Common Dreams:
"Citing violations of its Fair Workweek Law, New York City sued Starbucks on Friday, accusing the company of illegally firing a barista for his union organizing activities.
New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga said the agency filed a case at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH). The suit alleges that Starbucks violated 'just cause' protections of the city's 2017 Fair Workweek Law when the Seattle-based company unlawfully terminated Austin Locke, a Workers United organizer, on July 5—less than a month after crew members at the Astoria Starbucks where he worked voted to join a union. ...
Common Dreams reported Wednesday that Starbucks' union-busting CEO, Howard Schultz, got nearly a billion dollars richer during the Covid-19 pandemic, even as many of his baristas—who earn an average of around $17 an hour—struggle to survive."
-->Always lukewarm when it comes to labor activism, the NYT skipped this story of corporate wrongdoing and union triumph.
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The Intercept:
"PATRICK RYAN, A congressional candidate from New York, is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.
Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them.
The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports.
Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter."
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/22/patrick-ryan-congress-berico-dataminr/
-->The Democrats seem to be unable to nominate anyone without ties to Wall Street (Antonio Delgado) or the Military Industrial Complex (Pat Ryan). Don't bother looking for this news in the mainstream media.
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Barbara Ehrenreich died quite recently. Her books and articles told a truth about our flawed system, that working people don't earn enough to lead satisfying lives. And that billionaires at the very top are to blame. She was a crusader for justice; let's honor her courage and ingenuity for revealing our neoliberal system for what it is.
“The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us,” she told The New Yorker, “but that we will die trying.”
