May Day

 

Resistance continues

 

Kudos to Dropkick's Ken Casey

 

Best states to work in

 

#1 is D.C.  Not for long, I suspect.

2 - California

3 - Oregon

4 - New York

Worst?

52 - North Carolina

51 - Mississippi

50 - Alabama

Click the graphic (or here) to see your state's ranking.

May Day

Gallup polling

UPDATE 09/02/2025:

MAGA

On Wednesday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it was cancelling union contracts for most of its staff, a move that stripped some 350,000 VA employees of worker protections, according to Pete Kasperowicz, the VA press secretary. Only union contracts for around 4,000 police, firefighters and security guards remain in place, the VA said.

[...]

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency also terminated its union contracts for at least 8,000 union members. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have canceled their collective bargaining agreements, too.

[...]

These moves came after Trump in March signed an executive order terminating collective bargaining for federal workers under the guise of national security concerns.

[...]

Trump’s executive order was promptly tied up in litigation. A lawsuit from six unions including the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) argued Trump’s executive order was retaliatory because it selectively ended union participation for some agencies while maintaining them for others. The coalition won an injunction from a U.S. District judge for the Northern District of California in June, but, on Aug. 1, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the administration’s order “on its face… does not express any retaliatory animus.” (The panel was made up of two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee.)

[...]

These federal workers have now lost important worker protections that prevent them from falling victim to arbitrary firing and job loss.

Since returning to office in January, more than 150,000 federal employees accepted early resignation offers and left the government workforce. At least 51,000 more have been fired or targeted for layoffs according to a CNN analysis that was last updated in mid-July. Federal union leaders allege Trump is retaliating against the unions, who have been on the frontlines of Trump’s war on the civil service, often suing to protect jobs the administration sought to cut. With the appeals court ruling, the administration is now cleared to target some 950,000 total employees represented by federal unions at nearly two dozen agencies.

  TPM

Trump - destroyer of worlds.

Today in history 1941

Labor pressures had been building in the Magic Kingdom since promises made to artists over the success of Snow White were reneged on, and Walt Disney’s lawyer Gunther Lessing encouraged a hard line with his employees.

On May 28, in defiance of the Wagner act, Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, the creator of Goofy, and 13 other cartoonists for demanding a union. A motion to strike was made that evening.

The picket line with major cartoonists began the next morning.

  Zinn Education Project

With neither side willing to give in, the event lasted into the fall, turning uglier and lasting longer than either side had ever imagined. In the end, the workers won, and neither the Disney company nor the animation industry would ever be the same again.

[...]

While a union seems like a no-brainer for keeping employees happy and content, they are still resisted by people in positions of power, whether that person be the co-creator of Rick and Morty or Ed Catmull, the current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Catmull is staunchly anti-union, and has fought tooth-and-nail to keep the company he co-founded, Pixar, a union-free shop. As a result, even though Pixar is now owned by Disney, and even though Pixar has been the most financially successful animation studio in America for the last twenty years, the average starting wage for animators at the studio remains below unionized feature animation workers.

It also shouldn’t be a surprise that Catmull has emerged as the mastermind behind a wage-fixing scheme that has rocked the feature animation world over the past year, with evidence emerging that Catmull has worked for decades to prevent the industry’s employees from advancing their careers or being paid what they were truly worth.

[...]

[Disney Corp] today is worth $163 billion, making it the most valuable entertainment conglomerate currently in the world.

  Cartoon Brew

Animator Art Babbitt, one of the strike leaders, leads a picket 

at the premiere of “The Reluctant Dragon.”

Yes, many of the women are marching the picket line in skirts and heels, and men wear sport coats and ties.

More images here.

MAGA doesn't really want the 50s

 Not for everything anyway.  They just want the cultural 50s.

Trump has defended his tariffs by arguing that young American girls don’t need a lot of dolls—in fact, they can make do with fewer. His basic case, as top adviser Stephen Miller elaborated, is that we don’t need imported Chinese toys, because kids are already drowning in them, and most American parents will happily pay more for fewer quality dolls made in America rather than buy cheap and superfluous Chinese ones.

[...]

As many have noted, Trump—whose own kids were raised in literal golden splendor—is in no position to lecture Americans about accepting scarcity created by his own policies. Indeed, the whole conceit is a tacit admission that the tariffs will hike prices on consumers, which he keeps denying will occur.

[...]

Many of the jobs this would create are bad ones. And even if it were possible for some fraction of manufacturing jobs along these lines to be decent ones, Trump’s own hostility to unions and government regulations would work against that goal.

[...]

[Trump] reiterated the point to reporters on Air Force One, but this time, he grew angrier. “Let’s not waste a lot of time with stupid questions,” Trump ranted darkly, even though the queries posed concerned his own ideas about girls’ dolls, ones that raise obvious questions about the impact he himself expects his policies to have.

Stephen Miller: "If you had a choice between a doll from China that might have lead paint from it that is not as well constructed, as a doll made in America that has a highly environmental and regulatory standard ... and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would be willing to pay more."

  New Republic

You'd only be willing to pay more if you had more.

And with the Trump regime doing away with regulations, your American made dolls will not have "a highly environmental and regulatory standard" and may well be made by children themselves with states knocking back child labor laws as Republicans are doing now to make up for loss of cheap immigrant labor.

Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, points out that Trump has laid off large numbers of officials at agencies overseeing worker safety, halted government rules ensuring good working conditions, and fired pro-worker, pro-union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, among many other things.

“What makes manufacturing jobs good is unions and regulations that protect worker safety.”

That's just the point. Manufacturing isn't what made America great for employment. Unions did.

As for the desirability of manufacturing dolls in the US...

“Do most Americans want to sew tiny little skirts a thousand times a day?”

[...]

There’s no easy way to envision mass domestic doll manufacturing creating lots of good jobs, these people tell me. It’s not just that much of the human-performed work is drudgery. There are also other factors, they say: Lots of the materials you’d need to make the dolls, as well as many of the machines for making them, are also manufactured abroad. So you’d need to import all that anyway.

Rebuild textile factories, without regulations, for toxic dyes and chemicals.

Even if we could construct a massive and largely domestic supply chain for dolls, it would take many years to spin up. And it’s not clear how long many of the manufacturing jobs would last, even if we did do that. “The only thing that will happen is eventually robots and AI will take over,” Cathey says.

And the environment will be polluted.

Even if you think some good outcomes might result from producing far fewer plastic toys, lots of quality jobs won’t be one of them. Indeed, the opposite would happen, these industry officials tell me: Because toy companies also employ lots of higher-end professions like design and marketing—and these are the jobs that are concentrated in the United States already—producing far fewer toys would kill many of those good American jobs, while creating far fewer bad manufacturing jobs in their place.

“You’d be trading millions of good-paying jobs for tens of thousands of horrible-paying jobs,” Cathey says.

[...]

As Paul Krugman details, many Trump officials are now explicitly packaging the idea of a revival of low-level manufacturing work in many areas—from sneakers to apparel—in the language of nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s a preposterous notion, one that gets at the core absurdities and outright lies embedded in MAGA ideology at a very fundamental level.

After all, the whole selling point behind the promise of restored manufacturing is supposed to be that this will create a lot of good breadwinner jobs that will then shore up stable, virtuous manufacturing communities. But trying to reshore things like doll manufacturing—while rolling back worker protections and the regulatory state, which are also core ideological commitments of Trumpism—is a recipe for anything but.

[...]

“Painting eyeballs on Barbie dolls and styling the hair of Bratz dolls,” notes Foreman drily, “aren’t the kinds of jobs that President Trump has promised in Michigan or Alabama.”

I think they very much are.

May Day

 

Started here, but we don't celebrate it.  We should.

Have you found your local May Day National Day of Action protest site?

Another loss for the fascists

 

Remains to be seen what actually happens, of course.

Trump 2.0 - Fuck your rights

 

It might not end until King Orange has died.

And even then, Republicans will have sewn up their control, and Democrats will be as useless as they are now.

Trump 2.0 - Fuck unions

 

UPDATE 03/28/2025:

The purge continues

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Got an Amazon store near you?

If not, hopefully you've done your Amazon Xmas shopping already.

Anti-union forces will be out and proud on January 21, but until then...

Unions were gaining too much strength

I didn't know this was in the works, but they'd better do it now. When Trump takes over, unions are going to lose all the gains they've made in the last few years.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There's gonna be a lot of disappointed and frustrated Trump voters

Muslims in Pennsylvania upset.  Now union leaders.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

East coast port strike ends after two days

Of course, the Republicans didn't like this being settled.  They were counting on it to drag out through the election.  So, they're smearing Pete Buttigieg.  What a surprise.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Labor Day 2024

United we stand

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Up with unions!

Let 'em roll across the country.