One of the week’s big must-reads was How Trump is helping tycoons exploit the pandemic, by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. Specifically, Ronald Cameron, the owner of the massive poultry processing company Mountaire. Cameron is a major Trump donor, and he’s on a White House advisory board about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, there’s a campaign to bust the union of the workers at a Mountaire plant and the Trump administration is gutting regulations that protect these workers, whose job was already both dangerous and low-paid before COVID-19. Now, workers are getting sick and the company is keeping its numbers secret—and continuing to get favorable treatment from the Trump administration.
A worker at the plant told Mayer that a fellow worker ended up on a ventilator with COVID-19 after she told the company nurse she felt unwell and “The nurse sent her right back on the God-damned line to work. The nurses aren’t worth shit in there.” Mountaire workers got hazard pay of just a dollar an hour, which was canceled in June, while a Trump executive order forced them to remain on the job. “Why are they giving us a one-dollar raise and giving two million dollars to Donald Trump? What are we, animals?” the worker told Mayer. Read the whole thing.
● Get a free digital copy of the Labor Notes book Concessions and How to Beat Them, by Jane Slaughter.
● Speaking of which, Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants—CWA, writes, flight attendants tell airlines: Don't even think about concessions.
● Hundreds of thousands will walk out of work to 'Strike for Black Lives' on Monday.
● As a Black woman in a factory dominated by white men, Monica Mabin faced double discrimination.
● Postal workers are dying in heat waves. It's only going to get hotter, Dave Jamieson reports.
● Out of work: The coronavirus shutdown through the eyes of the recently unemployed.
● This obituary of union democracy activist Herman Benson is worth reading.
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