I remember how it was -- JR
Many of the new working class are college-educated -- and they don't like their situation
In the days when America used to make things, people used to think of the working class as workers on a factory assembly line. Many jobs in new industries such as Amazon and Starbucks are however just as routine, with the wrinkle that such jobs are usually more poorly paid than the old factory jobs. So worker dissatisfaction in such new workplaces has become widespread and that has generated the same old pressures towards unionization.
The NYT of course implies below that unionization will be helpful, even though unionization is more likely to lead to more automation and unemployment, as companies hit back. The reality is that such jobs will still exist and still be poorly paid regardless.
So is there a better solution to the problem available? Probably not. Such jobs will always be unattractive and poorly paid for many of those who work in them. They always have been and always will.
Only a big societal change in likely to change the situation. Only a reversal of credentialism is likely to help. The unending pressure on people to get higher and higher educational credentials is a large part of the problem. Only a change in those pressures is likely to change things in the workplace.
Much of the dissatsifaction driving the move to unionization originates in people being made the false promise that more education will lead to better jobs. For many it will not. For them it would have been better NOT to undertake ever higher levels of education. They are right to be angered by the false promises that have been made to them. Disillusionment with college education seems now to be catching on. One can only hope that it continues
Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.
Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.
Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”
In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.
And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.
“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”
These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.
Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.
And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.
Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”
While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”
That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.
More here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/college-workers-starbucks-amazon-unions.html
***********************************************Amazon Targets Conservative Children’s Book About Gender Identity
Once again, Amazon has shown it’s on the side of leftist activists, not free speech.
Matt Walsh, a popular conservative podcast host and writer at The Daily Wire, just released a children’s book titled “Johnny the Walrus.” The book, according to the description on Amazon, tells the tale of Johnny, who likes to pretend to be a dinosaur or a knight.
But one day “when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind,” states the description.
Amazon is clearly trying to squash Walsh’s book.
According to Walsh, his picture book has been removed from the category of children’s books and moved to political books. Ads for the book on Amazon also have been rejected by the tech giant as not being “appropriate for all audiences”—an umbrella term for standards that ban advertising for books promoting incest and pedophilia, among other things.
Amazon did not response to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.
Despite all this, Walsh’s book is soaring on Amazon, becoming No. 1 in books Wednesday.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has targeted conservative books. Last year, Amazon blocked ads for the new book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, which attempted to purchase the ads.)
After The Daily Signal reported on its actions against the Gonzalez book, Amazon reversed its decision and claimed the ads initially were blocked due to “inaccurately enforced” policies.
Last year, Amazon also banned Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
In response to a letter from four U.S. senators inquiring as to why Amazon had stopped selling Anderson’s book, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, responded, “We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson, however, notes that his book doesn’t characterize LGBTQ+ identities as a mental illness.
Meanwhile, while Anderson’s book is too dangerous, Amazon continues to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
And just like every other Big Tech company, Amazon never seems to censor or block leftists. Nor does it treat leftist books as too political to be classified as children’s books.
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‘Underhanded’: School Invites Students to Observe LGBTQ Day Without Parents’ Knowledge
Whether you know it or not, your child’s school may have observed a “Day of Silence” on behalf of the LGBTQ movement.
The advocacy group GLSEN invited schools across the country to hold a demonstration Friday to show support for LGBTQ students and their allies.
GLSEN encouraged participants to “take a vow of silence to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ people in schools,” according to the group’s website.
The Day of Silence would end, the group said, with participants holding “Breaking the Silence” rallies and events “to share their experiences during the protest and bring attention to ways their schools and communities can become more inclusive.”
One parent, whose son attends a private high school in Connecticut that has no religious affiliation, told The Daily Signal that her “suspicion” is that “a lot of schools, especially private schools, were participating in this.”
The mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son received an email from school administrators inviting students to wear rainbow colors last Friday and participate in a “Day of Action” to “support our LGBTQ+ community.”
The private school in Connecticut sent the email to students and faculty, but not to parents, the mother told The Daily Signal.
The email to students referenced “over 220 laws” that the school said targeted LGBTQ Americans this year, and included a link to a slideshow discussing some of the laws and the significance of the Day of Silence.
One slide tells students that “many states are trying to pass, or have passed, laws that prevent transgender youth from receiving gender affirming health care.” The slide adds that “gender affirming health care” includes “reversable puberty blockers and other hormone treatments” that “are shown to reduce transgender rates of suicide by 30%.”
Jay Richards, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says he believes that the only thing blocking the agenda of radical gender identity activists is “wide-awake parents.”
“Gender ideology is about dissolving the biological reality of male and female and replacing it with an entirely subjective notion of ‘gender identity’—which has no clear meaning or limiting principle,” Richards said in an email to The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.
“This isn’t just an abstract philosophical idea,” he said. “Gender ideology threatens the minds and bodies of students.”
The slides sent to students by the Connecticut school also address Florida’s new parental rights law, which opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. One slide states that critics argue that the law puts LGBTQ+ students at risk because it:
Affects the books students can read in elementary school, possibly prevents students with same-sex parents from talking about their families, creates the potential for teachers to be penalized or sued for classroom discussion, thereby stifling important conversations, [and] potentially prevents discussions of gender and sexuality beyond third grade.
The mother who spoke with The Daily SIgnal said she found it strange that her son’s school was putting such an emphasis on passage of a bill in Florida, because “these types of things are not being proposed in Connecticut.”
Emailing students an invitation to participate in a pro-LGBTQ rally, and sending them a slideshow with a political message without parents’ knowledge “seems underhanded to me,” the mother said, “especially if they’re going to ask kids to basically participate in … political engagement.”
She wonders whether administrators at her son’s school “would be equally willing to support student activism to protect girls sports for biological females,” the mother said.
“In Connecticut, our female student athletes are having to compete against boys. But I haven’t heard of any local schools engaging their student bodies to defend girls sports,” she said.
Parents are “waking up to a gender ideology that has been working its way into our schools and student curricula for years,” Heritage’s Richards said. “Those who thought the issue just involved accommodating a few kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes have had a rude awakening.”
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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