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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Poll: Most Americans Want Congress to Pass a Bill to Protect Abortion Rights

    Not only do most Americans want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade, but they also want Congress to pass a federal law to guarantee that abortion will remain legal, new polling finds.

    The CBS News/YouGov poll of 2,088 adult U.S. residents found that 58 percent of poll respondents want Congress to pass a bill legalizing abortion nationwide, versus 42 percent who would oppose such a bill. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats polled were in favor of the legislation.

    The findings also corroborate previous polling revealing that most Americans don’t want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe, as it appears poised to do following the leak of a draft opinion last week. Sixty-four percent of respondents in the CBS/YouGov poll said that they favored keeping Roe, including 90 percent of Democrats.

    Respondents also generally understood that, if Roe is overturned, people of color and poor people would have a harder time having access to abortions, while wealthy people’s access would largely remain unchanged. Trans people, who already face hurdles to obtain health care, would also have a harder time accessing abortion services if Roe protections were gone.

    Many Democrats in Congress are working on enshrining abortion rights into law, but there’s little chance that they’ll succeed. After the Supreme Court upheld Texas’s abortion law, which effectively banned the vast majority of abortions, the House of Representatives passed a bill largely along party lines to allow health providers to provide abortions “prior to fetal viability” or if the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant person’s health. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was the lone Democrat who voted against the bill.

    Passing the Senate will be a hurdle for Democrats — one that is likely impassable. Last week, about 30 Democrats gathered on the steps of the Capitol to announce their support for abortion access and vow to protect it. However, an abortion rights bill will not be able to pass the filibuster threshold of 60 votes, with Republicans in favor of implementing even harsher abortion restrictions nationwide.

    Further, even if Democrats eliminated the filibuster for this purpose, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) is a staunch opponent of abortion rights, meaning that the party wouldn’t have enough internal support for the cause.

    Some abortion rights advocates point out that this last-minute scramble to enshrine abortion rights into law is a display of the Democratic Party’s weakness, as Democrats have had decades to pass legislation to guarantee abortion rights but have failed to do so.

    Indeed, even as the public is in an uproar about the attack on abortion rights, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and other top Democrats have remained quiet about her endorsement of Cuellar, the only anti-abortion Democrat in the House. The Texas representative is facing a primary battle in his home state from Jessica Cisneros, a progressive pro-abortion candidate who’s been endorsed by high-profile lawmakers on the left like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    “Time and time again, we have seen Democrats use abortion rights as a campaign issue and fail to deliver on their promises to protect and expand our right to reproductive freedom,” Analilia Mejia, co-executive director or the Center for Popular Democracy, told NPR. “We deserve leadership that represents the vast majority of Americans who believe abortion should be accessible and affordable to all who require this critical health care.”

    Abortion rights advocates have also been calling on President Joe Biden to come out with a hard stance on the issue. Last week, Biden broke his silence on abortion rights to oppose the Supreme Court draft opinion but has declined to say whether he supports eliminating the filibuster for this cause.

  • Starbucks Hit With Lawsuit From Labor Board Over Anti-Union Employee Guidelines

    In a new lawsuit against Starbucks, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is alleging that a number of the company’s employee guidelines are in violation of labor laws.

    As first reported by More Perfect Union, the lawsuit, issued on Wednesday, takes issue with 19 sections of the company’s “Partner Guide,” which the NLRB argues are “overly-broad and discriminatory” against workers’ rights.

    Among the guidelines in violation of national labor laws allowing employees to freely form unions is the company’s dress code, which disallows workers from wearing clothing or even pins that display union symbols, according to the labor board. The company also places several restrictions on workers’ speech in violation of the law, the NLRB says, including banning workers from recording their working conditions through photo, video or audio mediums.

    The handbook’s restrictions preventing workers from participating in unsanctioned interviews or generally discussing their working conditions are also an intrusion on their labor rights, the labor board finds. Altogether, the NLRB alleges that the rules all act in the service of “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees” from exercising their right to form a union.

    The agency has given Starbucks until May 18 to respond to the lawsuit before the scheduled court hearing on June 14. It is the largest legal effort so far by the NLRB to intervene in the company’s union-busting practices.

    Over the past months, the NLRB has filed several charges against the company, alleging that the company has repeatedly violated labor laws in its treatment of its employees. Last month, labor board prosecutors found that the company illegally fired seven union organizers in Memphis, Tennessee; the workers made up nearly the entirety of that store’s union organizing group.

    The NLRB has made similar charges over the company’s dismissal of pro-union employees in Phoenix, Arizona, and last month filed a lawsuit against the company for doing so. The agency says that the terminations of Laila Dalton, Tyler Gillette and Alyssa Sanchez amounted to illegal retaliation against the employees for unionizing.

    If that injunction is successful, Starbucks will have to face legal consequences, including having to post and read aloud the court order against them in stores and reinstating the fired employees.

    The company may also find itself in legal trouble for a new policy it announced earlier this week. Workers will soon see a wage raise to $15 an hour or a 3 percent increase, whichever is higher, Starbucks announced – but the higher wages won’t apply to unionized stores or stores currently in the middle of a union campaign.

    Starbucks Workers United has filed charges against the move, saying that it’s clearly an attempt to discourage workers from forming unions.

    “We have filed charges against Howard Schultz’s threats that union stores won’t receive these benefits. That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it,” the union said. A unionized Buffalo store went on strike on Friday to protest the change.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The House Will Vote Next Week on Allowing Its Staffers to Unionize

    House leadership has scheduled a vote for a resolution that would allow House staffers to unionize, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced on Friday. The announcement comes three months after congressional workers first announced that they were unionizing.

    Rep. Andy Levin’s (D-Michigan) resolution, introduced shortly after workers brought their union efforts public in February, would give workers the green light to start unionizing office-by-office. Some Democrats, including Pelosi, have voiced their support for the effort, but it’s as yet unclear whether it will have enough votes to pass.

    In reaction to the news of the upcoming vote, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU) pressured lawmakers to approve the resolution. “Next week, the credibility of lawmakers will be put to the test. Will our bosses finally lead by example?” the union said in a statement. “With this vote, every member of Congress will have the opportunity to grant their own workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, free from retaliation.”

    “We welcome and look forward to the vote, and we expect that every member who has stood up for workers’ rights will vote for our right to form a union,” the union continued. “If Democrats are For the People, we are people too.”

    Levin celebrated the news. “I’m excited that my resolution to grant House staffers the right to unionize and bargain collectively will be considered on the House Floor next week,” he said. “Congressional staff have waited long enough. Let’s go!”

    CWU has been organizing for over a year. Last month, they sent a letter urging Pelosi to schedule a vote on the resolution, saying that staffers have waited long enough to be allowed to unionize. (The legislation that sets the groundwork for staffers’ unions passed nearly three decades ago, but was never implemented.)

    The union says that workers often face abusive conditions at work, as they’re expected to work long hours and for low pay. Conditions are especially bad for non-white staffers, who say that they feel as though there’s no room for advancement for them. Non-white people are already in the minority among congressional staff, which is largely white, and non-white staffers have reported experiencing racism at work.

    In a first, Pelosi also announced that she is now setting a minimum pay for House staffers. Starting September 1, the pay floor will be set at $45,000. This is slightly lower than the Washington, D.C. living wage of around $49,000 for a single adult without children, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, but still higher than the $30,000 that some staffers are reportedly making.

    “With a competitive minimum salary, the House will better be able to retain and recruit excellent, diverse talent. Doing so will open the doors to public service for those who may not have been able to afford to do so in the past,” Pelosi said in a press release. “This is also an issue of fairness, as many of the youngest staffers working the longest hours often earn the lowest salaries.”

    Staff turnover is incredibly high on Capitol Hill, and it reached a new high last year. With low pay and long hours, there is a high incidence of so-called brain drain among congressional staff – often highly qualified individuals – with many leaving for private sector jobs with higher pay.

  • As Over a Million Have Died to COVID, US Billionaires Have Gained $1.7 Trillion

    While the U.S. public has witnessed and experienced an unfathomable amount of death and tragedy over the course of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires have made out like kings and massively increased their wealth over the course of just over two years, new data shows.

    According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), American billionaires have added a colossal $1.71 trillion to their wealth since March of 2020. With an over 58 percent growth in their wealth, U.S. billionaires are now worth a collective $4.67 trillion. This is a towering figure — it amounts to nearly 25 percent of the U.S. GDP — $19.74 trillion — split between 727 people.

    The $1.71 trillion that billionaires have accumulated over the pandemic could pay for the entirety of the Build Back Better Act, congressional Democrats’ reconciliation bill that was slated to implement President Joe Biden’s social safety net and climate program last year. Alternatively, their wealth gain alone could pay off nearly all student loans, which are burdening 45 million Americans.

    IPS’s report comes as the U.S. has hit 1 million deaths due to COVID-19, according to an NBC analysis, though the real death toll is likely higher. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a large portion of COVID deaths were uncounted, meaning the total could be closer to 1.29 million deaths or more. When 100,000 people had died due to COVID in May 2020, The New York Times labeled the milestone as “incalculable” — 10 times that amount represents a loss beyond words.

    But perhaps not for billionaires, especially those who have seen their wealth skyrocket over the past two years. Elon Musk’s wealth multiplied by over 10 times during the pandemic; in March 2020, he was worth $24.6 billion, an already huge amount for any individual. As of Wednesday, he is worth $255 billion, and is the richest person in the world among those whose net worth is publicly available.

    “This jarring juxtaposition clearly illustrates that the work and strength of the working-class have made U.S. billionaires wealthier yet continue to bear the brunt of the pandemic,” Omar Ocampo, a co-author of the IPS report, told Truthout. “A strengthened labor movement and progressive taxation are both necessary to strengthen workers’ rights and make available to us the resources needed to increase investment in our healthcare system.”

    Others who were already shockingly wealthy also accumulated even more money during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos’s wealth shot up by nearly a third, from $113 billion to $150 billion; Bill Gates also gained about a third of his previous net worth with his wealth growing from $98 billion to $130 billion.

    Three members of the Walton family, who control more than 50 percent of Walmart, have seen their collective wealth grow by about 27 percent to $207.7 billion.

    Some lawmakers have made attempts to reign in billionaires’ wealth, which they can accumulate largely tax-free. President Joe Biden included a minimum tax on the country’s wealthiest people in his budget request for the 2023 fiscal year, and people like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) have introduced taxes specifically targeted at the ultra-wealthy to hack away at the growing wealth gap in the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “That’s a Fact”: Amazon Union’s Smalls Lambasts Anti-Union Senators in Hearing

    Amazon Labor Union (ALU) President Christian Smalls sharply rebuked U.S. senators for protecting Amazon from criticisms about its illegal labor practices at a Senate Budget Committee hearing led by Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) on Thursday.

    After Sanders delivered his opening speech, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) went on a tirade about how he thinks the independent Senator’s stances on the issues of Amazon illegally union busting and support of the labor movement in general are too politicized — even though Republicans dubiously claim to be the party of the working class. Graham said that it’s “very dangerous” that Sanders and the committee have determined Amazon to be, in Graham’s own words, “a piece of crap company.”

    The hearing was held for lawmakers to examine whether companies that violate federal labor laws, often openly, should be allowed to contract with the federal government.

    When Smalls began his testimony, he directly addressed Graham’s remarks.

    “First of all, I want to address Mr. Graham. It sounds like you were talking about more of the companies and the businesses in your speech, but you forgot that the people are the ones who make these companies operate,” Smalls said. “And when we’re not protected, and when the process for holding these companies accountable is not working for us — that’s the reason why we’re here today.”

    Smalls went on to say that it’s not “a Democrat or Republican thing. It’s a workers thing.” He reminded Graham that he is also supposed to represent the interest of workers who may be abused by companies in his state.

    Later in the hearing, Graham said that it’s unfair for the $1.2 trillion company to discuss their illegal conduct when there’s a legal system to file complaints about unfair labor practices — though labor experts generally acknowledge that the system’s lax punishments for breaking labor laws fail to deter union busting.

    Graham asked Smalls if he had filed legal complaints against the company. “You had a process where somebody could advocate for your interest,” Graham said.

    “There is a process that’s not working,” Smalls replied.

    “Well that’s your opinion,” Graham quipped.

    “That’s a fact,” Smalls said.

    Workers and union organizers faced abusive conditions from Amazon as ALU was organizing two New York City warehouses in Staten Island, Smalls continued, facing traumatizing intimidation and coercion tactics as part of the company’s multimillion dollar union-busting campaign. At one point, Smalls and other organizers were arrested while handing out food to workers after Amazon called the police on the group.

    Though Amazon faces charges of illegal union busting from the National Labor Relations Board, lax labor laws allow the company to get away with vast amounts of union busting moves, illegal or not, while facing little consequence. Sanders has asked President Joe Biden to cancel Amazon’s contracts with the federal government until the company stops union busting, but there’s no word from Biden yet on the request.

    “We want to feel that the government is allowing us to use our constitutional rights to organize,” Smalls said. “The notion that people united in this democracy will outmatch tyranny is the oldest American ideal.” And though workers won the union at the JFK8 Amazon warehouse, Amazon is still refusing to meet at the bargaining table with the workers, despite the legal obligation to do so.

    “To me, it just sounds like the corporations have the control, and they control whatever they want. They break the law, they get away with it — they know that already, that breaking the law during these election campaigns won’t be resolved during the election campaigns. So they purposely continue to break the law,” Smalls said, saying that the union had filed 40 unfair labor practices during the campaign. But despite the fact that many of these charges had merit, he said, the victims of these charges have still not gotten relief.

    Smalls called for Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for workers to form a union.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Companies Like Amazon and CVS Have Donated Millions to Anti-Abortion Politicians

    Despite claiming to support abortion and reproductive freedom, corporations are donating millions of dollars to conservative groups that oppose abortion and support bans on the medical procedure.

    As reported by Popular Information, in the last six years, corporations like Amazon, Walgreens and Google have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to anti-abortion political committees like the Republican Party’s leadership funds — the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) and the Republican Governors Asociation (RGA). Other corporations like Coca-Cola, CVS and Walmart have each given over a million dollars to such groups since 2016.

    Together, Amazon, AT&T, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, CVS, General Motors, Google, T-Mobile, Walgreens, Walmart, Wells Fargo and Verizon have spent at least $15.2 million to support anti-abortion politicians, according to publicly available political spending disclosures. This total doesn’t include donations made through private corporate lobbyists or support for right-wing nonprofits like the Heritage Foundation, as those donations don’t need to be disclosed under current campaign finance laws.

    As the Supreme Court hinted it will soon do this week, right-wingers have been working to overturn Roe v. Wade for decades, and these companies have thus contributed to the erosion of reproductive rights.

    For instance, in a 2017 report on “Women in the Economy,” Citigroup said that women are being held back by things like “restrictions on their reproductive rights,” and that the company wants to ensure “women are empowered to be free and equal participants in a robust, sustainable, and inclusive global economy.” As Popular Information finds, however, Citigroup has donated $685,000 to anti-abortion political groups since 2016.

    AT&T also claims to support “gender equity and the empowerment of women,” according to its 2020 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion report, but has given at least $1.4 million to groups that oppose abortion. The company has also become one of the largest donors to conservative groups – it is one of the top donors to politicians who supported Texas’s abortion ban and is also the primary funder for far-right outlet One America News.

    It’s important to recognize that, though people other than women can become pregnant, conservative anti-abortionists often don’t recognize this fact — and neither do many mainstream advocates of abortion rights. Thus, many corporations use trans-exclusive language to refer to abortion and reproductive rights as “women’s rights” even as they claim to be progressive. (In fact, attacks on body autonomy — such as bans on gender-affirming care or abortions — go hand-in-hand, often happening simultaneously.) At the same time, trans men and nonbinary people who can get pregnant also face gender-based discrimination that’s rooted in misogyny, patriarchy and heteropatriarchy at work and in their day-to-day lives.

    Just as the news of the Supreme Court’s draft decision on overturning Roe was breaking this week, Amazon announced that it will be giving its non-contract workers reimbursements of up to $4,000 a year for travel expenses related to an abortion. Many of the company’s poorest and most vulnerable workers would be excluded from the benefit, but the company gained positive headlines from the announcement nonetheless.

    Despite this new benefit, the company has donated to groups that are actively making it harder for its employees to get an abortion. The company has given nearly $1 million to anti-abortion groups, including nearly $780,000 to the RGA — a vital group as governors, with their veto power, can sometimes be the only person standing between a Republican-controlled legislature and the public’s reproductive rights.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Americans Would Be More Likely to Vote for Democrats If They Pass a Climate Bill

    If Democrats use their majorities in Congress to pass meaningful climate legislation, it could be a huge boon to their party in the upcoming midterm elections, new polling shows.

    A poll of over 1,100 likely voters conducted by Climate Power and Data for Progress shows that nearly half of voters – about 46 percent – say that they would be “much more” or “somewhat more” likely to vote for Democratic candidates this fall if Congress passed a clean energy bill to address the climate crisis, including 75 percent of self-declared Democrats and 45 percent of independents. About 31 percent of voters said that such an action wouldn’t affect their choice.

    The poll finds that passing climate legislation would also help Democrats court younger voters – a group from which President Joe Biden has been losing support in recent months. Among poll respondents under 45 years old, 58 percent say that they’d be more likely to vote for Democrats this fall if they acted on climate, while 27 percent say it wouldn’t affect their choice.

    The findings suggest that Democrats should act urgently to pass legislation to fund and expand clean energy production in the country in order to maintain their standing in the House and the Senate. Most pollsters currently predict that Democrats will at least lose the House to Republicans in November.

    “[L]awmakers have a mandate from voters to invest in domestic clean energy production and voters agree these investments will increase America’s energy security,” Data for Progress’s Danielle Deiseroth writes of the findings. “Voters recognize that climate change is not something that will happen in the distant future, but rather is happening now and even in their own backyards.”

    Overall, a majority of voters say that they think Congress should invest in clean energy. A whopping 90 percent of poll respondents said that they’d support the issue in order to address energy shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including an overwhelming majority of people from across the political spectrum.

    Indeed, climate experts say that shifting to clean energy sources like wind and solar is the only real way to achieve energy independence, while accruing additional benefits to public health and energy price dependability.

    International climate experts have also found that, in order to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis, major nations like the U.S. need to drastically reduce their production and use of fossil fuels. If the U.S. and other large emitters fail to rise to the occasion, it will spell catastrophe for the climate and for society as we know it.

    Though Democrats don’t have enough votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate – and would likely not be able to court enough Republicans, if at all any, to vote for clean energy legislation – the party could still take action through the budget reconciliation process on the issue. Reconciliation, which the party was planning to use for the Build Back Better Act last year, allows the Senate to pass legislation that’s related to the federal budget through a simple majority vote.

    Democrats are currently in talks to hammer out a new reconciliation deal, but nearly the entirety of the contents of that bill will be determined by whether or not they have the approval of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), a coal baron who is opposed to provisions that would phase out fossil fuels. This may be related to the fact that Manchin’s career and personal finances have benefited hugely from his stake in the coal industry.

    The poll findings add to a pile of evidence that shows Democrats should take bold, decisive action to help win over voters this fall.

    Previous Data for Progress polling found that student loan cancellation would find favor with about 45 percent of poll respondents in key battleground states and that it would also give a generic Democratic candidate about 6 points in support among young voters. Another poll last month by Morning Consult/Politico found that Democrats have lost ground among recipients of the expanded child tax credit since it expired in December, suggesting that Democrats may be able to gain back those voters if they reinstated the program.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • $50K Student Loan Cancellation Overwhelmingly Benefits Poorest Borrowers

    As President Joe Biden crafts a plan for canceling student loans, new data finds that student loan cancellation would overwhelmingly benefit Black borrowers and low-income debtors, with the benefits multiplying with higher levels of debt canceled.

    If Biden uses his executive power to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for student loan borrowers, it would reduce the share of people in the bottom 20 percent of wealth from 15 percent to 10 percent. Among those in the second-lowest 20 percent wealth group, the number would be reduced from 20 to 15 percent, the data shows. The proportion of people in the top 10 percent of wealth with debt would remain the same, at 4 percent.

    This gap closes even further with cancellation of $50,000 in loan debt. The proportion of people in the bottom 20 percent of wealth with debt would reduce to a mere 2 percent, while 3 percent of people in the top 10 percent or wealth would still have debts. “Cancellation overwhelmingly benefits low-wealth borrowers because rich people rarely borrow and pay off debt quickly when they do,” the report says.

    These findings bolster previous findings that student debt cancellation is a progressive policy, meaning that it overwhelmingly benefits lower and middle income earners and not the high-income earners, as opponents of debt cancellation falsely claim.

    The data was compiled for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) by sociology scholars from University of California, Merced, and Princeton University, and provide a host of statistics about the impacts of student loan cancellation.

    In a statement, Warren said that the analysis supports her proposal for Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of debt per borrower. “As this analysis clearly shows, canceling student debt is a matter of racial justice and about providing relief to millions of hard-working people who invested in their education but are now drowning in debt,” she said.

    Overall, $10,000 of debt cancellation would zero out debts for about a third of borrowers while making only a small dent for tens of millions of student loan holders. However, $50,000 of debt cancellation would zero out debts for about three-quarters of borrowers, or 30 million people.

    Warren further emphasized the finding that debt cancellation would help Black and Latinx borrowers the most. “The more President Biden cancels, the more we narrow the racial wealth gap among borrowers and the bigger the boost to Americans’ economic futures,” she continued. “This is the right thing to do.”

    Black and Latinx borrowers are disproportionately affected by student debt; the data shows that two-thirds of Black borrowers and 37 percent of Latinx borrowers owe more than their original loan amount 12 years after starting higher education, while only 30 percent of white borrowers experience the same.

    If Biden canceled up to $50,000 of debt per borrower, the proportion of Black people with debt would reduce from its current rate of 23.8 percent to just 6.4 percent. This would go a long way in closing the racial wealth gap; the disparity between the proportion of white people and Black people who have debt would reduce from 8.7 percent to 2.8 percent.

    The data comes as Biden is considering a narrow debt forgiveness plan in which he would cancel debt only for individuals making less than $125,000 a year. It’s unclear how much Biden is considering canceling, but he has insinuated that he would cancel less than $50,000 worth for those borrowers. He had promised during his campaign to cancel $10,000 of debt per borrower, but debt activists and progressive lawmakers say that’s not enough to trigger the most significant positive impacts for borrowers and the economy.

    Racial justice advocates say that if Biden undertakes student debt cancellation, it would be a major step toward fulfilling his campaign promises to center racial justice. Polls indicate that it would also be a popular move for him to take – and crucial to garner support for his party in the upcoming midterm elections.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks Announces Wage Raises – But Only For Stores That Aren’t Unionizing

    Starbucks announced on Tuesday that it is raising wages for its employees and offering a number of new benefits only to workers in stores that aren’t unionized or in a union drive – a move that is potentially illegal.

    The company will raise its wages to a base of $15 an hour, or a 3 percent raise, whichever is higher, for its nonunion employees. These changes were previously announced when the union drive was in its nascent stages last year.

    Currently, about 63 percent of Starbucks employees make under $15 an hour, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. It’s unclear how that percentage will change with union members and unionizing workers excluded from the pay raise.

    CEO Howard Schultz said in an investor call that the exclusionary pay increases are “investments” that “will enable us to handle the increased demand — and deliver increased profitability — while also delivering an elevated experience to our customers and reducing strain on our partners,” or employees.

    The company claims that it can’t make changes to unionizing workers’ pay during the union drive, but Starbucks Workers United says that it’s actually illegal for the company to exclude unionizing workers from new benefits.

    “We have filed charges against Howard Schultz’s threats that union stores won’t receive these benefits. That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it,” the union wrote on Twitter.

    A union campaign is supposed to be conducted in “laboratory conditions,” meaning that a union drive needs to be conducted in “conditions as nearly ideal as possible” in order to “determine the uninhibited desires of the employees,” according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Raising wages only for employees not in a union drive could compel workers to drop their organizing campaign or convince them to vote against the union when an election is conducted.

    “If Starbucks said, ‘Drop the union campaign and you’ll get this wage increase and better benefits,’ that’d clearly be illegal,” Matthew Bodie, a former NLRB lawyer and law professor at Saint Louis University, told the New York Times. “Hard to see how this is that much different in practice.” Bodie added that these pay increases could also be in violation of the mandate for employers to bargain with unionizing workers in good faith.

    If the NLRB validates the union’s charges that the selective raises are illegal, it wouldn’t be the first time that the labor board has found illegal conduct in Starbucks’s anti-union campaign. Last month, for instance, the labor board found that the company had illegally fired seven pro-union workers in Memphis, Tennessee; the company is also facing other charges from the NLRB that may result in the company facing legal consequences for its union-busting moves.

    The union says that these benefits are only being offered because of the union drive. “Congratulations to all the hard work of partners organizing at Starbucks – our campaign has pressured Howard Schultz and Starbucks to announce many of the benefits that we’ve been pushing for since day one and we’ve proposed at the bargaining table in Buffalo,” the union said.

    Indeed, the union drive has been remarkably successful. As of Tuesday, Starbucks Workers United has successfully unionized over 50 stores. The union has only lost about five of its union votes so far, with the results of three others still in contention.

    This is a success rate of about 85 percent, with new victories coming in nearly every day. The union recently surpassed 250 union petition filings, spanning across 36 states.

    The workers are a major part of the currently surging labor movement, and Starbucks and Amazon workers involved in unionizing will head to the White House on Thursday to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh to discuss the labor movement and how workers can keep spreading union efforts to other companies and sectors.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “We Are Not Going Back!” A Furious Elizabeth Warren Tells Crowd Outside SCOTUS

    In a rousing and fiery speech to pro-abortion protesters in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, longtime reproductive rights advocate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) denounced the “extremist” Supreme Court for its potential decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and vowed to fight against it.

    “I am angry,” she said, forcefully. “I am angry because an extremist United States Supreme Court thinks that they can impose their extremist views on all of the [people] of this country and they are wrong. I am angry because we have reached the culmination of what Republicans have been fighting for, angling for, for decades now.”

    Warren further emphasized that the people who will be most affected by widespread abortion bans are poor and working class members of the public.

    “I am angry because of who will pay the price for this. It will not be wealthy [pregnant people],” she said. “Wealthy [pregnant people] can get on an airplane. They can fly to another state. They can fly to another country. They can get the protection they need.”

    “This will fall on the poorest [people] in our country,” she continued. “This will fall on the young [people] who have been abused, who are victims of incest. This will fall on those who have been raped. This will fall on [parents] who are already struggling to work three jobs to be able to support the children they have.”

    Warren’s speech was met with cheers from protesters in front of the Supreme Court on Monday. Protesters gathered after a leaked draft opinion obtained by Politico and written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito showed that the Court has the votes to overturn Roe, which protects the right to an abortion in the U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the legitimacy of the draft on Tuesday morning.

    If Roe is overturned, 13 states would automatically ban abortion thanks to so-called “trigger laws” that have previously passed in the states. A number of other states have passed decrees saying that they either plan on restricting abortion if Roe is overturned or saying that their state constitutions don’t secure the right to an abortion. This brings the total number of states that would likely ban abortion to about 24 if the Supreme Court decision comes down against Roe.

    Though a source told Politico that at least five conservative justices will vote to overturn Roe, the draft isn’t final, and abortion rights activists are calling for mass uprisings in hopes of stopping the decision from being officially finalized.

    Warren, whose presidential platform in 2020 included a slate of aggressive pro-abortion actions, vowed to fight the decision. In an interview after her speech, Warren pointed out that Republicans have been “plotting” and packing the court for decades in order to work toward allowing states to ban abortions – despite the fact that the vast majority of the public doesn’t want Roe to be overturned.

    “I am here because I am angry and I am here because the United States Congress can change all of this,” Warren concluded, to cheers from the crowd. “Angry, but committed.”

    “Understand this, understand this: I have seen the world where abortion is illegal. And we are not going back. Not ever. So say it with me,” she said, her voice crackling with emotion, instructing the crowd to repeat after her. “We are not going back. Not ever. Not ever. Not ever. Never!”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden May Invite Starbucks and Amazon Union Organizers to the White House

    The Biden administration may soon invite Starbucks and Amazon union organizers to the White House, potentially heeding Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) call to do so last week.

    As White House insiders told The Washington Post, administration officials are currently in talks with union organizers to organize a potential visit. The meeting has not been finalized, and details are still being worked out, sources said.

    This would be a major show of support from the administration for ongoing labor movements that have been surging across the country. Though President Joe Biden has made some moves to support unions and the labor movement, his administration has been largely silent about the issue that has otherwise been making waves within the working class.

    White House officials are apparently eager to open a dialogue with labor organizers in order to showcase the resurgence of the labor movement, which they say is a direct result of the administration’s economic policies, according to the Post, though labor organizers have been working to mobilize workers en masse for years and long before this administration came to power.

    The meeting discussions appear to be a direct response to Sanders’s call last Sunday for Biden to invite unionizing workers to the White House. During a rally with Amazon workers and union organizers in New York City, Sanders praised Biden for speaking about labor issues but said he can and should go further to support the labor movement.

    “What he has got to do is start inviting these guys to the White House,” Sanders said. “He’s got to invite the Starbucks workers to the White House, the other unions that are organizing all over this country, and make it clear that he is on their side and that he is going to do what he can to support labor organizing throughout this country.”

    Sanders has been emphasizing that if Democrats want to come out with majorities in Congress after the midterm elections this fall, they need to strongly stand behind the labor movement. Biden should be a leader in that regard and could take steps like canceling Amazon’s contracts with the federal government because of the company’s disregard for federal labor laws in its union-busting campaigns, the Vermont senator said.

    Unionizing Starbucks workers have asked lawmakers to be more vocal about their union campaign in order to bring attention to the severe anti-union drive that the company has been waging. Starbucks has fired at least 18 pro-union employees, seemingly because of their involvement with union organizing, though the company alleges otherwise. It is illegal for companies to retaliate against workers for union activity, but current punishments for doing so are lax.

    The president of Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully unionized a Staten Island Amazon warehouse last month and lost its election for a second warehouse that voted last week, said that lawmakers should pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act in order to protect unionizing workers and galvanize new movements. Aside from that, Biden can act on his own, he said.

    “They have to pass the PRO Act,” ALU President Christian Smalls told Vanity Fair. “If they’re not going to pass the PRO Act, Biden needs to sign an executive order. Simple as that.”

    With less than 200 days to go until the midterm elections, vocally supporting workers’ movements could turn out to be a favorable strategy for the White House. Polling from September last year by Gallup showed that support for labor unions is on the rise and is currently at its highest level since 1965 with a 68 percent approval. Recent polling conducted by Blue Rose Research for More Perfect Union has also found that 75 percent of Americans support Amazon’s union efforts.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “SCOTUS Isn’t Just Coming for Abortion” Warns Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    After a draft opinion showing that the Supreme Court is prepared to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked on Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) warned that the conservative-dominated Court will go after gay marriage next as LGBTQ rights come under attack across the country.

    The draft opinion, written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, criticizes Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage, and the Lawrence v. Texas opinion of 2003, which legalized sex between gay couples – though gay people have continued to face prosecution despite this ruling. These decisions aren’t “deeply rooted in history,” Alito wrote in the leaked draft opinion.

    As anti-LGBTQ laws have spread across states and LGBTQ activists have sounded the alarm about their rights being taken away, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that these changes could soon be coming at a federal level.

    “​​As we’ve warned, SCOTUS isn’t just coming for abortion – they’re coming for the right to privacy Roe rests on, which includes gay marriage + civil rights,” she said on Monday. “[Sen. Joe] Manchin is blocking Congress [from] codifying Roe. House has seemingly forgotten about Clarence Thomas. These two points must change”.

    House Democrats have passed legislation that would effectively legalize abortion across the country, barring states from implementing abortion bans like Texas’s restrictive law that was upheld by the Supreme Court last year.

    But Democrats don’t have the votes to pass the law in the Senate, nor do they have the votes to overturn the filibuster in order to pass the legislation through a simple majority vote. Progressive lawmakers say that the party has failed to whip Manchin in line with the rest of the party over the past year, and the fact that the West Virginia senator is anti-choice only exacerbates the issue.

    Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his wife’s ties to the January 6 plot to overturn the certification of the 2020 election results. If Democrats don’t step up and vote to impeach Thomas, she said, there will be dire consequences for the party. Though Thomas is part of a conservative supermajority on the Court, replacing Thomas with a liberal justice would help to slightly balance the scales against far-right influence in the High Court.

    Democrats have a mandate to act swiftly to protect reproductive rights and other civil liberties, the New York lawmaker wrote. “People elected Democrats precisely so we could lead in perilous moments like these– to codify Roe, hold corruption accountable, & have a President who uses his legal authority to break through Congressional gridlock,” Ocasio-Cortez continued on Monday.

    “If we don’t, what message does that send? We can’t sit around, finger point, & hand wring as people’s futures + equality are on the line,” she said. “It’s time to be decisive, lead with confidence, fight for a prosperous future for all and protect the vulnerable. Leave it all on the field.”

    Indeed, as law scholar Marjorie Cohn wrote for Truthout in December, overruling Roe could just be a starting point for the conservative justices seeking to outlaw rights at the federal level. “If the Supreme Court retracts the right to abortion, other rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are also in jeopardy, including the rights to contraception, homosexual conduct and same-sex marriage,” Cohn wrote.

    At the state level, LGBTQ rights are aleady being quickly eroded. Republicans, who have become nearly synonymous with fascists and the far right, filed nearly 200 bills in the first three months of this year clearly aimed at attacking trans and gay kids’ very right to exist and designed to restrict the teaching of LGBTQ-related topics in schools.

    “If you are out here saying ‘marriage equality is next’ please do keep in mind that at least one state has made care for trans youth a felony right now and is currently in court defending that law,” wrote lawyer and trans activist Chase Strangio on Tuesday. “There is no ‘next’ – the horror is NOW.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Warns Democrats: Back Union Movement Now or Face Defeat This Fall

    In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) warned Democrats that they need to start publicly supporting surging labor movements or else face defeat in the midterm elections this fall.

    Since the unceremonious death of the Build Back Better Act last year, the Democratic party has been in dire need of messaging, and needs to embrace a strong pro-union platform if they want to boost their chances of retaining power in Congress, Sanders told the magazine before heading to rallies in support of unionizing Amazon workers in New York and Starbucks workers in Virginia.

    Democrats have to decide if they’re going to “become a party which stands for the working class of this country” or if they’ll “remain a corporately controlled party beholden to [their] wealthy campaign contributors and to the corporate media as well,” Sanders said.

    To choose the latter is to risk losing big in this year’s elections. “To turn your back on the working class, in general, is political suicide,” he said. Becoming “strongly involved in the labor movement” is, on the other hand, “the right thing to do,” he added. “It is also very, very good politics. And I think if the Democrats don’t do that immediately, they are going to look at a very, very bad 2022.”

    Sanders has been a staunch supporter of the labor movement, which is experiencing a renaissance led largely by young organizers and grassroots activists. For his part, he’s created a unit within his office of about 10 staffers focused on supporting unionizing workers not only within headline-grabbing campaigns, but also in places like John Deere, Kellogg’s and universities across the country.

    Sanders has also been pushing Democrats to take more action to support labor movements. Recently, he called for President Joe Biden to invite Starbucks and Amazon labor organizers to the White House, and to cancel Amazon’s federal contracts and refuse to work with the company until it stops union busting.

    Though Biden has pledged to be the most pro-union president in American history, he and the party, which holds a majority in both chambers of Congress, have so far fallen short of labor organizers’ expectations of the supposedly pro-union party. For instance, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, a sweeping bill that would make it far easier for workers to form unions in the country, has sat dormant in Congress for over a year after the House passed the bill last March.

    The president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which recently made waves for successfully unionizing the first Amazon warehouse in the country, told Vanity Fair that Congress can and should take action on the issue. “They have to pass the PRO Act,” said ALU President Christian Smalls. “If they’re not going to pass the PRO Act, Biden needs to sign an executive order. Simple as that.”

    Sanders had worked for provisions of the PRO Act to be included in the Build Back Better Act, which could have bypassed the filibuster, but the bill was gutted and killed by conservative Democrats in the Senate. In his interview, he also expressed frustration about how the Democratic Party handled those major obstructionists within their ranks — chiefly Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).

    The Vermont senator blamed Manchin and Sinema for dragging the party behind, but also said that Democrats need to shape up in their response to them.

    “How you handle Manchin, how you handle Sinema and the other conservative Democrats is one of the challenges that the Democrats have got to deal with,” he said. “But the current strategy is an absolute political failure.”

    Sanders also had harsh words for Amazon chairman Jeff Bezos. If the senator were given a chance to talk to Bezos directly, “There’s nothing that I would say to him except, ‘You know what? We’re gonna take you on,’” he said. “You could either start responding to the needs of your workers, or we’re gonna fight you ruthlessly.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Musk’s “Dangerous” Twitter Offer Makes the Case for a Wealth Tax, Warren Says

    As Elon Musk shores up $44 billion to buy Twitter, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is warning that the potential purchase could have major consequences for U.S. democracy.

    In an interview with MSNBC on Thursday, Warren said that Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, which Twitter agreed to earlier this week, makes the case that the country needs to “make two big changes” to its tax code and regulation of Big Tech.

    “The first one is we need a wealth tax in America. And let’s talk about how Elon’s purchase here was subsidized by tens of millions of people who’ve paid their taxes every year,” she said. “The second part is we need rules of the road for Big Tech.”

    Indeed, the only reason that Musk has the funds — or the financial leverage — to buy Twitter is because he has been allowed to accumulate an astounding amount of wealth over the course of the pandemic. In March of 2020, he was worth a little more than half of his $44 billion offer. Over the course of just two years, however, his wealth has skyrocketed by 1080 percent, largely tax-free.

    Warren went on to say that she believes the most alarming thing about Musk’s offer isn’t necessarily his right-wing politics, but the implications about who is allowed to make decisions surrounding a platform that millions of Americans use to communicate. “Ultimately what all this boils down to is power. Who’s going to have the power in our country?” she asked.

    “Are we going to make decisions as a democracy or is this going to be Elon Musk all by himself, off in a room, a bazillionaire, who just plays by his own set of rules? That’s really what’s at stake here,” she said, later adding that “it’s about one person making all of the decisions about how tens of millions of people will have an opportunity to communicate with each other.”

    Though lawmakers have passed some regulations on Big Tech in attempts to rein in corporations, Warren says that the industry still lacks a set of regulations that could help increase competition and allow for more user freedom. While phone calls can be made to any phone owner, regardless of what network they use, the millions of Twitter or other social media users are constrained to only being able to communicate with other users of the same platform, she said.

    “We need rules so that you can leave the Twitter platform and go to a competitor’s platform and still be able to reach each other. You have rules like that, then you actually have some competition,” she said. “Rules of the road could help facilitate that kind of competition and frankly break the stranglehold of someone like Elon Musk coming in and just owning the whole thing.”

    Unlike if Musk were to buy a company that produces soap or cars, Warren emphasized that buying Twitter is about buying influence and power. Earlier this week, Warren tweeted that even just the fact that this kind of purchase could go through without any stopgaps is an indication that the country needs stronger regulations.

    “One billionaire — whose estimated net worth has gotten about 10 times larger since the start of the pandemic — is about to have the power to decide how millions of people can communicate with each other,” she wrote. “It’s dangerous for our democracy to have so much power in so few hands.”

    Social media and political experts have also sounded the alarm about Musk’s potential purchase, noting that there is already a long list of billionaires who own major communication-related entities, like Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, for example.

    Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist,” meaning in theory that users who regularly encourage bigoted harassment, violence, and otherwise would remain on the platform, as well as users who spread vast amounts of disinformation. Even just the news of his purchase appears to have driven tens of thousands of far right users to the platform. Unregulated internet forums are a breeding ground for fascists; platforms like 4chan and 8chan, which prided themselves on having no content moderation, have been linked to hate crimes and mass murders.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Ridicules Romney for Saying that Student Loan Cancellation Is a “Bribe”

    Student debt cancellation advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) ridiculed Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Thursday after the Republican said that government benefits like loan forgiveness are tantamount to a “bribe.”

    After news circulated that President Joe Biden is exploring options to cancel student debt without Congress on Wednesday, Romney wrote, “Desperate polls call for desperate measures: Dems consider forgiving trillions in student loans. Other bribe suggestions: Forgive auto loans? Forgive credit card debt? Forgive mortgages? And put a wealth tax on the super-rich to pay for it all. What could possibly go wrong?”

    In response, Sanders, who favors canceling all student debt, pointed out that Romney’s view on student loans isn’t consistent with his views on government funding for corporations and the wealthy.

    “Mr. Romney supports ‘bribes’ in the form of tax cuts for the wealthy and billions in welfare for corporations, but is shocked by the idea that working Americans might get help paying off student debt,” Sanders tweeted. “I know he thinks corporations are people, but does he know people are people?”

    Political commentators also criticized Romney’s post, pointing out that Romney supported the huge bailouts that were provided to corporations and banks in 2008 with little accountability. Romney has personally benefited from such corporate bailouts, to the tune of millions of dollars; for instance, he profited from the bailout of Bain Capital as Bain skimmed money from workers’ pension funds.

    Romney’s argument that wealthy Americans shouldn’t have to face a tax to cover debtors’ student loans is also disingenuous. To justify their opposition to canceling student debt, conservatives often cite their supposed concerns over the federal deficit or government spending, but economists have found that the vast benefits from student debt cancellation would outweigh the limited impact that such an action would have on the deficit and inflation.

    The Utah Republican’s tweet also seemed to suggest that student debt cancellation is simply a last-ditch effort by Democrats to gain voters’ favor before the election, despite the fact that action on student debt is popular and would materially benefit millions of Americans’ lives — and as though Republicans aren’t actively trying to restrict voting and undermine elections across the country.

    While conservatives oppose student loan forgiveness outright, Biden has hesitated to act on the issue and appeared to dampen expectations on his plans to cancel debt on Thursday.

    In spite of reports that the president is considering canceling a substantial amount of debt, Biden said that canceling $50,000 of debt is not on the table. “I am considering dealing with some debt reduction. I am not considering $50,000 debt reduction,” he said, adding that he will be announcing a plan within the “next couple of weeks.”

    Some advocates are hopeful that Biden will cancel more than $50,000 per debtor, though that seems unlikely.

    It’s unclear what amount of student loans Biden is considering forgiving, and whether forgiveness will be universal across all debtors. His administration has flip flopped on the issue, and he pledged on the campaign trail that he would only cancel up to $10,000 for each borrower.

    Debt activists say that $10,000 is not enough to help borrowers who are the most in need and point out that that amount could easily come back in interest over time.

    Biden has heeded progressives’ advice on student debt before. When he extended the payment pause earlier this month, he also wiped out the default status of over 7 million borrowers, in order to give them a “fresh start” when payments restart. Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), both advocates of student debt cancellation, had urged his administration to move borrowers out of default in a letter last year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • While Democrats Try to Woo Manchin, He’s Headed to Billionaire-Hosted Fundraiser

    Amid a new push by Democrats to revive talks with conservatives in their party on President Joe Biden’s social, economic and climate agenda, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) is headed to a fundraiser at a billionaire’s house in California this weekend, hosted by the right-leaning political group No Labels.

    As uncovered by The Intercept, Manchin will be attending a private event this Saturday in the Los Angeles home of Howard Marks, co-founder of investment fund Oaktree Capital Management with a net worth of about $2.2 billion. There, Manchin will likely rub shoulders with Michael Milken, a Donald-Trump pardoned investor and financier with a net worth of $3.8 billion, according to Forbes.

    No Labels, the group that is hosting the event, is infamous among progressive groups for backing politicians with supposedly “sensible” politics that “have an uncanny likelihood of benefiting one particular element of our nation’s political economy: the superrich, or more precisely, the finance industry,” as Clio Chang wrote for The Intercept in 2018.

    According to investigative reports, No Labels played at least a small role in getting last year’s Build Back Better Act gutted and killed. At one point last year, reporters uncovered that the group appeared to have offered to donate to conservative Democrats in the House to present a united front against the rest of the Democratic party.

    In June of 2021, a leaked call showed that Manchin had been in at least one meeting with the group and their billionaire allies about maintaining the filibuster. The West Virginia lawmaker spent much of the rest of the year coming up with excuse after excuse to justify his opposition to nearly every provision in the bill — only for it to come out later that Manchin had likely decided early on in the months-long negotiations that he was never going to support the bill, regardless of how many adjustments Democrats made to accommodate him, according to accounts from Washington insiders and colleagues.

    During the negotiations, Manchin fraternized with coal industry executives and received donations from conservative billionaires who had never donated to Democrats before. His PAC raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in funds from major corporations, including Lockheed Martin, Wells Fargo and fossil gas company CNX Resources.

    In the months since Manchin killed the Build Back Better Act, progressives and Democrats have been trying to revive talks on the bill — or at least its crucial provisions to combat the climate crisis, as continued emissions are locking in increasingly dangerous levels of global warming.

    Although the coal baron met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers on energy and climate reforms this week, it’s unlikely that he will support any legislation that would meaningfully draw down the use of fossil fuels. Last month, he killed the nomination of climate champion Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Federal Reserve Board, saying that she wasn’t a supporter of the “all-of-the-above” style of energy policy that is killing any prospects of a livable climate.

    Meanwhile, Manchin also complained this week about the erosion of the Voting Rights Act, which, in theory, bars racial discrimination in elections. But he’s the one who spent last year refusing to change the filibuster to pass Democrats’ voting rights bill; in fact, the lawmaker even eventually opposed his own “compromise” voting rights bill, which he tried and failed to sell to Republicans.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 149 Democrats Demand More Cash for Underfunded Labor Board as Union Push Spreads

    As labor uprisings heat up and spread across the country, a group of House Democrats is calling for an increase in budget for the federal labor board, which has been starved of the funding it needs to address the current upswing in labor activity.

    The group of 149 Democrats, led by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-New Jersey), sent a letter to the House Committee on Appropriations on Wednesday, asking for a roughly 34 percent boost to the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) budget for fiscal year 2023 and requesting a budget of $368 million at minimum. The funding should be specifically directed toward addressing the “staffing crisis” at the board’s regional offices, they said.

    The lawmakers also asked for the removal of an appropriations rider that bars the NLRB from conducting union elections with an electronic voting system, which the letter writers called an “antiquated prohibition.” Currently, elections are conducted with paper ballots that are mailed to labor officials, who count them by hand.

    The NLRB’s budget has stayed the same for the last nine years, meaning that it has actually been cut by 25 percent in real dollars over the past decade or so. This has caused the overall staffing to shrink by 39 percent and field staffing to be cut in half over the past 20 years, the board says.

    These cuts are making it hard for the agency to handle the current surge of union and unfair labor practice filings from movements like those of Amazon and Starbucks workers; earlier this month, the labor board reported that it’s seen a 57 percent increase in union filings and a 14 percent increase in unfair labor practice filings between October 2021 and March 2022.

    “[W]ith 60 million non-union workers saying they would join a union if given the chance (including nearly 75 percent of young workers age 18-24), we only expect union election petitions to further increase,” the letter writers said. “With this skyrocketing workload, the NLRB is now responsible for far more workers than a decade ago yet has been denied the funding to meet these statutory requirements.”

    In his 2023 budget request, President Joe Biden asked Congress to provide $319 million in funding for the board, which is an increase of about 16 percent over its current $274 million budget. Though the agency acknowledges that this would help ease budgetary and staffing pressures, it is still not enough to fully address staff shortages.

    Norcross, co-chair of the Congressional Labor Caucus, told Truthout that the increase in funding is crucial to support the current burgeoning labor uprising.

    “Our federal budget reflects our national priorities. It documents our values. These past few years have been incredibly tough on the working people of this country, and we’ve seen thousands organize to push for better wages and better working conditions in the pandemic’s wake,” Norcross said. “The NLRB plays a vital role in ensuring employers respect workers’ rights, but they can’t do their job well unless they are adequately funded.

    Increasing the NLRB funding is a step toward “placing the American worker at the heart of the federal budget,” the lawmaker continued.

    It’s unclear if Democrats will be able to succeed in increasing the NLRB’s budget to this level. Though Republicans often claim to be the party of the working class, some conservatives have begun raising their objections with the NLRB, saying that it’s being used as a “cudgel” against corporations, which they claim are being harassed by labor officials.

    In reality, however, it is the corporations that are harassing their workers. Unionizing workers across industries have said that corporations are subjecting them to intimidation, surveillance and other forms of union-busting in order to quash union efforts, forcing workers to file labor charges against the companies for breaking labor laws.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Senators Unveil Bill to Bar Biden From Canceling Student Debt

    Just after news broke of President Joe Biden’s plan to fulfill his campaign promise to cancel student debt, Republicans introduced a bill that would explicitly bar him from doing so, despite evidence that the current towering burden of student debt constitutes a major economic crisis.

    GOP Senators Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), John Thune (South Dakota), Richard Burr (North Carolina), and two others unveiled a measure that would bar the president from canceling student debt because of a national emergency, and limit the president’s ability to extend a student debt payment pause.

    Their proposal, which is not likely to pass Congress, would also cap any future payment pauses for borrowers with a salary over four times the federal poverty line — or a mere $54,360 for single adults with no children. This is less than the average starting salary for college graduates from the class of 2020, which was $55,260.

    The bill comes just after a potential breakthrough on the issue of student debt. Biden told House lawmakers in a meeting on Tuesday that he’s considering canceling a substantial amount of student debt after Democrats and debt activists have begged him for months to do so.

    Roughly 43 million borrowers owe $1.9 trillion in student debt, according to the Student Debt Crisis Center. Debtors are often crushed by the weight of the debt, both financially and mentally; some owe triple or quadruple their original loan amount, and are burdened by the feeling or reality that the debt will never be repaid.

    Debtors also face “hidden” costs due to their loans, with higher interest rates on things like home and car loans and credit cards. Canceling student debt could result in wide-reaching positive effects on the economy, boosting borrowers’ ability to buy a home or start a business.

    Meanwhile, the student loan payment pause, which was originally put into effect by Donald Trump during the onset of the pandemic, has saved borrowers about $200 billion over the course of two years.

    The Republicans argue that student loan cancellation and the payment freeze are a “handout” to wealthy college graduates and those who may have taken on loans for them, parroting a right-wing argument that the people who would benefit most from loan forgiveness are already wealthy and don’t need the money.

    These arguments are based on false premises, however. People who take on student loans typically come from families without generational wealth that could cover the cost of tuition in the first place, and research has found that student loan forgiveness is progressive, meaning that it would provide the biggest benefits to the least wealthy debtors. The higher the loan amount that is canceled, the more progressive the benefit, the Roosevelt Institute found last year.

    The report also found that cancellation would be crucial to closing the racial wealth gap, providing aid to Black and Latinx borrowers who suffer the most from student loan debt.

    In their press release on the bill, the senators also say that the payment pause costs taxpayers $5 billion a month, citing Education Department data that shows $5 billion a month as the amount that borrowers save as a result of the pause extension. However, that’s an oversimplification of how federal student loans work and a flattening of the reason that the government gives student loans to begin with.

    It also suggests that student loans should be a method of raising money for the government, a notion that even Trump has said is needlessly cruel. “That’s probably one of the only things the government shouldn’t make money off — I think it’s terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans,” Trump said in 2015.

    Student loans are given out with the purpose of making it easier for students to afford college tuition, which is rising at astounding rates. It’s in the government’s best interest to make higher education more accessible, as this can help strengthen democratic participation in society and stave off fascism.

    To give loans, the government borrows money, adding to the deficit temporarily until the loans are paid back; the government sometimes collects a very limited profit from the loans due to interest. While it’s true that student loan cancellation may affect the deficit, a 2018 study by economic scholars found that the benefits of cancellation would be vast — not only for borrowers, but for the entire economy.

    According to the study, a one-time mass cancellation of student debt would provide an immediate boost to the GDP and would generate up to $1.1 trillion in 2016 dollars in GDP over a decade. The policy would create jobs, reduce unemployment, and have a stimulus effect that would offset some of the cost of the program, with only a moderate negative effect on the deficit and inflation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Gas Prices Soared in 2021, Big Oil CEOs Got a Nearly $45 Million Raise

    As gas prices shot up in 2021, CEOs of major oil and gas corporations raked in millions, a new analysis reveals.

    Compensation for Big Oil chief executives rose by nearly $45 million in 2021 over 2020 levels, a new analysis by Accountable.US shows, as first reported by the Guardian. In total, 28 large oil and gas corporations like Exxon and Shell gave $394 million to their CEOs last year.

    CEOs like Marathon Petroleum’s Michael Hennigan and Exxon’s Darren Woods were exceptionally highly compensated, being paid over $20 million each while getting bonuses of $5 million and $7 million, respectively. Woods’s pay bump alone was 50 percent of his previous pay. Tracy Krohn, the CEO of W&T Offshore, an oil and fracked gas producer, made $4 million more last year — nearly three times his 2020 compensation.

    On average, each CEO made $1.6 million more last year than they did in 2020. The bonuses for 14 CEOs alone totaled $31.8 million.

    “While the wealthy CEOs further line their pockets, Americans are left to foot the bill as they are forced to make sacrifices to cover the high prices at the pump,” the report reads.

    This massive raise came during a year that saw enormous spikes in gas prices, which corporations blamed on inflation. The average price per gallon for all grades of gas in 2021 was $3.10, according to the Energy Information Administration, far higher than the pre-pandemic average price of $2.69.

    However, the new data suggests that high gas prices weren’t caused solely by inflation, but also by companies seeking to pump profits and executive salaries.

    “Americans will not soon forget that when they were struggling to fill their tanks, oil and gas companies made billions in record profits and decided to give that money to wealthy industry executives and shareholders rather than help consumers by stabilizing gas prices,” said Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig in a statement.

    “It’s time for Big Oil to stop lying about the Biden administration’s energy policies and quit using inflation and the crisis in Ukraine to cash in and line their pockets at our expense,” Herrig continued.

    While conservatives and the oil and gas industry took advantage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to call for an increase in drilling, experts say that there’s little that increasing drilling could do to affect prices currently, and that such measures would be detrimental to the climate. Instead, gas prices have stayed high over the past months because the industry is paying out shareholders in spades, and Wall Street investors don’t want the high profits to stop.

    The profits have indeed been high. Last month, Accountable.US found that 25 top oil and gas companies made a whopping $205 billion in profits last year as consumers struggled at the pump, with some families having to cut down on trips to run errands to save money. Executives at companies like Chevron and Shell said that 2021 was a banner year in terms of profits, and praised the high prices as a good thing for the companies.

    “By the end of 2021, we had one of our most successful years ever with return on capital employed approaching 10 percent, our highest since 2014,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said in an earnings call earlier this year.

    In response to what progressives are saying is corporate price gouging, lawmakers have introduced windfall profits bills to capture the high profits that oil and gas companies are currently raking in to discourage them from inflating prices; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) went a step further and introduced a bill that would capture 95 percent of windfall profits from not only the oil and gas industry but also corporations across sectors, like Amazon and Blackstone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Says He Wants to Fulfill His Campaign Promise to Cancel Student Debt

    President Joe Biden may soon fulfill a long-vaunted campaign promise to cancel some amount of student debt without action from Congress, which has become a major touchstone issue for progressives and Democratic lawmakers during Biden’s time in office.

    During a meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) on Tuesday, Biden said that he’s exploring options to cancel a substantial amount of student debt. He didn’t specify how much he’s looking to cancel, according to meeting participants — but his recent openness to the idea marks a decidedly different tone from his administration’s previous statements and relative silence on the issue.

    “The president never mentioned an amount nor did the president say that he was going to wipe out all student debt,” Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-California), who was present at the meeting, told CBS. “He did a dialogue with us about the differential between young people who went to public schools or private schools and we CHC members said he should focus on both. And he said, ‘Okay, good to know.’”

    When Cardenas told the president that the caucus supported canceling at least $10,000 of student debt through executive action, Cardenas said that Biden “smiled and said, ‘You’re going to like what I do on that, I’m looking to do something on that and I think you’re going to like what I do.’”

    Caucus members emphasized to the president that Latinx students are more likely to be impacted by student debt than their white counterparts. Black students are also disproportionately affected by student loan debt, with Black and Latinx students holding far more debt on average than white borrowers.

    Biden also hinted that he may be extending the student loan payment pause again, past the current expiration date at the end of August.

    Though Biden promised to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt per borrower on the campaign trail, meeting attendees said that he appears to be prepared to forgive more, as debt activists and lawmakers have urged him to do.

    “As far as the president going out and talking about student loan cancellation with different groups, I do think that’s a very good sign,” Cody Hounanian, Student Debt Crisis Center executive director, told CBS. “I think the president is starting to recognize that student debt cancellation is very popular.”

    Debt cancellation would be a major win for advocates and lawmakers who have been pushing Biden to follow up on his pledge since he took office. Experts say that Biden does have the legal authority to cancel student debt via executive order, but his administration has delayed action on the matter and even went so far as to hide a memo prepared by the Education Department on the legality of the issue.

    Activists say that the reason that Biden may be having a change of heart is because of the pressure he’s faced from the public and members of his own party. “Let’s be very clear: Biden did not suddenly have a change of heart on student debtors and our financial burdens. He was forced to have a change in political will because of our organizing and political pressure,” wrote the Debt Collective in response to the news about the meeting. “Debtors have power — keep pushing.”

    The Debt Collective emphasized that $10,000 isn’t enough to help many borrowers and that any cancellation should come without caveats — no means testing, no forms to fill out and no income cap.

    Lawmakers celebrated the news and urged Biden to take bold action on the issue. Biden “has the power to transform the lives of millions of Americans by canceling student debt,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). “The payment pause has been a lifeline — and it’s time to deliver permanent relief. Cancel student debt, Mr. President.”

    Polling indicates that student debt forgiveness is a popular issue, especially among young voters — a group from which Biden is currently losing support. A poll of voters aged 18 to 29 that was released on Monday from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School found that a whopping 85 percent of young Americans favor some form of government action on student debt, with a plurality of 38 percent saying that they want the government to cancel student debt for everyone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Delta Announces It Will Pay Flight Attendants During Boarding Amid Union Push

    In a major win for unionizing flight attendants, Delta Air Lines announced on Monday that it will begin paying its flight attendants during boarding as the company faces a renewed union drive backed by the largest flight attendants’ union in the country.

    This is a first for a major U.S. airline; U.S. airlines typically don’t pay their flight attendants during boarding, meaning that attendants are providing free labor up until the plane door closes. The new pay will begin on June 2, although attendants will only be paid half of their normal hourly rate.

    The airline will also increase its domestic boarding time from 35 minutes to 40 minutes for narrow-body flights, which the company says is to “add resiliency to our operation.”

    The flight attendants’ union, organized by Delta workers seeking representation from the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), took credit for the pay change, saying in a statement that it is “the direct result of our organizing — and a desperate attempt to prevent their other new boarding policy from creating the kind of anger that it deserves,” referring to the expanded boarding times.

    “As we get closer to filing for our union vote, management is getting nervous,” the union continued. “But this also shows that Delta could have been paying Flight Attendants for boarding all along. And while this is a positive change, Flight Attendants are still being forced to fly more often thanks to short staffing.”

    Delta also announced a raise of 4 percent for its employees earlier this year, which is less than the inflation rate of 7 percent last year. This is their first raise since 2019, despite dangerous conditions for airline workers due to both COVID and an increased amount of unruly passengers throughout the pandemic.

    Delta AFA has been in the midst of organizing since 2019. Delta workers have the lowest proportion of union members among major airlines, with less than 20 percent of its workforce in a union. It’s the only major airline in which flight attendants aren’t unionized; pilots make up the largest proportion of unionized workers within the airline.

    AFA has tried repeatedly to unionize Delta flight attendants, but has fallen short each time; most recently, workers narrowly lost the union by only about 300 votes out of about 20,000 flight attendants in 2010, after facing intimidation and other union-busting tactics from the company.

    Delta has continued its anti-union tactics during this union drive. In 2019, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) filed a complaint with a federal agency that oversees labor complaints within the airline industry, accusing the company of illegal union-busting tactics like retaliating against union activists and coercing workers into voting against the union. IAM was running a separate union drive from the AFA campaign that appears to be dormant now.

    The complaint came after the company made two posters trying to turn workers against joining a union by emphasizing the cost of union dues. “Union dues cost around $700 a year,” read one poster. “A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union.” The posters provoked ire online, including from figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

    The company has also sent anti-union emails and launched a website populated with anti-union talking points, likely taken from consultants hired to bust the union campaign. But AFA President Sara Nelson says that this campaign is different from previous campaigns to unionize the group, as it comes amidst a flurry of labor union activity from workers across the country, and a pandemic that has heightened workers’ awareness of their material conditions.

    “The biggest thing that’s different about this campaign is that’s [sic] really being driven and fueled by the next generation,” Nelson told labor reporter Nell McShane Wulfhart in a Time article. “It’s not as if we don’t have people who have been around for decades involved, but the activists who are working on it day in and day out, putting in real time, putting their faces out there and working hard on this is the next generation.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Can Reduce Prescription Drug Prices Without Congress, Warren Says

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) has urged the Biden administration to take action to lower prescription drug prices after a group of legal and public health experts found that the executive branch has the power to do so without approval from Congress.

    In a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, Warren wrote that the agency should heed the advice of experts and “use its executive powers to lower drive prices, as explicitly contemplated by the Department of Health and Human Services’s Comprehensive Plan for Addressing High Drug Prices.”

    The letter follows a note that experts sent to Warren last week detailing how existing laws give HHS legal tools to intervene when “excessive” drug prices are negatively affecting public health.

    “These tools can help the Administration break patent barriers, foster competition where currently there is none, and drive down prices. Critically, using them requires no additional congressional action,” the experts wrote.

    The experts, led by professors and legal students from Harvard, Yale and Columbia, pointed to a law known as “government patent use power,” which gives the government the authority to use a patented technology without a license; the Defense Department uses the law to procure technologies like bullets and night vision goggles, for instance. In the past, the government has used this law to purchase patented medicines at a lower cost, but lawmakers haven’t used it for this purpose since the 1970s, the experts wrote.

    “Today, the federal government could and should use this power to curb excessively high drug prices paid by the government,” they said. The government doesn’t need to jump through specific hoops to use the law, they wrote, and “it can simply buy patented drugs from a low-cost manufacturer, or it can manufacture drugs itself.” This could drastically lower the cost of drugs used by Medicare and Medicaid.

    The letter also cites a 1980 bill known as the Bayh-Dole Act, which was adopted to provide the American public access to inventions that were created using government funds and thus tax revenue.

    “[W]hen the government directly funds research that results in a patent, the Bayh-Dole Act gives the government two additional tools: a royalty-free license in that patent and a right of the government to ‘march in’ on the patent to ensure that the resulting products are ‘available to the public on reasonable terms,’” said the letter writers.

    The combined use of Bayh-Dole and the patent use power law would be especially powerful, they said, and could help to significantly lower drug prices and expand access to crucial drugs.

    President Joe Biden has previously called for action to lower prescription drug prices via his social spending bill, known as the Build Back Better Act. But the pharmaceutical industry was vehemently opposed to the drug price provision in the bill, lobbying hard against the measure and persuading some conservative Democrats to oppose its inclusion as well.

    Ultimately, the Build Back Better Act was killed by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and the prescription drug pricing plans died with it. Earlier this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) demanded that the Senate floor take up debate on his and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s (D-Minnesota) bill to allow Medicare to access lower drug prices, but the debate was blocked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).

    If the Biden administration takes executive action to lower drug prices, circumventing Congress on the issue altogether, it would likely be an enormously popular move. Last year, polling found that the public overwhelmingly supported Sanders’s proposal to give Medicare the ability to negotiate prescription drug prices, with 88 percent of people surveyed saying that they supported the proposal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Calls on Biden to Invite Starbucks, Amazon Union Workers to White House

    During a rally with unionizing Amazon workers, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called on President Joe Biden to do more to support unions, saying that the president should invite the labor organizers to the White House.

    In New York City on Sunday, speaking in front of a crowd of Amazon Labor Union (ALU) members and supporters along with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Sanders commended Biden for praising unions more in speeches and statements than previous presidents have, but said that the president should do more than just talk.

    “Does the [Biden] administration need to be doing more to support unions?” one member of the crowd asked.

    “Yes,” Sanders replied, to cheers from the crowd. “To his credit, Biden has talked more about unions than any other president in my lifetime. But talk is not enough.”

    “What he has got to do is start inviting these guys to the White House,” he continued, gesturing to the ALU organizers standing by the platform. “He’s got to invite the Starbucks workers to the White House, the other unions that are organizing all over this country, and make it clear that he is on their side and that he is going to do what he can to support labor organizing throughout this country.”

    In an interview with The New York Times ahead of the rally on Friday, Sanders said that he has made this suggestion directly to the White House, and that he has told the Biden administration to take the time to listen to the workers about their wants, needs, and how the White House can support them.

    Aside from flying to meet with both Amazon workers in New York and Starbucks workers in Virginia on Sunday, Sanders has also held virtual town halls with both groups of workers that were live streamed to the public, asking them to share their experiences with union busting at their respective organizations. He has also made moves to leverage his power as a senator to pressure executives to stop union busting.

    Biden has generally been supportive of labor unions during his time in office. Earlier this month, in a speech to labor leaders at a union conference, Biden signaled his support for Amazon workers who are in the midst of a unionizing campaign.

    He noted that his administration has created a task force that explores and executes ways to better support unions from the federal level, “to make sure the choice to join a union belongs to workers alone.” Then, he said, “and by the way, by the way: Amazon, here we come.” Later, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki walked back this statement, saying that the government wouldn’t be involved in supporting unionizing efforts by Amazon workers.

    On the campaign trail, Biden pledged to be the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” Though workers have been driving a major resurgence of the labor movement over the past year or so, there are still major roadblocks in union organizing that experts say could be eased by support from the White House.

    Even just calling attention to union busting by a company, as Starbucks workers have previously called for from lawmakers, could help garner support for workers’ efforts. However, Biden has yet to comment on the Starbucks union push, which has been an extraordinary force within the labor movement over the past months.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge Holds Trump in Contempt With Daily $10K Fine Over Financial Investigation

    On Monday, a New York Supreme Court judge held Donald Trump in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena from New York Attorney General Letitia James for financial records related to his business practices.

    The subpoena ordered Trump to turn over documents concerning personal statements about his company’s finances, documents regarding tax audits and information about insurance. The former president was supposed to comply with the order by March 31 — a deadline that had been agreed to by both parties — but refused to do so, claiming that he didn’t have the documents in question.

    Trump will now face a fine of $10,000 per day from the court, which will be filed on Tuesday, until he complies with the subpoena or legitimately proves that his legal team has no record of the documents that the subpoena sought. The investigators are also seeking information from three of Trump’s mobile devices and documents from specific locations within the Trump Organization, including ones located right outside of Trump’s office.

    “Mr. Trump, I know you take your business seriously and I take mine seriously. I hereby hold you in civil contempt and fine you $10,000 per day until you purge that contempt,” Judge Arthur Engoron said at the hearing.

    Trump’s attorney said that he plans on appealing the decision. He has previously denied any allegations of wrongdoing and called the investigation “unconstitutional.” His legal team filed a lawsuit late last year in hopes of stopping the inquiry.

    James’s office said earlier this month that Trump had begun complaining about the subpoena around the deadline. Trump had already missed a previous March 3 deadline to turn in the documents.

    “The judge’s order was crystal clear: Donald J. Trump must comply with our subpoena and turn over relevant documents to my office,” James said in a statement. “Instead of obeying a court order, Mr. Trump is trying to evade it. We are seeking the court’s immediate intervention because no one is above the law.”

    James’s office has been in the process of investigating Trump and his business’s finances since 2019. Earlier this year, the investigation uncovered a letter from accounting firm Mazars that cut ties with the Trump Organization, claiming that the company’s financial filings for the past year were no longer reliable and that they should be recanted.

    According to James, the investigation has also uncovered that Trump’s businesses often rely on fraudulent practices to mislead lenders and insurers and to make it seem as though Trump’s net worth is higher than it actually is.

    James has also subpoenaed testimony about the family’s business practices from Trump and two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump. They have appealed that subpoena and are waiting on the results of the appeal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Starbucks May Soon Face Legal Consequences for Union Busting

    In a blow to Starbucks’s anti-union campaign, labor officials are seeking relief for fired pro-union Starbucks workers in Arizona, and filed an injunction on Friday to force the company to reinstate the fired workers.

    The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that Starbucks illegally fired three workers, according to the filing prepared by NLRB regional director Cornele A. Overstreet. The three workers, Laila Dalton, Tyler Gillette and Alyssa Sanchez, composed nearly the entirety of the union’s organizing committee at their store in Phoenix, according to officials.

    The injunction would force the company to immediately reinstate the workers and expunge any disciplinary actions against them that were taken in order to illegally union bust, according to the NLRB. The company will also have to post the court order against them within their stores and have a high-level executive read it aloud to employees in the presence of a board official.

    If the injunction is successful, it will be a major blow to Starbucks’s anti-union campaign, which has led to the termination of at least 18 pro-union workers so far.

    “Employees have the fundamental right to choose whether or not they want to be represented by the union without restraint or coercion by their employer,” Overstreet said in a statement. “The faith of Starbucks employees nationwide in workplace democracy will not be restored unless these employees are immediately reinstated under the protection of a federal court order.”

    Overstreet is seeking the strongest relief available, an ability that is granted to the agency when labor officials find that the company has taken such extreme measures that the board would not be able to remedy the problems through normal actions.

    “Immediate injunctive relief is necessary to ensure that the Employer does not profit nationwide from its illegal conduct, to protect the employees’ Section 7 rights, to preserve the Board’s remedial power, and to effectuate the will of Congress,” Overstreet continued.

    The company denied the allegations, saying that workers were fired because they violated existing policies. However, pro-union workers have pointed out that the company often fires workers for offenses that wouldn’t normally be considered fireable or for policies that didn’t exist before.

    The union celebrated the filing. “We’re glad to see concrete and swift action by Regional Director Overstreet, in response to Starbucks’ unprecedented and shocking union-busting campaign,” Starbucks Workers United wrote in a press release. “Starbucks’ treatment of our fellow partners in Arizona mirrors its treatment of union supporters at stores across the country. As a result, we fully expect that this is the first of many future petitions the NLRB will pursue against Starbucks, until the company is held accountable for its violations of our right to organize.”

    In spite of Starbucks’s union-busting efforts, the union has been incredibly successful so far. On Monday, workers in Hopewell, New Jersey, voted unanimously to form a union at their store, marking the 30th unionized corporate-owned store in the campaign. As of the beginning of April, only eight stores had voted for the union so far, meaning that the union has nearly quadrupled the number of unionized stores this month alone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Warns Democrats They’ll Lose Midterms If They Don’t “Get Up and Deliver”

    In interviews on Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) warned Democrats that they need to make moves to protect and uplift the American people if they want to have a chance at winning in this year’s midterm elections, including taking steps like canceling student debt.

    On CNN and CBS, Warren said that Democrats need to “get up and deliver” on issues like corporate price gouging and banning Congress from trading stocks. As she did in an op-ed for The New York Times last week, Warren emphasized that student loans are a huge economic barrier for many families, and that millions of Americans aren’t ready for student loan payments to restart.

    “We’ve got less than 200 days until the election, and American families are hurting. Our job while we are here in the majority is to deliver on behalf of those families,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding, “If we don’t get up and deliver, I think Democrats are going to lose.”

    Warren emphasized that Democrats need to act on issues that are actively affecting average families. “Democrats win when Democrats are in touch with the American people and what’s happening to them,” she said, pointing out that many families are struggling to afford groceries or fill up their gas tanks in order to get to work. “Instead of looking backwards, let’s look forward. Let’s get done what we can get done for the American people who elected us.”

    The Massachusetts Democrat confirmed on CNN that she would not be running for president again in 2024, as President Joe Biden will presumably run again. Last week, a leaked memo revealed that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has not ruled out running again in 2024 if Biden doesn’t put in a reelection bid.

    Warren also said that Democrats could easily act on student debt between now and the midterms. “Look, we know that the president has the authority to cancel student loan debt and the best way we know that is because President Obama did it, President Trump did it, and President Biden has now done it repeatedly,” she said. “The power is clearly there.”

    Indeed, Data for Progress and Rise polling has found that, in key battleground states, nearly half of likely voters say that they would vote in 2022 if Biden took action to cancel some amount of student loans. The polling finds that, if student debt is canceled, Democrats could gain six points among young voters in those states.

    Warren’s call to action comes as Biden is swiftly losing ground among young voters, a crucial group that voted for Biden by a huge margin in 2020. Inaction on student debt could also affect Biden’s chances in the 2024 presidential race.

    Polling by Intelligent.com last month found that roughly one-fifth of Democrats say they wouldn’t vote for Biden in the next presidential election if he doesn’t take action on student loans, with about a third of Americans saying that they are dissatisfied with how Biden has handled the student loan crisis so far.

    Biden has refused to follow up on his campaign promise to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt for each borrower. He recently extended the student loan payment pause and moved millions of borrowers out of default status, but progressive lawmakers and debt activists say that he still needs to do more.

    Canceling student debt “would lift the economic outlook for too many borrowers who still weren’t able to get a college diploma, for the millions of female borrowers who shoulder about two-thirds of all student loan debt, and for Black and Hispanic borrowers, a higher percentage of whom take on debt to attend college compared to white students, and have a harder time paying it off after school,” Warren wrote last week. “With the stroke of a pen, the president could make massive strides to close gender and racial wealth gaps.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Slams Supreme Court for Limiting Puerto Ricans’ Access to Disability Checks

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pushed back on a Supreme Court decision that limits Puerto Ricans’ access to government benefits on Thursday, condemning the decision for advancing the U.S.’s colonialist grip over the territory.

    In an 8 to 1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Ricans do not have the constitutional right to access the same government disability benefits as people living in the U.S. mainland. The ruling rejected an appeal from a Puerto Rican resident who was sued for $25,000 by the government for receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments when he moved to Puerto Rico.

    Ocasio-Cortez, whose family is from Puerto Rico, decried the decision. “2022 Imperialist Neo-colony Vibes: when my cousins can be drafted into war by a government they don’t even have a right to vote for and denies them benefits, yet that same government can exploit their land into a tax haven for crypto billionaires and tax evaders,” she wrote on Twitter.

    She went on to deflect comments from those who say that granting Puerto Rico statehood would solve the issue. “[B]efore people start trying to explain this away as a status/statehood issue, ask yourself why *any* U.S. citizen is denied the right to vote because of where they live,” she said.

    “Even U.S. citizens living ABROAD have the right to vote but U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico cannot. It’s colonialism,” she concluded, adding, “And in the case of D.C., racism.”

    As Puerto Rican advocates have pointed out, the Supreme Court ruling is the result of a hypocritical decision by President Joe Biden to continue former President Donald Trump’s argument that the territory’s residents shouldn’t receive SSI disability payments. This is despite Biden’s statement on the campaign trail that specifically condemned Trump’s appeal of an earlier decision that Puerto Ricans were eligible for the program.

    “[Biden] could have prevented this and chose not to fulfill his campaign commitment. Passing the buck to Congress is not an excuse,” wrote Power 4 Puerto Rico, a group made of diaspora allies that advocates for Puerto Rican self-determination. “What Puerto Rico needs is Admin and Congress to stop imposing, looking away from economic roadblocks like the Jones Act and austerity program.” The Jones Act was the 1917 bill that established Puerto Rico as a territory of the U.S.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only dissenter in the Court and the only justice of Puerto Rican descent, wrote in her dissent that the majority opinion “is utterly irrational.”

    “Congress’ decision to deny to the U. S. citizens of Puerto Rico a social safety net that it provides to almost all other U.S. citizens is especially cruel given those citizens’ dire need for aid,” she wrote. “Equal treatment of citizens should not be left to the vagaries of the political process.”

    As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, Puerto Rico has been increasingly exploited by wealthy people as a tax haven; government officials have placed incentives for wealthy people who normally reside stateside to hide their money in Puerto Rico in order to dodge taxes. A recent move to restructure the island’s debt — known as the Plan of Adjustment under the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) — will come at the cost of citizens and economic stability, and will serve mainly to benefit foreign capitalists, Truthout reported earlier this year.

    While some Democrats have pushed for statehood for Puerto Rico, the New York lawmaker has pushed instead for Puerto Ricans to be able to determine their own path for the island. Last March, Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill that would create a pathway for self-determination, calling for the creation of a “status convention” that would allow Puerto Ricans to decide on whether or not they want to become a state, become independent from the U.S., or otherwise.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Just 2.5 Miles From Corporate Headquarters, Starbucks Roastery Votes to Unionize

    Starbucks workers at a flagship roastery in the company’s hometown of Seattle voted to form a union with Starbucks Workers United on Thursday, joining 25 other Starbucks stores that are currently unionized.

    The roastery, which the union says is only 2.5 miles as the crow flies from the company’s corporate headquarters in downtown Seattle, is one of three flagship locations in the country. Workers voted 38 to 27 in favor of the union. The Seattle location is the second roastery to unionize; workers at the New York City roastery voted to form a union earlier this month.

    “This vote signals something that the Roastery organizers always knew to be true. That the bonds we share between workers are our greatest strength,” Seattle roastery employee Brennen Collins said in a statement. “We can resist and thrive, even among a storm of disinformation and fear-mongering perpetrated against our best interests.”

    Starbucks roasteries offer specialty drinks, food and merchandise to customers and also roast and ship coffee to regular stores. The company describes the roasteries as being like “If Willy Wonka had built the ultimate coffee shop,” and the locations are especially important to CEO Howard Schultz.

    “This Roastery is the fulfillment of a decades-long dream,” Schultz said when the Seattle roastery opened in 2014. “Everything we’ve ever done has led us to this point. This is the moment of the next generation of Starbucks.”

    The union has filed petitions in over 200 stores so far, covering more than 5,000 employees. More filings come in daily, and the number of unionized stores is rapidly increasing.

    The location is the second Starbucks store in the company’s hometown to unionize; last month, workers at the Broadway and Denny location voted unanimously to form a union. The location is just 10 minutes away by car from Starbucks’s corporate headquarters, and workers say they often see corporate employees come in and offer their support for the union drive.

    While workers have offered their support, however, management has been less than friendly toward the union and the worker-organizers.

    “Union-busting has become synonymous with Starbucks,” the union wrote in a statement. “Partners from stores that petition to join Workers United are prepared for the deluge of union-busting tactics that the company employs, including holding captive audience meetings, threatening loss of benefits, and spreading of misleading information to sow fear and confusion. The Seattle Roastery was no different.”

    The union noted that it has filed nearly 80 charges against Starbucks so far, alleging that the company has illegally interfered with the union drive and that it has retaliated against pro-union workers. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that the company has indeed violated federal labor laws on multiple of these charges so far.

    Though workers have protested against Starbucks’s union-busting tactics, Schultz is still dissatisfied with the results of the company’s anti-union campaign. In a leaked video with management from last week, as obtained by More Perfect Union, Schultz said that the pro-union workers are “some outside force” that is “trying desperately to disrupt our company.”

    “It’s an American right of workers not to unionize and to [instead] embrace the values and the culture of his or her company,” Schultz said in the hour-long conference. He said that it’s time for managers to step up their anti-union practices to make workers “understand what it would really mean to vote for a union.”

    The company recently filed its first unfair labor practice complaint against the union, painting pro-union workers as extremely aggressive and claiming that they made threats to bully other workers into supporting the union. Workers say that these allegations are patently untrue; worker-organizer Brian Murray wrote that the allegations are a “gross misrepresentation at best” of what he’s seen from pro-union workers, and that the company is only “doubling down on lies and threats” as more stores win their unions.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Is Traveling to Rally With Amazon and Starbucks Workers This Weekend

    This Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is traveling to both New York and Virginia in order to meet with unionizing Amazon workers and Starbucks workers on the same day.

    In New York City, Sanders will be meeting with Amazon Labor Union (ALU) organizers and workers, ALU President Christian Smalls announced on Twitter on Wednesday.

    “The workers [with Amazon Labor Union] are taking on one of the most powerful companies in the world and one of the wealthiest men in America,” Sanders said. “I’m proud to stand in solidarity with them and support their fight for dignity on the job. See you on Sunday!”

    The face-to-face meeting comes after an organizing call between Amazon workers and Sanders held earlier this month in celebration of ALU’s recent win at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York. Sanders praised the workers for their campaign, which he said showed that workers are in the midst of waging “a national, sweeping movement” for better working conditions and worker solidarity.

    Also on Sunday, Sanders will travel to Richmond, Virginia, to rally with Starbucks Workers United. The rally, called Unity Fest, was announced about a month ago and will also feature live music from local bands.

    Starbucks workers’ union recently swept Richmond, winning five union elections in one day, all by large margins. There are now roughly 25 unionized Starbucks stores in the country, with more union election results coming in weekly.

    These wins come as Starbucks has been attacking its employees across the country, despite findings from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that the company’s practice of retaliating against pro-union workers in places like Memphis and Phoenix is a violation of federal labor laws.

    “The movement of workers demanding dignity on the job wins again,” Sanders wrote on Tuesday. “Congratulations to Starbucks workers in Richmond on your vote to unionize! I will see you Sunday!”

    Sanders has supported unionizing workers in union campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, and beyond, especially as the labor movement has seen a surge of activity over the past year. In February, Sanders highlighted Starbucks workers’ struggles in a town hall and last month wrote a letter to CEO Howard Schultz demanding that he obey federal labor laws and step out of the way of unionizing workers.

    “At a time of growing income and wealth inequality, workers are fighting back and unionizing — at Amazon, Starbucks, universities and hospitals. They are right,” wrote Sanders on Wednesday. “We need an economy that works for all, not just billionaires.”

    Indeed, workers are fueling a renewed push for unions across the country. According to NLRB data, union filings have increased by 57 percent over roughly the past six months. Unions are increasingly popular in the U.S. One recent poll found that 75 percent of Americans support Amazon workers’ fight for a union, while Gallup polling last year found that public support for unions is at the highest level it’s been since 1965.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • First Apple Store Files for Union With at Least 6 Other Campaigns Underway

    Workers at an Apple store in Atlanta, Georgia, have filed for a union, becoming the first in the nation to do so after reporters found earlier this year that Apple employees in at least seven stores are in the midst of union organizing.

    The workers have filed for representation with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) — specifically, the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, or the CODE-CWA campaign, which is aimed at unionizing tech and video game workers. If they successfully unionize, they will be the first union among the company’s 272 retail stores in the U.S. The union would include roughly 107 workers in the store.

    According to Vice, 70 percent of workers at the store, located in the Cumberland Mall, have signed union cards — a far larger proportion of the workers than the 30 percent needed for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold an election. Only a simple majority of votes is needed to win a union election, which is scheduled for the Apple workers in early May.

    This marks a major milestone for workers amid a watershed moment in the labor movement. If the workers unionize, they will join workers from other major companies that are household names, including REI, Amazon and Starbucks, who have successfully formed unions just in the past few months. In unionizing under the CODE-CWA campaign, the Apple employees also join fellow workers in the tech sector, like those at Google and Activision Blizzard.

    At least six other stores are in the midst of union organizing, suggesting that there could be a nationwide appetite for unionizing Apple stores. Apple employees at a store in Grand Central Station in New York City recently announced that they’re seeking to unionize under Workers United using the name “Fruit Stand Workers United.” They are in the process of gathering enough signatures to petition for an election.

    Organizers hope that the Atlanta union will help set off a wave of union filings across the country, much like the union campaign currently being waged by Starbucks workers. According to Genius Bar worker Derrick Bowles, workers were inspired to unionize after seeing Amazon workers organize their campaign in Bessemer, Alabama. Though Amazon employees’ first union election failed — due to illegal tampering from the company, the NLRB ruled — Apple Workers Union was inspired by their efforts.

    “Right now, I think, is the right time because we simply see momentum swinging the way of workers,” Bowles told Bloomberg Law. “As we sat back and re-evaluated, what we realized is that we love being at Apple — and leaving Apple, that’s not something any of us wants to do. But improving it is something we wanted to do.”

    Starting pay for workers at the Cumberland Mall store is about $20 an hour, which workers say isn’t enough to live on in Atlanta. The union plans to ask for wages to be raised to at least $28 an hour and for wage raises to match inflation and reflect high profits that the company is reporting. For fiscal year 2021, Apple reported record revenues, with a net income of $94.7 billion — up a whopping 48 percent over the previous year.

    According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator, a living wage in Cobb County, where the mall is located, is about $17 an hour for a single adult with no children and $31 an hour for a single adult with one child; however, this data was calculated between 2020 and 2021, and surging inflation rates may have raised those numbers.

    Apple makes a significant amount of its revenue through its brick and mortar stores; as of 2019, the company was making roughly 30 percent of its overall revenue from its retail stores. Workers say that managers at the Grand Central Station store are trying to convince workers that there’s no need for a union, and that the company has emphasized its workers pay and benefits in response to the union campaign.

    “Somebody has got to be the first to do something,” Bowles told Bloomberg Law. “Being first doesn’t matter to us — doing it is what matters to us. And if we have to be first, we will be first.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.