Hold On, I'm Comin'.

It's where my head is heading.

We have the ability to have those fights on offense under a Biden presidency while we are likely to be almost entirely on defense under a second Trump adfarm-near-me/">ministration.

It's a sensible plan, seeing as for a lefty like me, there is nothing whatever to recommend Biden apart from who he is not. Honesty is good policy in such an instance.

A Militant Union’s Strategic Case for Joe Biden, by John Nichols (The Nation)

Instead of portraying Biden as “a savior,” the United Electrical union argues for beating Trump and then pressuring the Democrats.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, an 84-year-old independent union with a history of prioritizing working-class solidarity over party politics, has come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to level with the 35,000 workers it represents in manufacturing industries and public- and private-sector jobs.

UE is not feigning enthusiasm for Biden. Instead, in a stark assessment of the race issued just before the traditional Labor Day pivot into the fall campaign, the union’s general executive board acknowledged that “working people deserve a government, and a president, who will stand up for them against the corporate onslaught of the past several decades. Under both Republican and Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministrations, greedy corporations have destroyed good jobs, attacked our unions and devastated our communities. We have to be honest that the 2020 elections will not deliver that president.”

Unions often go overboard when it comes to talking up Democratic nominees. But UE officials are taking a different tack as they communicate with workers in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“We are clear that Biden is no savior, and will likely seek to implement the same kind of corporate-friendly policies as previous Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton,” admits the union statement. But, it adds, there is also clarity about something else: “The working class cannot afford four more years of Trump.”

That’s not a typical union endorsement. In fact, says UE general president Carl Rosen, “We do not consider this to be an endorsement of Joe Biden by UE but instead that it is a strategic recommendation to our members and to working people in general that they vote for Biden to remove Donald Trump from office.”

Fire in the Hole.

Just a wee bit of clarity, then some music, and finally a benediction. The content herewith is derived from past posts.

Labor Day is May 1, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Today is a boss's holiday.

 ... Tragically, our labor movement was never strong enough to buck the tyranny of capitalism for good. And today, with union membership in dramatic decline and workers under sustained attack from the political establishment, this militant past often feels like a distant, even irretrievable, memory.

But American workers did contribute at least one lasting legacy to the international movement for working-class liberation — a workers’ holiday, celebrating the ideal of international solidarity, and eagerly anticipating the day when workers might rise together to take control of their own lives and provide for their own well-being.

That holiday is May Day, not Labor Day.

---

Fathom the note on Woody Guthrie's guitar, and follow the link to hear the songs.

Top Ten Labor Day Songs, by Peter Rothberg (The Nation)

In honor of Labor Day, I’ve revised a previous attempt at the impossible task of naming the best songs ever written about working people. The list is highly debatable; songs about work and working people cut across genres and generations. I know it’s a travesty to neglect “Which Side Are You On?” and Johnny Paycheck’s classic “Take This Job and Shove It.” It also seems impossible that I’ve excluded Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Nina Simone, and John Mellencamp, and given such short shrift to the rich history of punk rock odes to the insanity of wage slavery. Hopefully, these songs will get people thinking about their own favorite musical celebrations of the working condition.

Dan Canon's congressional campaign was in full swing on Labor Day, 2017, and the candidate (he lost in the 2018 primary) had cogent thoughts about Labor Day. Well, it's about time someone around here did, and consequently, I believe they're worth repeating.

---

A couple of thoughts about Labor Day:

I've represented workers against big business here in my community for a decade now. Union folks don't often get to me, because they have a line of job protection that most American workers don't have. Most of the employment protections non-union folks *do* have were also a direct result of the labor movement. Overtime pay, workplace safety rules, anti-retaliation provisions - these are all thanks to unions, and affect most workers whether they've ever paid dues or not.

The issues brought to the fore by labor unions are more important now than ever. As plenty of people have rightly pointed out, our insane wealth gap has just emboldened the rich to take even more, not to generously lavish the working class with raises and pensions, because almost no one is telling them they can't. Labor unions tell them they can't. So oligarchs over the last decade or so have been pretty brazen about trying to break the back of organized labor as a whole. They keep the concentration of wealth at the top from getting even worse, and the top is pretty adamant that they'd *like* for it to get worse.

But it's too simplistic to say that the effort to gut unions is just based on greed. It's also part and parcel of the GOP/new-American-fascist agenda. Down here, if we are organized, we are a threat to the top. The more and better we are organized, the more of a threat we pose. And so naturally, the more divided we are, the less a threat we pose to an increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top. In fact, if we are very divided, we might not even notice such concentration at all. We might deny that it exists. We might think it doesn't affect us. We might not have time to care.

This is why there's a concerted effort to divide us up. Black v. white, Christian v. Muslim, straight v. gay, cis v. trans, etc. It makes us disorganized. Unfocused. Weak.

Where would you start a campaign of disorganization, were you to run one? Who would be among your primary targets? I bet one would be: the folks who have already known how to organize and get results for more than a century.

That's the reason we see our friends, families, and neighbors in the labor movement under attack. It's not just about making a few more dollars at the expense of someone else's hard work. It's about perpetuating divisions and preventing the amalgamation and galvanization of those of us down here below.
Let's all buy a drink for a union member and tell 'em we've got their backs. They've had ours for more than a hundred years.

Labor Day 2019: It SHOULD be honored on May 1. Today is a boss's holiday, but we'll celebrate with songs about working people, and thoughts by Dan Canon.

Just a wee bit of clarity, then some music, and finally a benediction. The content herewith is derived from past posts.

Labor Day is May 1, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Today is a boss's holiday.

 ... Tragically, our labor movement was never strong enough to buck the tyranny of capitalism for good. And today, with union membership in dramatic decline and workers under sustained attack from the political establishment, this militant past often feels like a distant, even irretrievable, memory.

But American workers did contribute at least one lasting legacy to the international movement for working-class liberation — a workers’ holiday, celebrating the ideal of international solidarity, and eagerly anticipating the day when workers might rise together to take control of their own lives and provide for their own well-being.

That holiday is May Day, not Labor Day.

---

Fathom the note on Woody Guthrie's guitar, and follow the link to hear the songs.

Top Ten Labor Day Songs, by Peter Rothberg (The Nation)

In honor of Labor Day, I’ve revised a previous attempt at the impossible task of naming the best songs ever written about working people. The list is highly debatable; songs about work and working people cut across genres and generations. I know it’s a travesty to neglect “Which Side Are You On?” and Johnny Paycheck’s classic “Take This Job and Shove It.” It also seems impossible that I’ve excluded Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Nina Simone, and John Mellencamp, and given such short shrift to the rich history of punk rock odes to the insanity of wage slavery. Hopefully, these songs will get people thinking about their own favorite musical celebrations of the working condition.

Dan Canon's congressional campaign was in full swing on Labor Day, 2017, and the candidate (he lost in the 2018 primary) had cogent thoughts about Labor Day. Well, it's about time someone around here did, and consequently, I believe they're worth repeating.

---

A couple of thoughts about Labor Day:

I've represented workers against big business here in my community for a decade now. Union folks don't often get to me, because they have a line of job protection that most American workers don't have. Most of the employment protections non-union folks *do* have were also a direct result of the labor movement. Overtime pay, workplace safety rules, anti-retaliation provisions - these are all thanks to unions, and affect most workers whether they've ever paid dues or not.

The issues brought to the fore by labor unions are more important now than ever. As plenty of people have rightly pointed out, our insane wealth gap has just emboldened the rich to take even more, not to generously lavish the working class with raises and pensions, because almost no one is telling them they can't. Labor unions tell them they can't. So oligarchs over the last decade or so have been pretty brazen about trying to break the back of organized labor as a whole. They keep the concentration of wealth at the top from getting even worse, and the top is pretty adamant that they'd *like* for it to get worse.

But it's too simplistic to say that the effort to gut unions is just based on greed. It's also part and parcel of the GOP/new-American-fascist agenda. Down here, if we are organized, we are a threat to the top. The more and better we are organized, the more of a threat we pose. And so naturally, the more divided we are, the less a threat we pose to an increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top. In fact, if we are very divided, we might not even notice such concentration at all. We might deny that it exists. We might think it doesn't affect us. We might not have time to care.

This is why there's a concerted effort to divide us up. Black v. white, Christian v. Muslim, straight v. gay, cis v. trans, etc. It makes us disorganized. Unfocused. Weak.

Where would you start a campaign of disorganization, were you to run one? Who would be among your primary targets? I bet one would be: the folks who have already known how to organize and get results for more than a century.

That's the reason we see our friends, families, and neighbors in the labor movement under attack. It's not just about making a few more dollars at the expense of someone else's hard work. It's about perpetuating divisions and preventing the amalgamation and galvanization of those of us down here below.
Let's all buy a drink for a union member and tell 'em we've got their backs. They've had ours for more than a hundred years.

The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 19: Department heads, insurance peddlers, duffers and a few other odds and ends from Gahan's long and winding money trail.

Previously: The Jeff Gahan Money Machine, Part 18: Clark Dietz, CD PAC top Gahan's "Quality of Distant Corporate Donors" chart.

Some people scuba dive, but during the coming weeks we'll be plumbing the depths revealed amid eight years of the Committee to Elect Gahan's CFA-4 campaign finance reports. Strap in, folks -- and don't forget those air(head) sickness bags.

A few thousand dollars here, a few more there ... fish bowl at the fundraiser, manila envelope under the mattress ... multiply the bounty by eight lucrative annual fundraising cycles ... and pretty soon, we're talking about real money.

The heavy hitters have been revealed. Here are six mid-range donors, their cumulative totals, and a pleasant golfing digression.

Lemor Dowell, New Albany Heating & Cooling
New Albany resident and business
Longtime Democratic Party fundraiser, shadowy back alley eminence grise with a given name impossible for the campaign treasurer to spell correctly on a consistent basis.
Total: $9,200

Edward and Dana Culpepper Cooper, Culpepper Group
Out of towners
Insurance and all-purpose local notoriety (formerly of Maverick, yet another Neace Lukens connection)
Total: $8,600

Lochmueller Group, Dean Boerste
Out of towners
Evansville-based engineering and wastewater consultants. The fiefdom of Dean Boerste, described to the Green Mouse as "the Warren Nash of Tell City." Ouch.
Total: $5,750

David and Karen Wood
Out of towners
Ambiguous financial planners in Louisville. Perhaps Big Daddy G needs a retirement savings plan for all of Clark Dietz PAC's and HWC's easy money.
Total: $5,500
---
Ecotech (Robert E. Lee and Bryan Slade)
Out of towners
Garbage collection and purported recycling.
Total: $4,050 in nine installments over the years

Ironically, at the Covered Bridge Golf Course web site there's a testimonial by Ecotech's Bryan Slade about the great success of a corporate golf outing. In 2015 both Robert Iezzi (Covered Bridge CEO) and the legendary Frank Urban "Fuzzy" Zoeller Jr. dropped $400 into the GahAnTM -- and also in 2015, with Gahan having surreptitiously funded a renovation for Valley View Golf Course, Laurie Kraft of Valley View handed back $650 to the mayor. Golfing combined total: $1,050.

And not to omit our good friends at Flaherty & Collins
Out of towners
Indy-based nationwide developers of apartments; with the help of Gahan's TIF subsidies and sewer tap-in waivers, Flaherty and Collins built the Breakwater -- twice.
Total: $2,250

---

You may have been wondering about unions, a traditional source of funding for Democratic candidates. There have been a few union donations to Gahan, most of them made during 2011 and 2012, and the most recent in 2015. It's a relatively paltry sum, leading observers to speculate just how helpful Gahan's "economic boom" has been for unions.

Perhaps the mayor's current efforts to squelch unionization at the wastewater treatment plant are a more accurate barometer of his (un)helpfulness to working people.

• Carpenter’s Union 12-10 United Brotherhood Local 613
• Int’l Brotherhood of Electrical Workers & PAC
• Indiana State Building & Construction Trades Council Legislative Fund
• Indiana UAW SAC Joint
• General Drivers, Warehousemen & Helpers #89
• Laborer’s Intl Union of New Albany
• Plumbers & Pipefitters Local 502

Total: $6,350

---

The single biggest personal contribution from someone who remains untraceable is $3,500 from Adam U. Kahn in 2014. Nothing before or since.

We have absolutely know idea who he is or why a guy from New York City would give this much money to a hack politician from New Albany.

---

It should be obvious by now that nepotism is a huge part of New Albany politics during Our Time of Extractive Gahanism. As such, donor roles sometimes overlap and become intertwined, as with the family members of a son-in-law appointed to a city job, the brother-in-law assigned to a board, and so on.

Just the same, here are two lists of people who work for Gahan and also give to Gahan. They're the ones who'd prefer all paradigms remain static.

First, the department heads, appointees, board members and various other higher-ups.

Terry Ginkins ... NAHA board member 8,525

(Stan) Robison Law Office ... City Attorney 5,250

David Duggins ... Redevelopment/New Albany Housing Authority 3,146

Linda Moeller ... Controller 2,398
William Todd Bailey ... Police Chief 2,000

Edward J. Wilkinson ... Sewer Board 1,860
Shane Gibson ... City Attorney 1,295
Steve Bonifer ... City-County Bldg board 1,215
Warren Nash ... Party goon, Board of Works 1,049
Cheryl Cotner (Bailey) ... Board of Works, mayoral secretary 1,000

Carl Malysz ... (Ex) economic development 700
Bob Norwood ... NAHA board member 350
John Brinkworth (Ex) sewer board 300
Matthew Juliot ... Fire chief 300
Scott Wood ... Planning & zoning 300
Michael Hall ... Non-communications stifler 250
Nathan Grimes ... Sewer board member 200
Joshua Staten ... Redevelopment director 150
Tonya Fischer ... Economic development 100
Alicia Meredith ... Parks Director 100
John Rosenbarger ... Planning & zoning 100
Anthony Toran ... NAHA appointee 100

Total: $30,768

Then, a handful of rank-and file; most of them are police and fire. I've combined them, and may have missed one or two: Seven donors, 11 separate donations over an 8-year period.

Total: $2,625

---

The preceding may seem like small totals compared with the bigger corporate donors, and yet in this installment we see just shy of $80,000 in donations, or $18% of Gahan's $438,000 from 2011-2018.

Coming next in Part 20, a summary. Then we move to the expenditures side of the ledger.

#FireGahan2019

Rebuttals are welcome and will be published unaltered -- so don't forget spellcheck. If you have supplementary information to offer about any of this, please let us know and we'll update the page. The preceding was gleaned entirely from public records, with the addresses of "individuals" removed.

Just one of those "no shit, Sherlock" moments: "Sickouts and Strike Threats Stopped the Government Shutdown."

Workers organizing to further their own interests, rather than those of the oligarchs.

What a concept.

Sickouts and Strike Threats Stopped the Government Shutdown, by Ben Beckett (Jacobin)

Just last night, there was no end to the government shutdown in sight. But when airport workers started calling in sick and raising the threat of a strike, everything suddenly changed.

As recently as Thursday evening, elected officials were engaged in theatrical, go-nowhere resolutions with no real chance of reopening the government.

But by Friday afternoon, President Trump abruptly announced a deal to reopen the government, at least temporarily. What changed in less than twenty-four hours? Massively disruptive worker sickouts and the threat of strikes.

Earlier this week, Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) international president Sara Nelson raised the possibility of a general strike to fight the shutdown, and a group of aviation unions issued a dire warning that the aviation system’s safety was degrading.

Then on Friday, the second missed payday of the shutdown, a significant number of air traffic controllers called out from work, temporarily grounding all flights at New York’s LaGuardia airport and causing flight delays across the East Coast. A source inside the White House told CNN Friday that the flight delays were a “contributing catalyst” to the hasty deal ...

Becker: "What’s happening at Four Roses has implications for both the broader labor movement, as well as future generations of American workers."

Photo credit: WKYT.

I didn't know an international brewing company (Kirin) owned Four Roses.

In Japanese, "kirin" can refer to giraffes, or to Qilin, the mythical hooved Chinese chimerical creatures. Kirin Brewery is named after the latter.

Whether it's Japanese or Jamaican is of little consequence.

The crux to me is that while celebrated craft brewers can be small and privately owned, tending not to be unionized, the doctrine of "bourbonism" generally rests on the investments of larger corporate conglomerates.

Just an observation: there'll come a time, craft beer nation.

Here's why the workers' strike at Four Roses has bigger implications, by Richard Becker (Courier Journal)

Production work came to a halt at the Four Roses Distillery in Lawrenceburg on Sept. 7 and at the company’s bottling facility in Nelson County. The workers, who are represented by three different unions, have been in prolonged and fractious negotiations with the company for several weeks. After the company issued its “last, best, and final offer,” the workers nearly-unanimously rejected it and voted to go on strike.

But this is no ordinary strike. What’s happening at Four Roses has implications for both the broader labor movement, as well as future generations of American workers.

Kirin Brewery Company, the parent company of Four Roses, has proposed a partial “two-tier” contract, in which future workers will have less paid time off than current workers. Two-tier union contracts have become increasingly common over the past several decades, but have only recently begun to capture the public’s attention. If you’ve followed the brewing unrest at UPS over their contract, you may have already heard of the concept. Essentially, a two-tier contract creates a second level of benefits and/or wages for workers hired after the effective date of the contract, while wages and benefits for current workers remain generally the same.

Obviously, companies seek to implement such systems in order to cut labor costs over the long term. And the evil genius of them is that their likelihood of passing in a vote by the workers is quite high because in theory, current workers have nothing to lose from such a setup. That’s what makes these workers’ resistance to the company’s proposal so uniquely selfless. These workers understand that two-tier contracts are potentially devastating for the survival of a vibrant American labor movement ...

Labor Day should be May 1. Today is a boss's holiday, but we'll celebrate with songs about working people, and thoughts by Dan Canon.

Just a wee bit of clarity, then some music, and finally a benediction. The content herewith is derived from past posts.

Labor Day is May 1, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Today is a boss's holiday.

 ... Tragically, our labor movement was never strong enough to buck the tyranny of capitalism for good. And today, with union membership in dramatic decline and workers under sustained attack from the political establishment, this militant past often feels like a distant, even irretrievable, memory.

But American workers did contribute at least one lasting legacy to the international movement for working-class liberation — a workers’ holiday, celebrating the ideal of international solidarity, and eagerly anticipating the day when workers might rise together to take control of their own lives and provide for their own well-being.

That holiday is May Day, not Labor Day.

---

Fathom the note on Woody Guthrie's guitar, and follow the link to hear the songs.

Top Ten Labor Day Songs, by Peter Rothberg (The Nation)

In honor of Labor Day, I’ve revised a previous attempt at the impossible task of naming the best songs ever written about working people. The list is highly debatable; songs about work and working people cut across genres and generations. I know it’s a travesty to neglect “Which Side Are You On?” and Johnny Paycheck’s classic “Take This Job and Shove It.” It also seems impossible that I’ve excluded Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Nina Simone, and John Mellencamp, and given such short shrift to the rich history of punk rock odes to the insanity of wage slavery. Hopefully, these songs will get people thinking about their own favorite musical celebrations of the working condition.

Dan Canon's congressional campaign was in full swing on Labor Day, 2017, and the candidate (he lost in the 2018 primary) had cogent thoughts about Labor Day. Well, it's about time someone around here did, and consequently, I believe they're worth repeating.

---

A couple of thoughts about Labor Day:

I've represented workers against big business here in my community for a decade now. Union folks don't often get to me, because they have a line of job protection that most American workers don't have. Most of the employment protections non-union folks *do* have were also a direct result of the labor movement. Overtime pay, workplace safety rules, anti-retaliation provisions - these are all thanks to unions, and affect most workers whether they've ever paid dues or not.

The issues brought to the fore by labor unions are more important now than ever. As plenty of people have rightly pointed out, our insane wealth gap has just emboldened the rich to take even more, not to generously lavish the working class with raises and pensions, because almost no one is telling them they can't. Labor unions tell them they can't. So oligarchs over the last decade or so have been pretty brazen about trying to break the back of organized labor as a whole. They keep the concentration of wealth at the top from getting even worse, and the top is pretty adamant that they'd *like* for it to get worse.

But it's too simplistic to say that the effort to gut unions is just based on greed. It's also part and parcel of the GOP/new-American-fascist agenda. Down here, if we are organized, we are a threat to the top. The more and better we are organized, the more of a threat we pose. And so naturally, the more divided we are, the less a threat we pose to an increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top. In fact, if we are very divided, we might not even notice such concentration at all. We might deny that it exists. We might think it doesn't affect us. We might not have time to care.

This is why there's a concerted effort to divide us up. Black v. white, Christian v. Muslim, straight v. gay, cis v. trans, etc. It makes us disorganized. Unfocused. Weak.

Where would you start a campaign of disorganization, were you to run one? Who would be among your primary targets? I bet one would be: the folks who have already known how to organize and get results for more than a century.

That's the reason we see our friends, families, and neighbors in the labor movement under attack. It's not just about making a few more dollars at the expense of someone else's hard work. It's about perpetuating divisions and preventing the amalgamation and galvanization of those of us down here below.
Let's all buy a drink for a union member and tell 'em we've got their backs. They've had ours for more than a hundred years.

Solidarity with the Communications Workers of America union members picketing AT&T on Spring Street.

I was walking up Spring Street earlier and stopped to chat with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union members who are on strike and picketing AT&T. I'm not positive, but I think they're from Local 4703.

It was a pleasure to hear their case, and I wish them the best. Lots of passing drivers were honking in solidarity.

This post from May 11 explains the issue.

CWA Authorizes Strike Against AT&T

The CWA takes action to speed up contract talks while filing an Unfair Labor Practice Charge against the Company

This week, CWA filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against AT&T and NABET-CWA employer Nexstar Media Group for refusing to provide information about each company's plan to use its tax windfall to invest in its workforce.

Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed, AT&T promised that corporations would use their massive gains from the bill to raise wages and create "7,000 good jobs for the middle class." Instead, just days after the tax bill became law, the company announced more than 1,500 layoffs, and has continued to stonewall workers fighting to protect U.S. jobs at the bargaining table – despite receiving $20 billion as a result of the tax bill.

The charges are the latest escalation of efforts to hold corporations accountable at the bargaining table for the tax bill promises they made. In recent months, CWA and other unions have filed information requests to find out if increased corporate profits from the tax bill are really going to raise wages and create jobs.

CWA's Executive Board has voted to authorize a potential strike by 14,000 workers covered by AT&T’s Midwest and Legacy T contracts, an action that gives CWA President Chris Shelton the go-ahead to set a strike date if an agreement can't be reached. Workers voted on April 10 to authorize a strike.

As AT&T faces scrutiny for paying $600,000 to Trump attorney Michael Cohen, the company continues to stonewall workers at the bargaining table over the need for good, family supporting jobs.

"AT&T paid six-figure sums to a shady consultant who provided nothing of value to the company but is unwilling to commit to family-supporting jobs in the communities that it serves," said CWA District 4 Vice President Linda L. Hinton. "If AT&T refuses to protect the good jobs that support our families and communities, our members will take action. AT&T promised to invest in its U.S. workforce if the GOP tax bill passed. We're going to hold them to that promise – even if it means going on strike."

"AT&T's claims that Michael Cohen did 'real work' for the company are laughable," said Lisa Bolton, Vice President of CWA Telecommunication and Technologies. "We know who does the real work at AT&T – our members. It's time for the company to agree to a fair contract that provides good jobs with affordable benefits."

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson promised to create 7,000 jobs if the GOP tax plan passed. Instead, despite a $20 billion windfall as a result of tax cuts in the bill, AT&T announced thousands of layoffs. The layoffs come as the company continues to eliminate good, middle-class jobs and rely increasingly on low-wage contractors overseas, devastating families and communities across America.

Before the Republican tax bill passed, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson promised that every $1 billion in tax savings would create “7,000 good jobs for the middle class.” Instead, just days after the tax bill became law, the company announced more than 1,500 layoffs – compounding workers’ concerns about the company’s practice of shifting work to low-wage overseas contractors, which many believe is hurting the quality of service and damaging AT&T’s brand. The company’s touted investment of just $1 billion on capital projects and one-time $1,000 bonuses to employees is equivalent to just 7% of its expected annual profit from the cuts. Overall jobs numbers at AT&T are down 29,000 from two years ago.

While AT&T refuses to release details about plans for its $20 billion in tax savings, a recent report from CWA found that AT&T has closed 44 call centers and eliminated 16,000 call center jobs in the last seven years. The report reveals the devastating impact of recent call center closures across the Midwest, an area that has been particularly hard hit by closures and layoffs. Meanwhile, the company’s latest quarterly earnings report reveals $4.7 billion in profits and indicates that AT&T is spending more than ever on dividends and buybacks.

The AT&T Midwest contract covers workers in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, while the Legacy T contract covers workers nationwide. Both contracts expired on April 14, 2018.

BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Vandals strike Asheville brewery: “No more breweries” and “**** Beer City.”

My initial thought upon reading about "anti-brewery vandalism" in Asheville was something on the order of: "Just their luck the Woman's Christian Temperance Union is still alive and kicking."

Indeed, the prohibitionists remain extant, drastically weakened but forever persistent. However, it's doubtful the WCTU is taking the war to Demon Craft Beer at night, clad in dark attire, masked and with spray paint in hand.

Here's the story.

Asheville’s One World Brewing Responds to Anti-Brewery Vandalism, by Jess Baker (Craft Beer Dot Com)

It’s been a frustrating week for One World Brewing, a small and independent craft brewery in Asheville, North Carolina. The brewery, which originally opened four years ago in downtown Asheville, was busy prepping to open its new location in the West Asheville district when vandals hit the brewery as well as surrounding local businesses.

The vandals scrawled messages in black spray paint on the front of the brewery’s white brick building at 520 Haywood Road: “No more breweries” and “**** Beer City.”

The vandals’ anti-brewery messages are stinging words for the Asheville beer community, a city where independent breweries are considered a major driver for tourism.

“We will not be deterred from doing what’s best for our employees and our community,” One World Brewing wrote on its Facebook and Instagram pages Thursday. “We are a homegrown, local, independently owned brewery that does so much more than just brew beer. We use beer as a platform to support so many other aspects of life that we are passionate about.”

The Asheville brewery, like many local breweries, is invested in supporting its employees as well as the community. The brewery used the incident to flip the script and talk about their strong bond with Asheville ...

Beer writer Bryan Roth, who shared the preceding link at Twitter, commented.

"anti-brewery messages" is a new one to me.

Not for Richard Florida, who mentioned the "g" word (gentrification) in a CityLab piece late last year -- or Athena Hobson, from London, two years ago.

During a shameless binge watch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I couldn’t help but notice all the references to gentrification (or in simpler terms – places becoming more trendy and modernised, which drives up the costs of living in that area, meaning poorer residents may be forced to relocate).

Hobson expands on her thought.

Don’t Blame The Brewers: Craft Beer And Gentrification, by Athena Hobson (Cultured Vultures)

First-time business owners are taking advantage of run down areas to set up shop and driving up the cost of living for local residents.

Understandably, it is gentrification that is largely responsible for provoking a deep hatred of the craft beer trend, but to what extent can we actually blame the brewers? Had it not been about beer, it may have been bubble tea cafés or ‘soul cycle’ studios. The aforementioned Cereal Killer Café has been under attack of petty vandalism as well as keyboard warriors since word spread of its opening – but would they be so successful if we weren’t so willing to buy into what they’re selling? After all, what is business but seeing a need and providing the product or service?

When you hand over your money to a company, however much or little that may be, you are funding their objectives ...

Regular blog readers residing in New Albany hardly need this reminder, but it's always better to be explicit, so kindly note that Mayor Jeff Gahan's 2017 seizure of public housing, with a stated objective of reducing the number of units by half, is an exercise in socio-economic cleansing -- and this displacement is not being conducted in a conceptual vacuum.

In fact, Gahan's war against the working poor is the logical consequence of our "success" in resuscitating downtown. It's part and parcel of gentrification, and as a "Democrat," the mayor illustrates that callous measures directed against the most vulnerable cannot always be blamed on right-wingers. 

Thanks in large part to food and drink businesses like my own brewery, with which I'm no longer involved, the historic core of the city has experienced a decade of substantive reinvestment.

The result has been an increase in "upscale" thinking, as opposed to those cross-cultural core retail stores operating downtown long ago prior to suburbanization and white flight.

As a corollary, the local political dialogue continues to narrow; either we explore ways to expand the "upscale" developments already in progress, or we do nothing at all. The ensuing shock waves are hitting those community members least able to cope economically, in part because the powers that be in New Albany view gentrification as a social phenomenon of unqualified and unquestioned good.

Few wish to contemplate the consequences, and most are willing to encourage even more of it with measures that gradually have crept beyond those designed somewhat modestly to encourage investment (as with loosened alcoholic beverage licensing in riverfront development areas), to ones like the public housing putsch that actively push social engineering, or the recent proposal (likely inevitable) to spend $8.5 million on local government wants (a new city hall) rather than affordable housing needs for a growing segment of the populace.

Back to the point. Why would someone vandalize a small brewery?

Probably for the same reason that residents of my city greet the news of another new bar or restaurant ...

The former Comfy Cow location will become a bar, but we have no further details.

Downtown NA restaurant and bar scorecard: one new location, two openings and four coming soon.

... with predictable but perfectly plausible questions like these.

Seriously, another bar?

How many downtown restaurants and bars are enough?

Will we be able to afford to eat at these latest and greatest places?

These questions have short-term answers: yes, it's too early to tell, and it's complicated.

Alcohol licensing exists to regulate drinking for the ostensible purpose of societal good, although maximum tax harvesting comes closer to the truth.

Indiana's riverfront development area mechanism is a legal construct expressly designed to "open" a delineated geographical area to licensing with fewer restrictions.

Riverfront permits have the effect of making a demarcated area slightly more free than before, because it provides a framework for licensing outside the customary allocation. It greatly reduces the overall cost of a permit, and opens the market to more participants.

As long as there is available money, and entrepreneurs are eager to spend it, there'll be contestants entering the game. We'll know when there are too many bars and restaurants when more establishments are closing than opening.

As for the pricing, this is a difficult topic somewhat outside the scope of these thoughts. I'll add only that there are fewer disparities in pricing than might appear to be the case among independent and chain/franchise when their menus are comparable, and while I'd never suggest that operators don't look for ways to squeeze a few cents more from any mark-up, it's hard to base a business model on $3 burgers and $6 beers.

There are other questions and answers, but I have no glib conclusions to offer about any of these potential digressions. I've agonized over them for years, and will continue to do so.

At the same time, there is another complementary Pandora's Box to be broached, this being the junction of morals, wages, costs and benefits pertaining to "craft" breweries as workplaces.

I've referenced work by Dave Infante on a couple of past occasions, and he's at peak provocation here.

Infante's piece raised a tremendous din in the usual beer discussion portals. About all I can do is shrug and say two things: Welcome to capitalism ... and I'm happy not to be tormented by these considerations any longer. The economics at a bar stand to be much simpler than those at a brewery.

Craft Beer’s Moral High Ground Doesn't Apply to Its Workers, by Dave Infante (Splinter News)

Scott Timms is taking a break from brewing beer. At 35, he’s been at it for 13 years, most recently having worked at Falling Sky Brewing, a popular brewpub in Eugene, OR, that regularly appears on “best of” lists in the state.

Brewing beer commercially can be hard, thankless work. “It’s a back-breaking job, lifting a hundred 50-pound bags” of ingredients and carrying them up stairs to be added to the mash, Timms says. And it can be dangerous: “You’re dealing with boiling liquids and pretty harsh chemicals that can definitely injury you…It’s not a safe job by any means.” At small breweries, where OSHA visits are unusual and procedures are unstandardized, the “outlook towards safety” can be “laissez-faire” verging on “lackadaisical,” he says.

For his work as a production manager at Falling Sky overseeing a team of brewers and working up to 65 hours a week, Timms made what came out to a little over $40,000 a year. Frustrated, he quit his brewing job in early 2018, convinced that craft brewers were getting shorted across the U.S. beer industry. “There are people making money here,” he says, “but it’s not us.”

In 2017, Lauren Michele Jackson wrote in Eater about the rise of “craft culture,” a food and beverage market that “fetishizes the authentic, the traditionally produced, and the specific [and] loathes the engineered, the mass-produced, and the originless.” Craft beer—made by brewers like Timms at more than 6,000 small, independent breweries across the country—has been a standard-bearer for this progressively infected, anti-commodity eating and drinking movement for more than two decades. Its staggering economic success has spurred an explosion of products in other food and drink categories marketed to like-minded customers. Walk the aisles of your closest Whole Foods and craft culture surrounds you.

But even as sales of craft-culture products steadily rise, the conditions for workers that make and serve those products vary widely. The labor is often physically demanding. Specialized workers are asked to “wear different hats” to make up for understaffing, and gladly answer calls for extra hours because they genuinely care about the products they’re making. Owners, either unwilling or unable to spend on quality executives, take on management responsibilities for which they have no training. The workforces are often small, giving rise to a much-touted familial intimacy that in turn can bring a distinctly familial dysfunction of favoritism and manipulation. Wages and benefits are inconsistent across industries and even within individual companies.

But craft culture is growing, and it’s bringing in a lot of money ...

The workers' holiday? That'd be May 1 -- and American workers did that.

Just as long as we're clear about the fact of the matter, I'm down with today.

Labor Day is May 1, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Today is a boss's holiday.

 ... Tragically, our labor movement was never strong enough to buck the tyranny of capitalism for good. And today, with union membership in dramatic decline and workers under sustained attack from the political establishment, this militant past often feels like a distant, even irretrievable, memory.

But American workers did contribute at least one lasting legacy to the international movement for working-class liberation — a workers’ holiday, celebrating the ideal of international solidarity, and eagerly anticipating the day when workers might rise together to take control of their own lives and provide for their own well-being.

That holiday is May Day, not Labor Day.

Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

Bud Selig is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. That's actually more repulsive as Donald Trump being elected president.

As a corrective, this long but necessary survey, ranging from the early days to the present.

Out of Left Field, by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias (Jacobin)

Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals.

... Despite their courageous and pioneering efforts, neither (Marvin) Miller nor (Curt) Flood have been elected to the Hall of Fame. While Miller was alive, the baseball establishment blocked him from the Cooperstown shrine five times. The owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame kept changing the voting rules to keep him out.

Yet baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who claimed that Miller is one of the three most important figures in baseball history, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Flood’s fifteen years of Hall of Fame eligibility ended in 1996 when he garnered just 15.1 percent of baseball writers’ votes. He died the following year at fifty-nine, which made him eligible to enter the Hall of Fame posthumously if the Veterans Committee voted him in. There’s been no effort to resuscitate his candidacy.

Time to learn something: "Friday is César Chávez Day, but who was César Chávez?"

Source.

The Wikipedia answer:

César Chávez Day

Cesar Chavez Day is a federal commemorative holiday in the U.S. by proclamation of President Obama in 2014. On March 31 of each year, it celebrates the birth and legacy of the civil rights and labor movement activist Cesar Chavez.

For much greater depth:

Friday is César Chávez Day, but who was César Chávez? by Marie Albiges (Community Impact Newspaper)

The Spanish phrase Sí, se puede — “Yes, it can be done” — was used as a rallying chant long before it was echoed in the streets of today’s protests on civil, worker and immigrant rights. It was coined by a man named César Chávez during a 1972 fast in which the Latino American farm worker rights advocate protested a signed Arizona bill that denied farm workers the right to strike and boycott during harvest seasons.

Chávez’ legacy as a leader among farm workers’ unions is honored Friday on what would have been his 90th birthday.

Resisting, are you? That's nice. Now learn about Mary Harris "Mother" Jones.

I could be wrong about this, but posting memes on Facebook might fall a bit short of what's needed.

Mother Jones: The Woman, by Elliot J. Gorn (Mother Jones)

Upton Sinclair knew Mother Jones. The author of the best-selling exposé of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, even made her a character in one of his novels, a lightly fictionalized work called The Coal War, which chronicled the bloody Colorado coal strike of 1913-14: "There broke out a storm of applause which swelled into a tumult as a little woman came forward on the platform. She was wrinkled and old, dressed in black, looking like somebody's grandmother; she was, in truth, the grandmother of hundreds of thousands of miners."

Stories, Sinclair wrote, were Mother Jones' weapons, stories "about strikes she had led and speeches she had made; about interviews with presidents and governors and captains of industry; about jails and convict camps." She berated the miners for their cowardice, telling them if they were afraid to fight, then she would continue on alone. "All over the country she had roamed," Sinclair concluded, "and wherever she went, the flame of protest had leaped up in the hearts of men; her story was a veritable Odyssey of revolt."

When Sinclair wrote these words, Mother Jones was one of the most famous women in America. Articles about her regularly appeared in magazines and newspapers, and for many working Americans, she had achieved legendary, even iconic, status. Yet the woman for whom Mother Jones magazine is named is scarcely known any longer. Some might recognize her name, know something about her activism on behalf of working people, or even recall her famous war cry: "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." But few remember much about Mother Jones, who battled corporate presidents and politicians, who went to jail repeatedly for organizing workers, and who converted tens of thousands of Americans to the labor movement and the left.

As I worked on a recent biography of Mother Jones, however, I came to appreciate her significance for our own times.

Essential reading: "The 'middle class' myth: Here’s why wages are really so low today."

According to Oil Can Eddie, "Class consciousness discourages office workers from unionizing."

I'd guess that something quite similar prevents neighborhoods and small businesses from organizing. Again and again, one points to Benjamin Franklin's famous utterance ...

"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

... and listeners nod, while continuing their lonely determination to fight heroic and mostly losing battles, all by themselves.

That clinical definition of insanity. It's New Albany's proud motto.

The “middle class” myth: Here’s why wages are really so low today

Want to understand the failures of the "free market" and the key to getting a decent wage? Here's the real story.

By Edward McClelland (Salon)

Let me tell you the story of an “unskilled” worker in America who lived better than most of today’s college graduates. In the winter of 1965, Rob Stanley graduated from Chicago Vocational High School, on the city’s Far South Side. Pay rent, his father told him, or get out of the house. So Stanley walked over to Interlake Steel, where he was immediately hired to shovel taconite into the blast furnace on the midnight shift. It was the crummiest job in the mill, mindless grunt work, but it paid $2.32 an hour — enough for an apartment and a car. That was enough for Stanley, whose main ambition was playing football with the local sandlot all-stars, the Bonivirs.

Stanley’s wages would be the equivalent of $17.17 today — more than the “Fight For 15” movement is demanding for fast-food workers. Stanley’s job was more difficult, more dangerous and more unpleasant than working the fryer at KFC (the blast furnace could heat up to 2,000 degrees). According to the laws of the free market, though, none of that is supposed to matter. All that is supposed to matter is how many people are capable of doing your job. And anyone with two arms could shovel taconite. It required even less skill than preparing dozens of finger lickin’ good menu items, or keeping straight the orders of 10 customers waiting at the counter. Shovelers didn’t need to speak English. In the early days of the steel industry, the job was often assigned to immigrants off the boat from Poland or Bohemia.

Plaid Friday 3: "Americans have chosen cheap ... (and) it's led to a cycle of impoverishment."

Something to consider while you're standing in line.

Who's Really to Blame for the Wal-Mart Strikes? The American Consumer, by Jordan Weissmann (The Atlantic)

... It would be a mistake, however, to think of this simply as a clash over one company. Rather, it's symptomatic of forces Wal-Mart helped set in motion and now shape our economy in fundamental way. It's about big box retail's refusal to pay a decent wage. It's about the way we've stacked the deck against unions. And it's about the choices we make as consumers.

Rock on: "America’s biggest retailer may be in for an unexpectedly painful holiday season."

The Hostess Twinkie extinction stories are mere empty calories compared with the real action. Bloomberg Businessweek provides the overview.

Labor

Wal-Mart Workers' Black Friday Strike

By Elizabeth Dwoskin on November 16, 2012

 

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America’s biggest retailer may be in for an unexpectedly painful holiday season. Protesting low wages, spiking health care premiums, and alleged retaliation from management, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) workers have started to walk off the job this week. First, on Wednesday, about a dozen workers in Wal-Mart’s distribution warehouses in Southern California walked out, followed the next day by 30 more from six stores in the Seattle area.

The workers, who are part of a union-backed employee coalition called Making Change at Wal-Mart, say this is the beginning of a wave of protests and strikes leading up to next week’s Black Friday. A thousand store protests are planned in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., the group says.

REWIND: Labor Day screeching, and Labor Day reading.

(Originally published in September, 2009)

The first part of the transgendered professor's Labor Day screed are the words of Samuel Gompers, and as we've come to expect, Ms. Denschak makes no effort to attribute them.

Just for the fun of it, here's a section of the Wikipedia article on Gompers.

He joined Local 15 of the Cigarmakers' International Union in 1864, and was elected president of Local 144 in 1875. He was elected second vice-president of the international union in 1886, and first vice-president in 1896. He served in this capacity until his death. In 1877, the union nearly collapsed. Gompers and his friend Adolph Strasser used Local 144 as a base to rebuild the Cigarmakers' Union, introducing a high dues structure and implementing programs to pay out-of-work benefits, sick benefits, and death benefits for union members in good standing. He told the workers they needed to organize because wage reductions were almost a daily occurrence. The capitalists were only interested in profits, "and the time has come when we must assert our rights as workingmen. Every one present has the sad experience, that we are powerless in an isolated condition, while the capitalists are united; therefore it is the duty of every Cigar Maker to join the organization. ... One of the main objects of the organization," he concluded, "is the elevation of the lowest paid worker to the standard of the highest, and in time we may secure for every person in the trade an existence worthy of human beings."

Whoa -- sounds damned near Commie to me.

Erika unleashed: "Eye" before "eeee!" except after "see."

At least Erika has a sense of humor.

To celebrate America's purported Labor Day (most for the rest of the planet observes the concept on May 1, but I digress) by suggesting the little people of New Albany hoist tiny, thimble-sized cans of Coors is brilliantly ironic, and likely will zoom over the heads of both her regular readers.

The Dark Side of Coors Light, in Know Your Right Wingers by Annika Carlson.

... As then-president of Adolph Coors Co. Jeff Coors said in a Los Angeles Times article agreeing to union demands is like “inviting the Russians in to take over America.” Until 1986, prospective Coors employees were sometimes required to take lie detector tests, answering questions about their sexual orientation, communist leanings, and how often they changed their underwear.

Gads, is Erika trying to tell us that Hillary Clinton drinks Silver Bullet?

My first bicentennial logo entry.

The seal of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an imperfect group to be sure but New Albany's best hope before being crushed by that bastard Washington C. DePauw and his bought and paid for local government and media.

Speaking of statements of moral authority....

Check out James Kelso in late 1800s New Albany, via Lawrence Lipin's Burying the "Destroyer of One Happy Home" again: