, for years Abbott has run the state as his own personal fiefdom - his people run the agencies and make the decisions and sit on the courts, and he’s prevented the legislature from doing anything other than his bidding due to an endless string of procedural tricks. The country’s second-largest state is being run by a power-hungry maniac who’s set to cruise to reelection and this is the first time I’ve seen a single piece of reporting on it? Wild.
In a deeply, darkly ironic bit of history, the Texas governorship was designed to be strictly limited by the state constitution because an abolitionist Union general ran the state during Reconstruction and it pissed the state’s racists off:
The weak-governor structure was created by the framers in 1876 who believed that Edmund Jackson Davis, a former Union general who led Texas following the Civil War, abused his powers as governor. A Republican who supported the rights of freed people, Davis disbanded the Texas Rangers and created a state police force that he used, at times, to enforce martial law to protect the civil rights of African Americans. He also expanded the size of government, appointing more than 9,000 state, county and local officials, which left a very small number of elected positions.
That said, state constitutional scholars and lawyers - and even his own party’s legislators - agree Abbott is violating all sorts of constitutional norms and state laws with his actions but…there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it while he remains in power. So, when you read stories about the Texas state government, remember it’s basically run by one guy and his criminal political cabal for the foreseeable future.
DWAC
We talked exhaustively last week about the machinations at Trump Media. This week, Matt Levine weighs in on the continuing attempts to take the company public:
My best guess is that the SEC is sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust and is using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump from dumping it on retail investors. But the retail investors have already bought it! They just want the deal to go through so they have some chance to get their $94.20 back.
He is referencing the SEC’s desire to block the DWAC deal on a technicality - that Orlando spoke with Trump Media staff prior to filing the SPAC, which is against the law, but only a little against the law, an important distinction in court. Normally, this sort of collusion would result in a fine or penalty, and with a normal company it might impact the share price because investors don’t like the appearance of impropriety. However, with DWAC, retail investors don’t care about any of that - or even, really, what Trump Media does - because they are buying shares of DWAC out of political loyalty, or a bet that anything associated with Trump will generate such hype they can turn around and sell at a profit to the next set of politically loyal retail buyers who’ve only just figured out how to install Robinhood on their phones.
The SEC, Levine muses, is maybe trying to use this technicality to scuttle the deal, because everyone involved seems to be aware Trump Media is a sham company run by scam artists, and it will never generate billions in revenue and return value to its shareholders based on literally everything that has happened up until this point. Basically, the SEC wants to nip it in the bud so they don’t have to spend time investigating DWAC for the many securities crimes it is virtually certain to commit, or has already committed.
Speaking of, federal prosecutors are also looking into DWAC for potential insider trading crimes:
Separately, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating the accuracy of Digital World’s disclosures to investors, although they appear more focused on an unusual surge in trading in the shares of Digital World just before it announced its merger with Trump Media.
Prosecutors are trying to determine whether some of those trades were made by a small group of people who had knowledge of discussions about the deal before they became public, including employees of a small Miami-based venture capital firm called Rocket One Capital.
This was from a year ago and didn’t make it onto the Things Wrong With the DWAC Deal radar, apparently. Anyhow, if DWAC is allowed to go public and melts down, it will be a predictable, preventable example of how our regulatory and legal systems are poorly equipped to deal with brazen white collar fraud. Especially if the people involved don’t believe there will be consequences and are doing as many crimes as possible to prove that point.
Rent
We talked last week about rent, and the tools corporate landlords use to keep rents steadily rising. Another thing landlords do to create artificial scarcity is sit on - or ‘warehouse’ - vacant units in hot housing markets like New York City:
Tens of thousands of vacant rent-stabilized apartments landlords reported to New York State in 2021 likely understates the true number that are empty.
That’s the contention of officials at the city’s housing agency, who shared with THE CITY previously unreleased figures that show 88,830 stabilized apartments were vacant in 2021 — far more than the 61,000 tallied by the state.
New York has 1 million rent stabilized apartments, meaning nearly 1 in 10 is currently vacant. Some of these units may be on the market awaiting rental, but many are not. Why? Landlords don’t like rent stabilized properties, because they can’t raise rent to keep up with real estate appreciation in a hot market. Also, the city calculates vacancy rates to determine whether New York is experiencing a ‘rent emergency’ which means that less than 5% of apartments are vacant. If the real vacancy number was ten percent or more, landlords with stabilized apartments would lose their tax benefits.
Oh, and a lawsuit brought by landlord groups seeking to abolish the city’s rent restrictions is winding its way through federal courts, potentially ending up before a Supreme Court that cares little for civil rights when they interfere with potential profits. Some landlords may be sitting on their buildings until this is resolved, so they can raise rents with impunity or force tenants out to renovate or redevelop buildings to justify higher prices.
New York City has an opaque, murky rental and real estate market, but like many major cities experiencing skyrocketing rents, it’s one that is tilted heavily in favor of property owners and landlords, and it may get more uneven if politicians and courts remove the flimsy protections currently afforded renters.
PSA: Google Search
Back in the spring, Google introduced a tool to remove your personal information from search results. You can read about it here. I tested it and it actually worked, go figure.
Short Cons
D Magazine - “The 43-year-old Collin County District Court judge was used to observing the courtroom from the opposite vantage point. Now, she was seated at the defense table, dressed not in a robe but in a conservative pantsuit, her blond hair pulled back in a basic bun. She was facing not only the loss of her career but also the loss of her family.”
Guardian - “The patrol units in three [California] counties appeared to spend most of their time on stops that officers initiated, compared to stops or contacts with the public in response to calls for help, such as 911 emergencies…”
MMFA - “The newest season of CBS’ Dr. Phil has regularly featured right-wing personalities, including anti-abortion activists, Fox News and PragerU personalities, and members of far-right student and parent groups, giving them platforms to share misinformation and hate.”
NBC News - “Gun retailers are running ads promoting firearms for sale on Facebook and Instagram, a tech industry watchdog said Wednesday in a report that shows apparent holes in how the apps enforce their own rules against ads that promote the use or sale of weapons.”
The Intercept - “That means that if you were encouraged by Damon to buy $1,000 worth of bitcoin last October 28, it would now be worth $342. If you purchased $1,000 of Ethereum, the next most popular cryptocurrency, it would be worth $363.”
Tips, thoughts, or more good union news to scammerdarkly@gmail.com