Strike Three
Unions
Normally when we talk about unions, it’s bad news. Despite unionization drives in recent years, weak US labor laws and powerful corporations seemed to thwart organizers at every turn.
While new union efforts floundered, a few major American labor unions dug in their heels and fought. Television and film writers and actors struck for months, with the WGA winning significant concessions last month, and SAG-AFTRA nearing a deal that studio executives previously insisted was impossible.
While writers and actors could leverage their creative talents and celebrity adjacency to garner public attention, blue collar unions toiled in relative obscurity. When we hear the word ‘Teamster’ we think Hoffa, corruption, things of that nature. But the Teamsters’ new leadership scored a huge victory against UPS this summer, eliminating an onerous two-tiered driver system, scoring big wage gains for part- and full-time workers, and forcing the installation of AC units (!!) in delivery trucks.
Then! This week the UAW reached a tentative deal with GM, the final holdout among the Big Three. Again, the automakers spent weeks insisting they couldn’t possibly meet UAW demands, only to cave as markets and public opinion shifted against them.
The story of how the Teamsters and UAW reached this point is an important one - both organizations uprooted an old, corrupt management structure and brought in a set of guys with the same name (spelled differently). Alex Press, an excellent labor reporter, goes more into depth in this interview, but I’ll summarize.
Until very recently the Teamsters were, in fact, still very corrupt. Corrupt in the sense that the president during the last UPS contract negotiation was named Hoffa (Jr.). The contract was so unpopular that Sean O’Brien, a loyal Hoffa lieutenant, defected and teamed up with a reform caucus within the Teamsters, promising to strike if necessary. He won, and when the time came, UPS drivers got their new deal.
The UAW is an even wilder story, because until recently the union had never elected its leaders. A federal corruption investigation put some folks in jail and for the first time the UAW voted to hold an actual election, which Shawn Fain and his Unite All Workers for Democracy (great name) won. Unlike O’Brien, Fain is an outspoken reformer, which anyone who watched his fiery YouTube livestreams may have picked up on.
In six short weeks, Fain and the UAW executed a series of tactical rolling strikes and walkouts at Ford, Stellantis, and GM plants while releasing videos to keep the public abreast of their demands. It was a labor and PR masterstroke, and the union’s members will reap the rewards.
Not only has the strike been a win for unionized autoworkers, but it’s sent shockwaves through the industry writ large. Toyota immediately gave its workers a pay bump. Fain has hinted the UAW is going to start organizing hard at non-union factories across the country, including and especially Tesla, with its cartoonishly anti-union CEO.
The financial press may be skeptical that the UAW or Teamsters can make headway into non-union shops. However! In August, the NLRB issued new guidance forcing companies that commit labor law violations to bargain with unions without formal elections. Basically, the union-busting tactics used by companies to delay or thwart union votes and elections could be curtailed by the revival of a rule we tossed out fifty years ago.
Hot Strike Summer may be over, but it’s worth celebrating the significant gains labor has made despite such strong headwinds. Two of the country’s biggest labor unions are finally being run by S(h)(e)a(w)ns whose primary job is securing gains for their members, and expanding their reach across a country in desperate need of strengthened worker protections.
The Economy
Labor union gains reflect a larger trend of wealth gains over the last few years. Unemployment is low, inflation is slowing, consumer spending and wages continue to rise. Economists bleating about recession have had their hopes dashed yet again. By all accounts, things are pretty good for most Americans, right? Right?
Instead, Americans are deeply pessimistic, with over 40% more people expecting the economy to be worse in the next five years than better. That’s even gloomier than in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and Great Recession in 2010, when unemployment exceeded 9%.
Huh? We’re more pessimistic about the economy now than we were in fucking 2010? What is wrong with this idiot country? The answer, unfortunately, is the vibes:
The answer is a toxic brew of bad events, not the least of which are the media feeding the human tendency toward the negative and social media spreading bad news faster and wider than ever before.
[…]
Last year, respondents to a long-established survey were far more likely to report having heard bad economic news than respondents in 1980, even though the so-called misery index — the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate — was almost twice as high back then.
Our vibes are worse than 1980, when shit was so bad we got conned into decades of austerity by Ronald Fucking Reagan and his team of UChicago clowns. Not great. The bad vibes are made worse by the media and social media, in a self-fulfilling doom loop:
Tweets by 44 news organizations they studied from 2018 to 2020 were significantly more negative in tone than positive. The negative tweets got more engagement in the form of likes and sharing. The patterns were similar for news organizations of different political leanings.
Twitter is followed by a fraction of the population but we know the same principle applies to Facebook posts, where a stunningly high percentage of people still get their ‘news’. As a matter of fact, when I tried to Google a few things for this piece, I got these dire ass articles from the AP and CNN telling me everything was bad, actually, despite positive underlying data.
That’s assuming you can even find the AP or CNN on your social network of choice, because as we’ve discussed, the big players are actively deplatforming legacy publishers in favor of whatever sensational content drives engagement without costing the platforms any money:
After Canada passed a law to force Facebook to share revenues with publishers, the company summarily yanked all news from its platform. Thus, during this summer’s wildfires, Canadian users had virtually no way of finding accurate information on Facebook. Conspiracies and propaganda, though, remained plentiful.
When the economy is good, but the only way to experience it is via headline-free links on Twitter posted by verified crypto scammers or your estranged relatives sharing Epoch Times articles on Facebook, it’s no surprise the misery index is trending up.
None of this is to say that things aren’t still bad for a lot of people. It is easy to cite wealth statistics without admitting they are weighted towards white homeowning families in a hot real estate market while inequality among the poor and minorities increases. We talk a lot about how deadly this country can be even if you make it into the middle class. For many, the misery index is lived experience.
It is worth remembering that these negative-tinged stories about an otherwise red hot economy do benefit the people who own social media platforms and news outlets (which are almost all owned by corporate conglomerates.) They don’t want you to unionize your workplace, or for the government to stop them price fixing your meat or jacking up your rent. The wealthy and powerful have a vested interest in the vibes feeling as bad as possible so we don’t imagine that, like UPS drivers or autoworkers, a better future is possible if we fight for it.
Mike Johnson
It is hard to care about procedural events in American politics, because American politicians are so devoid of humanity they might as well be CGI characters. So it was with little fanfare outside the Beltway press that the Republicans elected a new Speaker of the House, a position two steps away from the President in the line of succession for some fuckin’ reason. He is called Mike Johnson, a human person from Louisiana.
There is much to dislike about Johnson, an religious zealot who has a surprisingly long history of espousing truly heinous beliefs about God, the gays, no-fault divorce, and all the standard culture war topics. But he’s also a lawyer and politician, so you know there’s some grift happening.
He was the dean of a Christian law school that never actually became a law school:
The establishment of the Judge Paul Pressler School of Law was supposed to be a capstone achievement for Louisiana College, which administrators boasted would “unashamedly embrace” a “biblical worldview.” Instead, it collapsed roughly a decade ago without enrolling students or opening its doors amid infighting by officials, accusations of financial impropriety and difficulty obtaining accreditation, which frightened away would-be donors.
Basically, a weird little college in Louisiana had been taken over by arch conservatives who wanted to fire anyone who strayed from their interpretations of the Bible. Then, when a shale oil boom fattened the pockets of potential donors, the school’s board brought Johnson and others in to open a law school, a medical school, a film school (??), and a remake of Green Acres (???)
The school’s president, however, was busy spending the school’s money on pet projects in Africa and personal expenses. After it became clear they couldn’t build a(nother) feeder school for the Federalist Society, Johnson slunk back to his day job bringing lawsuits on behalf of aggrieved white Christians.
All this is to say, Johnson spent years in the conservative fever swamps, interacting with the same anonymous fiends who only make the news when they’re being arrested. Prior to his nomination, no one had heard of him because he was a boilerplate GOP sleazebag.
Working with hate groups, or hosting a podcast with your wife about stolen elections and abortion is run-of-the-mill stuff for Republicans. Being adjacent but not directly implicated in financial fraud is practically a requirement to win office. So why are we talking about this unpleasant little gremlin?
Because Mike Johnson does not have a bank account, according to his Congressional disclosures. Or any assets. Nor does his wife, or his family.
There are two explanations here. One is that the Johnson family is so broke that their bank balances did not clear the $5,000 required for disclosure. Do we buy this explanation?
"It’s strange to see Speaker Johnson disclose no assets,” [Jordan] Libowitz told The Daily Beast. “He made over $200,000 last year, and his wife took home salary from two employers as well, so why isn’t there a bank account or any form of savings listed?”
Johnson has also carried debts over for several years, which Libowitz said would sharpen the question.
“He owes hundreds of thousands of dollars between a mortgage, personal loan, and home equity line of credit, so where did that money go?” Libowitz said. “If he truly has no bank account and no assets, it raises questions about his personal financial wellbeing.”
Listen, I understand that journalists are expected to be even-handed about this sort of thing - the article speculates that Johnson could be so financially stressed it would make him vulnerable to foreign influence - but come on. What are we doing here? Clarence Thomas has made a career out of lying on disclosure forms. You really think this right wing darling who gets randomly appointed to run law schools and charities by the evangelical right is brokeass? Lord.
Johnson will either amend his disclosures and feign ignorance, or he will just keep on lying because there are no consequences for politicians who lie. It has become the ethos of his entire party. Despite all that, it is funny that a a four-term Congressman simply put ‘nah’ on his financial disclosures for years and no one bothered to look into it. And now he’s the third-most powerful person in Washington.
Realtors
Earlier this year I asked - is the MLS an illegal price-fixing cartel?
In order to use MLS, realtors agree to a fee-sharing agreement - the buyer and seller’s agent split a commission typically between three and six percent of the sale price, paid by the seller. Why does the seller pay the buyer’s agent? Who knows! That’s just how we do it here.
This was in response to one of two lawsuits winding its way through the court system, and, well, a jury has issued a resounding yes verdict:
A U.S. jury on Tuesday found the National Association of Realtors and some residential brokerages, including units of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, liable to pay $1.78 billion in damages for conspiring to artificially inflate commissions for home sales.
Hot damn! At issue were the ways fee shifting places the burden of broker fees on sellers, and allows for collusion between buyer and seller agents to ensure they get maximum commissions.
The defendants have all said they will appeal because of course they will, but it is an unexpectedly positive result nonetheless. A jury considered what must have been an incredibly boring, complicated case and stated unequivocally that realtors, their agencies and brokerages and trade groups, were all engaged in a big ol’ multibillion-dollar conspiracy. I love it.
WeWork
I have been writing this newsletter for four years, and one of the first I published was about Adam Neumann’s exit from WeWork. Four. Years. Ago! Since then, WeWork has restructured a few times, tried (and failed) to go public, gone public, and now it’s going to file for bankruptcy. It is impressive that this shambling corpse of a company continues to find people willing to lend or give it money, but here we are. It will be interesting to see what happens to the thirteen billion dollars’ worth of long term leases the company has on its books.
Matt Levine proposes a comedy option:
There is a lot of debt, and WeWork founder Adam Neumann is not as rich as he used to be, and he’s got other stuff going on. It’s not like he could, or would, come in and buy WeWork out of bankruptcy for $1 and give it a go again. But wouldn’t that be great? We talk sometimes around here about what I call the “Wag trade,” where an entrepreneur raises a bajillion dollars from SoftBank for his startup, incinerates it, and then buys the company back from SoftBank for pennies on the dollar. Adam Neumann is the all-time world champion of incinerating SoftBank’s money, and it would be very satisfying, for me, if he ends up owning WeWork again after it runs through all of SoftBank’s money.
We’ve got no shortage of business villains to write about these days, but if Neumann wants to throw his hat back in the ring, I say he should go for it.
Short Cons
Guardian - “Banks pumped more than $150bn last year into companies whose giant “carbon bomb” projects could destroy the last chance of stopping the planet heating to dangerous levels…”
Bolts - “Drawing on information about each person’s turnout in past cycles, we found that these [police] stops reduced the likelihood that a stopped individual turned out to vote by 1.8 percentage points on average.”
FT - “Chevron’s deal to buy Hess last week for $53bn gives the US supermajor access to one of the hottest prospects in the global resources industry: Guyana’s 11bn barrels of offshore oil.”
Rolling Stone - “The exchange was one of at least six instances between June 2020 and April 2021 in which Bloys and McCaffrey discussed using what they called a “secret army” to fire back at several TV critics on Twitter…”
NYT - “The defendants have “developed into a bona fide cargo theft and robbery crew” that used multiple vehicles to break into cargo trailers across the city this spring, federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Monday. In addition to refrigerators, tequila and dimes, they also stole — and in some cases tried to resell — televisions and frozen meat, shrimp and crab legs.”
WaPo - “More than 830,000 people missed their first student loan payment in three years after one servicer, Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, commonly known as MOHELA, failed to send timely statements to 2.5 million borrowers.”
Verge - “Tesla has been slashing prices to spark sales as it finds itself wrestling with softening demand and more competition. And repair costs are about double what the company spends on gas car fixes, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told Bloomberg.”
NYT - “In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.”
NY Mag - “These photos somehow offer less information than the customary floating-in-white-space Amazon product shot. They don’t add context. They subtract it. This toaster has been banished to four different locations in the uncanny valley, none of which are anywhere near an electrical outlet.”
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