It’s not just for railroads, or auto unions. It seems to have come to the Writers Guild of America. The WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers appear to have reached a tentative agreement, wanting only fleshing out the details and then a WGA rank and file vote.
The tentative agreement appears to include these items:
The UAW objects to American car manufacturers having temp workers on the payroll.
The use of temporary factory workers at the Detroit car companies has long rankled the United Auto Workers union, which wants fewer of them and a faster path to full-time status.
Never mind that
Automakers say they need the flexibility that temp workers provide, especially as they manage a tricky and costly transition to electric vehicles and confront the ups and downs of factory production.
Shawn Fain, UAW union boss, is extending his threat to Ford, GM, and Stellantis, the three major American car companies against which he’s taken selective strike action, a selectivity he’s said he’s using to maximize current damage to the companies.
…what the union calls a “stand up strike,” in which specific locals are asked to go on strike at their facilities. The union has said that strategy will give it flexibility in escalating the strike incrementally up to a potential nationwide strike if negotiations do not deliver sufficient progress in its view, and will make it harder for the auto companies to predict its next move.
The United Automobile Workers Union, per its president Shawn Fain, is threatening to strike the three automakers GM, Ford, and Stellantis (nee Chrysler) simultaneously after midnight Thursday (as I write Thursday midday). The union is demanding
Some of those would seem legitimate, or at least open to discussion, and typical union wants that most employers could find some sort of agreement on. The pay raise demand is egregious, and the demand to be paid for hours not worked is simply greedy, glorified featherbedding.
The Jefferson County Education Association, the teachers union representing the teachers of Colorado’s Jefferson County school district, has instructed its members to destroy
evidence of students’ transgender information
Leaving aside the fact that the union has no authority to order this—that’s the sole purview of the school district’s board and superintendent—there’s this much larger problem: it’s evidence tampering, which is a serious felony.
The union even anticipated the fact that the docs might be called into evidence in some future proceeding:
The email said, “if you do a questionnaire, please make it a paper and pencil activity – any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.”
The Los Angeles Police Department—yes, that one, of “violent extremist views” infamy regarding its cops displaying the Thin Blue Line flag anywhere in public—now is going to use Artificial Intelligence to teach cops how to be politically correct and suitably social justice-y when they make traffic stops and potentially in other, even more tension-filled, encounters.
The headline says it all:
AI to binge LAPD bodycam footage to weed out rude tone, aggressive language
Because rudeness is so terrible, and never mind the occasional—the often—need for cops to be aggressive during an encounter with an individual of the public, even on a traffic stop.
OK, State-ifying private enterprise, for now, if this proposal goes through. Some California Progressive-Democratic Party legislators are setting up legislation that would have California pay unemployment benefits to strikers. The move also would put businesses and workers, both, at some risk from Government control, but never mind that.
A group of California Democrats are expected to propose handing out unemployment benefits to striking workers.
Language expected to be released in the coming days or weeks to provide striking workers with benefits from California’s unemployment insurance program that is $18 billion in debt. The move comes amid historic strikes by both screenwriters and actors, forcing many movies and TV shows to halt production.
That’s the position of the Pennsylvania Progressive-Democratic Party’s Representative G Roni Green. She’s proposing, with an absolutely straight face, a State law that would require businesses with 500 or more employees to cut their employees’ 5-day, 40-hour work week to 4-day, 32-hour work weeks—with no change in pay. That’s a government-mandated 25% pay raise.
Jobs welfare doesn’t get much better than that.
Green’s rationalization centers on two premises. One is that society looks and operates differently than it once did in 1938 (when the government-mandated 40-hour work week was enacted). That’s true enough. Society has grown more complex, more technologically capable, and consumers’ needs (consumers being, after all, at the core of society) have grown quite a bit.
It seems that employers offering/allowing remote work at least some of the time, are better able to hire quickly than employers who require full-time presence in the office for work. The subheadline nicely sums up the article’s thesis.
Employers offering flexible work options are hiring at a faster pace than those requiring full-time office attendance
And the lede:
With employers fighting for a limited pool of office workers, those offering remote-friendly jobs appear to have the upper hand.
Upper hand compared to what? That brings me to my question, which is this: what’s the quality of work done by the part-time remote employee compared with that of the full-time in-the-office employee?
The United Auto Workers union is bent on being the epitome of it. UAW’s President Shawn Fain:
I think we should push a 32-hour work week.
In return for working less, the union is willing to settle for
In an ideal world, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, along with the other major car companies that assemble their cars in the US, will have the stones to tell the union to take a hike. American companies are not job welfare entities, they exist to produce goods and services for consumers and to make profits for their owners.