The Luddites weren’t backward technophobes. They saw factory owners using tech to degrade their livelihoods and they fought back — first by trying to negotiate, then writing to Parliament, and finally smashing the machines.
As workers today organize and strike over bosses using digital tech to upend their industries, there’s a lot we can learn from the Luddites’ story. I was thrilled to dig into it with @brianmerchant!
African AI workers, mostly from Kenya, released an open letter to Joe Biden this week asking him stop US tech companies from “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers” and to end the “modern day slavery” they’re subjected to.
Here's the final section of a letter to the FT from Brendan Kelly (Professor of Psychiatry, Trinity College Dublin) makes a crucial point...
While there is no doubting the problems of mental health, to treat all aspects of these personal travails as illness is to focus too much on the individual and allow our toxic society & workplaces to escape their share of the blame.
My union, SAG-AFTRA, is striking in Hollywood. It represents 160K movie and TV actors, as well as about 500 staffers at NPR. We journalists are not part of this strike but we support our fellow union workers!!!! ❤️ ❤️
I was never part of a union before coming to NPR but quickly learned the power of colleagues helping each other to be treated fairly at work!!!
Uber says it finally made an annual profit after 15 years, but who paid the price to get it there?
The company fired 6,700 workers, hiked fares for customers, and squeezed drivers even harder. Now the stock is up and investors will get a $7 billion share buyback. It turns your stomach.
Proposed Wage Theft Legislation Would Strip Violators of Their Ability to Do Business in #NewYork
“We did not have the data to understand the scale of the issue in New York State until the ProPublica and Documented series came out last year,” state Sen. Jessica Ramos said.
One way #classism shows up in discussions of UK #economic policy is the way that regulations that are intended to protect #workers are judged by (and criticised for) the 'burden' they put on #businesses.
However, seldom do we see the pressure to increase #profits & suppress wages described as burden being put onto workers.
All regulation is about trade-offs & balances but not when one side is favoured by an aspiration to relieve it of all 'burdens' while the other's burdens are dismissed
When the #HomeOffice can find no 'compelling reason' to reunite migrant #workers who are single mothers, with their children, you know that we are just a few small steps away from being a society depending on a modern form of indentured labour (or even slavery)... the Home Office is showing (once again) there is no limit to its inhumanity, and we are plunging back in time towards feudalism...
Railroad companies have penalized #workers for taking the time to make needed repairs and created a culture in which supervisors threaten and fire the very people hired to keep #trains running safely.
The GMB is right - Amazon is out of control in its ongoing & extensive campaign to fight unionisation here & elsewhere.
When a firm (here Amazon or elsewhere such as in the gig economy), so fears unionisation, you know that whatever their claims around technology, really their business model is built on exploring & under-paying labour.
A reasonable rule of thumb in UK #politcs is that if the Tax Payers Alliance doesn't like something, then it would likely benefit society;
to hear that they are against the four day #working week, leads me to think that the shadowy (corporate?) funders of the TPA are unhappy that #workers might be able to spend a little more time thinking about the inequities of the current system & a little less time being ground down by the world of #work.
If you wanted an estimate of how much #wagetheft is involved in the #gigeconomy then the #EU has answer for you.
The EU has just agreed new regulation that will standardise & enhance #workers rights in the gig economy, to include paternity leave & healthcare as well as banning automated firing decisions & cementing other (usual) workers' rights.
The EU expects this to add around 40% to prices for firms like Uber & Deliveroo... an indication of the 'saving' gained by exploring their workers!
So it seems the 'wage-price' spiral may not be a complete figment of political rhetoric; its just that its not #publicsector or the #lowpaid who are the one's receiving #inflation inducing pay rises... no, its the top 1% of earners who are actually the one's getting pay rises above inflation.
It makes further mockery of the notion that striking #NHS#workers & others are the greedy causes of inflation.
Blaming workers for this inflation is not analysis its #classwar
Even after a #Dallas mail carrier’s recent death from extreme heat, #USPS is still forcing carriers to speed up, work overtime hours, and forego breaks.
From yesterday: “We’re at a breaking point,” said Anthony Talarico, a co-worker of mail carrier Eugene Gates who died of hyperthermia deliverying mail this past summer.
While I accept that I'm very lucky to be able to retire early (which I did 2 years ago) & into a pretty stable financial situation....
the thing that has become pretty obvious to me over the last 24 months is the level of background #stress & tension I had been working under for pretty much my entire working life of 43 years...
because, now its (very obviously) just not there.... it makes me realise #workers need even more managerial reform than I had presumed!
#WFH increases #workers autonomy, as they're not under constant potential surveillance & work to their own arrangement(s); Managers feel threatened by this avoidance of direct control;
data on WFH seems to indicate workers are happier when hybrid working than when in the office full-time; whatever, they say, managers prefer fearful workers who're easier to manage