● The looming writers' strike is about much more than what's on TV.
● Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Rick Larsen (D-WA) write opposing air traffic control privatization in the Washington Post.
Last year, the GAO found that a privatized air-traffic-control system would be “too big to fail,” meaning taxpayers might have to bail out the corporation if it couldn’t pay the costs to operate a safe system. The GAO also could not confirm that a private system would be capable of protecting national security and collaborating with the military to protect Americans from security threats, nor could it guarantee that a private corporation would speed up the Federal Aviation Administration’s work to modernize the nation’s air-traffic-control system.
● Hear from the organizers of the May 1 Day Without an Immigrant.
● Sarah Jaffe: Back at the Carrier plant, workers are still fighting on their own:
The emptiness of Trump’s made-for-reality-TV moment becomes painfully clear a few miles southwest of the union hall, where the Carrier plant sits, amid a cluster of factories and warehouses, in one of the last industrial districts in the United States. On my visit in early March, signs of the workers’ struggles aren’t immediately visible, though they’re easy enough to find. Just across the street from Carrier, workers from the Sumco plant are walking a picket line. Less than a mile away, some 300 workers at the Rexnord plant await layoff notices as the company prepares to shut down and head south.
● Retail vs. Coal is an issue that’s been getting a lot of attention this week, and Erik Loomis weighs in:
It is however worth noting that the decline of manufacturing jobs is also the decline of generations of work that was once horrible, deadly, and destructive turned into well-paid, union jobs. And that is part of the story here too. Retail jobs are not worse than manufacturing jobs except for the fact that retail jobs have always been low paid and fights to turn manufacturing jobs into “good jobs” were successful. Of course, that process was racialized and gendered too because society valued the jobs of white males more than those of people of color and women. But part of the story is the decline of good paying jobs for the working class.
● Poynter’s Melody Kramer compares parental leave policies in American newsrooms, and the picture is bleak.
● Erik Loomis asks: Democrats and Labor: Frenemies forever?
Nothing in American labor history suggests unions can succeed if the government opposes their causes, but unions have consistently failed to further a pro-labor agenda within the Democratic Party. And without a realistic alternative—the Republican Party, after all, has waged a multi-decade war on workers—unions have no choice but to keep working within the Democratic Party.
● How Barnard contingent faculty won their first contract.
● Farmworker ... guestworker ... in North Carolina ... with a union?
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