Tag: labor
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How civil service workers are fighting Newsom’s return to office order
As many employers have forced workers back into offices since declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over, California’s unionized public servants successfully bucked the trend, at least for now.
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To Build our Power, We Must First Understand our Employer’s Power
While many unions do corporate research to design organizing or contract campaigns, it’s usually just a staff project. The members, and even local leaders, are expected to take marching orders from the staff team. This approach is backwards, write the authors. Their model involves members in the research right from the start, all the way…
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Decades After Nike Promised Sweatshop Reforms, Workers in This Factory Were Still Fainting
Workers have fainted for years inside Cambodia’s garment factories, where more than 57,000 people now produce Nike goods. People at Nike’s suppliers fainted en masse in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to news reports at the time, part of a string of events in which thousands of Cambodians got sick, vomited or collapsed…
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What would a general strike in the US actually look like?
Calling for general strikes is a staple of the radical toolkit. (I’ve made questionable efforts to call two or three myself over the past half-century.) But why has the idea of such mass actions suddenly appeared on the lips of such a wide range of people? There are three principal reasons:
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AI (so-called) is made possible by a hyper-exploited human workforce
These workers are the lifeblood of the burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Without them, products such as ChatGPT simply would not exist. That’s because the data they label helps AI systems “learn”. Self-driving cars, for example, rely on labelled video footage to distinguish pedestrians from road signs. Large language models such as ChatGPT rely on…
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From Picket Lines to Plot Lines
Written by Sonali Kolhatkar, published by Yes! Magazine on August 4th, 2023 under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Hundreds of thousands of creative workers in the film and television industry are currently flexing their labor power. For the first time in more than 60 years, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild (which merged with the…
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No Union? You Still Have a Right to Strike
Written by Richard de Vries, originally published by LaborNotes on December 08, 2022. Shared per LaborNotes republishing policy. Last year there were 87 strikes by non-union workers, according to Cornell’s Labor Action Tracker, accounting for one-third of all work stoppages in the U.S. Even without a union, you have the legal right to organize strikes, job…
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What Can Unions Do Now to Defend Abortion Rights?
By Sarah Hughes, originally posted on LaborNotes The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health on June 24 overturned the Roe v. Wade precedent, erasing the constitutional right to an abortion. Already for years, large parts of the U.S. have severely restricted abortion—especially hurting those least likely to have resources to travel for care, including poor, Black,…
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What is emotional labour – and how do we get it wrong?
Michael James Walsh, University of Canberra and Stephanie Alice Baker, City, University of London The term “emotional labour” is applied to an array of home-based activities — from keeping mental to-do lists, to remembering to call your in-laws on their birthdays. Some advocate the need to teach boys emotional labour, or identify it as the…
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