Uber and Lyft Drivers Kick Off Labor Day Weekend With Nashville Strike

"This is something we're doing for all of us," said a Tennessee Drivers Union co-president.


Drivers with Lyft and Uber held a strike at Nashville International Airport in Tennessee on August 30, 2024, the start of Labor Day weekend.
(Photo: Tennessee Drivers Union/X)

Jessica Corbett
Aug 30, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Drivers for the ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber are demanding better pay and work conditions by beginning Labor Day weekend with a Friday strike at Nashville International Airport.

"The Tennessee Drivers Union (TDU) has strategically chosen Labor Day weekend to stage its strike," the group said in a statement. "The weekend, which draws thousands of visitors to Nashville's music, entertainment, and tourist venues, highlights the $31 billion industry that relies heavily on the labor of ride-share drivers to generate profits."

In addition to the airport strike, which began at 1:00 pm and was set to continue until at least 7:00 pm, the drivers planned to "lead a caravan through Broadway in downtown Nashville, the center of Tennessee's country music tourism industry."

WPLNreported that "at one point, the airport shut down access to the ride-share lot and refused to allow more drivers to enter and join the strike on Friday."

TDU co-president Kovan said that "this is something we're doing for all of us, not for a single individual, whether you are Uber Black, a regular Uber, or a taxi driver," and "this is gonna be the beginning of a nightmare" for the companies.

The union is calling for meetings with Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell and the Metropolitan Council, the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, and the Transportation Licensing Commission to go over demands, based on surveying hundreds of drivers.

The workers said they want an expansion of their airport lot as soon as possible and clean, working bathrooms on-site, a 9:00 pm cutoff for scooters in the city, a cap on the number of ride-share drivers in the area, enforcement of the prohibition on fake taxis, and a "dignified" wage.

Drivers for the ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber are demanding better pay and work conditions by beginning Labor Day weekend with a Friday strike at Nashville International Airport.

"The Tennessee Drivers Union (TDU) has strategically chosen Labor Day weekend to stage its strike," the group said in a statement. "The weekend, which draws thousands of visitors to Nashville's music, entertainment, and tourist venues, highlights the $31 billion industry that relies heavily on the labor of ride-share drivers to generate profits."

In addition to the airport strike, which began at 1:00 pm and was set to continue until at least 7:00 pm, the drivers planned to "lead a caravan through Broadway in downtown Nashville, the center of Tennessee's country music tourism industry."

WPLNreported that "at one point, the airport shut down access to the ride-share lot and refused to allow more drivers to enter and join the strike on Friday."TDU co-president Kovan said that "this is something we're doing for all of us, not for a single individual, whether you are Uber Black, a regular Uber, or a taxi driver," and "this is gonna be the beginning of a nightmare" for the companies.

The union is calling for meetings with Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell and the Metropolitan Council, the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, and the Transportation Licensing Commission to go over demands, based on surveying hundreds of drivers.

The workers said they want an expansion of their airport lot as soon as possible and clean, working bathrooms on-site, a 9:00 pm cutoff for scooters in the city, a cap on the number of ride-share drivers in the area, enforcement of the prohibition on fake taxis, and a "dignified" wage.

"The drivers are doing everything. The gas comes out of the drivers' pay, the repairs of the car because it is a personal car, so if they're giving the driver just 45% of the fare, that leaves everybody struggling," a six-year driver in Nashville, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told The Guardian. "In one hour, I can drive from the airport to downtown or downtown to the airport and get $8 to $10, and then a different hour I can get $17. We need the pay to be consistent."

Citing delays in waiting for fares, receiving tickets without warnings, and inadequate airport bathrooms, the driver said, "That's why we came together."

"With the current economic situation, it is really difficult to meet family needs or what you need to survive. We're trying to fight for our rights," he explained. "We also don't want passengers to be overcharged by Uber. When they take over 50% or 60% of the ride fare, they are counting on us getting tips from riders, but the way we are struggling we understand people are struggling, so not everyone tips."



While Lyft and Uber drivers in Nashville joined delivery service workers for Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, Postmates, and other companies in a strike on May 1, or International Workers' Day, TDU said Friday that "this ride-share organizing effort is the first of its size to occur in the Deep South, in an explicitly anti-worker state."

A report released last month by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) details how "for at least the last 40 years, pay and job quality for workers across the South has been inferior compared to other regions—thanks to the racist and anti-worker Southern economic development model."

"In addition to right-to-work laws and the overall opposition from political leaders across the region, workers seeking to organize a union typically face intense opposition from employers," the EPI report says. "Further, because of the political opposition to unions, when workers try to organize, employers know that they can illegally intimidate them, refuse to recognize the union, or negotiate a contract in bad faith—with little to no fear of being held accountable by political leaders."

In April, as Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga began voting on whether to join the United Auto Workers, six Southern Republican governors, including Tennessee's, released a joint statement saying they were "highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states."

The Volkswagen employees ultimately voted to join the UAW. The EPI report emphasizes that "workers must be able to come together in a union to demand fair wages and benefits, a safe working environment, and the ability to have a say about their workplace—even when politicians are intransigent."

TDU co-president Arkangelo on Friday also stressed how important it is to "always stand in solidarity with one another," saying that "if we don't come together as people striving for their rights then we will continue to suffer and [be] robbed by two giants, Uber and Lyft."

Labor Militancy Is the Only Way to Increase Union Membership

We need to rebuild the labor movement, and that means not going back to the kind of unions that existed in the postwar era. We need unions with a radical vision, unions that exert power in the workplace and society.


Member of United Auto Workers Local 4811strike at UCLA carrying "On Strike" pickets, academic workers and supporters walked off the job Tuesday on Tuesday, May 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA.
(Photo: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

C.J. Polychroniou
Aug 31, 2024

Common Dreams


With Labor Day 2024 upon us, it is important to critically reflect on the current state of the U.S. labor movement and the challenges that it faces in an environment where Big Business dominates the economy and mainstream society continues to abide allegiance to the values of a Lockean political culture in which ruthless individualism reigns supreme. To put it mildly, without a strong labor movement and a public spirit guiding our institutions, the country will never succeed in realizing the vision of a just and fair society.

However, the news on the labor front is not very encouraging. The share of U.S. workers who belong to a union has been declining since the early 1980s—an era which coincides with the full swing of the neoliberal counterrevolution and deindustrialization. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and declined to 11.1 percent in 2015.

In 2021, the union membership rate was 10.3 percent and dropped to 10.1 percent in 2022. In 2023, union membership declined even further to 10.0 percent, which is a historic low.

The irony is that the United States has seen a “union boom” over the last couple of years. Thousands of employees at Starbucks stores across the country have voted to unionize and workers at Amazon warehouses and Trader Joe’s, grad students, and Uber and Lyft drivers also joined the unionization fight. But the data, as cited above, tells a different story. The share of U.S. workers belonging to a union continues to decline and is now at the lowest rate in history. Today, organized labor in the United States is dominated by public-sector employees, which is more than five times higher than the 6 percent rate of private-sector employees.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union.The United States is near the bottom among industrialized democracies when it comes to union membership rates. The average level of union membership across the European Union (EU) is 23 percent, but the average is held down by relatively low levels of membership in some large EU states, such as Germany with 18 percent and France with 8 percent. However, even in countries where union density is lower, such as in France, virtually all workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Denmark, Sweden and Finland, union density is 70 percent. Incidentally, the Nordic countries consistently rank among the happiest nations in the world. In the latest World Happiness Report, the United States doesn’t even make the top 20 list. Trade union density is even higher in Africa and most parts of Asia than it is in the United States.


Why is union membership in the United States so low? This is something of an anomaly considering the fact that polls consistently reveal that majorities of U.S. adults see the decline in union membership as bad for the country and for working people. It is mostly ultra-conservatives and reactionary think tanks like the Hoover Institution that believe that the decline of unions is good news.

Globalization, technology, and the transformation of an industrial economy into a service-oriented society are the most common reasons offered for the decline of U.S. unions. However, these explanations, even when put together, are not sufficient in explaining why the U.S. has one of the lowest union membership rates in the world. Europe is much more open than the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund. Thus, globalization alone cannot be an explanation for the general decline in unionization in the U.S. Europe’s technology lags behind the U.S., but it is not technology but rather institutional arrangements and intentional policy decisions that succeed in altering in significant ways the balance between capital and labor that can explain why union membership has plateaued at 10 percent among workers in the United States. We must acknowledge that neoliberalism itself is not a monolithic process; rather, it is affected by a variety of domestic pressures and thus plays out differently in different national contexts.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union. The basic rights of U.S. workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining have been under attack throughout the history of U.S. capitalism. Strikes figured prominently during the height of the industrialization era and well into the twentieth century, with immigrant workers from Ireland, Italy and Germany being at the forefront of labor radicalism, but so did employer and government violence directed against striking workers. The U.S. has the most violent labor history in the western world. The U.S. government may be the only government in the industrialized world that has engaged in systematic massacres of striking workers.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act, was passed in July 1935. The Act, whose broad intention was to guarantee employees “the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection” was probably instrumental in the dramatic increase in unionization rates that was witnessed from the late 1930s to the 1950s, hitting its apex at 32 percent; yet, its failures are well established and can, conversely, be attributed to the decline in private sector unionization rates that started taking place following their peak in the late 1950s. In fact, NLRA, however ironic this may sound, may be responsible for the creation of “a vibrant non-union sector instead.”

The Supreme Court, of course, has also been instrumental in creating a “vibrant non-union sector.” The Court has consistently made decisions that limit union power, including the right to strike. Rather typical here was the stance taken by the union-busting Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she said that employees who strike in support of union bargaining “gamble” their jobs.

In no other country in the western world is anti-union consulting as huge of an industry as it is in the United States.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world has the right to strike been as severely undermined as in the U.S. In fact, U.S. labor law is an outright failure when it comes to safeguarding one of the key International Labor Organization (ILO) principles, which is to guarantee the right to strike, as it allows employers to enjoy the right to replace workers who strike for better wages and conditions.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world is anti-union consulting as huge of an industry as it is in the United States. As shocking as it may sound, it’s estimated that employers spend more than $400 million per year in hiring “union-avoidance” consultants.

Moreover, “the party of the people” is equally guilty for throwing U.S. workers under the bus. All three living Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton) let down unions and certainly were no friends to working people. In fact, they worked ceaselessly to promote neoliberalism and overall policies that were a disaster for labor, with Clinton leading the pack.

But no narrative for the dismal state of unionization in the U.S. can be fully complete if the role that unions themselves played in undermining the vision and the goals of the labor movement can be left out. As David N. Gibbs points out in his outstanding book The Revolt of the Rich, the largest union in the country, the AFL-CIO, “was conceived on very conservative terms as an institutional reaction against leftist strains within the labor movement” and one of its main activities was working with the Central Intelligence Agency in fighting communism both at home and abroad. Getting rid of class struggle unionism was a primary objective of the AFL-CIO even when the union had begun its steady decline. Worse still, the ties between mafia and labor unions, which go back to the early 1930s, had reached such a high point by the late 1950 that government investigation on labor racketeering got underway that in the ensuing decades would lead to convictions of major labor leader and mob figures. As James B. Jacobs argues in Mobsters, Unions, and the Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement, “labor racketeering” was a major feature of U.S. organized labor and contributed in a very big way to the decline of U.S. trade unionism.

We need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the struggle to create a fair and just society.

The U.S. labor movement has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts over the last few years, although the truth of the matter is that union membership remains stagnant. The challenges ahead are indeed immense as there is no alternative left party in the U.S. and no social democratic traditions which rely on trade unions for softening the injustices inflicted by the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism is brutal and the reactionary forces, which lead all the way up to the Supreme Court, are extremely powerful, well organized, and massively funded.

Yet, we need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the struggle to create a fair and just society. We need to rebuild the labor movement, and that means not going back to the kind of unions that existed in the postwar era. We need unions with a radical vision, unions that exert power in the workplace and society. There is no reason why a service-based economy, which is mainly associated with low wages and insecure employment, should offer less opportunities for union membership. In this context, there is much to learn from the experience of the Union of Southern Service Workers, a union that doesn’t shy away from taking militant action on the job against low pay and dangerous work conditions and to demand a seat at the table.Rejecting business unionism and renewing in turn labor militancy is the only way to increase union membership and fight back labor exploitation and inequality.

Trump and Harris, with starkly different records on labor issues, are both courting union voters

Robert Forrant, UMass Lowell
Fri, August 30, 2024 

Both candidates are reaching out to union leaders and rank-and-file members. 

AUTOWORKERS FOR TRUMP AT A NON UNION SHOP

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images and Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump are in a tight race for the White House. Every voting bloc will count – including members of labor unions and other people in their households.

The majority of union leaders have over generations endorsed Democratic candidates, and this race is no exception. Although rank-and-file union members have also historically sided with the Democratic Party by large margins, that support has wavered for at least the past 45 years. In 2016, exit polls indicated that voters in union households supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Trump by only 8 percentage points, down from 18 percentage points in 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

No Democratic presidential nominee had fared worse with union voters since Ronald Reagan’s wins over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1980 and 1984.

Union voters are particularly prominent in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, three swing states where the share of voters who belong to unions is above the national average of 10%.

A late 2023 New York Times/Siena College poll of six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2020 – those three plus Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin – shows that Biden and Trump were tied at 47% among union voters when they were asked who they’d vote for in 2024. Biden had an 8 percentage point advantage with these same voters in 2020, according to a different survey.

3 key issues

Union voters, like all U.S. citizens, are concerned about many issues. But they are more likely than most people to seriously consider a candidate’s record in terms of support for workers and organized labor. Labor historians generally concur that the Biden administration has the second-strongest labor-friendly record, after Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And I find that historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who contends that Trump’s years in office were bad for organized labor, is representative of how labor experts see his track record.

In my view as a labor studies scholar, three aspects of the candidates’ records are the most likely to sway union members one way or the other.

Federal workers

Trump signed three executive orders in 2018 that restricted the labor rights of approximately 950,000 federal government employees who belong to unions. In 2020, he signed another measure, known as Schedule F, that The Washington Post described as “designed to gut civil service job protections.”

Biden rescinded those executive orders. He also established a White House task force charged with making recommendations for how to streamline the procedures for federal worker union organizing, which Harris chaired. The number of federal employees in unions has risen by tens of thousands during the Biden administration.

Union elections

Rules governing how elections are conducted once workers express an interest in forming a union date back to the 1930s, when Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. The National Labor Relations Board, created by that legislation, oversees union elections.

In 2019, when Trump appointees held a majority of the NLRB’s five seats, the board overturned an Obama-era NLRB ruling mandating speedy elections. In 2023, when Biden’s appointees were in the majority, the board issued a ruling favorable to unions that rolled back that Trump-era ruling.

Today, when a majority of workers in a workplace say they want union representation, an employer must either recognize and bargain with the union or seek an election. If that employer violates labor law in the period before the election, the election is called off and the NLRB may order the employer to recognize and bargain with the union.

OSHA

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a Labor Department agency, is responsible for U.S. workers’ health and safety.

Fewer workplace inspections occurred during the Trump administration than during Obama’s second term. This decline is largely attributable to the slow hiring of new OSHA inspectors to replace those who had retired.

The number of inspections is rising again. However, by OSHA’s calculations, workplace accidents and fatalities have increased during the Biden administration.

The Trump administration issued no workplace rules about coronavirus safety, leaving hundreds of thousands of people employed in health care, groceries, meatpacking and education at risk.

By comparison, two days after taking office in 2021, Biden issued an executive order that established masking guidelines, and his administration made health and safety protocols on the job during the rest of the COVID-19 pandemic a high priority.

Compared with the inaction by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has been more active in proposing health and safety measures. For example, in July 2024 it proposed rules designed to protect some 36 million workers from health risks associated with extreme heat. After a period for written comments, public hearings will be held on the bill.

When Trump tried cutting OSHA funding for 2018 by approximately US$10 million, Congress blocked his efforts. The Biden administration is seeking a 3.7% increase in OSHA’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year.

Legislative and gubernatorial records

Harris was a U.S. senator before she became vice president; her vice presidential running mate, Tim Walz, is the governor of Minnesota and was a member of Congress before that; and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is currently a U.S. senator as well. The candidates’ records in those positions are also indicators of what they might attempt to do in the White House.

The AFL-CIO, the largest umbrella organization for U.S. unions, gave Harris a lifetime score of 98% on her Senate voting record. Walz got a 93% rating for his votes from the AFL-CIO when he served in the House of Representatives. He belonged to the National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, while working as a high school teacher.

As Minnesota’s governor, Walz signed into law paid sick days for the state’s workers and a measure that made Minnesota the first state to establish a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers. In 2023, Walz also signed a law that established the Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board to oversee the health and welfare of nursing home workers.

The AFL-CIO has given Vance a 0% rating for his Senate votes as of mid-2024. Among other things, Vance opposed the nominations of several judges and government officials with pro-labor track records.

Addressing auto workers

Perhaps the most visible sign of Biden’s support for labor unions came when he walked a Michigan picket line with striking members of the United Auto Workers in September 2023. He was the first president to do so.

Trump turned up nearby the next day. He gave a speech at a nonunion auto parts plant.

More recently, Trump did himself no favors with labor voters and their allies when, in a highly publicized conversation with Tesla, SpaceX and X CEO Elon Musk, he praised Musk for firing employees who spoke out on workplace problems and attempted to unionize.

How union households will vote in 2024 is not clear. But there’s no doubt that the Harris and Trump campaigns are certain that it will matter, just as it did in 2020, when Biden narrowly won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and in 2016, when Clinton lost those states.

Robert Forrant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

 

Half of Uber, Lyft trips replace more sustainable options

Study suggests ways to make ride-hailing more sustainable and equitable

University of California - Davis

 

image: 

A ride-hailing trip underway.

view more 

Credit: Noel Tock

More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles, according to a study from the University of California, Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. 

The study was conducted to help guide development of the Clean Miles Standard, a state regulation designed by the California Air Resources Board to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from ride-hailing services. 

Published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, the study analyzed data collected among riders in three metropolitan regions — the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles and Orange counties — between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019. The data set consisted of 7,333 ride-hailing trips by 2,458 respondents. 

About 47% of the trips replaced a public transit, carpool, walking or cycling trip. An additional 5.8% of trips represented “induced travel,” meaning the person would not have made the trip were an Uber or Lyft unavailable. This suggests ride-hailing often tends to replace most sustainable transportation modes and leads to additional vehicle miles traveled. 

Equity issues

The study also found that respondents who did not have a household car, or who identified as a racial or ethnic minority, were the least likely to cancel a trip if ride-hailing was not available. This indicates that their Uber or Lyft ride was an essential, not discretionary trip, although the authors say this finding requires more research. 

“Hopefully, the results of this study can be used to increase the sustainability of ride-hailing and also address potential equity issues that are apparent,” said lead author James Giller, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.

At their best, ride-hailing services can connect people to mobility opportunities they may otherwise not have had, ideally while saving emissions and reducing traffic when the vehicle is electric and the ride is shared. When not used sustainably, however, such services can also increase traffic, reduce the use of public transit — an economical and sustainable mode of transportation for a variety of income levels — and increase social inequities. 

Recommendations for sustainable ride-hailing

To improve sustainability, the study recommends ride-hailing trips — especially those offered by shared, or pooled, services—be better connected to public transit in low-demand areas, so they complement those services rather than replace them. 

“There’s certainly a place for ride-hailing and opportunities to improve its sustainability,” Giller said. “It’s all about making sure it’s used in the most efficient way by increasing the occupancy of the vehicles; by making sure these trips connect people to transit stations for longer distance travel; that they’re done in efficient, clean cars; and that we can reduce as much as possible the inefficiencies associated with finding passengers and going to pick them up.”

Study coauthors include senior author Giovanni Circella of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and Mischa Young of the Université de l’Ontario français in Canada.

"This study helps inform agencies on the role that ride-hailing has in complementing versus substituting the use of other travel modes,” Circella said. “The study is particularly unique due to the richness of the data used. While the data were collected before the pandemic, and thus might refer to different market conditions, the research helps establish an important benchmark that will help policymakers improve the sustainability of passenger travel as part of efforts to decarbonize transportation in California and beyond."

The study was funded primarily by the California Air Resources Board. Additional funding was provided by the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program of UC Davis.

---

Journal

Transportation Research Record Journal of the Transportation Research Board

DOI

10.1177/0361198124124 

Method of Research

Survey

Article Title

Correlates of Modal Substitution and Induced Travel of Ridehailing in California

Article Publication Date

28-Aug-2024

Would a Harris/Walz Administration be Economically Progressive?

By Chris Green

August 27, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Chsdrummajor07, Creative Commons 4.0

My answer to the question posed in this article’s headline is: probably not to a significant extent. I will explain further below.

As a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris has been forced to contend with the conflicting interests of different factions of the Democratic Party. On the one hand much of the Democratic base–and the American population in general–supports such social democratic policies as Medicare for All and a guarantee by the federal government of a job for every American. On the other hand, Harris and the Democratic Party in general are funded by big business. Democrat Party business donors want to see economic policies that will enhance their control over the American economy; they want the government to minimize, if not entirely eliminate any policy that might redistribute wealth toward the working class or regulate business in the public interest.

The contradictions inherent in attempting to appeal to both business interests and poor, working class and environmentally conscious voters is the most likely explanation for the oft-repeated criticism that Harris has been vague, silent or incoherent in her public policy stances. During her time in the US Senate (which coincided with her first run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019), she supported Medicare for All, a federal job guarantee and a ban on fracking. In the face of pushback from powerful business interests and concerns about potentially alienating certain sections of “moderate” voters, she has reversed herself on all three issues.

For her presidential platform, there have been indications of support for building upon the Keynesian measures implemented by the Biden administration to stabilize the American economy after the Covid pandemic. Often many aspects of her platform have lacked specific details. Harris’s supporters have framed her policy positions as aiming to create a “care economy”: the spurring of federal government investment in securing greater housing, educational, child care, elder care and health care access for ordinary Americans. She has called for raising the national minimum wage–but has not suggested by how much. She has called for federal government subsidies for new homebuyers; an expansion of the earned income and child tax credits; and called for action to fight price gouging on groceries. She has said she supports passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions.

One barrier in passing Harris’s proposals remains the US Senate’s filibuster. Since the Obama era the Republicans have repeatedly abused the filibuster, making it necessary for a 60 vote supermajority to pass many Democrat backed bills. One way to avoid the filibuster is the budget reconciliation process whereby legislation related to the federal budget can pass the US Senate with a simple 50 vote majority. The budget reconciliation process was used in early 2021 to pass the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act. To the latter, Democrats attempted to attach a measure instituting a national $15/hr minimum wage (the federal government raised it to its current rate of $7.25/hr in 2009). However, the Senate parliamentarian advised that a minimum wage measure did not belong in a budgetary bill–contradicting the argument of other experts that minimum wage legislation did affect the federal budget and thus was not improper to include in a spending bill. Harris, acting as president of the Senate in her position as Biden’s vice-president, agreed to drop the minimum wage provision based on the parliamentarian’s recommendation.

The Senate parliamentarian has no legal authority. US Senators have no obligation to comply with the parliamentarian’s recommendations. When the Senate parliamentarian objected to tax related legislation early in the administration of George W. Bush, Senate Republicans simply fired him. But as representatives of the “left” party in the American political system, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are in a special predicament. They are in a forever struggle to show the business community that American capitalism is safe in their hands. In trying to pass even the most mildly redistributive measures like the aborted minimum wage hike, it has been common for Democrats to try to demonstrate to the business community that they are proceeding with the utmost caution, that they are not moving “too far to the left.” For Democrats, demonstrating that caution includes respecting the conservative guardrails of American politics like the Senate parliamentarian and the filibuster.

When American Prospect executive editor David Dayen brought up the possibility of eliminating the filibuster with multiple Democratic US Senators at the recent Democratic National Convention(DNC), almost all seemed reluctant to talk about the subject. Democrats have indicated that if they retain their 50 seat Senate majority in November’s election, they will enact rules to eliminate the filibuster for two areas of legislation: to expand voting protections and to encode abortion rights. Apart from those exceptions, Democrats will continue to refrain from exercising their ability as the majority party to completely eliminate the filibuster, thus allowing Republicans to continue to derail Democrat backed legislation. By doing so, Democrats are attempting to show the business community that as they advocate for mildly redistributive measures like an expanded child tax credit, they are fully respectful of all the conservative guardrails of American politics.

Should Democrats retain their simple 50 seat Senate majority in November’s election, the Republican abuse of the filibuster will provide them with a convenient excuse to shelve legislation which they formally support but for which they hold little real enthusiasm: for example the PRO Act.

Democrats and Corporate Power

As Michelle Goldberg recently observed in a New York Times piece cheerleading calls by Harris and speakers at the DNC to fight price gouging and other abuses by corporate monopolies, a perfect ally in that fight would be Lina Khan, the Biden appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has used her position to pursue vigorous antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies. Khan has faced strong opposition from many Republicans but has also gained notable support among them as well. Republicans who view themselves as representing medium sized and small business against corporate behemoths like Google–such as Donald Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance–have expressed support for Khan.

However in July, two billionaire Harris donors–the media mogul Barry Diller and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman–publicly called for Khan to be fired. One of Harris’s spokespeople, Maryland governor Wes Moore, indicated in a CNBC interview that the Harris camp was ambivalent if not in outright disagreement with Khan’s antitrust approach. Moore suggested that a Harris administration would have friendlier antitrust policies for “large industries.”

The broad outlines of Harris’s economic policy have been formulated by figures from the corporate world. Two such leading figures are Brian Deese and Mike Pyle, both former Biden White House officials and top executives at Blackrock, the global asset management giant. Another leading advisor is Deanne Millison, until 2023 Vice-President Harris’s chief economic advisor and currently a lobbyist for the Ford Motor Company. Harris has particularly strong links to figures from Silicon Valley. Her brother-in-law Tony West, recently took unpaid leave from his position as Uber’s chief legal officer to serve as an advisor to her presidential campaign. Prominent Google lawyer Karen Dunn has also been advising Harris in her presidential run–after the Biden/Harris administration successfully sued Google for having an illegal search engine monopoly and is potentially weighing the option of breaking Google up into smaller companies.

Tim Walz

For many in the Democrats’ left-liberal base, Kamala Harris’s strong corporate connections have been more than offset by the appointment of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. As Minnesota governor, Walz signed into law a bevy of progressive reforms: enhanced abortion rights protections; 12 weeks of paid medical and family leave for Minnesota workers; universal, free breakfast and lunch provision for the state’s public school students; a program to assist low income Minnesotans to obtain insulin; crackdowns on safety violations at Amazon warehouses in the state; a 20 percent wage boost for Uber and Lyft drivers in the state.

Left-liberal commentators gushed over Walz. Robert Borosage, in The Nation, declared that the Walz nomination was yet another sign that Democrats were moving back towards Keynesian policies since Joe Biden assumed the presidency: “waving goodbye to the neoliberal consensus”–deregulation, job killing free trade deals and fiscal austerity–that constituted the Party’s priorities under Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Jacobin, Branko Marcetic celebrated the nomination of the “unabashedly progressive” Walz as evidence of the growing influence of Bernie Sander supporters on the Democratic Party. The Democratic Socialists of America took credit for exerting its influence to have Walz picked as Harris’s running mate over the arch-zionist neoliberal Pennsylvania Democratic governor Josh Shapiro. Meanwhile labor sociologist Barry Eidlin told Jacobin’s Alex N. Press that “Walz is a clear example of a middle-of-the-road politician who is open to listening to movements.” According to Eidlin, with Walz as vice-president and his track record of dialoguing with social movements, such movements would be able to influence the Democratic Party.

Tim Walz: A Darker Side

Some progressive Minnesotans have views of Tim Walz different from those held by the likes of Marcetic and Borosage. Minneapolis/St. Paul African American American community organizer Rod Adams told Sarah Jaffe of In These Times that Walz as governor was “super beholden to corporations.” In 2023, Mary Turner, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, accused Walz of “siding with the profits and power of corporate executives over the rights and needs of patients and workers.” She added that “Governor Walz has made clear to Minnesotans that their democratic process does not work for them, but for the wealthy and powerful few.”

Turner’s denunciations were inspired by Walz’s succumbing to pressure from the Mayo Clinic and other hospitals and derailing legislation requiring hospitals in Minnesota to form committees (with nurses given a leading voice) to determine appropriate nursing staffing levels at their respective worksites. Mayo had threatened to withdraw billions in planned new investments from Minnesota if the legislation went into effect.

Then there are the views of indigenous and environmental activists who see Walz as a tool of fossil fuel industries with his backing of the Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Minnesota. After running for governor in 2018 as an opponent of the pipeline, once assuming office he gradually transitioned into supporting the project, appointing oil industry friendly persons to key state regulatory agencies and deploying law enforcement to violently repress activists peacefully protesting the pipeline.

The Minnesota Model: A Blueprint for National Action?

The suite of progressive reforms signed into law by Walz has been lauded by progressives as the “Minnesota Model,” providing a potential blueprint for Kamala Harris to implement her vision of the “care economy”at the national level. What gets lost in celebration of this model is that in passing progressive reforms, Walz was responding to pressure from numerous social justice movements in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region. These movements have been built up over the course of years through patient and arduous effort by working class activists. The movements–focusing on labor issues, police brutality, immigrant rights, housing, education and health care–are the real embodiment of the Minnesota model, not Tim Walz himself (as some progressives seem to think). Walz has been described as a progressive firebrand; however he doesn’t have a long track record of being so. Representing a Republican leaning rural district in Congress for 12 years (2007-19), he mainly showed himself to be a relatively cautious centrist.

Walz has benefited as governor from a relatively strong Minnesota economy and a large state budget surplus: in the neoliberal era, under such conditions, political and business elites have often been willing to tolerate greater social spending and other modest concessions to ordinary people.

It will be considerably harder to implement any parallel to the Minnesota Model at the national level. For one, the US president and Congress are particularly vulnerable to pressure from Wall Street to rein in fiscal deficits; thus any increases in social spending by a potential Harris/Walz administration will probably be modest, at best.

The administration of Bill Clinton provides an instructive example as to how a Harris/Walz administration might evolve if elected. Clinton campaigned for the presidency in 1992 on a proposal for federal government spending on infrastructure as a way to stimulate the economy and provide jobs. According to Bob Woodward’s 1994 book The Agenda, after winning the presidency Clinton was subjected to a series of lectures from US Federal Reserve Bank officials about the need to discard his infrastructure spending proposal and instead concentrate his entire presidential agenda on implementing Wall Street friendly budget deficit slashing policies. Clinton reacted with dismay according to Woodward: “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Subsequently, Clinton’s infrastructure plan was forgotten; he significantly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit for America’s low income population but otherwise spent nearly his entire presidency cooperating with Republicans to significantly slash budget deficits (in the interests of Wall Street).

Woodward portrayed Clinton entering the presidency as a starry eyed progressive idealist, looking to harness the power of the federal government to benefit ordinary people. According to this portrait, it was only after becoming president that Clinton realized he would be forced to orient his entire presidency around bowing down to Wall Street’s power. Alexander Cockburn, writing in the Los Angeles Times in 1994, argued that Clinton was probably nowhere near as naive as Woodward portrayed him. Clinton’s campaign in 1992 showed plenty of signs that he was aligned with Wall Street. His proposal for infrastructure spending during the campaign was paired with caveats about such new spending being contingent on cutting spending elsewhere in the federal budget. Like many of the noises today emanating from the Harris/Walz campaign in support of the “care economy,” Clinton’s infrastructure proposal was substantially vague–it was probably offered not with the intention of seriously trying to implement it but only as rhetorical fluff during the campaign to mobilize progressive voters. The Clinton team’s probable intention all along–from the 1992 campaign to the assumption of the presidency–was to serve Wall Street. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his 1999 book No One Left to Lie To: “the essence of American politics” is “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Rhetorically–especially during election campaigns–politicians present themselves as populists operating on behalf of ordinary people; meanwhile, behind the scenes, their actual policies are molded to enhance the power of economic elites.

But then again Harris/Walz face somewhat different conditions in 2024 than those faced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992. In current times (as during the 1990’s) one hears frequent warnings from Wall Street elites, politicians and media commentators about the urgent need to rein in federal budget deficits. However, at the same time, the Covid pandemic and the evolving geopolitical and economic rivalry with China has encouraged sections of elite policymakers and business leaders to support considerably greater federal government spending and economic intervention in order to strengthen the domestic American economy. Both the Biden and Trump administrations significantly expanded tariffs to protect American manufacturers against Chinese competition. A visible portion of congressional Republicans supported the Biden administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021 as well as Biden’s $280 billion CHIPS Act of 2022; Republican governor Gregg Abbott of Texas indicated support for the CHIPS Act’s underlying principle by signing into law Texas’s own $1.4 billion investment into semiconductors. Also recent Democratic legislation to expand the Child Tax Credit passed the US House with a strong majority of the body’s Republicans supporting it.; however the measure failed in the Senate with heavy Republican opposition.

Many Republican politicians and media commentators have denounced the increased spending policies of the Biden administration as evidence of the latter being communist. However, beneath the surface of such stupid demagoguery, it is clear that there is a modicum of symmetry between both parties about the need for an industrial policy to strengthen domestic American business (especially in the context of rivalry with China). It is within that context that one expects the greatest chance for elements of Minnesota Model type policies to be passed at the national level: greater government investments in health care, education, child care, expanded child tax credits, a higher minimum wage and similar measures justified to make American workers more productive in economic competition with China.

Robert Borsage was wrong to write that the nomination of Tim Walz represents the Democratic Party “waving goodbye” to neoliberalism. Democrats are still fundamentally neoliberal even if they have taken a slightly Keynesian turn in recent years. It will be up to social movements of the type which successfully pressured Governor Tim Walz to sign Minnesota model policies into law to keep up the pressure on Democrats if there is any chance of them moving further away from neoliberalism.

Uber fined in Netherlands for sending drivers' data to the US

Reuters
Updated Mon, 26 Aug 2024

Ride-hailing platform Uber (UBER) has been fined 290 million euros ($324 million) in the Netherlands for sending the personal data of European taxi drivers to the United States in violation of EU rules, Dutch data protection watchdog DPA said on Monday.
Uber Technologies, Inc. (UBER)

Uber has stopped the practice, the DPA added.

"This flawed decision and extraordinary fine are completely unjustified," Uber spokesperson Caspar Nixon told Reuters in an email.

"Uber’s cross-border data transfer process was compliant with GDPR during a 3-year period of immense uncertainty between the EU and US," he added, saying the company would appeal and was confident that "common sense will prevail".

The DPA said Uber transferred personal data to the United States and failed to appropriately safeguard the data.

"This constitutes a serious violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)," it said.

Uber can appeal the decision with the DPA and if unsuccessful can then file a case with the Dutch courts. The appeals process is expected to take some four years and any fines are suspended until all legal recourses have been exhausted, according to the DPA.

The investigation was triggered after a French human rights organisation lodged a complaint on behalf of more than 170 taxi drivers in France with the country's data protection authority. However, as Uber has its European headquarters in the Netherlands, it was forwarded to the DPA.

French national data protection regulator CNIL said in a separate statement that it had cooperated with the DPA.

In a related case, the DPA fined Uber 10 million euros ($11 million) in January for infringement of privacy regulations regarding its drivers' personal data.

($1 = 0.8942 euros)

(Reporting by Stephanie Van Den Berg, Tassilo Hummel; editing by Jason Neely, Kirsten Donovan)

Class Contradictions Were on Display as Democrats Courted Labor at the DNC

Differences could remain between unions and a potential Harris administration on Gaza and corporate allegiances.

By Jacqui Germain , 

Truthout/InTheseTimes

PublishedAugust 23, 2024

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers members wave American flags during the final day of the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois.Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images

The morning after a string of labor leaders took the Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) Monday night stage, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates was feeling optimistic. As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson walked across the stage to open the DNC, she was reminded of his background as a middle school teacher and labor organizer. Remembering SEIU President April Verrett’s own organizing roots in Chicago’s labor landscape moved the CTU leader too, as did recalling Gov. Tim Walz’s early years as a high school teacher.

The whole evening felt “surreal,” Gates said.

“The Democratic Party, it feels like, is making a better choice in the direction in which it is marching,” says Gates. “Look, Kamala says, when we fight, we win. We literally hear that at every labor rally we attend. That is a significant symbol of our fight. And I think it’s also a recognition that the democracy that we want to protect in this country is only possible if we are in solidarity, if we are organized, and if we are fighting for the many. That’s what I left [Monday] night with — that in this struggle to compel the Democratic Party, the progressive wing — along with organized labor — are making a run at the platform.”

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain offered one of Monday night’s most memorable speeches, sporting a bright red UAW shirt with “TRUMP IS A SCAB” printed across the front. The pointed call-out at the former president comes a month after Donald Trump called for Fain’s firing, and a year after Trump deliberately tried to undermine the union’s historic Stand-Up Strike in 2023. Fain’s commitment to positioning Trump as an adversarial anti-labor figure for the working class could provide a winning path for the Democratic Party.

“On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the working class,” said Fain, who noted he was representing the UAW’s 1 million active and retired members on the DNC’s top stage.

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“On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lapdogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves. So, for us in the labor movement, it’s real simple. Kamala Harris is one of us. She’s a fighter for the working class. And Donald Trump is a scab.”

The tens of thousands of Democratic National Convention attendees packing Chicago’s United Center couldn’t help themselves. Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab! Trump is a scab!

The declaration-turned-refrain caught on quickly. The insult evokes Scabby, the movement’s beloved, hideous rat, and serves as a reminder of the many strikes and boycotts the inflatable icon has watched over. It’s a well-known, age-old badge of shame and it’ll be tough for Trump to fight it off.

The DNC’s first night was in large part a response to the Republican Party’s attempt to claim working-class bona fides. Midway through the evening, half a dozen labor union presidents were welcomed to the stage to share joint remarks on organized labor’s support for the party: AFSCME President Lee Saunders, SEIU President April Verrett, LIUNA General President Brent Booker, IBEW International President Kenneth Cooper, CWA President Claude Cummings Jr., and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. (Teamsters President Sean O’Brien was notably absent. A Teamsters spokesperson reportedly told HuffPost the union hadn’t received a response to their request for O’Brien to speak at the convention.)

“This election is about two economic visions: one where families live paycheck to paycheck, where people have no right to join a union — a CEO’s dream, but a worker’s nightmare,” explained Shuler. “Or an opportunity economy where we lower the cost of groceries, prescription [drugs] and housing. Where we go after Big Pharma, corporate landlords and price gougers. Where there’s no such thing as a man’s job or a woman’s job or like Donald Trump would say, a Black job — just a good union job.”

The IBEW’s Cooper was greeted to the podium by a long, low Cooooooop! from the eager crowd. “She’s bringing back American manufacturing to forgotten places throughout our country,” he said of Harris, adding that she’d cast a key vote to protect the IBEW’s pension plans in California. “She’s lifted our apprentices up all over the nation, and guess what? She’s not afraid to use the word ‘union.’”

The tone throughout the evening and in conversations following the pro-worker symphony was overwhelmingly uplifting. A movement that had largely been set back on its heels for decades seemed to be in position to have major influence again.

“I’m 61,” says UCLA Labor Studies Professor Victor Narro, “In my lifetime, [the Biden] administration has been the most pro-union administration. It took all these years to finally have a president who actually walked the picket line, you know? I’m hoping it continues with the Kamala Harris administration really prioritizing the working class and the labor movement.”

And yet, the Democratic Party remains full of class contradictions. For all the working-class imagery smartly threaded into speeches — and even the identifiable economic measures that have led to real financial gains for people across the country — the Democratic Party still maintains its own long-standing corporate allegiances.

Just 24 hours after their pro-labor showcase, the Democratic Party welcomed former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who expounded on Harris’s “pro-business and pro-worker” stance. On Wednesday, the party invited Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West to the stage for brief remarks. West, who is also Harris’s brother-in-law and an unpaid adviser to her campaign, is often viewed as an enemy to workers, both for his role in protecting Wall Street elites from accountability in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, and for his role in Uber’s aggressive anti-worker efforts across the country.

Outside the bubble of the convention, the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t been able to push Congress to raise the national minimum wage, despite voters in both Democratic-led and Republican-led states successfully passing minimum wage increases at the state-level across the country for years. President Joe Biden appointed a National Labor Relations Board that has delivered crucial rulings in favor of unions amid labor disputes.

Often cited as the most pro-union president of our lifetime, Biden made history by walking the UAW picket line in 2023; the year prior, he kept with the historical function of the vast majority of U.S. presidents by helping break the railroad workers’ strike. After two years of negotiations and working without a contract, railroad workers’ unions began consolidating support and votes to escalate for the first time in decades. Instead, under the powers of the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Biden intervened by appointing a Presidential Emergency Board to produce a settlement for both sides to re-negotiate around, effectively neutralizing a labor fight many workers appeared to be hungry for.

The UAW is also reinforcing its footing as a fighting union. Fain might not describe himself as antagonizing his membership’s employers, but he certainly believes in leverage and in using it collectively to extract wins for everyone. The UAW’s decision to publicly support a ceasefire — the result of months of internal organizing on the part of rank-and-file workers — has also cultivated a new, energizing front. On Thursday, the UAW was a major force of support when it backed the Uncommitted campaign’s demand that the DNC allow a Palestinian American to speak on the convention’s main stage:

“If we want peace, if we want real democracy, and if we want to win this election,” reads the UAW statement, “the Democratic Party must allow a Palestinian American speaker to be heard from the DNC stage tonight.”

The UAW’s stance on a ceasefire and support for the Uncommitted movement’s push to bring Palestine to the forefront of the DNC stage may appear to put the union at odds with a Democratic Party that would likely prefer to think of organized labor and foreign policy as separate issues. In the end, the party ultimately spurned the request to feature a Palestinian speaker at the convention.

Fain has also taken the lead on calling on organized labor to coordinate their contract dates for May 1, 2028, in the hopes of consolidating enough labor leverage across industries to be the catalyst for major working-class change. Of course, if Democrats win, that May Day would fall under a Harris-Walz administration. And if the DNC’s Monday night lights and speeches are to be believed, the Biden-Harris administration was, and the Harris-Walz administration will be, a willing and enthusiastic partner in that decidedly pro-worker direction.

“If you have a White House that’s very pro-labor, it really does help so much — and especially in that kind of activity where they call for something that resembles a general strike,” says Narro.

Between now and then, there’s certainly time to build enough buy-in from both organized labor and those workers not yet unionized to offer a considerable show of labor strength, leverage and discipline. A Trump-Vance administration would most likely be not just opposed to, but pointedly hostile towards workers engaged in the kind of mass organized labor defiance. Many in the labor movement believe a Harris-Walz administration would be obviously better; Narro guesses the administration would, at the least, use the podium to support the right to strike and urge employers to come to an agreement with workers while keeping their pro-business priorities intact.

Depending on which wing of the labor movement you ask, you’ll get different perspectives on what it means to be pro-worker. Some argue being pro-worker doesn’t necessarily require an oppositional stance; positioning employers as labor’s necessary partners produces compromises and concessions that allow for benefits on both ends. Others argue that being pro-worker necessarily means being anti-big business. Being willing to be confrontational with an employer clarifies the union’s labor leverage and their readiness to use it to extract pro-worker wins. Broadly speaking, the history of organized labor itself is marked by different periods when unions found themselves on either side of the spectrum. The question remains: Which version of a revived labor movement would the Democratic Party, and a possible future Harris-Walz administration, be receptive to?

But more importantly, which version of a revived labor movement do workers envision for themselves?


Jacqui Germain is a journalist and poet living in St. Louis, Missouri. She’s the author of Bittering the Wound, her debut poetry collection about the Ferguson Uprising.