On Labor Day, Imagine Unions for All American Workers | Opinion newsweek.com/labor-day-imagi…

The economic right of center is always saying “If you want less of something, then tax it” Maybe after the millionaires tax next we can figure out a tax on corporate lobbyists, political action committees and federalist society members?

With a few anomalous exceptions privatizing public monopolies generally means wealth accumulation for shareholders and austerity for ratepayers, consumers, workers. No thanks.

Okay but if income is property, then laying someone off from a job must be theft, right?

Democrats have a neoliberalism problem and a billionaire sycophancy problem. Unions aren’t perfect. But after $80T of upwards income transfer to the 1% over 5 decades, blaming them for govt failure is like blaming the bank janitor after the CEO loots the vault.

Advocates allege fraud in WA's public comment system, saying duplicate and fake sign-in inflated opposition to a proposal to enact a income tax on income over $1 million. st.news/3Muanxv

I guess it’s nice that the @CityofSeattle put up these warning signs, but it would be nicer if they just fixed the problem…

London bus stop near Amazon HQ 🎯🔥

In 2013, progressive SEIU union leader @DavidMRolf, one of the most innovative and strategic thinkers in organized labor, sparked the $15 min wage movement that spread across big blue cities by running and winning - by 77 votes - a then quite radical ballot measure in Seatac, a small working class Seattle suburb (home to thousands of low paid airport workers), to raise their min wage to $15. Now, 12 years later, urban working class voters are voting increasingly Republican and only 6 percent of private sector workers are in a union. And Rolf is in a surprising (to us, anyway!) dialogue with a rising right-of-center movement led by conservative economists like @oren_cass that seeks to push the Republican Party to adopt economic policies that boost blue collar workers. So on the latest episode of Blue City Blues (@bluecitypodcast) @hyded and I sat down for revealing conversation with Rolf to ask him whether present-day union leaders are culturally and politically out of step with their own members, why the Democratic Party is losing the working class, and whether the Republican Party is really likely to embrace pro-worker economic policies. We weren't disappointed - David has a lot of candid and insightful things to say on all of these fronts!

One of the world’s richest men wants his newspaper to strictly push policies that favour the rich. That’s the upshot of Jeff Bezos’s announcement today of a new regime at the Washington Post. My latest. unherd.com/newsroom/jeff-bez…

CEO @timoreilly: “As labor organizer @DavidMRolf said to me, “God did not make being an auto worker a good job!” Those middle class jobs that we look back at with such nostalgia were the result of a fierce competition between companies and labor as to who would set the rules of the game. The invisible hand became very visible indeed by way of bitter strikes, and then transcended the market into the political process with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act), the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (Taft-Hartley), and state “right to work laws.” Read more: evonomics.com/rewrite-the-ru…

NEW: Cherry Street Coffee House owner complained to City Council that paying minimum wage may force him to close stores. Outraged, the workers shut down one of his stores anyway. Business may have power in City Hall, but workers still run the workplace. thestranger.com/news/2024/08…

When we doubled our minimum wage, our retention rate doubled. This stuff isn't rocket science.

I’ll just leave this here for the @SeattleCouncil @workingwa @seiu775 @ufcw3000 @teamsters117 @MLKLabor fox13seattle.com/news/earn-l…

Michigan supreme court strikes down tipped-worker penalties while the big-biz @SeattleCouncil tries to make Seattle the only west coast jurisdiction to impose them @JoyHollings @workingwa @seiu775 @ufcw3000 @MLKLabor @teamsters117 @TammyMoralesSEA

Now the industry wants to make a sub-minimum wage permanent for their employees, relying on their customers to make up the difference. Red states like Florida have voted for $15. Alaska and Montana don’t allow tip penalties. Weakening our min wage law is political suicide.

A deal is a deal. The Seattle min wage law, negotiated by a 24-person city commission, recommended by a 21-2 vote, passed unanimously the @SeattleCouncil, signed by the Mayor, allowed small local restaurants a TEN YEAR phase-in period.

When you pay people more, they spend more locally, and our economy grows. For 10 years these businesses have profited from that booming growth. It’s time for them to pony up or pack it up.

This debate was settled in 2014 with Seattle's historic minimum wage agreement, and countless cities and states have followed our lead. Any effort to roll back the most popular thing the city has done in this century is destined to be an ugly, expensive, embarrassing failure.

If they can’t figure out how to pay a fair wage in 10 years, then they need to be in a different line of work. Lots of restaurants have figured this out. We shouldn’t reward the handful of business owners who want to pay substandard wages.